Nathaniel Scharping writes via Science Magazine: On 15 January, Tonga's Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano erupted under the sea, rocking the South Pacific nation and sending tsunamis racing around the world. The eruption was the most powerful ever recorded, causing an atmospheric shock wave that circled the globe four times, and sending a plume of debris more than 50 kilometers into the atmosphere. But it didn't stop there. The ash and gasses punching into the sky also shot billions of kilograms of water into the atmosphere, a new study concludes. That water will likely remain there for years, where it could eat away at the ozone layer and perhaps even warm Earth.

In all, the plume shot approximately 146 billion kilograms of water into Earth's stratosphere, an arid layer of the atmosphere that begins several miles above sea level, the authors report this month in Geophysical Research Letters. That's equivalent to about 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, or about 10% of the entire water content of the stratosphere, [study co-author and JPL atmospheric scientist Luis Millan] says. Other volcanoes have added measurable amounts of water vapor to Earth's atmosphere, he says, but the scale this time was unprecedented. That's likely because of the eruption's magnitude and underwater location, he says. The water will probably remain in the stratosphere for half a decade or more, he says.

Big volcanic eruptions often cool the climate, because the sulfur dioxide they release forms compounds that reflect incoming sunlight. But with so much water vapor flung aloft, the Tonga eruption could have a different impact. Water absorbs incoming energy from the Sun, making it a potent greenhouse gas. And the sulfur dioxide will dissipate in just a few years whereas the water will likely stick around for at least 5 years -- and potentially longer Millan thinks. That could make Earth warmer for years and accelerate the warming from greenhouse gasses, [says Matthew Toohey, a physicist who focuses on climate modeling and the effects of volcanic eruptions at the University of Saskatchewan and was not involved with the work]. "We'll kind of just jump forward by a few years." But the actual effects on climate will likely take time to understand [...]. High above Earth, the water will likely react with other chemicals, potentially degrading the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet light, and even changing the circulation of air currents that govern weather patterns.

What if we glimpsed alien life for the first time by peering through a natural telescope made by the Sun's gravity? This wild idea, known as a solar gravitational lens (SGL) mission, may sound like an Einsteinian fever dream, but scientists have now found that it is "feasible with technologies that are either extant or in active development," according to a new study. Motherboard reports: Researchers led by Henry Helvajian, senior scientist in the Physical Sciences Laboratories at the nonprofit research center The Aerospace Corporation, have now shared the initial results of this ongoing NIAC study on the preprint server arxiv, which have not been peer-reviewed. Though the team cautioned that the mission would need to overcome several technical challenges, it could ultimately answer one of humanity's most fundamental questions: Are we alone in the universe?

"The SGL offers capabilities that are unmatched by any planned or conceivable optical instrument," according to the study, which was co-authored by Slava Turyshev, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and principal investigator of the NIAC mission concept. "With its unique optical properties, the SGL can be used to obtain detailed, high resolution images of Earth-like exoplanets as far as 100 light years from Earth, with measurement durations lasting months, or at most a few years." "Of particular interest is the possibility of using the SGL to obtain images of high spatial and spectral resolution of a yet-to-be-identified, potentially life-bearing exoplanet in another solar system in our Galactic neighborhood," the researchers added. "The direct high-resolution images of an exoplanet obtained with the SGL could lead to insight on the on-going biological processes on the target exoplanet and find signs of habitability."

The focal point of the Sun's gravitational lens is located all the way out in interstellar space, some 550 and 900 times the distance that Earth orbits our star, which is much farther than any spacecraft has ventured beyond our planet. Helvajian and his colleagues envision their mission as consisting of a one-meter telescope that is accompanied by a sunshade and propelled by solar sails that produce thrust by capturing solar radiation, in a somewhat analogous fashion to wind-propelled sails. Even if they were able to overcome the technical hurdles involved with this concept -- which include the development of more reliable solar sails and long-duration navigation and communications systems -- the team estimated that it would take at least 25 to 30 years for a spacecraft to reach this far-flung location, in the best case scenario. That said, if a telescope were able to spot alien life, arguably the biggest breakthrough in science, it would be well worth the long wait.

Long-time Slashdot reader Bodhammer shared this story of a remarkable solar-powered tower that produces carbon-neutral, sustainable versions of diesel and jet fuel — using only water and carbon dioxide (plus sunlight) as its inputs. One hundred and sixty-nine sun-tracking reflector panels, each presenting three square meters (~32 sq ft) of surface area, redirect sunlight into a 16-cm (6.3-in) hole in the solar reactor at the top of the 15-m-tall (49-ft) central tower. This reactor receives an average of about 2,500 suns' worth of energy — about 50 kW of solar thermal power.

This heat is used to drive a two-step thermochemical redox cycle. Water and pure carbon dioxide are fed in to a ceria-based redox reaction, which converts them simultaneously into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, or syngas. Because this is all being done in a single chamber, it's possible to tweak the rates of water and CO2 to live-manage the exact composition of the syngas. This syngas is fed to a Gas-to-Liquid (GtL) unit at the bottom of the tower, which produced a liquid phase containing 16% kerosene and 40% diesel, as well as a wax phase with 7% kerosene and 40% diesel — proving that the ceria-based ceramic solar reactor definitely produced syngas pure enough for conversion into synthetic fuels....

The team says the system's overall efficiency (measured by the energy content of the syngas as a percentage of the total solar energy input) was only around 4% in this implementation, but it sees pathways to getting that up over 20% by recovering and recycling more heat, and altering the structure of the ceria structure. "We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system," said ETH Professor Aldo Steinfeld, the corresponding author of the research paper. "This solar tower fuel plant was operated with a setup relevant to industrial implementation, setting a technological milestone towards the production of sustainable aviation fuels."

"The solar tower fuel plant described here represents a viable pathway to global-scale implementation of solar fuel production," reads the study.

"T2 SDE is not just a regular Linux distribution," reads the announcement. "It is a flexible Open Source System Development Environment or Distribution Build Kit (others might even name it Meta Distribution). T2 allows the creation of custom distributions with state of the art technology, up-to-date packages and integrated support for cross compilation."

Slashdot reader ReneR writes: The T2 project released a major milestone update, shipping full support for 25 CPU architectures, variants, and C libraries. Support for cross compiling was further improved to also cover Rust, Ada, ObjC, Fortran, and Go!

This is also the first major release where an AI powered package update bot named 'data' contributed more changes than human contributors combined! [Data: 164, humans: 141]

T2 is known for its sophisticated cross compile support as well as supporting nearly all existing CPU architectures: alpha, arc, arm, arm64, avr32, hppa, ia64, m68k, mipsel, mips64, nios2, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x, spare, sparc64, superh x86, x86-64 and x32 for a wide use in Embedded systems. The project also still supports the Sony PS3, Sgi Octane and Sun workstations as well as state of the art ARM64, RISCV64 as well as AMD64 for regular cloud, server, or simply enthusiast workstation use.

Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has detected two new extrasolar planets. Phys.Org reports: The newfound alien worlds, designated TOI-5152 b and TOI-5153 b, are the size of Jupiter but about three times more massive than the solar system's biggest planet. [...] TOI-5152 b has a radius of about 1.07 Jupiter radii and is approximately three times more massive than Jupiter. It orbits its parent star every 54.19 days, at a distance of some 0.31 AU from it. The planet's equilibrium temperature was measured to be 688 K. The host TOI-5152 is a G1-type star nearly two times larger than the sun, located about 1,200 light years away from the Earth. Its age is estimated to be between 1.4 and 6.8 billion years.

TOI-5153 b has a mass of 3.26 Jupiter masses, while its radius was estimated to be 1.06 Jupiter radii. The orbital period of this exoplanet was measured to be 20.33 days and its distance to the host is nearly 0.16 AU. The astronomers calculated that the equilibrium temperature of TOI-5153 b is at a level of 906 K. The parent star is of spectral type F8. It is about 40% larger than the sun and is assumed to be 5.4 billion years old. The distance to this planetary system is about 1,270 light years. Therefore, TOI-5152 b and TOI-5153 b are warm and massive Jupiter-sized alien worlds. The astronomers noted that they are both metal-enriched and their heavy element content is consistent with the mass-metallicity relation of gas giants. Given that the two planets orbit moderately bright stars, the authors of the paper added that they are ideal targets for additional observations. The findings have been reported on the arXiv pre-print repository.

A dormant black hole nine times the mass of the Sun has been found outside the Milky Way for the first time, in what researchers have called a "very exciting discovery." The Guardian reports: Though it is not the first contender, a researcher from the University of Sheffield says this black hole is "the first to be unambiguously detected outside our galaxy." The researchers had been looking for black hole binary systems for more than two years before finding what has become known as VFTS243. Stellar-mass black holes are formed when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse under their own gravity. In a system of two stars revolving around each other, this process leaves behind a black hole in orbit with a luminous companion star.

The newly discovered dormant black hole is at least nine times the mass of the Earth's Sun, and orbits a hot blue star weighing 25 times as much as the Sun. It has been observed in a neighboring galaxy by a team of international scientists; their study -- published in Nature Astronomy -- suggests that the star that gave rise to VFTS243 vanished without any sign of an associated supernova explosion. Confirming the likelihood of what he termed a "direct-collapse scenario," Paul Crowther, professor of astrophysics at the University of Sheffield, believes this has "enormous implications for the origin of black hole mergers in the cosmos."

Microsoft is shifting to a new engineering schedule for Windows which will see the company return to a more traditional three-year release cycle for major versions of the Windows client, while simultaneously increasing the output of new features shipping to the current version of Windows on the market. Zac Bowden writes via Windows Central: The news comes just a year after the company announced it was moving to a yearly release cadence for new versions of Windows. According to my sources, Microsoft now intends to ship "major" versions of the Windows client every three years, with the next release currently scheduled for 2024, three years after Windows 11 shipped in 2021. This means that the originally planned 2023 client release of Windows (codenamed Sun Valley 3) has been scrapped, but that's not the end of the story. I'm told that with the move to this new development schedule, Microsoft is also planning to increase the output of new features rolling out to users on the latest version of Windows.

Starting with Windows 11 version 22H2 (Sun Valley 2), Microsoft is kicking off a new "Moments" engineering effort which is designed to allow the company to rollout new features and experiences at key points throughout the year, outside of major OS releases. I hear the company intends to ship new features to the in-market version of Windows every few months, up to four times a year, starting in 2023. Microsoft has already tested this system with the rollout of the Taskbar weather button on Windows 11 earlier this year. That same approach will be used for these Moments, where the company will group together a handful of new features that have been in testing with Insiders and roll them out to everyone on top the latest shipping release of Windows. Many of the features that were planned for the now-scrapped Sun Valley 3 client release will ship as part of one of these Moments on top of Sun Valley 2, instead of in a dedicated new release of the Windows client in the fall of 2023.

Popular Science reports: A raft of thin-film silicon bubbles deployed from Earth into outer space and stretching to the size of Brazil could potentially block the Sun's solar radiation from further warming Earth, possibly helping to not only stave off climate change, but potentially reverse it.

This new "space bubbles" plan offered by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rifts off a concept first offered by astronomer Roger Angel. The multidisciplinary team of architects, civil and mechanical engineers, physicists and material scientists have worked on the technical and social aspects of what the group calls a "planetary-scale project" in an effort to find a non-Earth-bound solution to climate change.

The MIT group believes that if the raft of bubbles can deflect 1.8 percent of incident solar radiation before it hits Earth, they can fully reverse today's global warming. Even if they can't establish a 1.8 percent shading, they trust a smaller percentage provides enough benefit to help mitigate global warming.

To make it happen, the group proposes deploying small, inflatable bubbles into outer space that they could then manufacture into a space raft the size of Brazil and suspend near the L1 Lagrangian Point, the location between the Earth and Sun where the gravitational influence of both bodies cancel out. The team does suggest having some sort of system to ensure the raft stays in place and that may provide the ability to move the bubbles closer to the Sun for optimal impact....

MIT cautions they don't view the project as a replacement to current adaption and mitigation efforts, but as a backup solution should climate change spin out of control...

They plan to investigate low vapor-pressure materials to rapidly inflate and assemble the rafts, whether with a silicon-based melt or a graphene-reinforced ionic liquid... The team also believes a bit of science fiction may help in finding "novel ways" of shipping the material to space, such as a magnetic accelerator, known as a railgun.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: The BBC looks at a 100-year art project in which famous authors write books that will not be published until the year 2113. An annual ceremony takes place near a forest of sapling trees which will be turned into paper in the year 2113 and then used for printing those books.
From the article: It began with the author Margaret Atwood, who wrote a story called Scribbler Moon, and since then the library has solicited submissions from all over the world... All the manuscripts will be stored for almost a century inside locked glass drawers in a hidden corner of Oslo's main public library, within a small, wooden repository called the Silent Room. In 2114, the drawers will be unlocked, and the trees chopped down — and 100 stories hidden for a century will finally be published in one go.
It's part of Scottish artist Katie Paterson's fascination with the passage of time: One of her first works, Vatnajokull (the sound of) [included] a phone number that anyone could call to listen to an Icelandic glacier melting. Dial the number, and you'd be routed to a microphone beneath the water in the Jökulsárlón lagoon on Iceland's south coast, where blue-tinged icebergs calve away and float towards the sea....

One of her most recent exhibitions in Edinburgh, Requiem at Ingleby Gallery, featured 364 vials of crushed dust, each one representing a different moment in deep time. Vial #1 was a sample of presolar grains older than the Sun, followed by powdered four-billion-year-old rocks, corals from prehistoric seas, and other traces of the distant past. A few visitors were invited to pour one of the vials into a central urn: when I was there in June, I poured #227, a four-million-year-old Asteroidea fossil, a kind of sea star....

Of all her work exploring the long-term though, Future Library is the project most likely to be remembered across time itself. Indeed, it was deliberately created to be. And this year its longevity was ensured: Oslo's city leaders signed a contract formally committing them and their successors to protect the forest and library over the next 100 years.

The Associated Press reports on a massive new 150-foot (45-meter) tower going up in Berlin — just to hold 56 million liters (14.8 million gallons) of hot water that "will help heat Berlin homes this winter even if Russian gas supplies dry up..."

"[T]he new facility unveiled Thursday at Vattenfall's Reuter power station will hold water brought to almost boiling temperature using electricity from solar and wind power plants across Germany. During periods when renewable energy exceeds demand the facility effectively acts as a giant battery, though instead of storing electricity it stores heat..." "It's a huge thermos that helps us to store the heat when we don't need it," said Tanja Wielgoss, who heads the Sweden-based company's heat unit in Germany. "And then we can release it when we need to use it.... Sometimes you have an abundance of electricity in the grids that you cannot use anymore, and then you need to turn off the wind turbines," said Wielgoss. "Where we are standing we can take in this electricity."

The 50-million-euro ($52 million) facility will have a thermal capacity of 200 Megawatts — enough to meet much of Berlin's hot water needs during the summer and about 10% of what it requires in the winter. The vast, insulated tank can keep water hot for up to 13 hours, helping bridge short periods when there's little wind or sun....

Berlin's top climate official, Bettina Jarasch, said the faster such heat storage systems are built, the better. "Due to its geographic location the Berlin region is even more dependent on Russian fossil fuels than other parts of Germany," she told The Associated Press. "That's why we're really in a hurry here."
"While it will be Europe's biggest heat storage facility when it's completed at the end of this year, an even bigger one is already being planned in the Netherlands."

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!

Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. It converts heat to electricity with over 40% efficiency -- making it more efficient than steam turbines, the industrial standard. MIT Technology Review reports: The invention is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel's photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source. It can generate electricity from sources that reach 1,900 to 2,400C -- too hot for turbines, with their moving parts. The previous record efficiency for a TPV cell was 32%, but the team improved this performance by using materials that are able to convert higher-temperature, higher-energy photons. The researchers plan to incorporate the TPV cells into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources such as the sun and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. Cells would convert the heat into electricity and dispatch it to a power grid when needed.

The researchers have now successfully demonstrated the main parts of the system in small-scale experiments; the experimental TPV cells are about a centimeter square. They are working to integrate the parts to demonstrate a fully operational system. From there, they hope to scale up the system to replace fossil-fuel plants on the power grid. Coauthor Asegun Henry, a professor of mechanical engineering, envisions TPV cells about 10,000 feet square and operating in climate-controlled warehouses to draw power from huge banks of stored solar energy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Scientists at top universities in China propose sending a spacecraft powered by nuclear fission to orbit Neptune -- the outermost planet in our solar system -- in 2030. Astronomers have not yet been able to look at Uranus and Neptune in much detail. The best data collected so far comes from NASA's Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to have flown by the big blue orbs way back in 1986 and 1989. [...] The challenges involved are considerable. The outer solar system is cold, dark, and cruel. Spacecraft flying far from the Sun cannot rely on solar power, and need other sources of energy to maintain steady orbits and keep their instruments from freezing.

The Chinese authors envisioned a spacecraft with a mass up to 3,000 kilograms powered by a nuclear fission reactor at one end. It would also carry four smaller satellites -- two to study Neptune's atmosphere and another two to probe Triton, its largest moon, The Planetary Society first reported. Triton is an odd object -- it orbits in the opposite direction to its host planet, is geologically active, and may harbor liquid oceans beneath its icy crust. The best time to launch such a spacecraft would be 2030, the scientists reckoned. It could fly aboard China National Space Administration's Long March 5 rocket, and would reach Neptune a decade later after flying by the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn.

A group of MIT researchers is exploring a radical idea for reversing global warming: using a raft of "space bubbles" to reflect sunlight away from our planet. Freethink reports: The copious amounts of greenhouse gasses humans have been releasing into the air ever since the Industrial Revolution are forming a sort of blanket around our planet, trapping heat in the atmosphere and causing global temperatures to creep ever higher. [...] Instead of injecting particles into Earth's atmosphere to cool the planet, an interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers proposes we take solar geoengineering to space. Specifically, the group is investigating what might happen if we positioned a shield made of bubbles at Lagrangian Point 1 -- a point in space where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and the sun form a sort of equilibrium that would keep the shield in orbit there indefinitely.

The proposed shield would be about the size of Brazil, and the bubbles for it could be manufactured and deployed in space, possibly out of silicon -- the group has already experimented with creating these "space bubbles" in the lab. "In our preliminary experiments, we succeeded at inflating a thin-film bubble at a pressure of 0.0028 atm, and maintaining it at around -50C (to approximate space conditions of zero pressure and near-zero temperature)," they said in a press release. Because the bubbles would be almost a million miles away from Earth, the MIT team says this approach to solar geoengineering wouldn't be as risky as methods that directly involve Earth's atmosphere. [...] This isn't the first time someone has proposed placing a solar shield in space to cool the planet, but creating it out of bubbles would give us a relatively straightforward way to abort the mission if it went awry: just pop the bubbles.

nickwinlund77 shares a report from Phys.Org: A new study led by University of Arizona researchers may have solved two mysteries that have long puzzled paleo-climate experts: Where did the ice sheets that rang in the last ice age more than 100,000 years ago come from, and how could they grow so quickly? Understanding what drives Earth's glacial -- interglacial cycles -- the periodic advance and retreat of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere -- is no easy feat, and researchers have devoted substantial effort to explaining the expansion and shrinking of large ice masses over thousands of years. The new study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, proposes an explanation for the rapid expansion of the ice sheets that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere during the most recent ice age, and the findings could also apply to other glacial periods throughout Earth's history.

About 100,000 years ago, when mammoths roamed the Earth, the Northern Hemisphere climate plummeted into a deep freeze that allowed massive ice sheets to form. Over a period of about 10,000 years, local mountain glaciers grew and formed large ice sheets covering much of today's Canada, Siberia and northern Europe. While it has been widely accepted that periodic "wobbling" in the Earth's orbit around the sun triggered cooling in the Northern Hemisphere summer that caused the onset of widespread glaciation, scientists have struggled to explain the extensive ice sheets covering much of Scandinavia and northern Europe, where temperatures are much more mild. [...] "Using both climate model simulations and marine sediment analysis, we show that ice forming in northern Canada can obstruct ocean gateways and divert water transport from the Arctic into the North Atlantic," [said Lofverstrom, an assistant professor of geosciences and head of the UArizona Earth System Dynamics Lab], "and that in turn leads to a weakened ocean circulation and cold conditions off the coast of Scandinavia, which is sufficient to start growing ice in that region."

"These findings are supported by marine sediment records from the North Atlantic, which show evidence of glaciers in northern Canada several thousand years before the European side," said Diane Thompson, assistant professor in the UArizona Department of Geosciences. "The sediment records also show compelling evidence of a weakened deep ocean circulation before the glaciers form in Scandinavia, similar to our modeling results." Together, the experiments suggest that the formation of marine ice in northern Canada may be a necessary precursor to glaciation in Scandinavia, the authors write. [...] "It is possible that the mechanisms we identified here apply to every glacial period, not just the most recent one," [Lofverstrom] said. "It may even help explain more short-lived cold periods such as the Younger Dryas cold reversal (12,900 to 11,700 years ago) that punctuated the general warming at the end of the last ice age."

"In late 2021, operators of the European Space Agency's Swarm constellation noticed something worrying," reports Space.com. "The satellites, which measure the magnetic field around Earth, started sinking toward the atmosphere at an unusually fast rate — up to 10 times faster than before.

"The change coincided with the onset of the new solar cycle, and experts think it might be the beginning of some difficult years for spacecraft orbiting our planet." "In the last five, six years, the satellites were sinking about two and a half kilometers [1.5 miles] a year," Anja Stromme, ESA's Swarm mission manager, told Space.com. "But since December last year, they have been virtually diving. The sink rate between December and April has been 20 kilometers [12 miles] per year."

Satellites orbiting close to Earth always face the drag of the residual atmosphere, which gradually slows the spacecraft and eventually makes them fall back to the planet. (They usually don't survive this so-called re-entry and burn up in the atmosphere.) This atmospheric drag forces the International Space Station's controllers to perform regular "reboost" maneuvers to maintain the station's orbit of 250 miles (400 km) above Earth. This drag also helps clean up the near-Earth environment from space junk.

Scientists know that the intensity of this drag depends on solar activity — the amount of solar wind spewed by the sun, which varies depending on the 11-year solar cycle.... [S]ince last fall, the star has been waking up, spewing more and more solar wind and generating sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections at a growing rate. And the Earth's upper atmosphere has felt the effects. "There is a lot of complex physics that we still don't fully understand going on in the upper layers of the atmosphere where it interacts with the solar wind," Stromme said. "We know that this interaction causes an upwelling of the atmosphere. That means that the denser air shifts upwards to higher altitudes."

Denser air means higher drag for the satellites. Even though this density is still incredibly low 250 miles above Earth, the increase caused by the upwelling atmosphere is enough to virtually send some of the low-orbiting satellites plummeting. "It's almost like running with the wind against you," Stromme said. "It's harder, it's drag — so it slows the satellites down, and when they slow down, they sink...." The lower the orbit of the satellites when the solar storm hits, the higher the risk of the spacecraft not being able to recover, leaving operators helplessly watching as the craft fall to their demise in the atmosphere....

All spacecraft around the 250-mile altitude are bound to have problems, Stromme said. That includes the International Space Station, which will have to perform more frequent reboost maneuvers to keep afloat, but also the hundreds of cubesats and small satellites that have populated low Earth orbit in the past decade.... "Many of these [new satellites] don't have propulsion systems," Stromme said. "They don't have ways to get up. That basically means that they will have a shorter lifetime in orbit. They will reenter sooner than they would during the solar minimum."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article!

"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!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Seattle-based Zap Energy is using a lesser-known approach to nuclear fusion to build modular, garage-sized reactors. They are cheaper and don't require the large, incredibly powerful magnets used in traditional fusion experiments. Ultimately, they may also provide a quicker route to achieving commercially viable nuclear fusion, a press statement reveals.

Nuclear fusion has the potential to remove our reliance on fossil fuels by providing a practically limitless energy source that produces power in a similar way to the Sun and the stars. Fusion experiments, such as Europe's ITER, typically rely on large donut-shaped tokamak reactors using extremely powerful magnets to control the plasma generated during the fusion reaction. Zap Energy has developed a different approach with its Z-pinch technology. The company uses an electromagnetic field instead of the expensive magnetic coils and shielding materials used in tokamaks. This, they say, pins the plasma inside a relatively small space and "pinches" it until it becomes hot and dense enough for the required reaction to take place.

Z-pinch technology was first thought up in the 1950s, but until recently, instability problems meant that research had been largely focused on the more stable tokamak technology. In 2019, a group of researchers from the University of Washington proposed the use of sheared axial flow to smooth the plasma streams, preventing distortions that previously led to instability. One of the authors of that study, Uri Shumlak, co-founded Zap Energy in 2017 in a bid to leverage the sheared axial flow technique to make Z-pinch technology commercially viable. Just last week, Zap Energy reached a key milestone by creating the first plasmas inside its prototype reactor, called the FuZE-Q. The Zap Energy team also just closed a $160-million Series C funding round, which will help it to further develop its Z-pinch technology and hopefully bring it to the market. The company says its reactors could be small enough to fit inside a garage, meaning it could give both micro nuclear reactor and nuclear fusion firms a run for their money.

The Sun shone 20% less brightly on early Earth, and yet fossil evidence shows that our planet had warm shallow seas where stromatolites -- microbial mats -- thrived. Now a study may have solved the "faint young Sun paradox," showing that saltier oceans could have prevented Earth from freezing over during Archean times, 3bn years ago. From a report: We all know that the composition of the atmosphere (particularly the abundance of greenhouse gases) plays a crucial role in tempering Earth's climate, but what about the composition of the oceans? To answer this question researchers used an ocean-atmosphere general circulation model to investigate the impact of salinity.

They show that saltier oceans result in warmer climates, partly because the salt depresses the freezing point of seawater and inhibits sea-ice formation, but mostly because the greater density of salty water alters ocean circulation patterns and aids heat transport to the poles. Under their Archean scenario they show that present-day levels of salinity produce a severely glaciated world with only a narrow strip of open water at the equator. But pushing salinity up to 40% greater than today revealed a warmer Archean world, with average surface temperatures of more than 20C, and ice only appearing seasonally at the poles. Their findings are reported in Geophysical Research Letters.

Nasa has begun turning off the spacecraft Voyager's systems, signaling the beginning of the end of the probe's 50-year career. The Independent reports: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 -- two identical probes -- were launched in 1977 and travelled across interstellar space to the edge of the solar system, giving humanity its closest look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Now, however, Nasa must start limiting the Voyagers' processes in order to keep them operating until 2030. "We're at 44 and a half years," says Ralph McNutt, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told Scientific American. "So we've done 10 times the warranty on the darn things."

The first Voyager craft has four remaining functioning instruments, while Voyager 2 has five, all of which are powered by converting decaying plutonium into electricity. This battery has had its output decreasing by approximately four watts every year, leading to Nasa making some tough choices about what to disable; in 2019, engineers had to turn off the heater for the cosmic-ray detector, a key piece of equipment for detecting when Voyager 2 exited the heliosphere- the magnetosphere, astrosphere and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun.

The final instruments Nasa will disable are likely to be the magnetometer and the plasma science instrument, which are contained in the body of the spacecraft. These are warmed by the excess heat of the computers, while the others are suspended on a 13 meter fiberglass boom, meaning that they are likely to take the longest to get cold. Both craft remain so far from Earth that it takes a radio signal almost 22 hours to reach Voyager 1 and just over 18 for Voyager 2 -- even when traveling at the speed of light.