"Russia's first lunar mission in decades has ended in failure with its Luna 25 spacecraft crashing into the moon's surface," reports CNN: The incident, a blow to Russia's space ambitions, happened after communication with the robotic spacecraft was interrupted, a blow to Russia's space ambitions. Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said it lost touch with Luna 25 on Saturday around 2:57 p.m. Moscow time... According to a "preliminary analysis," Luna-25 "switched to an off-design orbit" before the collision, Roscosmos said. It was not immediately clear what caused the crash... The news comes a day after the spacecraft reported an "emergency situation" as it was trying to enter a pre-landing orbit, according to Roscosmos...

The spacecraft was meant to complete Russia's first lunar landing mission in 47 years. The country's last lunar lander, Luna 24, landed on the surface of the moon on August 18, 1976... Luna 25 was seen as a proving ground for future robotic lunar exploration missions by Roscosmos. Several future Luna spacecraft were slated to make use of the same design. If it had been successful, Luna 25 would have marked a huge stride for the country's civil space program — which some experts say has faced issues for decades — and demonstrate that it could still perform in high-profile, high-stakes missions. "They were having a lot of problems with quality control, corruption, with funding," said Victoria Samson, the Washington office director for Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes the peaceful exploration of outer space, during an interview Friday.

News that Russia experienced issues with its spacecraft elicited sympathy that reverberated throughout the space community. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's former head of science, said in a social media post that no one in the industry "wishes bad onto other explorers... We are reminded that landing on any celestial object is anything but easy & straightforward," he said,
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam and TheNameOfNick for sharing the news.

Russia has successfully launched Luna 25, the country's first lunar lander in 47 years. From a report: The uncrewed spacecraft lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, Russia. Hitching a ride aboard a Soyuz-2 Fregat rocket, Luna 25 took flight at 8:10 a.m. local time Friday, or 7:10 p.m. ET Thursday. Residents of a Russian village were temporarily evacuated Friday morning since there is a "one in a million chance" that one of Luna 25's rocket stages could fall there, according to Reuters.

The spacecraft is expected to first enter an orbit around Earth before transferring to a lunar orbit and ultimately descending to the surface of the moon. Russia's last lunar lander, Luna 24, landed on the moon on August 18, 1976. Luna 25 and India's Chandrayaan-3 mission, which launched in mid-July, are both expected to land at the lunar south pole on August 23, and it's a race to see which country will land first, according to Reuters. But Roscomos said the two missions are not expected to cause a problem for each other because their specific landing zones differ, Reuters reported.

Russia hopes to launch its first successful lunar landing mission for nearly 50 years, with a long-delayed takeoff from the far east of the country scheduled for early on Friday morning that the Kremlin aims to tout as a new achievement in space exploration. From a report: The Luna-25 mission will seek to land near the south pole of the moon, collecting geological samples from the area, and sending back data for signs of water or its building blocks, which could raise the possibility of a future human colony on the moon. But the more immediate goal is to prove that Russia still can launch a lunar landing mission after numerous failures in the past, generations of turnover among its scientific experts, delays due to sanctions and now isolation due to its war in Ukraine.

Post-Soviet Russia has launched two failed space landing missions, the Mars-96 in 1996 and Phobos-Grunt in 2011, both of which crash-landed into the Pacific Ocean. "The Russian Federation hasn't had much luck with launching unmanned interplanetary probes," said Vitaly Egorov, a blogger who writes extensively on space exploration. "Now 12 years later they're launching Luna-25 and the main intrigue is whether or not it will succeed in reaching [the moon] or not, and if it does, can it actually land there? "One of the main goals is to let modern specialists put down space probes softly on celestial objects. They haven't had that experience in 47 years. That knowledge needs to be restored for new specialists on a new technological level."

Long-time Slashdot reader William Robinson shares a report from the BBC: India's space agency has released the first images of the Moon taken by the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which entered lunar orbit on Saturday. The images show craters on lunar surface getting larger and larger as the spacecraft draws closer. Chandrayaan-3's lander and rover are due to reach the surface on August 23. If successful, India will be the first country to perform a controlled "soft landing" near the south pole. It will also become only the fourth to achieve a soft landing on the Moon after the US, the former Soviet Union and China.

After the spacecraft orbited the Earth for about 10 days, it was sent into the translunar orbit last Tuesday and successfully injected into the lunar orbit on Saturday. Indian Space Research Agency (Isro) said that all checks showed that Chandrayaan-3 was in good "health." It has also pointed out that "this is the third time in succession that Isro has successfully injected a spacecraft into the lunar orbit." Scientists say Chandrayaan-3, the third in India's program of lunar exploration, is expected to build on the success of its earlier Moon missions.

Nasa engineers hope to re-establish contact with the Voyager 2 spacecraft after sending a faulty command that severed communications with the far-flung probe. From a report: The spacecraft is one of a pair that launched in 1977 to capture images of Jupiter and Saturn, but continued on a journey into interstellar space to become the farthest human-made objects from Earth. The space agency lost contact with Voyager 2, which is now more than 12bn miles away, when mission staff accidentally beamed the wrong command to the distant spacecraft more than a week ago.

The command caused the probe to tilt its antenna away from Earth, and although the direction it is pointing in changed by only 2%, the shift was enough for engineers operating receivers on Earth to lose touch with it. Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, were launched within a couple of weeks of one another to explore the planets and moons of the outer solar system. Voyager 1 is still in contact with Earth and nearly 15bn miles away. In 2012, it became the first probe to enter interstellar space and is now the most distant spacecraft ever built. Voyager 2 hurtled into interstellar space in 2018 after discovering a new moon around Jupiter, 10 moons around Uranus and five around Neptune. It remains the only spacecraft to study all four of the solar system's giant planets at close range.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space telescope has released its first test images. New Scientist reports: Euclid launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 1 July and took about a month to reach its final orbit about four times as far from Earth as the moon. While it sailed to its destination, researchers on Earth were hard at work turning on and calibrating its two cameras. The telescope's first images show that both cameras are working as expected, peering into the universe in both visible and infrared light. These images show an area of the sky about one-quarter the area of the full moon, but over the course of its six-year mission Euclid is expected to observe an area about 300,000 times larger, covering about a third of the entire sky.

"We see just a few galaxies here, produced with minimum system tuning," said Giuseppe Racca, Euclid's project manager at ESA, in a statement. "The fully calibrated Euclid will ultimately observe billions of galaxies to create the biggest ever 3D map of the sky." Once the instruments are fully calibrated, which is expected to take a few months, Euclid will begin mapping. The ultimate goal is to figure out the distribution of matter in the universe, measuring how it clumps and moves, which will give scientists unprecedented insights into the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

"NASA took a significant step Tuesday toward allowing humans on the moon to 'live off the land,'" reports the Washington Post.

NASA awarded several contracts "to build landing pads, roads and habitats on the lunar surface, use nuclear power for energy, and even lay a high-voltage power line over half a mile..." Instead of going to the moon and returning home, as was done during the Apollo era of the 1960s and early '70s, NASA intends to build a sustainable presence focusing on the lunar South Pole, where there is water in the form of ice. The contracts awarded Tuesday are some of the first steps the agency is taking toward developing the technologies that would allow humans to live for extended periods of time on the moon and in deep space. Materials on the moon must be used to extract the necessities such as water, fuel and metal for construction, said Prasun Desai, NASA's acting associate administrator for space technology. "We're trying to start that technology development to make that a reality in the future," he said.

The largest award, $34.7 million, went to billionaire Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin space venture, which has been working on a project since 2021 called Blue Alchemist to build solar cells and transmission wire out of the moon's regolith — rocks and dirt. In a blog post this year, Blue Origin said it developed a reactor that reaches temperatures of nearly 3,000 degrees and uses an electrical current to separate iron, silicon and aluminum from oxygen in the regolith. The testing, using a lunar regolith simulant, has created silicon pure enough to make solar cells to be used on the lunar surface, the company said. [NASA says it could also be used to make wires.] The oxygen could be used for humans to breathe. "To make long-term presence on the moon viable, we need abundant electrical power," the company wrote in the post. "We can make power systems on the moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth."

The award is another indication that Blue Origin is trying to position itself as a key player in helping NASA build a permanent presence on and around the moon as part of the Artemis program... The company said it is developing a solar-powered storage tank to keep propellants at 20 degrees Kelvin, or about minus-423 degrees Fahrenheit, so spacecraft can refuel in space instead of returning to Earth between missions.
Other winners cited in the article:

• Zeno Power, which "intends to use nuclear energy to provide power on the moon," received a $15 million contract (partnering with Blue Origin).

• Astrobotic — which plans to launch a lander to the moon this year — got a $34.6 million contract "to build a power line that would transmit electricity from a lunar lander's solar arrays to a rover. It ultimately intends to build a larger power source using solar arrays on the moon's surface."

• Redwire won a $12.9 million contract "to help build roads and landing pads on the moon. It would use a microwave emitter to melt the regolith and transform treacherous rocky landscapes into smooth, solid surfaces, said Mike Gold, Redwire's chief growth officer."

The technologies — which include in-space 3D printing — "will expand industry capabilities for a sustained human presence on the Moon," NASA said in a statement.

The U.S. space agency will contribute a total of $150 million, with each company contributing at least 10-25% of the total cost (based on their size). "Partnering with the commercial space industry lets us at NASA harness the strength of American innovation and ingenuity," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "The technologies that NASA is investing in today have the potential to be the foundation of future exploration."

"Our partnerships with industry could be a cornerstone of humanity's return to the Moon under Artemis," said acting associate administrator Desai. "By creating new opportunities for streamlined awards, we hope to push crucial technologies over the finish line so they can be used in future missions.

"These innovative partnerships will help advance capabilities that will enable sustainable exploration on the Moon."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The four astronauts assigned to soar beyond the far side of the Moon on NASA's Artemis II mission settled into their seats inside a drab classroom last month at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It was one in a series of noteworthy moments for the four-person crew since NASA revealed the names of the astronauts who will be the first people to fly around the Moon since 1972. There was the fanfare of the crew's unveiling to the public in April and an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. There will, of course, be great anticipation as the astronauts close in on their launch date, currently projected for late 2024 or 2025. But many of the crew's days over the next 18 months will be spent in classrooms, on airplanes, or in simulators, with instructors dispensing knowledge they deem crucial for the success of the Artemis II mission. In the simulator, the training team will throw malfunctions and anomalies at the astronauts to test their ability to resolve a failure that -- if it happened in space -- could cut the mission short or, in a worst-case scenario, kill them.

"In order to do those things, what knowledge do we have to impart to them? What skills do we have to teach them?" said Jacki Mahaffey, NASA's leading training officer for the Artemis II mission. "Overall, our goal is we've got a little bit in the classroom, but the more that we can get the crew in front of the displays in the vehicle mockups and really kind of immersed in that environment, the sooner, the better. Commander Reid Wiseman and his crewmates -- pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen -- were named to the Artemis II crew on April 3. Much of their time over the next two-and-a-half months was devoted to making a public relations tour, giving interviews, going to NASA centers around the country, visiting Capitol Hill, and meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Mahaffey said they also got a pre-training pep talk from Charlie Duke, who walked on the Moon on the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972. NASA hasn't trained a crew to fly to the Moon since Apollo 17 at the end of 1972, the last time astronauts walked on the lunar surface.

Wikipedia notes that "Today, the Moon has no active volcanoes even though a significant amount of magma may persist under the lunar surface."

But this week the New York Times reports that "The rocks beneath an ancient volcano on the moon's far side remain surprisingly warm, scientists have revealed using data from orbiting Chinese spacecraft." The findings, which appeared last week in the journal Nature, help explain what happened long ago beneath an odd part of the moon. The study also highlights the scientific potential of data gathered by China's space program, and how researchers in the United States have to circumvent obstacles to use that data...

The Chinese orbiters both had microwave instruments, common on many Earth-orbiting weather satellites but rare on interplanetary spacecraft. The data from Chang'e-1 and Chang'e-2 thus provided a different view of the moon, measuring the flow of heat up to 15 feet below the surface — and proved ideal for investigating the oddity... At Compton-Belkovich, the heat flow was as high as 180 milliwatts per square meter, or about 20 times the average for the highlands of the moon's far side. That measure corresponds to a temperature of minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit about six feet below the surface, or about 90 degrees warmer than elsewhere. "This one stuck out, as it was just glowing hot compared to anywhere else on the moon," said Matthew Siegler, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, Ariz., and who led the research...

"Now we need the geologists to figure out how you can produce that kind of feature on the moon without water, without plate tectonics," Dr. Siegler said.
Universe Today believes this could help scientists better understand the moon's past. "What makes this finding unique is the source of the hotspot isn't active volcanism, such as molten lava, but from radioactive elements within the now-solidified rock that was once molten lava billions of years ago."

Thanks to Slashdot reader rolodexter for sharing the news.

The US Senate has slashed the budget for NASA's ambitious mission to return soil and rock samples from Mars' surface. From a report: NASA had asked for $949 million to support its Mars Sample Return mission, or MSR, in fiscal year 2024. In its proposed budget for the space agency, released Thursday, the Senate offered just $300 million and threatened to take that amount away. "The Committee has significant concerns about the technical challenges facing MSR and potential further impacts on confirmed missions, even before MSR has completed preliminary design review," stated the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee in its report on the budget.

The committee report, obtained by Ars, noted that Congress has spent $1.739 billion on the Mars Sample Return mission to date but that the public launch date -- currently 2028 -- is expected to slip, and cost overruns threaten other NASA science missions. Further, the report states that the $300 million allocated to the Mars mission will be rescinded if NASA cannot provide Congress with a guarantee that the mission's overall costs will not exceed $5.3 billion. In that case, most of the $300 million would be reallocated to the Artemis program to land humans on the Moon.

An Indian spacecraft blazed its way to the far side of the moon Friday in a follow-up mission to its failed effort nearly four years ago to land a rover softly on the lunar surface, the country's space agency said. From a report: Chandrayaan-3, the word for "moon craft" in Sanskrit, took off from a launch pad in Sriharikota in southern India with an orbiter, a lander and a rover, in a demonstration of India's emerging space technology. The spacecraft is set to embark on a journey lasting slightly over a month before landing on the moon's surface later in August. Applause and cheers swept through mission control at Satish Dhawan Space Center, where the Indian Space Research Organization's engineers and scientists celebrated as they monitored the launch of the spacecraft. Thousands of Indians cheered outside the mission control center and waved the national flag as they watched the spacecraft rise into the sky.

"Congratulations India. Chandrayaan-3 has started its journey towards the moon," ISRO Director Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said shortly after the launch. A successful landing would make India the fourth country -- after the United States, the Soviet Union, and China -- to achieve the feat. The six-wheeled lander and rover module of Chandrayaan-3 is configured with payloads that would provide data to the scientific community on the properties of lunar soil and rocks, including chemical and elemental compositions, said Dr. Jitendra Singh, junior minister for Science and Technology. India's previous attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon's little-explored south pole ended in failure in 2019. It entered the lunar orbit but lost touch with its lander that crashed while making its final descent to deploy a rover to search for signs of water.

NASA has expanded its contracts with Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to design and develop new spacesuits, providing each company with an additional $5 million. Engadget reports: NASA has ordered a spacesuit from Axiom Space meant for use in Low Earth Orbit, specifically for spacewalks outside the International Space Station. The original contract for Axiom was for a spacewalking system that the Artemis III astronauts will wear on the lunar surface when they land on the moon. Axiom unveiled a prototype for its original order in March, showcasing a suit with joints that allow wearers to move around with ease and a helmet equipped with a light and an HD camera. Meanwhile, Collins Aerospace has received an order for a spacesuit meant for use on the lunar surface. The company was previously contracted to develop a spacewalking suit for use outside the ISS. In other words, each company has received a new order that mirrors the other's previous one.

Redundancy is an important part of space tech development. In this case, spacesuits meant for the same purpose developed by two different companies could ensure that astronauts will have something to use if the other one fails for any reason. That said, the new task orders are for the companies' initial "design modification work" -- they're essentially modifying their original suits for a new purpose -- and NASA wants to see them first before committing to their continued development. Axiom told SpaceNews that if NASA decides to push through with the new spacesuits' development, the full order will cost the agency $142 million over four years.

Popular Science describes how NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will use a pair of ramps to become the first rover to explore the Moon's south pole when it arrives in late 2024. From the report: "We all know how to work with ramps, and we just need to optimize it for the environment we're going to be in," says NASA's VIPER program manager Daniel Andrews. A VIPER test vehicle recently descended down a pair of metal ramps at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, as seen in the agency's recently published photos, with one beam for each set of the rover's wheels. Because the terrain where VIPER will land -- the edge of the massive Nobile Crater -- is expected to be rough, the engineering team has been testing VIPER's ability to descend the ramps at extreme angles. They have altered the steepness, as measured from the lander VIPER will descend from, and differences in elevation between the ramp for each wheel. "We have two ramps, not just for the left and right wheels, but a ramp set that goes out the back too," Andrews says. "So we actually get our pick of the litter, which one looks most safe and best to navigate as we're at that moment where we have to roll off the lander."

VIPER is a scientific successor to NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS mission, which in 2009 confirmed the presence of water ice on the lunar south pole. "It completely rewrote the books on the moon with respect to water," says Andrews, who also worked on the LCROSS mission. "That really started the moon rush, commercially, and by state actors like NASA and other space agencies." The ice, if abundant, could be mined to create rocket propellant. It could also provide water for other purposes at long-term lunar habitats, which NASA plans to construct in the late 2020s as part of the Artemis moon program.

But LCROSS only confirmed that ice was definitely present in a single crater at the moon's south pole. VIPER, a mobile rover, will probe the distribution of water ice in greater detail. Drilling beneath the lunar surface is one task. Another is to move into steep, permanently shadowed regions -- entering craters that, due to their sharp geometry, and the low angle of the sun at the lunar poles, have not seen sunlight in billions of years. The tests demonstrate the rover can navigate a 15-degree slope with ease -- enough to explore these hidden dark spots, avoiding the need to make a machine designed for trickier descents. "We think there's plenty of scientifically relevant opportunities, without having to make a superheroic rover that can do crazy things," Andrews says.

Developed by NASA Ames and Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic, VIPER is a square golf-cart-sized vehicle about 5 feet long and wide, and about 8 feet high. Unlike all of NASA's Mars rovers, VIPER has four wheels, not six. "A problem with six wheels is it creates kind of the equivalent of a track, and so you're forced to drive in a certain way," Andrews says. VIPER's four wheels are entirely independent from each other. Not only can they roll in any direction, they can be turned out, using the rover's shoulder-like joints to crawl out of the soft regolith of the kind scientists believe exists in permanently shadowed moon craters. The wheels themselves are very similar to those on the Mars rovers, but with more paddle-like treads, known as grousers, to carry the robot through fluffy regolith. [...] Together with Astrobotic, Andrews and his team have altered the ramps, and they now include specialized etchings down their lengths. The rover can detect this pattern along the rampway, using cameras in its wheel wells. "By just looking down there," the robot knows where it is, he says. "That's a new touch." Andrews is sure VIPER will be ready for deployment in 2024, however many tweaks are necessary. After all, this method is less complicated than a sky crane, he notes: "Ramps are pretty tried and true."

George Church was part of the team that pioneered CRISPR gene editing. In 2021 he co-founded a kind of real-world "Jurassic Park" — Colossal Biosciences, a biotech startup working to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth.

For the 30th anniversary of the movie Jurassic Park, Rolling Stone brought in Colossal's co-founder and CEO, Ben Lamm, to share how the movie inspired and influenced their plans. Lamm writes that in 1993 he was 11 years old when he'd first seen the movie Jurassic Park. And even then, "Yes, as an 11-year-old I thought, what if dinosaurs could be real?"

Lamm says he's now excited at "not just de-extincting animals but at the possibility for endless discoveries that would arise from the pursuit of doing so..." When I first told my lawyer that I was interested in starting Colossal and bringing back the woolly mammoth, he asked me if I had read Michael Crichton's book or seen Spielberg's Jurassic Park movie. Since then, it's a question that has come up in nearly every meeting with investors, journalists, and lawyers. I have, which meant that I spent a number of years thinking about if we should de-extinct animals before I set out to figure out if we could. (Thanks, Dr. Ian Malcolm.) Before ever setting foot in a lab, I spent many years and countless hours thinking about the moral questions at the heart of the story.

And, with each successive year, I watched, heard, and learned about more and more animals dying due to climate change — a modern-day extinction. I came to the conclusion that the question is no longer should we practice de-extinction science but how long do we have to get it right... [T]he scary vision of the future isn't one where dinosaurs escape Isla Nubar and fly to the mainland, putting a healthy planet at risk, but instead a future where there aren't enough animals left to support food webs and ecosystems. And that includes humans, too... [I]t is our belief that it is possible to safeguard against or even stop that fatalist future vision using a similar approach in the original movie with some slight variations. It all goes back to genetics and a lot of what I learned about when I first met George...

In the same way that wireless headsets, CAT scans, LEDs, the computer mouse, and thermal blankets are all products of going to the moon, de-extinction efforts have created breakthroughs already for both conservation and human healthcare. In Colossal's first few years of work, our woolly mammoth research alone has not only accelerated genetic rescue in elephants, but also, it is working to cure a deadly elephant virus that kills 25% of all baby elephants worldwide each year. The de-extinction toolkit is also establishing a genetic backup of all living elephant species, and building the necessary tools for elephant cloning and gestation. And now, unlike Dr. Hammond, who bought an island and hid his experiment from the world, governments are coming to us asking if we can help them to restore their critically endangered animals and help safeguard their keystone species.
Lamm points out that you can get good DNA samples from specimens frozen in permafrost, skeletons preserved in caves, and from preserved specimens in museums.

But "You can't get DNA from amber. Trust us. It's porous and doesn't preserve well."

Stephen Clark writes via Ars Technica: When India's ambassador to the US signed up his country to the Artemis Accords last month, it signaled the world's most populous nation -- with a growing prowess in spaceflight -- could be turning toward the United States as a partner in space exploration. India became the 27th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a non-binding set of principles among like-minded nations guiding a vision for peaceful and transparent exploration of space. The accords cover the international registration of human-made space objects, the open release of scientific data, and an agreement for nations not to claim territory on the Moon or other planetary bodies, among other tenets.

Details about future cooperation between the US and India remain scarce. Nelson plans to travel to India later this year for meetings and discussions with Indian space officials. One objective of Nelson's trip will be to hammer out broad objectives for a "strategic framework" for human spaceflight cooperation. Despite the name of the Artemis Accords, there's no guarantee that India will play a significant role in NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon and eventually send humans to Mars. "There's no implication of a signatory to the Artemis accords also being part of the Artemis program," Nelson told Ars.

But none of the other 26 signatories to the Artemis Accords -- a list that includes European space powers and Japan -- has their own human spaceflight program. India is developing a human-rated spacecraft called Gaganyaan that could be ready to fly people into low-Earth orbit in 2025, several years later than originally planned. "The fact that they are a nation that intends in the future to fly own their own astronauts, is that significant? The answer is yes," Nelson said. "I think it's of significance that a major country that's not considered aligned with the US (is) a signatory." "I've described India as a sleeping giant and one that is quickly awakening," Gold told Ars. "India is absolutely vital to global space development, and Artemis in particular, since the country is active with lunar programs, Martian programs, and now even human spaceflight." "Where India might fit into the Artemis program is still to be determined," writes Clark. "The partnership between the US and India in space could take a step forward next year with the flight of an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station. NASA has agreed to provide advanced training to Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston before a flight opportunity to the space station in low-Earth orbit."

India's space program has "held closer ties with Russia in the past," notes Clark. "Russia provided upper-stage engines for India's GSLV Mk.II rocket until India developed its own engine for the job. And four Indian astronauts slated for the Gaganyaan program completed more than a year of training at Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow in 2021, according to Indian media."

"Despite India's overture toward a closer relationship with NASA, the Asian power remains linked with Russia," adds Clark. "India still imports significant amounts of Russian oil and has not officially condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

A new article in the Washington Post reports that even internally, "Space Force officials are still debating its priorities, analysts say: Is it to support warfighters on the ground? Or should it focus primarily on protecting assets in space? Or both?"

In April, the Washington Post reported that space would likely be a key part of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and one possible Space Force counter-measure would "ensure that the United States avoids 'operational surprise,' by keeping track of other countries' satellites and movements in space while also being able to 'identify behaviors that become irresponsible or even hostile.'"

To address the possibility of enemies shooting down satellites, the Space Force is also "pivoting, relying on constellations of small satellites that can be easily replaced and, to an increasing degree, maneuver." That's just one example of how the Space Force intends to ensure the U.S. maintains "space superiority," as its leaders often say, to protect the satellites the Defense Department relies on for warnings of incoming missiles, steering precision-guided munitions and surveilling both friendly and hostile forces. It also could deter conflict in space — why strike a satellite if there are backups that would easily carry on the mission...?

[Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the commander of the 45th Space Wing] gave a tour of some of the roles the Space Force could play, offering a glimpse into its future. Soldiers and Marines already pre-position supplies and equipment on the ground, he said. Could the Space Force start storing supplies in space and then fly them to hot spots on Earth as well? "In theory, we could have huge racks of stuff in orbit and then somebody can call those in, saying. 'I need X, Y, Z delivered to me now on this random island.' And then, boom, they shoot out and they parachute in and they land with GPS assistance," he said. "It's a fascinating thought exercise for emergency response — you know if a type of tidal wave or tsunami comes in and wipes out a whole area."

The military is also working to harness solar energy in space, and then beam it to ground stations. Could the Space Force use that technology to beam power to remote areas to support soldiers on the ground? Another idea: If the cadence of launches really does double or triple and the costs continue to come down, could the Space Force start using rockets to deliver cargo across the globe at a moment's notice? Soon there could be commercial space stations floating around in orbit. "Can we lease a room?" Purdy said. "Can we lease a module?"
A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believes the U.S. Space Force is misunderstood — at least partly because much of what it does is classified. "We fundamentally need to normalize the classification," he tells the Washington Post, "so we can have a conversation with the public, with the American people."

An anonymous reader quotes this report from the Washington Post: In a new study released in Nature this week, researchers state that Earth formed within just 3 million years. That's notably faster than previous estimates placing the timeline up to 100 million years.... "We can also predict that if other planets formed ... by the same mechanism, then the ingredients required for life such as water, should be present on other planets and other systems, so there's a greater chance that we have water worlds elsewhere in the galaxy," said Isaac Onyett, lead author of the study and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Copenhagen.

The authors assert that this rapid genesis occurred through a theory called pebble accretion. The general idea, according to co-author and cosmochemist Martin Bizzarro, is that planets are born in a disk of dust and gas. When they reach a certain size, they rapidly attract those pebbles like a vacuum cleaner. Some of those pebbles are icy and could provide a water supply to Earth, thought of as pebble snow. This would have led to an early version of our planet, known as proto-Earth, that is approximately half the size of our present-day planet. (Our current rendition of Earth likely formed after a larger impact about 100 million years later, which also led to the formation of our moon....)

The team determined the time scale of Earth's formation by looking at silicon isotopes from more than 60 meteorites and planetary bodies in the vicinity of Earth, which represent the rubble leftover after planet formation... By analyzing the silicon compositions in samples of different ages, Onyett said they can piece together a time sequence of what was happening in the disk of dust before Earth formed. They found that, as the samples increased in age, the composition of the asteroids changed toward the composition of the cosmic dust that was being accumulated by Earth. "That's very strong evidence that this dust was also being swept up as it was drifting inwards towards the Sun," said Onyett. "It would have been swept up by Earth as it was growing by accretion."

Birger Schmitz, an astrogeologist at Lund University who was not involved in the research, said these results are "very compelling" and could shift how we think about our planet's formation... Most importantly, he said the results show there is nothing special about our water-carrying planet. "It is just a very ordinary planet in our galaxy. This is important in our attempts to understand how common higher forms of life are in the universe."
While scientists agree pebble accretion does explain the formation of gas-giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, some still argue that rocky planets like Earth were instead formed through larger and larger asteroid collisions...

Researchers have discovered high concentrations of phosphorus in ice crystals emitted from Saturn's moon Enceladus, enhancing its potential to support life. The findings, based on data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, suggest that Enceladus may possess the necessary elements for life. Reuters reports: The discovery was based on data collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, the first to orbit Saturn, during its 13-year landmark exploration of the gaseous giant planet, its rings and its moons from 2004 to 2017. The same team previously confirmed that Enceladus' ice grains contain a rich assortment of minerals and complex organic compounds, including the ingredients for amino acids, associated with life as scientists know it. But phosphorus, the least abundant of six chemical elements considered necessary to all living things -- the others are carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur -- was still missing from the equation until now.

"It's the first time this essential element has been discovered in an ocean beyond Earth," the study's lead author, Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at the Free University in Berlin, said in a JPL press release. [...] One notable aspect of the latest Enceladus discovery was geochemical modeling by the study's co-authors in Europe and Japan showing that phosphorus exists in concentrations at least 100 times that of Earth's oceans, bound water-soluble forms of phosphate compounds. "This key ingredient could be abundant enough to potentially support life in Enceladus' ocean," said co-investigator Christopher Glein, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. "This is a stunning discovery for astrobiology." "Whether life could have originated in Enceladus' ocean remains an open question," Glein said.

In less than two years, NASA plans to have astronauts walking on the moon again — the first time in over half a century. "And one potential surprise could be detecting life on the moon," reports Space.com: New research suggests that future visitors to the lunar south pole region should be on the lookout for evidence of life in super-cold permanently shadowed craters — organisms that could have made the trek from Earth. Microbial life could potentially survive in the harsh conditions near the lunar south pole, suggested Prabal Saxena, a planetary researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "One of the most striking things our team has found is that, given recent research on the ranges in which certain microbial life can survive, there may be potentially habitable niches for such life in relatively protected areas on some airless bodies," Saxena told Space.com.

Indeed, the lunar south pole may possess the properties that can enable survival and potentially even episodic growth of certain microbial life, Saxena said. "We're currently working on understanding which specific organisms may be most suited for surviving in such regions and what areas of the lunar polar regions, including places of interest relevant to exploration, may be most amenable to supporting life," he said. In work presented at a recent science workshop on the potential Artemis 3 landing sites, Saxena and study members reported that the lunar south pole may contain substantial surface niches that could be potentially habitable for a number of microorganisms.
While it's possible organic molecules from earth might have been hurled to the moon after a meteor impact, there's a much more likely possibility. A NASA organic geochemist on the study views humans as "the most likely vector, given the extensive data that we have about our history of exploration..." Especially if humans start visiting these temperate radiation-protected sites...

China is planning to deploy a constellation of satellites in orbit around the moon to create a radio telescope that would enable the study of radio waves longer than 33 feet, providing insights into the "Dark Ages" of the universe. Space.com reports: The array would consist of one "mother" satellite and eight mini "daughter" craft. The mother would process data and communicate with Earth, and the daughters would detect radio signals from the farthest reaches of the cosmos, Xuelei Chen, an astronomer at the China National Space Administration (CNSA), said at the Astronomy From the Moon conference held earlier this year in London. Putting such an array in orbit around the moon would be technically more feasible than building a telescope directly on the lunar surface, a venture that NASA and other space agencies are currently considering as one of the next big steps in astronomy.

"There are a number of advantages in doing this in orbit instead of on the surface because it's engineeringly much simpler," Chen said during the conference. "There is no need for landing and a deployment, and also because the lunar orbital period is two hours, we can use solar power, which is much simpler than doing it on the lunar surface, which, if you want to observe during the lunar night, then you have to provide the energy for almost 14 days." He added that this proposed "Discovering Sky at the Longest Wavelength," or Hongmeng Project, could orbit the moon as early as 2026.

A telescope on the moon, astronomers say, would allow them to finally see cosmic radiation in a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is impossible to study from Earth's surface: radio waves longer than 33 feet (10 meters), or, in other words, those with frequencies below 30 megahertz (MHz). "If you are looking into the low-frequency part of the electromagnetic spectrum, you'll find that, due to strong absorption [by Earth's atmosphere], we know very little about [the region] below 30 megahertz," Chen said. "It's almost a blank part of the electromagnetic spectrum. So we want to open this last electromagnetic window of the universe."