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Science

Scientists Zap Sleeping Humans' Brains with Electricity to Improve Their Memory (npr.org) 17

"A little brain stimulation at night appears to help people remember what they learned the previous day," reports NPR — a finding that could one day help people with memory problems, sleeps issues, or depression: A study of 18 people with severe epilepsy found that they scored higher on a memory test if they got deep brain stimulation while they slept, a team reports in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The stimulation was delivered during non-REM sleep, when the brain is thought to strengthen memories it expects to use in the future. It was designed to synchronize the activity in two brain areas involved in memory consolidation: the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.

"Some improved by 10% or 20%, some improved by 80%," depending on the level of synchrony, says Dr. Itzhak Fried, an author of the study and a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles.

NASA

Boeing Delays Starliner Launch Again After Discovering Two Serious Problems (arstechnica.com) 66

"A Boeing official said Thursday that the company was 'standing down' from an attempt to launch the Starliner spacecraft on July 21," reports Ars Technica, "to focus on recently discovered issues with the vehicle." Starliner's program manager said they'd spent last weekend investigating the problems, and "after internal discussions that included Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun, the company decided to delay the test flight" carrying astronauts to the International Space Station. The issues seem rather serious to have been discovered weeks before Starliner was due to launch on an Atlas V rocket. The first involves "soft links" in the lines that run from Starliner to its parachutes. Boeing discovered that these were not as strong as previously believed. During a normal flight, these substandard links would not be an issue. But Starliner's parachute system is designed to land a crew safely in case one of the three parachutes fails. However, due to the lower failure load limit with these soft links, if one parachute fails, it's possible the lines between the spacecraft and its remaining two parachutes would snap due to the extra strain.

The second issue involves P-213 glass cloth tape that is wrapped around wiring harnesses throughout the vehicle. These cables run everywhere, and Nappi said there are hundreds of feet of these wiring harnesses. The tape is intended to protect the wiring from nicks. However, during recent tests, it was discovered that under certain circumstances possible in flight, this tape is flammable.

Thanks to xanthos (Slashdot reader #73,578) for sharing the article.
NASA

NASA UFO Team Calls For Higher Quality Data In First Public Meeting (science.org) 39

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The truth may be out there about UFOs, or what the government currently calls "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAPs). But finding it will require collecting data that are more rigorous than the anecdotal reports that typically fuel the controversial sightings, according to a panel of scientists, appointed by NASA to advise the agency on the topic, that held its first public meeting [on Wednesday].

The 16-person panel, created last year at the behest of NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, is not itself evaluating UFO claims. Instead, it is advising NASA on how the agency can contribute to federal investigations that have been led by the Department of Defense (DOD) and intelligence agencies, says panel chair David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the Simons Foundation, who spoke to Science ahead of the meeting. "NASA is a public agency, an open agency, that encourages the use of the scientific method for looking at results." But science can only be done when there are data to work on, he adds. "You're not going to learn much from fuzzy pictures from the 1950s." So far, most "unidentified" phenomena flagged by the military have ended up being weather balloons, drones, camera glitches, or undisclosed military aircraft, Spergel says. "It's very unlikely there are space aliens that travel through space and use technology that looks remarkably like what we have right now." [...]

It remains to be seen whether NASA will devote any further funding to study UAPs beyond the $100,000 allocated for the panel, which will issue a report this summer. Many scientists would be reluctant to have existing funds steered away from more conventional lines of research in the search for signatures of life or extraterrestrial intelligence. As the panel meeting wound down, Spergel said no UAP so far demands the existence of extraterrestrials. "We have not seen the extraordinary yet." Most incidents end up being more mundane. Panel member Scott Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and naval aviator, recounted flying in an F-14 off the coast of Virginia, when his co-pilot swore that he saw a UAP. "We turned around," he said. "We went to go look at it. It turns out it was Bart Simpson, a balloon."

Mars

First Livestream of Images From Mars (cnn.com) 18

quonset writes: In what is considered to be a first, the European Space Agency (ESA) will, if everything goes to plan, stream live images of Mars from ESA's Mars Express orbiter on Friday, June 2nd. The event is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the launch of the agency's Mars Express -- a mission to take three-dimensional images of the planet's surface to see it in more complete detail.

You can watch the stream on ESA's YouTube channel for an hour starting at 6 p.m. Central European Time, or noon ET Friday. While it won't be truly live, there will be a new image about every 50 seconds of that hour, the agency said. "Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before," said James Godfrey, spacecraft operations manager at ESA's mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, in a statement. "I'm excited to see Mars as it is now -- as close to a martian 'now' as we can possibly get!"

Science

New Device Generates Electricity From Thin Air (smithsonianmag.com) 54

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Smithsonian: With a new technique, scientists have essentially figured out how to create power from thin air. Their tiny device generates electricity from the air's humidity, and it can be made from nearly any substance, scientists reported this month in the journal Advanced Materials. The invention involves two electrodes and a thin layer of material, which must be covered with tiny holes less than 100 nanometers in diameter -- thinner than one-thousandth the width of a human hair, according to a statement from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where the researchers work.

As water molecules pass through the device, from an upper chamber to a lower chamber, they knock against the tiny holes' edges, creating an electric charge imbalance between the layered chambers. In effect, it makes the device run like a battery. The whole process resembles the way clouds make electricity, which we see in the form of lightning bolts, according to Inverse's Molly Glick. [...] Currently, the fingernail-sized device can only create continuous electricity equivalent to a fraction of a volt, writes Vice's Becky Ferreira. But the researchers hope it can someday become a practical, sustainable source of power.

Scientists have previously tried harnessing humidity to generate electricity, but their attempts have often only worked for a short amount of time or relied on expensive materials, per Vice. In 2020, Yao and other researchers found a way to continuously collect electricity from humidity using a material grown from bacteria. But now, the new paper shows that such a specific material isn't necessary -- just about any material works, such as wood or silicon, as long as it can be punctured with the ultra-small holes. This finding makes the device much more practical; it "turns an initially narrow window to a wide-open door for broad potential," Yao tells Vice.

Space

Hubble Network Wants To Connect a Billion Devices With Space-Based Bluetooth Network (techcrunch.com) 60

Seattle-based startup Hubble Network plans to launch a constellation of 300 satellites to create a global satellite network that any Bluetooth-enabled device can connect to, anywhere in the world. The network aims to provide real-time updates for devices equipped with Bluetooth low energy (BLE) chips, offering connectivity to over a billion devices. TechCrunch reports: Hubble Network CEO Alex Haro says the company has engineered "technical tricks" to make this scale of connectivity possible for the first time, like lowering the bitrate, or the amount of data transferred per second. Hubble has also rethought the design of the satellite antenna. Instead of sticking a single antenna on the side of a satellite bus, the company is using hundreds of antennae per satellite. This means that each satellite can support millions of connected devices. The result is a radio signal that can be detected around 1,000 kilometers away -- or almost 10 orders of magnitude longer than what can be detected from a Bluetooth chip over terrestrial networks.

Hubble Network plans to launch an initial batch of four satellites on SpaceX's Transporter-10 rideshare mission in January 2024, and onboard early pilot customers after. The startup is fully funded through this mission, Haro said, thanks to a $20 million Series A round that closed in March. That round was led by Transpose Platform, with additional participation from 11.2 Capital, Y Combinator, Yes.VC, Convective Capital, Seraphim Space, Type One Ventures, Soma, AVCF5, Space.VC, Jett McCandless, John Kim, Chris Nguyen, Alan Keating and Don Dodge.

After launching four satellites next January, Hubble plans to build out its constellation to 68 satellites total over the next two-and-a-half years. While the first four satellites will provide global coverage on their own, Haro said that it will be about a six-hour gap until devices can update on the ground. Increasing the constellation to 68 birds means that a satellite will be overhead every 15 minutes or so -- an update rate that is sufficient for "the vast majority" of customer use cases, Haro said. While Hubble is clearly targeting existing Bluetooth devices -- of which billions exist all over the world already -- Haro is confident that the company's network will solicit developers to build applications that don't even exist yet.

Science

The First X-Ray Taken of a Single Atom (arstechnica.com) 19

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Atomic-scale imaging emerged in the mid-1950s and has been advancing rapidly ever since -- so much so, that back in 2008, physicists successfully used an electron microscope to image a single hydrogen atom. Five years later, scientists were able to peer inside a hydrogen atom using a "quantum microscope," resulting in the first direct observation of electron orbitals. And now we have the first X-ray taken of a single atom, courtesy of scientists from Ohio University, Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois-Chicago, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

"Atoms can be routinely imaged with scanning probe microscopes, but without X-rays one cannot tell what they are made of," said co-author Saw-Wai Hla, a physicist at Ohio University and Argonne National Laboratory. "We can now detect exactly the type of a particular atom, one atom at a time, and can simultaneously measure its chemical state. Once we are able to do that, we can trace the materials down to [the] ultimate limit of just one atom. This will have a great impact on environmental and medical sciences." [...] Hla has been working for the last 12 years to develop an X-ray version of STM: synchrotron X-ray-scanning tunneling microscopy, or SX-STM, which would enable scientists to identify the type of atom and its chemical state. X-ray imaging methods like synchrotron radiation are widely used across myriad disciplines, including art and archaeology. But the smallest amount to date that can be X-rayed is an attogram, or roughly 10,000 atoms. That's because the X-ray emission of a single atom is just too weak to be detected -- until now.

SX-STM combines conventional synchrotron radiation with quantum tunneling. It replaces the conventional X-ray detector used in most synchrotron radiation experiments with a different kind of detector: a sharp metal tip placed extremely close to the sample, the better to collect electrons pushed into an excited state by the X-rays. With Hla et al.'s method, X-rays hit the sample and excite the core electrons, which then tunnel to the detector tip. The photoabsorption of the core electrons serves as a kind of elemental fingerprint for identifying the type of atoms in a material. The team tested their method at the XTIP beam line at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source, using an iron atom and a terbium atom (inserted into supramolecules, which served as hosts). And that's not all. "We have detected the chemical states of individual atoms as well," said Hla. "By comparing the chemical states of an iron atom and a terbium atom inside respective molecular hosts, we find that the terbium atom, a rare-earth metal, is rather isolated and does not change its chemical state, while the iron atom strongly interacts with its surrounding." Also, Hla's team has developed another technique called X-ray-excited resonance tunneling (X-ERT), which will allow them to detect the orientation of the orbital of a single molecule on a material surface.

Education

India Cuts Periodic Table and Evolution From School Textbooks (nature.com) 309

In India, children under 16 returning to school this month at the start of the school year will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements, or sources of energy. Nature: The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15-16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability.

Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students. Overall, the changes affect some 134 million 11-18-year-olds in India's schools. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) -- the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks -- released textbooks for the new academic year that started in May.

Researchers, including those who study science education, are shocked. "Anybody who's trying to teach biology without dealing with evolution is not teaching biology as we currently understand it," says Jonathan Osborne, a science-education researcher at Stanford University in California. "It's that fundamental to biology." The periodic table explains how life's building blocks combine to generate substances with vastly different properties, he adds, and "is one of the great intellectual achievements of chemists."

ISS

SpaceX Mission Carrying Former NASA Astronaut, Three Paying Customers Returns From Space Station (cnn.com) 19

A SpaceX capsule carrying a former NASA astronaut and three paying customers returned from the International Space Station, marking the conclusion of a historic weeklong mission for the crew. From a report: The Crew Dragon spacecraft departed the space station Tuesday morning and the crew spent nearly 12 hours in orbit as the capsule maneuvered back toward Earth. After a fiery reentry, the Crew Dragon and passengers made a safe splashdown off the coast of Panama City, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico at 11:04 p.m. ET. This mission, dubbed Axiom Mission 2, or AX-2, launched from Florida on May 21. AX-2 was put together by the Houston-based company Axiom Space and marked the second all-private mission to the orbiting outpost, meaning solely commercial companies, rather than a government agency, have been leading the mission.

This mission was also a milestone in the history of spaceflight as stem cell researcher Rayyanah Barnawi became the first woman from Saudi Arabia to travel to space. The AX-2 mission is one in a lineup of commercial missions designed to spur private sector participation in spaceflight -- particularly in low-Earth orbit, where the International Space Station orbits. Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, 63, led the AX-2 crew. Whitson, now an Axiom Space employee, also became the first woman to command a private spaceflight. One of the three paying customers joining Whitson was John Shoffner, an American who made his fortune in the international telecom business and founded the hardware company Dura-Line Corp. Saudi Arabia also paid to fly two of its citizens: Barnawi and Ali AlQarni, a fighter pilot in the Royal Saudi Air Force.

During the mission, Barnawi led stem cell research suited for the microgravity environment aboard the space station. The orbiting laboratory has long been a key venue for various scientific experiments, as the lack of gravity can give researchers a better fundamental understanding of the topic at hand. Barnawi and AlQarni also engaged in outreach projects, including testing out a kite in microgravity and capturing video for viewers back home. The AX-2 crew spent about eight days working alongside astronauts representing NASA, Russia's Roscomos space agency and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency aboard the space station, though they operated on different schedules. The AX-2 crew worked through a lineup of more than 20 investigations and science projects -- including stem cell and other biomedical research.
"Late tonight, at 11:02 pm local time in California (06:02 UTC Wednesday), SpaceX has a chance to reach 200 successful launches [of the Falcon 9 rocket] with a Starlink mission lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base," reports Ars Technica. "Such a performance is in uncharted territory for any orbital rocket, ever. [...] SpaceX is setting itself up to double the record for the number of consecutive successes by an orbital rocket."

You can view a livestream of the launch here.
Biotech

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes Begins 11-Year Prison Sentence (bbc.com) 77

Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has begun her 11-year prison sentence after being convicted of four counts of fraud. The BBC reports: She will serve her term in a minimum-security prison in Texas. Holmes reported to the federal facility in Bryan, Texas, which holds between 500 and 700 inmates at any given time, on Tuesday. It is about 100 miles (160km) north of Houston, her hometown. Her arrival at the facility was confirmed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which declined to give any more details about her confinement, citing privacy concerns.

There, the woman once billed as the world's youngest self-made billionaire might work alongside other inmates for between 12 cents (10p) and $1.15 (93p) an hour - much of which will go towards her court-mandated restitution payments. [...] The Texas prison camp where Holmes will serve time is a sprawling 37-acre facility. Most inmates there have been convicted of non-violent crimes, low-level drug dealing or white-collar offenses. According to the facility's handbook, life largely revolves around work and extracurricular activities that include foreign language, computer literacy or business courses.

Holmes had fought to stay out of prison while her legal appeal works its way through the courts. She argued a delay would allow her to raise "substantial questions" about the case that could warrant a new trial. Her defense team also argued that she should remain free to care for her children, one who is nearly two and the other three months old. The Wall Street Journal reported the prison has facilities where inmates can host gatherings and where children can play. Holmes and other mothers are allowed to hold their children in their lap and breastfeed their infants, according to official Bureau of Prison guidelines.

Science

LHC Experiments See First Evidence of a Rare Higgs Boson Decay (web.cern.ch) 24

CERN: The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 marked a significant milestone in particle physics. Since then, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations have been diligently investigating the properties of this unique particle and searching to establish the different ways in which it is produced and decays into other particles. At the Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) conference last week, ATLAS and CMS report how they teamed up to find the first evidence of the rare process in which the Higgs boson decays into a Z boson, the electrically neutral carrier of the weak force, and a photon, the carrier of the electromagnetic force. This Higgs boson decay could provide indirect evidence of the existence of particles beyond those predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.

The decay of the Higgs boson into a Z boson and a photon is similar to that of a decay into two photons. In these processes, the Higgs boson does not decay directly into these pairs of particles. Instead, the decays proceed via an intermediate "loop" of "virtual" particles that pop in and out of existence and cannot be directly detected. These virtual particles could include new, as yet undiscovered particles that interact with the Higgs boson. The Standard Model predicts that, if the Higgs boson has a mass of around 125 billion electronvolts, approximately 0.15% of Higgs bosons will decay into a Z boson and a photon. But some theories that extend the Standard Model predict a different decay rate. Measuring the decay rate therefore provides valuable insights into both physics beyond the Standard Model and the nature of the Higgs boson.

Science

German Startup Wins Initial Funding For Revolutionary Fusion Energy Machine (ft.com) 97

A German startup has secured initial funding to develop a revolutionary fusion energy machine that it hopes can provide a future source of abundant, emissions-free power. From a report: Proxima Fusion, incorporated in January, aims to build a complex device known as a stellarator and is the latest company to join the emerging fusion industry's effort to generate electricity by fusing atoms. Although the amount of funding is small at only $7.5mn, it is significant as Proxima is the first fusion company to spin out of Germany's revered Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. The institute is the home of the world's most advanced existing stellarator in Greifswald, in eastern Germany, built by government-funded scientists over the past 27 years using supercomputers and advanced engineering.

Little known outside the world of plasma physics, a stellarator is an alternative to the better known tokamak device, pioneered by Soviet scientists in the 1950s. Both use huge magnets to suspend a floating mass of hydrogen plasma as it is heated to extreme temperatures so the atomic nuclei fuse releasing energy. Until recently nearly all funding of so-called magnetic confinement fusion has been channelled into tokamaks such as the Joint European Torus in Oxford, England, or the Sparc device being built by the Bill Gates-backed Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Massachusetts.

China

China Launches Shenzhou-16 Mission To Chinese Space Station (reuters.com) 14

China sent three astronauts to its now fully operational space station as part of crew rotation on Tuesday in the fifth manned mission to the Chinese space outpost since 2021, state media reported. From a report: The spacecraft, Shenzhou-16, or "Divine Vessel," and its three passengers lifted off atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert in northwest China at 9:31 a.m. The astronauts on Shenzhou-16 will replace the three-member crew of the Shenzhou-15, who arrived at the space station late in November. The station, comprising three modules, was completed at the end of last year after 11 crewed and uncrewed missions since April 2021, beginning with the launch of the first and biggest module -- the station's main living quarters. China has already announced plans to expand its permanently inhabited space outpost, with the next module slated to dock with the current T-shaped space station to create a cross-shaped structure.
Mars

Adventures on Mars: 'Ingenuity' Helicopter Survives a Communications Blackout (nasa.gov) 22

The Mars helicopter 'Ingenuity' recently completed its 47th, 48th, and 49th flight, NASA reports on the blog for its Mars rover 'Perseverance'. That rover is making a "long ascent" up the delta in Mars' Jezero crater, "an area where scientists surmise that, billions of years ago, a river once flowed into a lake.

On its 47th flight, Ingenuity attempted "tactical and scientific scouting" for the rover, but "just narrowly missing the main area of interest." But then... Ingenuity's 48th flight produced a treasure trove of aerial images showing the exact area of interest at a resolution several orders of magnitude better than anything prior. All of these images were downlinked to Earth and provided to rover planners and scientists a full two weeks before the rover would reach this area... [T]he team chose to send the helicopter farther up the delta rather than perform additional scouting flights in the region... The Guidance Navigation and Control team once again managed to push the flight envelope with a 16-meter vertical popup at the end of the flight. At the peak, Ingenuity snapped the highest suborbital picture taken of the Martian surface since landing...

That downlink was the last time the team would hear from the helicopter for an agonizingly long time. Eager to continue up the delta, the team tried and failed to uplink the instructions for Flight 50 several times. Sol after sol, the helicopter remained elusive. Each time, the downlinked telemetry from the Helicopter Base Station (HBS) on the rover would come back showing no radio sign of the helicopter... When the rover emerged from the communications shadow on its way to Foel Drygarn and the helicopter was still nowhere to be found, the situation began to generate some unease... In more than 700 sols operating the helicopter on Mars, not once had we ever experienced a total radio blackout. Even in the worst communications environments, we had always seen some indication of activity...

Finally, on Sol 761, nearly a week after our first missed check-in, our communications team observed a single, lonely radio ACK (radio acknowledgement) at 9:44 LMST (Local Mean Solar Time), exactly the time when we'd expect to see the helicopter wakeup. Another single ACK at the same time on Sol 762 confirmed that the helicopter was indeed alive, which came as a welcome relief for the team. Ultimately, this first-of-its-kind communications blackout was a result of two factors. First, the topology between the rover and the helicopter was very challenging for the radio used by Ingenuity. In addition to the aforementioned communications shadow, a moderate ridge located just to the southeast of the Flight 49 landing site separated the helicopter from the rover's operational area. The impact of this ridge would only abate once the rover had gotten uncomfortably close to the helicopter. Second, the HBS antenna is located on the right side of the rover, low enough to the deck to see significant occlusion effects from various part of the rover...

Relying on the helicopter's onboard preflight checks to ensure vehicle safety and banking on solid communications from the rover's imminent proximity, the team uplinked the flight plan. As commanded, Ingenuity woke up and executed its 50th flight on the red planet, covering over 300 meters and setting a new altitude record of 18 m.

The rover had closed to a mere 80 meters by the time the helicopter lifted off in the Martian afternoon Sun.

And Flight 51 happened 9 days later...
Power

Japan Will Try to Beam Solar Power from Space by 2025 (engadget.com) 111

An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: Japan and JAXA, the country's space administration, have spent decades trying to make it possible to beam solar energy from space. In 2015, the nation made a breakthrough when JAXA scientists successfully beamed 1.8 kilowatts of power, enough energy to power an electric kettle, more than 50 meters to a wireless receiver. Now, Japan is poised to bring the technology one step closer to reality.

Nikkei reports a Japanese public-private partnership will attempt to beam solar energy from space as early as 2025. The project, led by Naoki Shinohara, a Kyoto University professor who has been working on space-based solar energy since 2009, will attempt to deploy a series of small satellites in orbit. Those will then try to beam the solar energy the arrays collect to ground-based receiving stations hundreds of miles away.

Orbital solar arrays "represent a potentially unlimited renewable energy supply," the article points out -- running 24 hours a day.
Mars

A Quake on Mars Showed Its Crust is Thicker Than Earth's (sciencenews.org) 15

"Planetary scientists now know how thick the Martian crust is," reports ScienceNews, "thanks to the strongest Marsquake ever observed." On average, the crust is between 42 and 56 kilometers thick [26 to 34 miles], researchers report in a paper to appear in Geophysical Research Letters. That's roughly 70 percent thicker than the average continental crust on Earth.

The measurement was based on data from NASA's InSight lander, a stationary seismometer that recorded waves rippling through Mars' interior for four Earth years. Last May, the entire planet shook with a magnitude 4.7 quake that lasted more than six hours. "We were really fortunate that we got this quake," says seismologist Doyeon Kim of ETH Zurich.

InSight recorded seismic waves from the quake that circled Mars up to three times. That let Kim and colleagues infer the crust thickness over the whole planet. Not only is the crust thicker than that of the Earth and the moon, but it's also inconsistent across the Red Planet, the team found. And that might explain a known north-south elevation difference on Mars.

Moon

A Japanese-Made Moon Lander Crashed Because a Crater Confused Its Software (go.com) 37

Last month Japanese startup ispace tried to become the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon — but in the crucial final moments lost contact with its vehicle.

Now the Associated Press reports that company officials are revealing what happened: while trying to land, their vehicle went into free-fall. Company officials blame a software issue, plus a decision in December to change the touchdown location to a crater. The crater's steep sides apparently confused the onboard software, and the 7-foot (2-meter) spacecraft went into a free-fall from less than 3 miles (5 kilometers) up, slamming into the lunar surface. The estimated speed at impact was more than 300 feet (100 meters) per second, said the company's chief technology officer, Ryo Ujiie.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the crash site the next day as it flew overhead, revealing a field of debris as well as lunar soil hurled aside by the impact. Computer simulations done in advance of the landing attempt did not incorporate the terrain of the new landing site, Ujiie said.

CEO and founder Takeshi Hakamada said the company is still on track to attempt another moon landing in 2024, and that all the lessons learned will be incorporated into the next try. A third landing attempt is planned for 2025.

Space

JWST Discovers a Supermassive Black Hole is 'Far Larger Than Expected' (theguardian.com) 28

The Guardian reports that a supermassive black hole discovered at the center of an ancient galaxy "is five times larger than expected for the number of stars it contains, astronomers say." Researchers spotted the immense black hole in a galaxy known as GS-9209 that lies 25bn light-years from Earth, making it one of the most distant to have been observed and recorded. The team at Edinburgh University used the James Webb space telescope (JWST) to observe the galaxy and reveal fresh details about its composition and history. Dr Adam Carnall, who led the effort, said the telescope — the most powerful ever built — showed how galaxies were growing "larger and earlier" than astronomers expected in the first billion years of the universe...

Carnall said the "very massive black hole" at the centre of GS-9209 was a "big surprise" that lent weight to the theory that such enormous black holes are responsible for shutting down star formation in early galaxies. "The evidence we see for the supermassive black hole was really unexpected," said Carnall. "This is the kind of detail we'd never have been able to see without JWST."

NASA

Cost Overruns and Delays: NASA's Artemis Moon Rocket Will Cost $6B More, Take Longer (space.com) 101

"An independent report looking into the development of NASA's new moon rocket has found significant cost overruns and delays that could harm the agency's plans to put astronauts back on the moon," reports Space.com.

Their article cites specifically "increases in costs related to contracts awarded to Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman for SLS's propulsion systems," citing a 50-page report published Thursday by NASA's Inspector General: Altogether, the four contracts for the rocket's booster and engine were initially projected to cost $7 billion over a span of 14 years, but are now projected to cost at least $13.1 billion over nearly 25 years. "NASA continues to experience significant scope growth, cost increases, and schedule delays on its booster and RS-25 engine contracts, resulting in approximately $6 billion in cost increases and over 6 years in schedule delays above NASA's original projections," the report found.

These significant increases were caused by a variety of long-standing, interrelated management issues impacting both the SLS development campaign and the wider Artemis program, the report notes, including "some of which represent potential violations of federal contracting requirements." The use of heritage RS-25 engines and boosters from the space shuttle and Constellation programs for the new SLS rocket was intended to bring significant cost and schedule savings over developing new systems. But the "complexity of developing, updating, and integrating new systems along with heritage components proved to be much greater than anticipated," according to the report.

To remedy this, the report makes a number of recommendations to NASA management to increase transparency, accountability and affordability of the SLS booster and engine contracts, including switching from "cost-plus" awards towards a fixed-price contract structure. However, the assessment still finds the enormous cost of SLS hard to manage for NASA and damaging to its long term "Moon to Mars" plans. "Without greater attention to these important safeguards, NASA and its contracts will continue to exceed planned cost and schedule, resulting in a reduced availability of funds, delayed launches, and the erosion of the public's trust in the Agency's ability to responsibly spend taxpayer money and meet mission goals and objectives — including returning humans safely to the moon and onward to Mars."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared the article along with a YouTube video with excerpts from recently released high-resolution video of the rocket's last launch.
Space

Gravitational-Wave Detector LIGO Is Back (nature.com) 10

After three years of upgrades, the gravitational-wave detector known as LIGO, or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, has resumed searching for colliding black holes and other cosmic cataclysms. "The improvements should allow the facility to pick up signals from colliding black holes every two to three days, compared with once a week or so during its previous run in 2019-20," reports Nature. From the report: The Virgo detector near Pisa, Italy, which has undergone its own $9-million upgrade, was meant to join in, but technical issues are forcing its team to extend its shutdown and perform further maintenance. "Our expectation is we'll be able to restart by the end of summer or early autumn," says Virgo spokesperson Gianluca Gemme, a physicist at Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Genoa.

KAGRA, a gravitational-wave detector located under Mount Ikenoyama, Japan, is also restarting on 24 May. Its technology, although more advanced -- it was inaugurated in 2020 -- is being fine-tuned, and its sensitivity is still lower than LIGO's was in 2015. Principal investigator Takaaki Kajita, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the University of Tokyo, says that KAGRA will join LIGO's run for a month and then shut down again for another period of commissioning. At that point, the team will cool the interferometer's four main mirrors to 20 kelvin, Kajita says -- a feature that sets KAGRA apart from the other detectors that will serve as the model for next-generation observatories.

In upgrades carried out before the 2019-20 run, LIGO and Virgo tackled some of this noise with a technique called light squeezing. This approach deals with inherent noise caused by the fact that light is made of individual particles: when the beams arrive at the sensor, each individual photon can arrive slightly too early or too late, which means that the laser waves don't overlap and cancel out perfectly even in the absence of gravitational waves. "It's like dropping a bucket of BBs [lead pellets]: it's going to make a loud hiss, but they all hit randomly," physicist Lee McCuller explained while showing a prototype of the LIGO interferometers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Light squeezing injects an auxiliary laser beam into the interferometer that reduces that effect. "Its photons arrive more regularly, with less noise," said McCuller, who is now at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

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