Time reports on virtual doppelgangers — also known as "digital twins". (Alternate URL here.) Created by feeding video, images, blueprints or other data into advanced 3-D mapping software, digital twins are being used in medicine to replicate and study internal organs. They've propelled engineers to devise car and plane prototypes — including Air Force fighter jets — more quickly. They allow architects and urban planners to envision and then build skyscrapers and city blocks with clarity and precision. And this year, digital twins began to break into the mainstream of manufacturing and research. In April, chipmaker Nvidia launched a version of its Omniverse 3-D simulation engine that allows businesses to build 3-D renderings of their own — including digital twins. Amazon Web Services announced a competing service, the IoT TwinMaker, in November...

The need was always there. In the 1960s, NASA created physical replicas of spaceships and connected them to simulators so that if a crisis ensued on the actual vehicle hundreds of thousands of miles away, a team could workshop solutions on the ground. Dave Rhodes, the senior vice president of digital twins at Unity Technologies, a video-game and 3-D-platform company, says that digital-twin technology is only now being widely released because of several confluent factors, including the increased computing power of cloud-based systems, the spread of 5G networks, improvements in 3-D rendering and the remote work demands of COVID-19....

Digital-twin technology is being trialed across the medical landscape, for planning surgical procedures and exploring the heart risks of various drugs... Digital twins are also being used in other complex and potentially dangerous machines, from nuclear reactors in Idaho to wind turbines in Paris.... Digital twin humans are coming too: the NFL and Amazon Web Services have created a "digital athlete" that will run infinite scenarios to better understand and treat football injuries.... BMW could soon implement digital twins at all facilities.

Frank Bachmann, the plant director in Regensburg, says that the advantages of digital twins will only be fully realized when every factory is digitized in a standard way. "We need these processes of digital twins everywhere," he says.
The technology "raises questions about privacy and cybersecurity," Time warns. "Many of these digital twins are made possible by a multitude of sensors that track real-world data and movement.

"Workers at factories with digital twins may find their every movement followed; the hacker of a digital twin could gain frighteningly precise knowledge about a complex proprietary system."

The International Space Station's operations have been extended through 2030, NASA announced on Friday. "Though it was never in doubt that the U.S. would continue its near-term commitment to the ISS," reports Engadget, "NASA's announcement comes amid heightened tensions with Russia, one of several nations sharing access to the Space Station. 2021 also saw Russia deepen its cooperation in space with China, another US adversary, as The New York Times noted in June."

NASA's announcement emphasized it would continue work with the space agencies of Europe, Japan, Canada, and Russia "to enable continuation of the groundbreaking research being conducted in this unique orbiting laboratory through the rest of this decade." From NASA.gov: "The International Space Station is a beacon of peaceful international scientific collaboration and for more than 20 years has returned enormous scientific, educational, and technological developments to benefit humanity...." said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "As more and more nations are active in space, it's more important than ever that the United States continues to lead the world in growing international alliances and modeling rules and norms for the peaceful and responsible use of space...." Nearly 110 countries and areas have participated in activities aboard the station, including more than 1,500,000 students per year in STEM activities.

Instruments aboard the ISS, used in concert with free-flying instruments in other orbits, help us measure the stresses of drought and the health of forests to enable improved understanding of the interaction of carbon and climate at different time scales. Operating these and other climate-related instruments through the end of the decade will greatly increase our understanding of the climate cycle.

Extending operations through 2030 will continue another productive decade of research advancement and enable a seamless transition of capabilities in low-Earth orbit to one or more commercially owned and operated destinations in the late 2020s. The decision to extend operations and NASA's recent awards to develop commercial space stations together ensure uninterrupted, continuous human presence and capabilities; both are critical facets of NASA's International Space Station transition plan.
NASA's announcement also points out that the Space station has hosted "more than 3,000 research investigations from over 4,200 researchers across the world."

"China has formally approved three missions targeting the south pole of the moon, with the first to launch around 2024..." reports Space.com, "each with different goals and an array of spacecraft." The trio make up the so-called fourth phase for the Chinese lunar exploration program, which most recently landed on the moon last December with a sample-return mission dubbed Chang'e 5. Wu Yanhua, deputy head of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), told China Central Television (CCTV) in a recent interview that the three missions had been approved.

Chang'e 7 will be the first to launch; Wu did not provide a timeline, but previous reporting indicates a hoped-for launch around 2024, with the mission to include an orbiter, a relay satellite, a lander, a rover and a "mini flying craft" designed to seek out evidence of ice at the lunar south pole. The various component spacecraft will carry a range of science instruments including cameras, a radar instrument, an infrared spectrum mineral imager, a thermometer, a seismograph and a water-molecule analyzer; the mission will tackle goals including remote sensing, identifying resources and conducting a comprehensive study of the lunar environment...

Chang'e 8 will launch later this decade and will be a step toward establishing a joint International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) with Russia and potentially other partners. The mission is expected to test technology for using local resources and manufacturing with 3D printing, according to earlier Chinese press statements.... The ILRS plan includes development of a robotic base which can be later expanded to allow astronauts to make long-term stays on the lunar surface in the 2030s.
China had previously scheduled their lunar research station for the year 2035, reports the South China Morning Post. The newspaper cites concerns from Zhang Chongfeng, deputy chief designer of China's manned space programme, that America's space program might ultimately seize common land on the moon. The US government and Nasa have proposed the Artemis Accords to set rules for future lunar activities. Already signed by more than a dozen US allies, the accords allow governments or private companies to protect their facilities or "heritage sites" by setting up safety zones that forbid the entry of others. China and Russia are opposed to the accords because this challenges the existing international protocols including the UN's Moon Agreement, which states that the moon belongs to the entire human race, not a certain party, according to Zhang.

But to effectively counter the US on the moon, China would have to "take some forward-looking measures and deploy them ahead of schedule", he said in a paper published in domestic peer-reviewed journal Aerospace Shanghai in June... Instead of building an orbiting "gateway", China would directly put a nuclear-powered research station on the moon. The unmanned facility would allow visiting Chinese astronauts to stay on the moon for as long as their American peers but only at a fraction of the cost. To counter the US territorial claims, China would also deploy a mobile station. This moon base on wheels would be able to roam freely on the lunar surface for over 1,000km, and the use of artificial intelligence technology would mean astronauts need not be present for its operation.

And, unlike the American programme, which focuses on surface activities, China would pay a great deal of attention to the exploration of caves, which could provide a natural shelter for the construction of permanent settlements.

"With the successful extension of Webb's second sunshield mid-boom, the observatory has passed another critical deployment milestone," NASA announced Friday, adding that the sunshield "now resembles its full, kite-shaped form in space..." The completion of the sunshield cover and mid-boom deployments over the past two days marks a critical milestone for Webb: all 107 membrane release devices associated with the sunshield deployment — every single one of which had to work in order for the sunshield to deploy — have now successfully released. Webb has 178 of these 'non-explosive actuators' in all; 107 were used to keep the sunshield safe and folded prior to deployment...

While the deployments took longer than expected today, that was due to the operations team moving forward with caution and according to the protocols they laid out for dealing with unpredictable situations...

The two mid-boom arms are now locked in their final position. They will hold the sunshield membranes in their proper place, as the team turns to the final stage in the sunshield's deployment: tensioning. In the coming days, the team will separate and then individually tension each of the five sunshield layers, stretching them into their final, taut shape. This will create space between the membranes to allow heat to radiate out, making each successive layer of the sunshield cooler than the one below... Sunshield tensioning will take at least two days but may take longer, due to the complexity of the process and the flexibility built into the timeline.
Universe Today shares a video showing the complexity of the sunshield operation. Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 writes that "Unlike other nail-biting JWST events like the rocket launch, something of this size and complexity has never been attempted in space.

"After this, the telescope's optics will be in the shade forevermore, and can begin cooling to the frigid operating temperature needed to detect infrared light."

Two dozen theologians participated in a program funded partially by NASA to research how humans may react to news that intelligent life exists on other planets, according to one religious scholar who says he was recruited. From a report: The Rev. Dr. Andrew Davison, of the University of Cambridge, told the Times UK in a recent interview that he was among 23 other theologians in a NASA-sponsored program at the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton University from 2016 to 2017. Davison said he and his colleagues examined how each of the world's major religions would likely respond if they were made aware of the existence of aliens. His own work focused on the connection between astrobiology and Christian theology. Will Storrar, director of the CTI, said NASA wanted to see "serious scholarship being published in books and journals" addressing the "profound wonder and mystery and implication of finding microbial life on another planet," the Times reported.

[...] NASA's Astrobiology program provided partial funding through a grant to the CTI in 2015, with the agency-funded portion of the project concluding in 2017, a NASA spokesperson confirmed to Changing America. NASA was not directly involved in the selection of researchers for the study.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from MIT News: Aerospace engineers at MIT are testing a new concept for a hovering rover that levitates by harnessing the moon's natural charge. Because they lack an atmosphere, the moon and other airless bodies such as asteroids can build up an electric field through direct exposure to the sun and surrounding plasma. On the moon, this surface charge is strong enough to levitate dust more than 1 meter above the ground, much the way static electricity can cause a person's hair to stand on end. Engineers at NASA and elsewhere have recently proposed harnessing this natural surface charge to levitate a glider with wings made of Mylar, a material that naturally holds the same charge as surfaces on airless bodies. They reasoned that the similarly charged surfaces should repel each other, with a force that lofts the glider off the ground. But such a design would likely be limited to small asteroids, as larger planetary bodies would have a stronger, counteracting gravitational pull.

The MIT team's levitating rover could potentially get around this size limitation. The concept, which resembles a retro-style, disc-shaped flying saucer, uses tiny ion beams to both charge up the vehicle and boost the surface's natural charge. The overall effect is designed to generate a relatively large repulsive force between the vehicle and the ground, in a way that requires very little power. In an initial feasibility study, the researchers show that such an ion boost should be strong enough to levitate a small, 2-pound vehicle on the moon and large asteroids like Psyche. The team predicted that a small rover, weighing about two pounds, could achieve levitation of about one centimeter off the ground, on a large asteroid such as Psyche, using a 10-kilovolt ion source. To get a similar liftoff on the moon, the same rover would need a 50-kilovolt source. "This kind of ionic design uses very little power to generate a lot of voltage," [explains co-author Paulo Lozano]. "The power needed is so small, you could do this almost for free."

Just two weeks after launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft has opened its "eye" and returned its first images from space -- a major operational milestone for the spacecraft and DART team. Phys.Org reports: After the violent vibrations of launch and the extreme temperature shift to minus 80 degrees C in space, scientists and engineers at the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, held their breath in anticipation. Because components of the spacecraft's telescopic instrument are sensitive to movements as small as 5 millionths of a meter, even a tiny shift of something in the instrument could be very serious. On Tuesday, Dec. 7, the spacecraft popped open the circular door covering the aperture of its DRACO telescopic camera and, to everyone's glee, streamed back the first image of its surrounding environment. Taken about 2 million miles (11 light seconds) from Earth -- very close, astronomically speaking -- the image shows about a dozen stars, crystal-clear and sharp against the black backdrop of space, near where the constellations Perseus, Aries and Taurus intersect.

The DART navigation team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California used the stars in the image to determine precisely how DRACO was oriented, providing the first measurements of how the camera is pointed relative to the spacecraft. With those measurements in hand, the DART team could accurately move the spacecraft to point DRACO at objects of interest, such as Messier 38 (M38), also known as the Starfish Cluster, that DART captured in another image on Dec. 10. Located in the constellation Auriga, the cluster of stars lies some 4,200 light years from Earth. Intentionally capturing images with many stars like M38 helps the team characterize optical imperfections in the images as well as calibrate how absolutely bright an object is -- all important details for accurate measurements when DRACO starts imaging the spacecraft's destination, the binary asteroid system Didymos.

The James Webb Space Telescope should be able to remain in orbit for more than 10 years, thanks to a fuel-efficient launch on Christmas Day, according to NASA. From a report: The telescope was carried aboard the Arianespace Ariane 5. Despite two brief midcourse corrections, its launch used less propellant than initially expected. That will allow the $10 billion observatory "science operations in orbit for significantly more than a 10-year science lifetime," the US space agency said in a release on Wednesday The first midcourse correction was a relatively minor, 65-minute post-launch burn, which bumped up the telescope's speed by approximately 45 miles per hour. Another smaller correction on Dec. 27 added an additional 6.3 mph. That added boost also allowed the JWST's solar array to unfold about a minute and a half after it separated from the Ariane 5, just 29 minutes after launch. The array was coded to automatically deploy either when the observatory reached a certain altitude or 33 minutes after launch, whichever came first.

$100 billion was spent building the International Space Station — including 42 different assembly flights, reports Recode. Yet "after two decades in orbit, the International Space Station will shut down," as NASA re-focuses on sending humans back to the moon. (UPDATE: NASA has extended ISS operation through 2030.)

While they plan to keep it functioning as long as possible, NASA "has only technically certified the station's hardware until 2028 and has awarded more than $400 million to fund private replacements." (Which they estimate will save them $1 billion a year.)

So then what happens? When these stations are ready, NASA will guide the ISS into the atmosphere, where it will burn up and disintegrate. At that point, anyone hoping to work in space will have to choose among several different outposts. That means countries won't just be using these new stations to strengthen their own national space programs, but as lucrative business ventures, too. "Commercial companies have the capability now to do this, and so we don't want to compete with that," Robyn Gatens, the director of the ISS, told Recode. "We want to transition lower-Earth orbit over to commercial companies so that the government and NASA can go use resources to do harder things in deep space."

Private companies currently backed by NASA, including Lockheed Martin and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, could launch as many as four space stations into Earth's orbit over the next decade. NASA is also building a space station called Gateway near the moon; a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the living quarters for the station is scheduled to launch in 2024.

Russia and India are planning to launch their own space stations to low-Earth orbit, too, and China's Tiangong station, which is currently under construction, already has astronauts living aboard... Russia may leave the ISS as soon as 2025, the same year its space agency, Roscosmos, plans to launch its new $5 billion space station. The European Space Agency, which represents 22 different European countries, is now training its astronauts for eventual missions to Tiangong...

[C]ompetition for customers could get even more intense as space stations launched by China, Russia, and India open for business.
Recode ultimately sees a future where private-sector customers choose from competing space stations — and even have to consider the political consequences of "favoring one nation's space station over another..."

"In the best of scenarios, these new stations will learn from each other and massively expand scientific knowledge. But they will also make global politics a much bigger part of space, which could impact what happens here on Earth and how humanity explores the moon and Mars."

"We have LIFTOFF of the @NASAWebb Space Telescope!" NASA tweeted seven hours ago, sharing a 32-second video of the launch. "At 7:20am ET (12:20 UTC), the beginning of a new, exciting decade of science climbed to the sky," they wrote, adding that the telescope "will change our understanding of space as we know it."

The CBC reports: The world's largest and most powerful space telescope rocketed away Saturday on a high-stakes quest to behold light from the first stars and galaxies, and scour the universe for hints of life.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope soared from French Guiana on South America's northeastern coast, riding a European Ariane rocket into the Christmas morning sky. "What an amazing Christmas present," said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's science mission chief.

The $10-billion US observatory hurtled toward its destination 1.6 million kilometres away, or more than four times beyond the moon. It will take a month to get there and another five months before its infrared eyes are ready to start scanning the cosmos. First, the telescope's enormous mirror and sunshield need to unfurl; they were folded origami-style to fit into the rocket's nose cone. Otherwise, the observatory won't be able to peer back in time 13.7 billion years as anticipated, within a mere 100 million years of the universe-forming Big Bang. NASA administrator Bill Nelson called the telescope a time machine that will provide "a better understanding of our universe and our place in it: who we are, what we are, the search that's eternal."

"We are going to discover incredible things that we never imagined," Nelson said following liftoff, speaking from Florida's Kennedy Space Center. But he cautioned: "There are still innumerable things that have to work and they have to work perfectly.... We know that in great reward there is great risk...."

"We have delivered a Christmas gift today for humanity," said Josef Aschbacher, the European Space Agency's director general....

Cheers and applause erupted in and outside Launch Control following the telescope's flawless launch...
Official online dashboards are now tracking its position. (And you can watch complete footage of the entire launch here.) "If all goes well, the sunshield will be opened three days after liftoff, taking at least five days to unfold and lock into place," the CBC points out. "Next, the mirror segments should open up like the leaves of a drop-leaf table, 12 days or so into the flight." In all, hundreds of release mechanisms need to work — perfectly — in order for the telescope to succeed. Such a complex series of actions is unprecedented — "like nothing we've done before," noted NASA program director Greg Robinson.
Thanks to Slashdot readers Dave Knott and hackertourist for sharing the news...

Nasa's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) has successfully extended its 4-metre boom arm to assume its operational configuration. From a report: Launched on 9 December atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, IXPE is a space observatory designed to study X-rays from black holes, neutron stars and other exotic celestial objects. To bring X-rays into focus requires a long telescope because mirrors cannot bend the highly energetic rays by large amounts. Instead they have to be coaxed into focus with a device called a grazing incidence telescope. IXPE has three of these. Each sits on the end of the boom arm and directs light into the instruments in the body of the spacecraft. By measuring the polarisation of the X-rays, IXPE will reveal information about the magnetic environment of their targets. At launch the spacecraft was roughly cubic, about 1-metre long on each side, with the 4-metre-long boom arm folded into a canister 0.3 metres in length. This allowed the IXPE to fit into the nose cone of the rocket. On 15 December, the spacecraft extended the boom. Mission personnel are now working to commission the telescope, ready for science observations to begin in the new year.

Decades of tension, debate, and determination have led to this moment, as the James Webb Space Telescope begins its million-mile journey into deep space. From a report: For the world's most advanced space telescope, and the thousands of people who've worked on it over the decades, the starting gun is about to fire. After more than a quarter-century of planning, designing, building, waiting -- and of obsessively testing the most complex space observatory ever assembled -- the mammoth James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to launch at 7:20 a.m. eastern time on December 25. Whether that launch represents a year-end gift to science or a catastrophic conclusion to 2021 depends on two things: a safe rocket ride into the sky, and the weeks immediately afterward.

For JWST's mission to succeed, the telescope must execute an intricate series of carefully choreographed maneuvers during its first month in space. Even a single misstep could compromise the entire mission. And the telescope must perform its devilishly difficult dance far beyond the reach of human hands, hurtling toward a point in space a million miles away. "This is a high-risk and a very high-payoff program," NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy said during a call with reporters on December 21. "There are a lot of hard, long weeks ahead, where the telescope has to deploy perfectly."

But the risk is worth the reward. When JWST opens its golden, 21-foot-wide eye, it will transform our view of the cosmos and of ourselves. The telescope's mission is to tell the story of the universe, from a few beats after its radiant, percussive birth through the sweep of cosmic ages until now -- when humans craft machines that are powerful enough to look back to the beginnings of space and time. With an eye that's sensitive enough to see a bumblebee in lunar orbit, the telescope will peer into the primordial murk from which stars, galaxies, and planets emerged, piercing the darkness that has occluded the gaze of other great observatories.

"As it seeks answers about the cosmos and what they mean for Earth's origins, NASA on Friday announced a slew of discoveries about Jupiter," reports the Washington Post

"And scientists brought home an interstellar tune from the road."

The Juno spacecraft is gathering data about the origin of the solar system's biggest planet — in which more than 1,300 Earths could fit. Among its recent findings are photos from inside the planet's ring, a map of its magnetic field, details of its atmosphere and a trippy soundtrack from a spacecraft's travels around one of its moons.

But it's not exactly a song, or even perceptible to the human ear.

The radio emissions Juno recorded are not what a person would hear if they went to Jupiter — space is a vacuum and does not carry soundwaves like air does on Earth. But the probe zooming through space captured the electric and magnetic emissions that scientists later converted into perceptible sound. Turns out, orbiting Ganymede, which is one of Jupiter's moons and the largest satellite in the solar system, kind of sounds like R2-D2.
Launched in 2011, became the eighth spacecraft to ever reach Jupiter in 2016, "and the first to probe below the giant planet's thick gas cover.

"It fought Jupiter's extreme temperatures and hazardous radiation to survey its north and south poles, chugging along despite a lack of sunshine on its solar panels."

Sixty years after NASA set the goal, and three years after its Parker Solar Probe launched, the spacecraft has become the first to "touch the sun." CNN World reports: The Parker Solar Probe has successfully flown through the sun's corona, or upper atmosphere, to sample particles and our star's magnetic fields. The announcement was made at the 2021 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans on Tuesday, and research from the solar milestone has been published in the Physical Review Letters.

The Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 and set out to circle closer and closer to the sun. Scientists, including the spacecraft's namesake astrophysicist Eugene Parker, want to answer fundamental questions about the solar wind that streams out from the sun, flinging energetic particles across the solar system. The sun's corona is much hotter than the actual surface of the star, and the spacecraft could provide insight about why. The corona is one million degrees Kelvin (1,800,000 degrees Fahrenheit) at its hottest point, while the surface is around 6,000 Kelvin (10,340 degrees Fahrenheit).

The spacecraft has already revealed surprising finds about the sun, including the 2019 discovery of magnetic zig-zag structures in the solar wind called switchbacks. Now, thanks to Parker's latest close approach to the sun, the spacecraft helped scientists determine that these switchbacks originate from the solar surface. Before Parker Solar Probe's mission is done, it will have made 21 close approaches to the sun over the course of seven years. The probe will orbit within 3.9 million miles of the sun's surface in 2024, closer to the star than Mercury -- the closest planet to the sun.

NASA is constantly tracking potentially dangerous asteroids in Earth's vicinity, and now a new tool allows anyone to explore their paths through the solar system. From a report: There are about 28,000 near-Earth asteroids and comets tracked by astronomers to make sure they don't pose a risk to our planet. The interactive tool allows anyone using it to zoom in on specific asteroids of interest in order to learn more about the objects and their orbits. Another feature of the tool allows users to see the next five close approaches of asteroids to Earth. "We were keen to include this feature, as asteroid close approaches often generate a lot of interest," Jason Craig, one of the developers of the tool, said in a statement. "The headlines often depict these close approaches as 'dangerously' close, but users will see by using Eyes just how distant most of these encounters really are."

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Engadget: Becoming an astronaut requires perfect 20/20 vision, but unfortunately, the effects of space can cause astronauts to return to Earth with degraded eyesight. Now, researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed a sleeping bag that that could prevent or reduce those problems by effectively sucking fluid out of astronauts' heads. More than half of NASA astronauts that went to the International Space Station (ISS) for more than six months have developed vision problems to varying degrees. In one case, astronaut John Philips returned from a six month stint about the ISS in 2005 with his vision reduced from 20/20 to 20/100, as the BBC reported.

Fluids tend to accumulate in the head when you sleep, but on Earth, gravity pulls them back down into the body when you get up. In the low gravity of space, though, more than a half gallon of fluid collects in the head. That in turn applies pressure to the eyeball, causing flattening that can lead to vision impairment -- a disorder called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, or SANS. To combat SANS, researchers collaborated with outdoor gear manufacturer REI to develop a sleeping bag that fits around the waist, enclosing the lower body. A vacuum cleaner-like suction device is then activated that draws fluid toward the feet, preventing it from accumulating in the head. Around a dozen people volunteered to test the technology, and the results were positive.

"The Federal Aviation Administration said on Friday that it was ending a program that awarded small gold pins called 'Commercial Space Astronaut Wings' to certain people who flew to space on private spacecraft," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) But before the program officially retires in January, all who applied for the gold wings after flying to space this year will still receive them, the agency said.

That means Mr. Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon who rode a rocket with his space company, Blue Origin, to the edge of space in July, will be considered a commercial astronaut. So will Richard Branson, the founder of the space tourism firm Virgin Galactic who flew his own company's rocket plane to space in the same month. William Shatner, the Star Trek star who flew with Blue Origin to the edge of space in October, will also receive astronaut wings to go with his Starfleet paraphernalia. Twelve other people were also added to the federal agency's list of wing recipients on Friday [bringing the list up to 30 people].

The changes will help the F.A.A. avoid the potentially awkward position of proclaiming that some space tourists are only passengers, not astronauts.

The Commercial Space Astronaut Wings Program was created by Patti Grace Smith, the first chief of the F.A.A.'s commercial space office, to promote the private development of human spaceflight — a mandate from a 1984 law that aimed to accelerate innovation of space vehicles. The program began handing out pins to qualified individuals in 2004, when Mike Melvill, a test pilot who flew the Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne plane, became its first recipient. To qualify for the commercial astronaut wings under the original guidelines, a person had to reach an altitude of at least 50 miles, the marker of space recognized by NASA and the U.S. Air Force, and be a member of the spacecraft's "flight crew..."

Although no one will receive the little gold pins after 2021, those who fly above 50 miles on an F.A.A.-licensed rocket will be honored in the agency's online database.

But future space tourists should not despair a lack of post-flight flair. Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX have each presented paying and guest passengers with custom-designed wings.
Or, as the Associated Press put it, "The FAA said Friday it's clipping its astronaut wings because too many people are now launching into space and it's getting out of the astronaut designation business entirely...." "The U.S. commercial human spaceflight industry has come a long way from conducting test flights to launching paying customers into space," the FAA's associate administrator Wayne Monteith said in a statement. "Now it's time to offer recognition to a larger group of adventurers daring to go to space."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story.

"To date, nearly 28,000 near-Earth asteroids have been found by survey telescopes that continually scan the night sky, adding new discoveries at a rate of about 3,000 per year..." according to an article from NASA:

"The first version of Sentry was a very capable system that was in operation for almost 20 years," said Javier Roa Vicens, who led the development of Sentry-II while working at JPL as a navigation engineer and recently moved to SpaceX. "It was based on some very smart mathematics: In under an hour, you could reliably get the impact probability for a newly discovered asteroid over the next 100 years — an incredible feat."
But RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477), summarizes some new changes: For nearly 20 years, newly discovered asteroids had orbital predictions processed by a system called "Sentry", resulting in quick estimates on the impact risk they represent with Earth. Generally this has worked well, but several things in the future required updates, and a new system adds a number of useful features too.

The coming wave of big survey telescopes which will check the whole sky every few days is going to greatly increase the number of discoveries. That requires streamlining of the overall system to improve processing speed. The new system can also automatically incorporate factors which previously required manual intervention to calculate, particularly the effect of asteroid rotation creating non-gravitational forces on a new discovery's future orbit. Objects like asteroid Bennu (recently subject of a sampling mission) had significant uncertainty on their future path because of these effects. That doesn't mean that Bennu can possibly hit us in the next few centuries, but it became harder to say over the next few millennia. As NASA puts it:

Popular culture often depicts asteroids as chaotic objects that zoom haphazardly around our solar system, changing course unpredictably and threatening our planet without a moment's notice. This is not the reality. Asteroids are extremely predictable celestial bodies that obey the laws of physics and follow knowable orbital paths around the Sun.

But sometimes, those paths can come very close to Earth's future position and, because of small uncertainties in the asteroids' positions, a future Earth impact cannot be completely ruled out. So, astronomers use sophisticated impact monitoring software to automatically calculate the impact risk....

[T]he researchers have made the impact monitoring system more robust, enabling NASA to confidently assess all potential impacts with odds as low as a few chances in 10 million.


The article includes videos explaining the future uncertainties on the orbits of potentially hazardous asteroids Bennu and Apophis.

Blue Origin successfully completed a 10-minute suborbital spaceflight this morning.

But with SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and the space agencies of Russia and China, Blue Origin also helped humanity achieve another milestone Saturday. The Washington Post explains how it will push us far past a record set in 1985 when America's space shuttle made nine flights into space: Saturday's launch will be the 13th human spaceflight of the year, two more than in 1985, when NASA carried out those nine shuttle flights, and the Russian Soyuz vehicle carried astronauts on two launches.

All of those flights reached orbit, while several of the flights this year barely scratched the edge of space in relatively short suborbital jaunts. Still, this year is "the busiest year in human spaceflight," Jennifer Levasseur, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said in an interview. "We're entering a new phase of activity that we've never, frankly, seen before. And it creates a lot of excitement."

Saturday's Blue Origin flight will also carry Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of space exploration firm Voyager Space; Evan Dick, an investor; Lane and Cameron Bess, the first parent-child pair to fly to space; and Laura Shepard Churchley, a daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space...

China, which is building a space station in low Earth orbit, flew two crewed missions this year, and Russia has flown three, including the flight this week. The flurry of activity is reminiscent of 1985, Levasseur said, a time when NASA was optimistic that it would fly dozens of times a year, carrying all sorts of people to space.
The Post ultimately calls 2021 "one of the most remarkable years for human spaceflight."

A brand-new space telescope will soon reveal a hidden vision of the cosmos, potentially transforming our understanding of black holes, supernovas and even the nature of the universe itself. No, not that one. From a report: Much attention is being devoted this month to the James Webb Space Telescope, from NASA and the European Space Agency, which is set to launch on Dec. 22. But a more exclusive cadre of astronomers watched excitedly on Thursday during the trip to space of a smaller, but also transformative, observatory. NASA launched the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, or IXPE mission, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1 a.m. Eastern. The spacecraft cost a mere $188 million, compared with the James Webb's mammoth budget of $9.7 billion, and is expected to demonstrate a new form of astronomy. It will, for the first time, perform imaging X-ray polarimetry in orbit, a technique that could offer astronomers insights that no other telescope can match.

"It's giving us information about some of the most bizarre and exciting objects in space," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate. IXPE (pronounced by the mission team as "ix-pee") was placed into an orbit 340 miles above Earth after its launch. The telescope will spend several weeks there deploying its scientific instruments and testing its equipment, then begin its two-year mission. X-rays are a useful way to observe the universe. Emitted from extremely energetic objects, they allow astronomers to probe events -- superheated jets near black holes or explosions of stars, for example -- in a way other wavelengths, such as visible light, cannot. But X-rays can be studied only from space because they are mostly absorbed by Earth's atmosphere. A variety of dedicated X-ray space telescopes and instruments have launched to orbit, most notably NASA's Chandra X-ray and ESA's XMM-Newton observatories, which both launched in 1999. With spacecraft like these, scientists have unveiled the birthplaces of stars inside gaseous nebulas and mapped the spread of dark matter in clusters of galaxies, among other pioneering work.