NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) hope to take custody of the samples Perseverance has been patiently collecting and return them safely to Earth, and they'll need the help of two more helicopters. IFLScience reports: NASA and the ESA are collaborating on putting a lander on Mars that is capable of taking off again and making a rendezvous with an orbiter which will then bring the cargo back to Earth. Rather than collect its own samples, the return mission will take over those collected by Perseverance, and the biggest change to the plans lies in how that transfer will occur. The project has not got funding yet but the space agencies are refining their plans. In a quest for the backing they need new details have been announced, along with a return date -- 2033 -- only slightly further off than 1969 was when Kennedy promised a Moon landing "before this decade is out."

Previously the Sample Return Lander was planned to carry a Sample Fetch Rover and its associated second lander. Instead, NASA and the ESA are now proposing to equip the lander with two helicopters based on the phenomenally successful Ingenuity. They will be able to traverse the gap between the Mars Ascent Vehicle and where Perseverance left them much more quickly and having two offers redundancy if one fails. There's also a possibility that Perseverance could deliver the samples directly to the Mars Ascent Vehicle if it is still operating when the ascent vehicle lands.

If everything goes to plan the Earth Return Orbiter and Sample Retrieval Lander will launch in 2027 and 2028 respectively. Although delays are common for space missions, the fact Ingenuity has continued to operate -- and even set records for its flights -- well beyond its anticipated mission time has increased the sample return team's optimism.

A Mars orbiter has captured stunning pictures of the largest canyon in the solar system, called Valles Marineris. It stretches across 2,500 miles of the red planet's equator, a distance that is roughly equivalent to the diameter of the continental United States. Motherboard reports: Mars Express, a European Space Agency (ESA) mission that arrived at Mars in 2003, recently imaged the deepest reaches of this epic canyon, where its slopes descend more than four miles into the Martian surface, which is five times deeper than the Grand Canyon, according to an ESA statement. The observations reveal two massive "chasma," or trenches, that run parallel along the western portion of Valles Marineris, known as Tithonium Chasma in the south and Ius Chasma in the north. These trenches are each about 500 miles in length, making them twice as long as the Grand Canyon -- and they encompass only about a fifth of Valles Marineris' full extent.

Mars Express snapped these shots of the chasma in April with its High Resolution Stereo Camera, during its 23,123th orbit around the planet. The images are so sharp that ESA scientists used them to generate close-up perspectives of Tithonium Chasma that resemble aerial photographs. The pictures show dark dunes, huge mountains, and the fallout of landslides within the chasma, which are annotated in an accompanying map. Canyons on Earth are usually whittled out by the flow of rivers over millions of years, but scientists believe Valles Marineris was formed by tectonic activity on Mars more than three billion years ago. [...] Valles Marineris may have also hosted liquid water billions of years ago, when Mars was wetter, warmer, and potentially habitable.

Microbes are the smallest known living organisms on Earth and can be found just about everywhere, even in the cold, Mars-like conditions of lava caves. From a report: On the island of Hawai'i, scientists recently found a marvelous assortment of novel microbes thriving in geothermal caves, lava tubes, and volcanic vents. These underground structures were formed 65 and 800 years ago and receive little to no sunlight. They can also harbor toxic minerals and gases. Yet microbial mats are a common feature of Hawai'ian lava caves. Samples of these mats, taken between 2006 and 2009 and then again between 2017 and 2019, reveal even more unique life forms than expected. When researchers sequenced 70 samples for a single RNA gene, commonly used for identifying microbial diversity and abundance, they could not match any results to known genuses or species, at least not with high confidence.

"This suggests that caves and fumaroles are under-explored diverse ecosystems," write the study's authors. e biomass in Earth's deep subsurface. Yet because these organisms are so tiny and live in such extreme environments, scientists have historically overlooked them. In recent years, underground microbes have received more interest because they exist in environments very similar to those found on Mars. But there's still a long way to go. Recent estimates suggest 99.999 percent of all microbe species remain unknown, leading some to refer to them as "dark matter." The new research from Hawai'i underscores just how obscure these life forms are.

The European Space Agency has officially terminated cooperation with Russia on a mission to put a rover on Mars, with Russia's space chief furiously responding by banning cosmonauts on the ISS from using a Europe-made robotic arm. France 24 reports: The ESA had previously suspended ties on the joint ExoMars mission, which had planned to use Russian rockets to put Europe's Rosalind Franklin rover on the red planet to drill for signs of life, due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher tweeted on Tuesday that because the war and resulting sanctions "continue to prevail," the agency would "officially terminate" ties with Russia on ExoMars and its landing platform.

The firebrand head of Russian space agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin issued an angry response. "Has the head of the European Space Agency thought about the work of thousands of scientists and engineers in Europe and Russia which has been ended by this decision? Is he prepared to answer for sabotaging a joint Mars mission?" Rogozin said on Telegram. "I, in turn, order our crew on the ISS to stop working with the European manipulator ERA," he added.

"Researchers and engineers from Kyoto University and the Kajima Corporation have released their joint proposal for a three-pronged approach to sustainable human life on the Moon and beyond," reports Gizmodo. The first element involves "The Glass," which aims to bring simulated gravity to the Moon and Mars through centrifugal force. From the report: Gravity on the Moon and Mars is about 16.5% and 37.9% of that on Earth, respectively. Lunar Glass and Mars Glass could bridge that gap; they are massive, spinning cones that will use centrifugal force to simulate the effects of Earth's gravity. These spinning cones will have an approximate radius of 328 feet (100 meters) and height of 1,312 feet (400 meters), and will complete one rotation every 20 seconds, creating a 1g experience for those inside (1g being the gravity on Earth). The researchers are targeting the back half of the 21st century for the construction of Lunar Glass, which seems unreasonably optimistic given the apparent technological expertise required to pull this off.

The second element of the plan is the "core biome complex" for "relocating a reduced ecosystem to space," according to a Google-translated version of the press release. The core biome complex would exist within the Moon Glass/Mars Glass structure and it's where the human explorers would live, according to the proposal. The final element of the proposal is the "Hexagon Space Track," or Hexatrack, a high-speed transportation infrastructure that could connect Earth, Mars, and the Moon. Hexatrack will require at least three different stations, one on Mars's moon Phobos, one in Earth orbit, and one around the Moon.

This month will mark a new chapter in the search for extraterrestrial life, when the most powerful space telescope yet built will start spying on planets that orbit other stars. Astronomers hope that the James Webb Space Telescope will reveal whether some of those planets harbor atmospheres that might support life. New York Times: Identifying an atmosphere in another solar system would be remarkable enough. But there is even a chance -- albeit tiny -- that one of these atmospheres will offer what is known as a biosignature: a signal of life itself. "I think we will be able to find planets that we think are interesting -- you know, good possibilities for life," said Megan Mansfield, an astronomer at the University of Arizona. "But we won't necessarily be able to just identify life immediately."

So far, Earth remains the only planet in the universe where life is known to exist. Scientists have been sending probes to Mars for almost 60 years and have not yet found Martians. But it is conceivable that life is hiding under the surface of the Red Planet or waiting to be discovered on a moon of Jupiter or Saturn. Some scientists have held out hope that even Venus, despite its scorching atmosphere of sulfur dioxide clouds, might be home to Venusians. Even if Earth turns out to be the only planet harboring life in our own solar system, many other solar systems in the universe hold so-called exoplanets. In 1995, Swiss astronomers spotted the first exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star. Known as 51 Pegasi b, the exoplanet turned out to be an unpromising home for life -- a puffy gas giant bigger than Jupiter, and a toasty 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. In the years since, scientists have found more than 5,000 other exoplanets. Some of them are far more similar to Earth -- roughly the same size, made of rock rather than gas and orbiting in a "Goldilocks zone" around their star, not so close as to get cooked but not so far as to be frozen.

Photosynthesis "is very inefficient, with only about 1% of the energy found in sunlight ending up in the plant," according to a new announcement from the University of California, Riverside. But now scientists at the school and the University of Delaware "have found a way to bypass the need for biological photosynthesis altogether and create food independent of sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis." The research, published in Nature Food, uses a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate, the form of the main component of vinegar. Food-producing organisms then consume acetate in the dark to grow. Combined with solar panels to generate the electricity to power the electrocatalysis, this hybrid organic-inorganic system could increase the conversion efficiency of sunlight into food, up to 18 times more efficient for some foods.

"With our approach we sought to identify a new way of producing food that could break through the limits normally imposed by biological photosynthesis," said corresponding author Robert Jinkerson, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering...

Experiments showed that a wide range of food-producing organisms can be grown in the dark directly on the acetate-rich electrolyzer output, including green algae, yeast, and fungal mycelium that produce mushrooms. Producing algae with this technology is approximately fourfold more energy efficient than growing it photosynthetically. Yeast production is about 18-fold more energy efficient than how it is typically cultivated using sugar extracted from corn. "We were able to grow food-producing organisms without any contributions from biological photosynthesis..." said Elizabeth Hann, a doctoral candidate in the Jinkerson Lab and co-lead author of the study. The potential for employing this technology to grow crop plants was also investigated. Cowpea, tomato, tobacco, rice, canola, and green pea were all able to utilize carbon from acetate when cultivated in the dark....

By liberating agriculture from complete dependence on the sun, artificial photosynthesis opens the door to countless possibilities for growing food under the increasingly difficult conditions imposed by anthropogenic climate change. Drought, floods, and reduced land availability would be less of a threat to global food security if crops for humans and animals grew in less resource-intensive, controlled environments. Crops could also be grown in cities and other areas currently unsuitable for agriculture, and even provide food for future space explorers.

"Using artificial photosynthesis approaches to produce food could be a paradigm shift for how we feed people," said corresponding author Robert Jinkerson, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering. "By increasing the efficiency of food production, less land is needed, lessening the impact agriculture has on the environment. And for agriculture in non-traditional environments, like outer space, the increased energy efficiency could help feed more crew members with less inputs...."

"Imagine someday giant vessels growing tomato plants in the dark and on Mars — how much easier would that be for future Martians?" said co-author Martha Orozco-Cárdenas, director of the UC Riverside Plant Transformation Research Center.
Thans to Slashdot reader John.Banister for sharing the link!

CNN reports that a professor and his students at Stanford's Autonomous Systems Lab have received "phase II" funding from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (which supports space robotics research) after proving the feasibility of their plan for robots to crawl through space caves. "The team will use the next two years to work on 3D simulations, a robot prototype, develop strategies that help the robot avoid risk, and test out [their cave robot] in a realistic mission environment — likely a cave site in New Mexico or California."

One of the students explains to CNN that "Caves are risky environments, but they're scientifically interesting. Our idea for this robot is to go far before people would get there to do interesting science and scope out the area."

CNN explains why space caves are so crucial: New research suggests that the best chance of finding past or present evidence of life on Mars requires going below its surface — at least 6.6 feet (2 meters) below. Mars has an incredibly thin atmosphere, which means that the surface of the red planet is bombarded by high energy radiation from space, and that could quickly degrade substances like amino acids that provide fragile evidence of life. Those harsh surface conditions also present a challenge for astronauts, which is one reason scientists have suggested that caves on other planets could be the key to future exploration. Vast cave systems on the moon and Mars could act as shelters for future space travelers.

Caves could also contain resources like water, reveal more about the history of a planet — and be havens for evidence of microbial life. On Earth, there are a varied range of cave systems, many of which remain unexplored, and they support diverse groups of microorganisms. But caves are dangerous — and since we've never peered inside a Martian cave, it's difficult to know what to expect.
The cave robot would presumably to be equipped with cameras, microscopes and LIDAR remote sensing, and the team envisions it will be tethered to a power-supplying rover on the surface.

One team member even told CNN the robots could be adapted to perform maintenance and upkeep on the planned "Gateway" lunar outpost between Earth and the moon.

Martian rock samples collected by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover show signs of key ingredients for life as we know it on Earth. Space.com reports: The venerable Curiosity Rover drilled samples from Gale crater, the site of an ancient lake on Mars. Using these samples, scientists were able, for the first time, to measure the total amount of organic carbon in Martian rocks, according to a statement from NASA. Organic carbon, which is carbon bound to a hydrogen atom, is a prerequisite for organic molecules created and used by all known forms of life. However, organic carbon can also come from non-living sources, such as meteorites and volcanic eruptions. While previous studies have detected organic carbon in smaller quantities in Martian rock samples, the new measurements provide insight into the total amount of carbon in organic compounds.

"Total organic carbon is one of several measurements [or indices] that help us understand how much material is available as feedstock for prebiotic chemistry and potentially biology," Jennifer Stern, lead author of the study and a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the statement. "We found at least 200 to 273 parts per million of organic carbon. This is comparable to or even more than the amount found in rocks in very low-life places on Earth, such as parts of the Atacama Desert in South America, and more than has been detected in Mars meteorites."

[...] However, in addition to organic carbon, the researchers identified other signs suggesting Gale crater may have once supported life, including the presence of chemical energy sources, and chemical compounds such as oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur and low acidity. "Basically, this location would have offered a habitable environment for life, if it ever was present," Stern said in the statement. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"China's Mars sample return mission aims to collect samples from the Red Planet and deliver them to Earth in 2031, or two years ahead of a NASA and ESA joint mission," reports SpaceNews: Lifting off in late 2028... the complex, multi-launch mission will have simpler architecture in comparison with the joint NASA-ESA project, with a single Mars landing and no rovers sampling different sites. However, if successful, it would deliver to Earth the first collected Martian samples; an objective widely noted as one of the major scientific goals of space exploration....

The mission will build on the Mars entry, descent and landing technologies and techniques demonstrated by Tianwen-1 in May 2021, as well as the regolith sampling, automated lunar orbit rendezvous and docking, and high velocity atmospheric reentry success achieved by the 2020 Chang'e-5 lunar sample return mission.... Landing on Mars would take place around September 2029. Sampling techniques will include surface sampling, drilling and mobile intelligent sampling, potentially using a four-legged robot.

The ascent vehicle will consist of two stages, using either solid or liquid propulsion, and will be required to reach a speed of 4.5 kilometers per second, according to the presentation. After rendezvous and docking with the waiting orbiter, the spacecraft will depart Mars orbit in late October 2030 for a return to Earth in July 2031.

Sun Zezhou [chief designer of the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter and rover mission], added that the Tianwen-1 orbiter will conduct an aerobraking test in Mars orbit later this year as part of the sample return mission preparation.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the story!

Engineers at the European Space Agency (ESA) are getting ready for a Windows 98 upgrade on an orbiter circling Mars. The Verge reports: The Mars Express spacecraft has been operating for more than 19 years, and the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) instrument onboard has been using software built using Windows 98. Thankfully for humanity and the Red Planet's sake, the ESA isn't upgrading its systems to Windows ME. The MARSIS instrument on ESA's Mars Express was key to the discovery of a huge underground aquifer of liquid water on the Red Planet in 2018. This major new software upgrade "will allow it to see beneath the surfaces of Mars and its moon Phobos in more detail than ever before," according to the ESA. The agency originally launched the Mars Express into space in 2003 as its first mission to the Red Planet, and it has spent nearly two decades exploring the planet's surface.

MARSIS uses low-frequency radio waves that bounce off the surface of Mars to search for water and study the Red Planet's atmosphere. The instrument's 130-foot antenna is capable of searching around three miles below the surface of Mars, and the software upgrades will enhance the signal reception and onboard data processing to improve the quality of data that's sent back to Earth. "We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS," explains Carlo Nenna, a software engineer at Enginium who is helping ESA with the upgrade. "Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!"

A rare, five-planet alignment will peak on June 24, allowing a spectacular viewing of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as they line up in planetary order. From a report: The event began at the beginning of June and has continued to get brighter and easier to see as the month has progressed, according to Diana Hannikainen, observing editor of Sky & Telescope. A waning crescent moon will be joining the party between Venus and Mars on Friday, adding another celestial object to the lineup. The moon will represent the Earth's relative position in the alignment, meaning this is where our planet will appear in the planetary order. This rare phenomenon has not occurred since December 2004, and this year, the distance between Mercury and Saturn will be smaller, according to Sky & Telescope.

At its re:Mars conference, Amazon today announced the launch of CodeWhisperer, an AI pair programming tool similar to GitHub's Copilot that can autocomplete entire functions based on only a comment or a few keystrokes. From a report: The company trained the system, which currently supports Java, JavaScript and Python, on billions of lines of publicly available open-source code and its own codebase, as well as publicly available documentation and code on public forums. It's now available in preview as part of the AWS IDE Toolkit, which means developers can immediately use it right inside their preferred IDEs, including Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm and Amazon's own AWS Cloud 9. Support for the AWS Lambda Console is also coming soon. Ahead of today's announcement, Vasi Philomin, Amazon's VP in charge of its AI services, stressed that the company didn't simply create this in order to offer a copy of Copilot. He noted that with CodeGuru, its AI code reviewer and performance profiler, and DevOps Guru, its tool for finding operation issues, the company laid the groundwork for today's launch quite a few years ago.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: At its annual re:Mars conference today in Las Vegas, Amazon's Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, announced a spate of new and upcoming features for the company's smart assistant. The most head turning of the bunch was a potential new feature that can synthesize short audio clips into longer speech.

In the scenario presented at the event, the voice of a deceased loved one (a grandmother, in this case), is used to read a grandson a bedtime story. Prasad notes that, using the new technology, the company is able to accomplish some very impressive audio output, using just one minute of speech. Details are scant, at the moment. There's no timeline or further specifics, but -- at very least -- this is the kind of news that will likely invite all manner of scrutiny over potential applications beyond something as banal or even heartwarming as reading a child The Wizard of Oz.

There are no environmental showstoppers in SpaceX's plans to launch a giant new rocket to orbit from South Texas, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Monday. From a report: An environmental assessment by the agency has concluded that SpaceX's plans for orbital launches will have "no significant impact" on the region along the Gulf Coast near Brownsville, Texas. But the F.A.A. is also requiring the company to undertake more than 75 actions to minimize the impact on the surrounding areas as it begins flights of Starship, a vehicle that is central to NASA's plans to return to the moon as well as the vision of Elon Musk, the company's founder and chief executive, to colonize Mars. The actions Mr. Musk's company must take include earlier notice of launches, monitoring of vegetation and wildlife by a biologist, coordination with state and federal agencies to remove launch debris from sensitive habitats and adjustment of lighting to lessen impact on wildlife and a nearby beach. The mitigation measures required by the F.A.A. also restrict closures of a highway that passes the SpaceX site during launches so that people can visit the nearby beach, park and wildlife refuge. The agency said the highway could not be closed on 18 holidays and not on more than five weekends a year.

Four months ago, NASA's Mars rover Perseverance picked up a "pet rock," tucked inside its left front wheel, that's been riding along ever since. Space.com reports: So far, its ridden across 5.3 miles (8.5 kilometers) with the Perseverance rover as it drives across its Jezero Crater home on Mars.

Perseverance has carried the rock north across its landing site, named for the famed late science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, and then west across a region called "Kodiak," the remains of a former delta at Jezero. The rover is currently in the midst of what NASA calls its Delta Front Campaign and may have drilled into its first sedimentary Mars rock, Ravanis wrote.

"Perseverance's pet rock is now a long way from home," Ravanis wrote. "It's possible that the rock may fall out at some point along our future ascent of the crater rim. If it does so, it will land amongst rocks that we expect to be very different from itself."

If that happens, a future Martian geologist might be a bit confused to find the rock so out of place, Ravanis added.

"We have reestablished reliable communications with Ingenuity," reported the team lead for NASA's Mars helicopter, Teddy Tzanetos, in a blog post last week. As detailed in our last blog post, for the first time in our yearlong extended mission we had a loss of communications with Ingenuity from the downlink of May 3 (Sol 427) and May 4 (Sol 428). After a week of anomaly investigation, two sols dedicated to data collection, and the heroic efforts of the Perseverance and Ingenuity operations teams, I am very happy to report that we have reestablished reliable communications with Ingenuity.

Based on all available telemetry, the helicopter appears healthy, and we have resumed a modified form of operations. Assuming winter recommissioning activities complete nominally, Ingenuity's 29th flight may occur in the next few sols.... All telemetry downlinked so far suggests that Ingenuity is healthy, with no signs of damage from the overnight cold cycles.
That's the good news.

The bad news? Telemetry from Ingenuity confirmed that the loss of communications was due to insufficient battery state-of-charge (SOC) going into the night, which resulted in a reset of our mission clock. This daily state-of-charge deficit is likely to persist for the duration of Martian winter (until September/October).

Challenges like these are to be expected: After hundreds of sols and dozens of flights beyond the five flights originally planned, the solar-powered helicopter is in uncharted terrain. We are now operating far outside our original design limits. Historically, Mars is very challenging for spacecraft (particularly solar-powered spacecraft). Each sol could be Ingenuity's last....

We have reached the point in Martian late fall/early winter at which Ingenuity can no longer support the energy demands of nominal operations. Starting on the evening of Sol 426, we believe Ingenuity started experiencing overnight battery brownouts (drops in the battery's voltage), which reset the electronics. Due to the seasonal decrease in available solar energy, increases in airborne dust density, and the drop in temperatures, the energy demand to keep the electronics powered and warm throughout the night has surpassed Ingenuity's available energy budget.... We expect to be in this challenging winter energy paradigm until around Sol 600, at which point we expect to return to being power-positive from sol to sol.
The blog post says NASA can cope with a resetting mission clock. But the helicopter's battery (and other electronics) are now facing overnight ambient temperatures of about minus 80 degrees C (minus 112 degrees F), "a lifetime risk to our electronic components." Although component failure has always been a risk that we have carried since rover deployment, that risk is now magnified... We do have limited electronics core module (ECM) component testing to suggest that select components may survive through the winter, but we cannot predict how the entire ECM will fare throughout winter. Cold-soaking electronics is believed to have caused the end of the Opportunity and Spirit Mars rover missions.

Given our elevated risk posture, our focus in the last several sols has been to prioritize data downlink from Ingenuity to the Helicopter Base Station (HBS). We have a handful of Heli-to-HBS transfer activities left before all unique data are copied from Ingenuity to the HBS. Specifically, we are copying flight performance logs, electronics logs, and high-resolution color images from the last eight flights that are still onboard Ingenuity.

After all critical logs are transferred, the team will proceed with a recommissioning phase during which we will reestablish Ingenuity's flight-readiness given our ongoing overnight cold-cycling. Like during the technology demonstration phase, we will perform a high-speed spin before proceeding to flight. Should Ingenuity receive a clean bill of health, we would be ready to execute a short sortie to the southwest in Flight 29. This flight will improve our radio link for approximately the next four to six months while Perseverance samples at the river delta.

In the meantime, the Ingenuity flight software team will be preparing a series of upgrades to enable advanced navigation features. These new capabilities will help Ingenuity ascend the river delta and continue its missions as a forward scout for Perseverance past winter.
Mashable notes that Ingenuity recently sent back new footage showing its April 8th flight — calling it Ingenuity's "farthest and fastest flight yet." Flying 33 feet above the surface of Mars on April 8, "it traveled 2,310 feet — a bit less than half a mile — at 12 mph." The whole record-breaking feat lasted a little over 2.5 minutes, but that's much longer than its first flight of 39 seconds in the spring of 2021. NASA increased the new video's speed fivefold, reducing its runtime to less than 35 seconds.

Amateur astronomers are preparing for a heavenly treat from Friday as the five planets visible to the naked eye line up in order of their distance from the sun across the pre-dawn sky. From a report: For those who can face the early start, and have an unobstructed view of the horizon to the east and south-east, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, could all be visible before the faintest, Mercury, vanishes in the glare of sunrise. It is not uncommon to see two or three planets close together, but the five that can be spotted with the naked eye have not appeared in order, as viewed from the northern hemisphere, since December 2004.

"This is really cool," said Prof Beth Biller, personal chair of exoplanet characterisation at Edinburgh University's institute for astronomy. "We now know of many other stars hosting multiple planets. This is a rare opportunity to see the same thing closer to home, with all five 'naked eye' planets in our solar system visible at once." The planets of the solar system orbit the sun in a remarkably narrow plane, meaning that when viewed from Earth, they appear to lie close to an imaginary line in the sky called the ecliptic. The five planets will rise above the horizon in the early hours of Friday, though it may be hard to see them all until later in the month.

New spacesuits made by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace could be worn by astronauts that land on the moon later this decade through NASA's Artemis program, the agency announced Wednesday. The suits will also be worn by crew members living and working on the International Space Station. CNN reports: The contracts were awarded by NASA as part of its strategy of growing commercial partnerships. Both companies have been selected to move forward in developing the next generation of spacesuits. Depending on how the two companies deliver on the suits and their spacewalking capabilities, one company could prevail over the other. That flexibility has been built into the task awards as the two companies progress in product development.

The Artemis program seeks to land the first woman and the first person of color at the lunar south pole by 2025, and eventually prepare for landing crewed missions on Mars. Experts from NASA have developed the required safety and technical standards for the spacesuits. Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace will design, develop and potentially produce the suits and any necessary equipment for space station crew and Artemis astronauts. [...] The suits are expected to be ready by the mid-2020s.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in March of 2017, this strange note first appeared at the end of a paper in the journal Nature: "Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations." I looked over the paper, and it didn't have any maps in it. None of the authors had unusual affiliations, just the normal university departments. Why the disclaimer? Before answering this question, let's dig a bit deeper. This notice first started appearing in mid-March of 2017, when it was attached to every single research paper in that issue. I cannot find any papers prior to that with the "Publisher's note." Ever since then, Nature has put this notice on every paper in all of their journals. For example, the current issue has a paper on mapping sound on the planet Mars, by an international team of astronomers and physicists. It does contain maps, but they don't describe any features on Earth. Nonetheless, it has the disclaimer at the end about "jurisdictional claims in published maps."

(Nature has done it to me too, for example in this 2018 paper led by a former Ph.D. student of mine. I didn't yet know about the weird disclaimer when that paper appeared, and I didn't catch it until later.) It's not just Nature, but apparently all of the many journals published by the Nature Publishing Group, which today number in excess of 100 publications. I looked at a few randomly chosen papers in Nature Biotechnology and Cancer Gene Therapy, as a test, and they all have exactly the same Publisher's Note. None of these papers, I should add, have any maps in them. I couldn't find anything odd about the institutional affiliations either. Nature is one of the oldest and most-respected journals in all of science, dating back to 1869. Just a few years ago, in 2015, Nature's publishing group merged with Springer, the second-largest for-profit scientific publisher in the world, and they changed their name to Springer Nature. We'll see why this is relevant in a minute.

I should also mention that the papers appearing in these journals, especially Nature itself, are rigorously peer-reviewed. Any map that appears undergoes the same peer review. The reviewers also see all the authors' institutional affiliations. Normally, the publisher has no say over any of this content: if it passes peer review, it's published. So what happened? Springer Nature, it seems, added this note because of pressure from the Chinese government. The Chinese government doesn't want any maps to show Taiwan, and it doesn't want any affiliations to from scientists in Taiwan unless they show (incorrectly) that Taiwan is part of China. I admit that I'm speculating, but we have very clear evidence that SpringerNature has succumbed to Chinese demands on related matters. In late 2017, the New York Times reported that Springer was "bowing to pressure from the Chinese government to block access to hundreds of articles on its Chinese website." [...]