NASA's 2022 DART mission "successfully demonstrated how a fast-moving spacecraft could change an asteroid's trajectory by crashing into it," remembers Gizmodo, "potentially providing a way to defend Earth — though the asteroid in this test was never a real threat."

But a followup study suggests debris from that 525-foot (160-meter) asteroid "could actually strike back," they add, "though we're not in any danger." The [DART] team posits that the collision produced a field of rocky ejecta that could reach Earth within 10 years... [Various aerospace scientists] studied data collected by the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids, or LICIACube, which observed DART's impact of Dimorphos up close. Then, they fed LICIACube's data into supercomputers at NASA's Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility to simulate how the debris from the asteroid — basically dust and rock — may have disseminated into space. The simulations tracked about 3 million particles kicked up by the impact, some of which are large enough to produce meteors that could be spotted on Earth. Particles from the impact could get to Mars in seven to 13 years, and the fastest particles could make it to our own world in just seven years.

"This detailed data will aid in the identification of DART-created meteors, enabling researchers to accurately analyze and interpret impact-related phenomena," the team wrote in the paper.
"However, these faster particles are expected to be too small to produce visible meteors, based on early observations," said Dr. Eloy Peña-Asensio, who lead the research team, in an interview with Universe Today. (He's a Research Fellow with the Deep-space Astrodynamics Research and Technology group at Milan's Polytechnic Institute.) The team's simulations indicated it could take up to 30 years before any of the ejecta is observed on Earth, in a new (and human-created) meteor shower called the Dimorphids.

So while they won't pose any risk, "If these ejected Dimorphos fragments reach Earth... their small size and high speed will cause them to disintegrate in the atmosphere, creating a beautiful luminous streak in the sky."

Slashdot reader Dave Knott writes: After once again being plagued by controversy, this time due to a thwarted ballot-stuffing campaign, the 2024 Hugo Awards have been awarded at the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention.

This year's winners are:

* Best Novel: Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh
* Best Novella: Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher
* Best Novelette: "The Year Without Sunshine", by Naomi Kritzer
* Best Short Story: "Better Living Through Algorithms", by Naomi Kritzer
* Best Series: Imperial Radch, by Ann Leckie
* Best Graphic Story or Comic: Saga, Vol. 11, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples
* Best Related Work: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
* Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
* Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: The Last of Us: "Long, Long Time", written by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, directed by Peter Hoar
* Best Game or Interactive Work: Baldur's Gate 3, produced by Larian Studios
* Best Editor Short Form: Neil Clarke
* Best Editor Long Form: Ruoxi Chen
* Best Professional Artist: Rovina Cai
* Best Semiprozine: Strange Horizons, by the Strange Horizons Editorial Collective
* Best Fanzine: Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together, editors Roseanna Pendlebury, Arturo Serrano, Paul Weimer; senior editors Joe Sherry, Adri Joy, G. Brown, Vance Kotrla
* Best Fancast: Octothorpe, by John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty
* Best Fan Writer: Paul Weimer
* Best Fan Artist: Laya Rose
* Lodestar Award for Best YA Book: To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose
* Astounding Award for Best New Writer: Xiran Jay Zhao

NASA chief Bill Nelson didn't mince words about the agency's budget crunch. "You can't put 10 pounds of potatoes in a five-pound sack," he told ArsTechnica in an interview, addressing $4.7 billion in cuts over two years.

To scientists fretting over axed missions, Nelson offered a frank "I feel your pain." The Mars Sample Return's ballooning $11 billion price tag and 2040 timeline forced a reset. "We pulled the plug," Nelson admitted, but he's banking on cheaper, creative alternatives emerging by year's end.

The moon rover Viper got the chop too, blowing its budget by 40%. "There comes a limit," Nelson said, defending the tough call. Viper lunar rover project was "running 40 percent over budget." He defended these decisions as necessary given the $2 billion cut to science funding alone. The cuts stem from the Fiscal Responsibility Act. Nelson expressed hope for a "reprieve" in fiscal year 2026, but noted uncertainty due to another looming debt ceiling issue.

Slashdot contributors Tablizer, radaos, fjo3, and dbialac highlighted a major discovery by scientists: a reservoir of liquid water hidden deep beneath Mars' rocky outer crust. The BBC reports: The findings come from a new analysis of data from Nasa's Mars Insight Lander, which touched down on the planet back in 2018. The lander carried a seismometer, which recorded four years' of vibrations -- Mars quakes -- from deep inside the Red Planet. Analyzing those quakes -- and exactly how the planet moves -- revealed "seismic signals" of liquid water... The Insight probe was only able to record directly from the crust beneath its feet, but the researchers expect that there will be similar reservoirs across the planet. If that is the case, they estimate that there is enough liquid water on Mars to form a layer across the surface that would be more than half a mile deep.

However, they point out, the location of this Martian groundwater is not good news for billionaires with Mars colonization plans who might want to tap into it. "It's sequestered 10-20km deep in the crust," explained Prof Manga. "Drilling a hole 10km deep on Mars -- even for [Elon] Musk -- would be difficult," he told BBC News.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shared this report from Science magazine: One of the classic tropes of science fiction is terraforming Mars: warming up our cold neighbor so it could support human civilization. The idea might not be so far-fetched, research published today in Science Advances suggests...

Samaneh Ansari [a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University and lead author on the new study] and her colleagues wanted to test the heat-trapping abilities of a substance Mars holds in abundance: dust. Martian dust is rich in iron and aluminum, which give it its characteristic red hue. But its microscopic size and roughly spherical shape are not conducive to absorbing radiation or reflecting it back to the surface. So the researchers brainstormed a different particle: using the iron and aluminum in the dust to manufacture 9-micrometer-long rods, about twice as big as a speck of martian dust and smaller than commercially available glitter. Ansari designed a simulation to test how these theoretical particles would interact with light. She found "unexpectedly huge effects" in how they absorbed infrared radiation from the surface and how they scattered that radiation back down to Mars — key factors that determine whether an aerosol particle creates a greenhouse effect.

Collaborators at the University of Chicago and the University of Central Florida then fed the particles into computer models of Mars's climate. They examined the effect of annually injecting 2 million tons of the rods 10 to 100 meters above the surface, where they would be lofted to higher altitudes by turbulent winds and settle out of the atmosphere 10 times more slowly than natural Mars dust. Mars could warm by about 10 degreesC within a matter of months, the team found, despite requiring 5000 times less material than other proposed greenhouse gas schemes...

Still, "Increasing the temperature of the planet is just one of the things that we would need to do in order to live on Mars without any assistance," says Juan Alday, a postdoctoral planetary science researcher at the Open University not involved with the work. For one, the amount of oxygen in Mars's atmosphere is only 0.1%, compared with 21% on Earth. The pressure on Mars is also 150 times lower than on Earth, which would cause human blood to boil. And Mars has no ozone layer, which means there is no protection from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. What's more, even once warmed, martian soils may still be too salty or toxic to grow crops. In other words, McInnes says, upping the temperature "isn't some kind of magic switch" that would make Mars habitable.

That isn't stopping Ansari and her colleagues from investigating the possibilities.

"Scientists working with NASA's Perseverance rover state emphatically that they are not claiming to have discovered life on Mars," writes the New York Times.

"But many would regard a rock that the rover just finished studying as 'Most Likely to Contain Fossilized Microbial Martians'..." The rover has drilled and stashed a piece of the rock, which scientists hope can be brought back to Earth in the coming years for closer analysis and more definitive answers. "What we are saying is that we have a potential biosignature on Mars," said Kathryn Stack Morgan, the mission's deputy project scientist. She describes a biosignature as a structure, composition or texture in a rock that could have a biological origin.

The rock, which scientists named Cheyava Falls, possesses features that are reminiscent of what microbes might have left behind when this area was warm and wet several billion years ago, part of an ancient river delta. The scientists clarified that they did not spot anything that they thought might be actual fossilized organisms... Within the rock, Perseverance's instruments detected organic compounds, which would provide the building blocks for life as we know it. The rover also found veins of calcium sulfate — mineral deposits that appear to have been deposited by flowing water. Liquid water is another key ingredient for life. Perseverance also spotted small off-white splotches, about 1 millimeter in size, that have black rings around them, like miniature leopard spots. The black rings contain iron phosphate.

The chemical reactions that created the leopard spots could also have provided energy for microbes to live on.
"One of the key parts of Perseverance's mission is to drill samples of interesting rocks for a future mission to bring samples back to Earth for scientists to study with state-of-the-art instruments in their laboratories," the article points out. And while exactly how those rocks would be return has yet to be determined, deputy project scientist Morgan tells the Times, "I think this sample comes to the top of the list."

joshuark shares a report from The Verge: NASA researchers have successfully tested laser communications in space by streaming 4K video footage originating from an airplane in the sky to the International Space Station and back. The feat demonstrates that the space agency could provide live coverage of a Moon landing during the Artemis missions and bodes well for the development of optical communications that could connect humans to Mars and beyond. NASA normally uses radio waves to send data and talk between the surface to space but says that laser communications using infrared light can transmit data 10 to 100 times faster than radios. "ISS astronauts, cosmonauts, and unwelcomed commercial space-flight visitors can now watch their favorite porn in real-time, adding some life to a boring zero-G existence," adds joshuark. "Ralph Kramden, when contacted by Ouiji board, simply spelled out 'Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!'"

12 years on Mars — and NASA's Curiosity rover "has made its most unusual find to date," reports CNN — rocks made of pure sulfur.

"And it all began when the 1-ton rover happened to drive over a rock and crack it open, revealing yellowish-green crystals never spotted before on the red planet." "I think it's the strangest find of the whole mission and the most unexpected," said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "I have to say, there's a lot of luck involved here. Not every rock has something interesting inside...." White stones had been visible in the distance, and the mission scientists wanted a closer look. The rover drivers at JPL, who send instructions to Curiosity, did a 90-degree turn to put the robotic explorer in the right position for its cameras to capture a mosaic of the surrounding landscape. On the morning of May 30, Vasavada and his team looked at Curiosity's mosaic and saw a crushed rock lying amid the rover's wheel tracks. A closer picture of the rock made clear the "mind-blowing" find, he said...

"No one had pure sulfur on their bingo card," Vasavada said...

Members of the team were stunned twice — once when they saw the "gorgeous texture and color inside" the rock and then when they used Curiosity's instruments to analyze the rock and received data indicating it was pure sulfur, Vasavada said.
Vasavada also was grateful for the original landing site where Curiosity began methodically exploring back in 2012.

"I'm glad we chose something that was 12 years' worth of science."

NASA reports in an article for Phys.Org: Scientists were stunned on May 30 when a rock that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover drove over cracked open to reveal something never seen before on the Red Planet: yellow sulfur crystals. Since October 2023, the rover has been exploring a region of Mars rich with sulfates, a kind of salt that contains sulfur and forms as water evaporates. But where past detections have been of sulfur-based minerals -- in other words, a mix of sulfur and other materials -- the rock Curiosity recently cracked open is made of elemental (pure) sulfur. It isn't clear what relationship, if any, the elemental sulfur has to other sulfur-based minerals in the area.

While people associate sulfur with the odor from rotten eggs (the result of hydrogen sulfide gas), elemental sulfur is odorless. It forms in only a narrow range of conditions that scientists haven't associated with the history of this location. And Curiosity found a lot of it -- an entire field of bright rocks that look similar to the one the rover crushed. "Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert," said Curiosity's project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "It shouldn't be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Just before the weekend, dozens of record labels including UMG, Warner, and Sony, filed a massive copyright infringement lawsuit against Verizon at a New York federal court. In common with previous lawsuits that accused rivals of similar inaction, Verizon Communications Inc., Verizon Services Corp., and Cellco Partnership (dba Verizon Wireless), stand accused of assisting subscribers to download and share pirated music, by not doing enough to stop them. The labels' complaint introduces Verizon as one of the largest ISPs in the country, one that "knowingly provides its high-speed service to a massive community of online pirates."

Knowledge of infringement, the labels say, was established at Verizon over a period of several years during which it received "hundreds of thousands" of copyright notices, referencing instances of infringement allegedly carried out by its subscribers. The complaint cites Verizon subscribers' persistent use of BitTorrent networks to download and share pirated music, with Verizon allegedly failing to curtail their activity. "While Verizon is famous for its 'Can you hear me now?' advertising campaign, it has intentionally chosen not to listen to complaints from copyright owners. Instead of taking action in response to those infringement notices as the law requires, Verizon ignored Plaintiffs' notices and buried its head in the sand," the labels write.

"Undeterred, infringing subscribers identified in Plaintiffs' notices continued to use Verizon's services to infringe Plaintiffs' copyrights with impunity. Meanwhile, Verizon continued to provide its high-speed service to thousands of known repeat infringers so it could continue to collect millions of dollars from them." Through this lawsuit, which references piracy of songs recorded by artists including The Rolling Stones, Ariana Grande, Bob Dylan, Bruno Mars, Elvis Presley, Dua Lipa, Drake, and others, the labels suggest that Verizon will have no choice but to hear them now. [...]

Attached to the complaint, Exhibit A contains a non-exhaustive list of the plaintiffs' copyright works allegedly infringed by Verizon's subscribers. The document is over 400 pages long, with each track listed representing potential liability for Verizon as a willful, intentional, and purposeful contributory infringer, the complaint notes. This inevitably leads to claims based on maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per copyrighted work infringed on Count I (contributory infringement). The statutory maximum of $150,000 per infringed work is also applied to Count II (vicarious infringement), based on the labels' claim that Verizon derived a direct financial benefit from the direct infringements of its subscribers. The labels' complaint can be found here (PDF).

"The latest version of the Linux kernel adds an array of improvements," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu, " including a new memory sealing system call, a speed boost for AES-XTS encryption on Intel and AMD CPUs, and expanding Rust language support within the kernel to RISC-V." Plus, like in all kernel releases, there's a glut of groundwork to offer "initial support" for upcoming CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, Wi-Fi, and other hardware (that most of us don't use yet, but require Linux support to be in place for when devices that use them filter out)...

Linux 6.10 adds (after much gnashing) the mseal() system call to prevent changes being made to portions of the virtual address space. For now, this will mainly benefit Google Chrome, which plans to use it to harden its sandboxing. Work is underway by kernel contributors to allow other apps to benefit, though. A similarly initially-controversial change merged is a new memory-allocation profiling subsystem. This helps developers fine-tune memory usage and more readily identify memory leaks. An explainer from LWN summarizes it well.

Elsewhere, Linux 6.10 offers encrypted interactions with trusted platform modules (TPM) in order to "make the kernel's use of the TPM reasonably robust in the face of external snooping and packet alteration attacks". The documentation for this feature explains: "for every in-kernel operation we use null primary salted HMAC to protect the integrity [and] we use parameter encryption to protect key sealing and parameter decryption to protect key unsealing and random number generation." Sticking with security, the Linux kernel's Landlock security module can now apply policies to ioctl() calls (Input/Output Control), restricting potential misuse and improving overall system security.

On the networking side there's significant performance improvements to zero-copy send operations using io_uring, and the newly-added ability to "bundle" multiple buffers for send and receive operations also offers an uptick in performance...

A couple of months ago Canonical announced Ubuntu support for the RISC-V Milk-V Mars single-board computer. Linux 6.10 mainlines support for the Milk-V Mars, which will make that effort a lot more viable (especially with the Ubuntu 24.10 kernel likely to be v6.10 or newer). Others RISC-V improvements abound in Linux 6.10, including support for the Rust language, boot image compression in BZ2, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, and Zstandard (instead of only Gzip); and newer AMD GPUs thanks to kernel-mode FPU support in RISC-V.
Phoronix has their own rundown of Linux 6.10, plus a list of some of the highlights, which includes:

• The initial DRM Panic infrastructure
• The new Panthor DRM driver for newer Arm Mali graphics
• Better AMD ROCm/AMDKFD support for "small" Ryzen APUs and new additions for AMD Zen 5.
• AMD GPU display support on RISC-V hardware thanks to RISC-V kernel mode FPU
• More Intel Xe2 graphics preparations
• Better IO_uring zero-copy performance
• Faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption with modern Intel and AMD CPUs
• Continued online repair work for XFS
• Steam Deck IMU support
• TPM bus encryption and integrity protection

Researchers from Cornell University have developed a novel urine collection and filtration system for spacesuits, designed to improve hygiene and comfort for astronauts during long spacewalks. This new system, inspired by the 'stillsuits' from the Dune franchise, recycles urine into potable water using a vacuum-based external catheter and a forward-reverse osmosis unit. It's expected to be tested for use in upcoming NASA moon and Mars missions. Phys.Org reports: [Researchers] have now designed a urine collection device, including an undergarment made of multiple layers of flexible fabric. This connects to a collection cup (with a different shape and size for women and men) of molded silicone, to fit around the genitalia. The inner face of the collection cup is lined with polyester microfiber or a nylon-spandex blend, to draw urine away from the body and towards the inner cup's inner face, from where it is sucked by a vacuum pump. A RFID tag, linked to an absorbent hydrogel, reacts to moisture by activating the pump.

Once collected, the urine is diverted to the urine filtration system, where it gets recycled with an efficiency of 87% through a two-step, integrated forward and reverse osmosis filtration system. This uses a concentration gradient to remove water from urine, plus a pump to separate water from salt. The purified water is then enriched in electrolytes and pumped into the in-suit drink bag, again available for consumption. Collecting and purifying 500ml of urine takes only five minutes.

The system, which integrates control pumps, sensors, and a liquid-crystal display screen, is powered by a 20.5V battery with a capacity of 40 amp-hours. Its total size is 38 by 23 by 23 cm, with a weight of approximately eight kilograms: sufficiently compact and light to be carried on the back of a spacesuit. Now that the prototype is available, the new design can be tested under simulated conditions, and subsequently during real spacewalks. The design has been published in the journal Frontiers in Space Technology.

They lived 378 days in a "mock Mars habitat" in Houston, reports Engadget. But today the four volunteers for NASA's yearlong simulation will finally emerge from their 1,700-square-foot habitat at the Johnson Space Center that was 3D-printed from materials that could be created with Martian soil.

And you can watch the "welcome home" ceremony's livestream starting at 5 p.m. EST on NASA TV (also embedded in Engadget's story). More det ails from NASA: For more than a year, the crew simulated Mars mission operations, including "Marswalks," grew and harvested several vegetables to supplement their shelf-stable food, maintained their equipment and habitat, and operated under additional stressors a Mars crew will experience, including communication delays with Earth, resource limitations, and isolation.
One of the mission's crew members told the Houston Chronicle they were "very excited to go back to 'Earth,' but of course there is a bittersweet aspect to it just like any time you reach the completion of something that has dominated one's life for several years."

Various crew members left behind their children or long-term partner for this once-in-a-lifetime experience, according to an earlier article, which also notes that NASA is paying the participants $10 per hour "for all waking hours, up to 16 hours per day. That's as much as $60,480 for the 378-day mission."

Engadget points out there are already plans for two more one-year "missions" — with the second one expected to begin next spring...

I'm curious. Would any Slashdot readers be willing to spend a year in a mock Mars habitat?

Scientists in China have found a species of moss that is able to withstand Mars-like conditions. The species is called Syntrichia caninervis and it's found in regions including Antarctica and the Mojave desert. The Guardian reports: "The unique insights obtained in our study lay the foundation for outer space colonization using naturally selected plants adapted to extreme stress conditions," the team write. [...] Writing in the journal The Innovation, researchers in China describe how the desert moss not only survived but rapidly recovered from almost complete dehydration. It was also able to regenerate under normal growth conditions after spending up to five years at -80C and up to 30 days at -196C, and after exposure to gamma rays, with doses of around 500Gy even promoting new growth.

The team then created a set-up that had similar pressures, temperatures, gases and UV radiation to Mars. It found the moss survived in this Mars-like environment, and was able to regenerate under normal growth conditions, even after seven days of exposure. The team also noted plants that were dried before such exposure faired better. "Looking to the future, we expect that this promising moss could be brought to Mars or the moon to further test the possibility of plant colonization and growth in outer space," the researchers write.

Slashdot reader Required Snark shared this article from Ars Technica: Almost exactly two years ago, as it prepared for the next generation of human spaceflight, NASA chose a pair of private companies to design and develop new spacesuits. These were to be new spacesuits that would allow astronauts to both perform spacewalks outside the International Space Station as well as walk on the Moon as part of the Artemis program. Now, that plan appears to be in trouble, with one of the spacesuit providers — Collins Aerospace — expected to back out, Ars has learned. It's a blow for NASA, because the space agency really needs modern spacesuits.

NASA's Apollo-era suits have long been retired. The current suits used for spacewalks in low-Earth orbit are four decades old. "These new capabilities will allow us to continue on the International Space Station and allows us to do the Artemis program and continue on to Mars," said the director of Johnson Space Center, Vanessa Wyche, during a celebratory news conference in Houston two years ago. The two winning teams were led by Collins Aerospace and Axiom Space, respectively. They were eligible for task orders worth up to $3.5 billion — in essence NASA would rent the use of these suits for a couple of decades. Since then, NASA has designated Axiom to work primarily on a suit for the Moon and the Artemis Program, and Collins with developing a suit for operations in-orbit, such as space station servicing...

The agency has been experiencing periodic problems with the maintenance of the suits built decades ago, known as the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, which made its debut in the 1980s. NASA has acknowledged the suit has exceeded its planned design lifetime. Just this Monday, the agency had to halt a spacewalk after the airlock had been de-pressurized and the hatch opened due to a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit of Tracy Dyson's spacesuit. As a result of this problem, NASA will likely only be able to conduct a single spacewalk this summer, after initially planning three, to complete work outside the International Space Station.
Collins designed the original Apollo suits, according to the article. But a person familiar with the situation told Ars Technica that "Collins has admitted they have drastically underperformed and have overspent" on their work, "culminating in a request to be taken off the contract or renegotiate the scope and their budget."

Ironically, the company's top's post on their account on Twitter/X is still a repost of NASA's February announcement that they're "getting a nextx-generation spacesuit" developed by Collins Aerospace, and saying that the company "recently completed a key NASA design milestone aboard a commercial microgravity aircraft."

NASA's post said they needed the suit "In order to advance NASA's spacewalking capabilities in low Earth orbit and to support continued maintenance and operations at the Space Station."

Longtime Slashdot reader thephydes writes: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has announced that the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument on the Perseverance rover has been brought back online "Six months of running diagnostics, testing, imagery and data analysis, troubleshooting, and retesting couldn't come with a better conclusion," said SHERLOC principal investigator Kevin Hand of JPL.

JPL writes in a press release. "Mounted on the rover's robotic arm, SHERLOC uses cameras, spectrometers, and a laser to search for organics and minerals that have been altered by watery environments and may be signs of past microbial life." In addition to its black-and-white context camera, SHERLOC is assisted by WATSON, a color camera for taking close-up images of rock grains and surface textures. The instrument stopped working this past January when it encountered an issue where the "movable lens cover designed to protect the instrument's spectrometer and one of its cameras from dust became frozen in a position that prevented SHERLOC from collecting data," says JPL.

"Analysis by the SHERLOC team pointed to the malfunction of a small motor responsible for moving the protective lens cover as well as adjusting focus for the spectrometer and the Autofocus and Context Imager (ACI) camera. By testing potential solutions on a duplicate SHERLOC instrument at JPL, the team began a long, meticulous evaluation process to see if, and how, the lens cover could be moved into the open position."

China brought a capsule full of lunar soil [non-paywalled link] from the far side of the moon down to Earth on Tuesday, achieving the latest success in an ambitious schedule to explore the moon and other parts of the solar system. From a report: The sample, retrieved by the China National Space Administration's Chang'e-6 lander after a 53-day mission, highlights China's growing capabilities in space and notches another win in a series of lunar missions that started in 2007 and have so far been executed almost without flaw. "Chang'e-6 is the first mission in human history to return samples from the far side of the moon," Long Xiao, a planetary geologist at China University of Geosciences, wrote in an email. "This is a major event for scientists worldwide," he added, and "a cause for celebration for all humanity."

Such sentiments and the prospects of international lunar sample exchanges highlighted the hope that China's robotic missions to the moon and Mars will serve to advance scientific understanding of the solar system. Those possibilities are contrasted by views in Washington and elsewhere that Tuesday's achievement is the latest milestone in a 21st-century space race with geopolitical overtones. In February, a privately operated American spacecraft landed on the moon. NASA is also pursuing the Artemis campaign to return Americans to the lunar surface, although its next mission, a flight by astronauts around the moon, has been delayed because of technical issues. China, too, is looking to expand its presence on the moon, landing more robots there, and eventually human astronauts, in the years to come.

Slashdot reader hackertourist shared this announcement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Edward C. Stone, former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and project scientist of the Voyager mission for 50 years, died on June 9, 2024. He was age 88...

Stone served on nine NASA missions as either principal investigator or a science instrument lead, and on five others as a co-investigator (a key science instrument team member). These roles primarily involved studying energetic ions from the Sun and cosmic rays from the galaxy. He had the distinction of being one of the few scientists involved with both the mission that has come closest to the Sun (NASA's Parker Solar Probe) and the one that has traveled farthest from it (Voyager).

Stone is best known for his work on NASA's longest-running mission, Voyager, whose twin spacecraft launched in 1977 and are still exploring deep space today. He served as Voyager's sole project scientist from 1972 until his retirement in 2022. Under Stone's leadership, the mission took advantage of a celestial alignment that occurs just once every 176 years to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. During their journeys, the spacecraft revealed the first active volcanoes beyond Earth, on Jupiter's moon Io, and an atmosphere rich with organic molecules on Saturn's moon Titan. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to fly by Uranus and Neptune, revealing Uranus' unusual tipped magnetic poles, and the icy geysers erupting from Neptune's moon Triton.
The mission "transformed our understanding of the solar system, and is still providing useful data today," writes hackertourist. (Watch Stone speak in this 2018 video about the Voyager 2 spacecraft.) NASA's announcement also includes stories of Stone's desire to engage the public and his thoughtfulness in considering the true boundary of interstellar space. As director of JPL, Stone was responsible for more than two dozen other missions, including landing NASA's Pathfinder mission with the first Mars rover in 1996. "Ed Stone was a trailblazer who dared mighty things in space. He was a dear friend to all who knew him, and a cherished mentor to me personally," said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

"Ed took humanity on a planetary tour of our solar system and beyond, sending NASA where no spacecraft had gone before. His legacy has left a tremendous and profound impact on NASA, the scientific community, and the world."

The sun fired off a volley of radiation-riddled outbursts in May. When they slammed into Earth's magnetic bubble, the world was treated to iridescent displays of the northern and southern lights. But our planet wasn't the only one in the solar firing line. From a report: A few days after Earth's light show, another series of eruptions screamed out of the sun. This time, on May 20, Mars was blitzed by a beast of a storm. Observed from Mars, "this was the strongest solar energetic particle event we've seen to date," said Shannon Curry, the principal investigator of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter, or MAVEN, at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

When the barrage arrived, it set off an aurora that enveloped Mars from pole to pole in a shimmering glow. If they were standing on the Martian surface, "astronauts could see these auroras," Dr. Curry said. Based on scientific knowledge of atmospheric chemistry, she and other scientists say, observers on Mars would have seen a jade-green light show, although no color cameras picked it up on the surface. But it's very fortunate that no astronauts were there. Mars's thin atmosphere and the absence of a global magnetic shield meant that its surface, as registered by NASA's Curiosity rover, was showered by a radiation dose equivalent to 30 chest X-rays -- not a lethal dose, but certainly not pleasant to the human constitution.

Scientists have discovered early morning frost on the summits of Martian volcanoes near the planet's equator, indicating that water ice forms overnight in colder months and evaporates after sunrise. "While the frosty layer is exceptionally thin, it covers an enormous area," reports The Guardian. "Scientists calculate that in the more frigid Martian seasons, 150,000 tons of water, equivalent to 60 Olympic swimming pools, condense daily on the tops of the towering mountains." From the report: "It's the first time we've discovered water frost on the volcano summits and the first time we've discovered water frost in the equatorial regions of Mars," said Adomas Valantinas, a planetary scientist at the University of Berne in Switzerland and Brown University in the US. "What we're seeing could be a trace of a past Martian climate," Valantinas said of the frost-tipped volcanoes. "It could be related to atmospheric climate processes that were operating earlier in Martian history, maybe millions of years ago."

Valantinas spotted the frost-capped volcanoes in high-resolution colour images snapped in the early morning hours on Mars by the European Space Agency's Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). With colleagues, he confirmed the discovery using a spectrometer on TGO and further images taken by the agency's Mars Express orbiter. The frost appears as a bluish hue on the caldera floors and is absent from well-lit slopes. [...] [W]riting in Nature Geoscience, the researchers describe how Martian winds may blow up the mountainsides and carry more moist air into the calderas where it condenses and settles as frost at particular times of year. Modeling of the process suggests the frost is water ice as the peaks are not cold enough for carbon dioxide frost to form.