technology_dude shares a report from Ars Technica: As part of its Artemis program to return humans to the Moon this decade, NASA has a minimum requirement that its "human landing system" must be able to deliver 865 kg to the lunar surface. This is based on the mass of two crew members and their equipment needed for a short stay. However, in selecting SpaceX's Starship vehicle to serve as its human lander, NASA has chosen a system with a lot more capability. Starship will, in fact, be able to deliver 100 metric tons to the surface of the Moon -- more than 100 times NASA's baseline goal.

"Starship can land 100 tons on the lunar surface," said Aarti Matthews, Starship Human Landing System program manager for SpaceX. "And it's really hard to think about what that means in a tangible way. One hundred tons is four fire trucks. It's 100 Moon rovers. My favorite way to explain this to my kids is that it's the weight of more than 11 elephants." Matthews made her comments last week at the ASCENDxTexas space conference in Houston. She was responding to a question from an audience member, Jeff Michel, an engineer at Johnson Space Center. [...] "NASA specified a high-level need, but we, industry, are taking away one of your biggest constraints that you have in designing your payloads and your systems," she said. "It's significantly higher mass. It's essentially infinite volume for the purposes of this conversation. And the cost is an order of magnitude lower. I think that our NASA community, our payload community, should really think about this new capability that's coming online."

"We all need to be thinking bigger and better and really inspirationally about what we can do," Matthews said. "Anyone who has worked on hardware design for space application knows you're fighting for kilograms, and sometimes you're fighting for grams, and that takes up so much time and energy. It really limits ultimately what your system can do. That's gone away entirely." [...] "If you, as an engineer, are developing an in-situ resource utilization system, what does your system look like when you have no mass constraint?" she asked. "What about when you have no volume constraint? That would be the exciting thing that I would like to hear from NASA engineers, what they can do with this capability." "The engineer says NASA is not thinking big enough," adds Slashdot reader technology_dude. "I think it's pretty obvious what the payload should be, a nuclear powered boring machine. With flamethrower weapons just in case! Leave a comment for my resume. Maybe I'll call."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Helga and Zohar are headed for a trip around the Moon on an important mission, measuring radiation risks for female astronauts for the first time. The inanimate pair are manikins modeled after the body of an adult woman. For the Artemis 1 mission, in which an uncrewed Orion capsule will travel to the Moon and back, one of the manikins will be outfitted with a newly developed radiation protection vest. Helga and Zohar, as they're called, won't be alone, as they'll be joined by a third manikin that will collect data about flight accelerations and vibrations. Artemis 1 is scheduled to blast off later this year. The Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon for the first time in over 50 years, but this time the space agency has vowed to land the first woman on the dusty lunar surface. [...]

The Helga and Zohar manikins are part of the MARE experiment, designed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The experiment will use two identical representations of the female body to investigate radiation exposure throughout the flight of the Artemis 1 mission, which may last up to six weeks. Artemis 1 will set the stage for Artemis 2, in which an Orion capsule carrying real humans will fly to the Moon and back (without landing), possibly as early as 2024. [...] Here's how it will work. The manikins are made from materials that mimic the bones, soft tissues, and organs of an adult woman, all of which will be tracked by more than 10,000 passive sensors and 34 active radiation detectors, according to DLR. One of the manikins, Helga, will fly to the Moon unprotected while the other one, Zohar, will wear a radiation protection vest called the AstroRad (which was developed by American aerospace company Lockheed Martin and Israeli startup StemRad).

As they travel aboard the Orion spacecraft to the Moon, Helga and Zohar will be affected by the harsh environment of space. The manikins, having traveled beyond the protective shielding of Earth's magnetosphere, will be exposed to various types of space radiation, like charged particles produced by the Sun or energy particles trapped within Earth's atmosphere. Space radiation is known to alter molecules of DNA, which is obviously not good for human health. Upon their arrival back at Earth, data collected from the two manikins will help researchers to better understand the level of protection provided by the newly developed AstroRad vest.

In 1972 — half a century ago — Charles Moss Duke walked on the moon.

Now 86 years old, he's ready for America to get back to exploring the moon, reports the Associated Press: Duke said he does not begrudge NASA for ending the Apollo program to focus on space shuttles, the international space station and other missions in more remote parts of space. But he looks forward to future missions that build off of what he and others have learned from their time on the moon, which called "a great platform for science."

Duke also noted that he's encouraged by the commercial partnerships that have developed around space exploration, like Space X and Blue Origin [and the companies he describes in their video as "the others"]. Those options, he said, "make space available for more people and more science and engineering and unmanned stuff."

"That compliment is going to be really important in the future," Duke went on.
The article notes the first of NASA's huge Space Launch System rockets is scheduled to blast off later this year, "with crewed flights planned subsequently." In the video interview, Duke adds that "With Artemis, NASA is going to be focused on deep space, to the moon and beyond, and I'm excited about that..."

"The more people we get into space, and can see the beauty of the earth — and the incredible emotion that you [feel] when you see the earth hung in the blackness of space — it's going to affect a lot of people."

Once every 10 years there's a report released by America's National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Released this year, the report recommends prioritizing a mission to the planet Uranus to map its gravitational and magnetic fields and study how the planet's internal heat moves to the surface.

BGR reports: Despite being the seventh planet in our solar system, there's very little we know about Uranus as a whole. In fact, one of the best images we have of the planet was captured in 1986 by the Voyager 2... Additionally, scientists want to learn more about the various moons that surround the planet. We also know very little about the ring system that surrounds the blue planet. A team led by Mark Hofstadter, a planetary scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab wrote a white paper on their goals....

We currently already have the tech we need to get a spacecraft there that can orbit the planet. Additionally, scientists have found that launching a mission in 2031 would allow us to capitalize on gravity assistance from Jupiter.
The report also recommends studying Enceladus, an icy moon orbiting Saturn which has shown signs it could sustain microbial life.

Thanks to Slashdot reader alaskana98 for submitting the story.

Shallow liquid water may be present on Jupiter's moon Europa, data based on the Greenland ice sheet suggests. The Independent reports: Europa is a prime candidate for life in the Solar System, and its deep saltwater ocean has captivated scientists for decades. The giant planet's moon has been visited by the Voyager and Galileo spacecrafts, and data collected on these missions, together with modeling, indicates the potential presence of a liquid water ocean beneath a 20-30km thick ice shell. While the thickness of the icy shell makes sampling it a daunting prospect, increasing evidence reveals the ice shell may be less of a barrier and more of a dynamic system -- and potentially good enough to support life in its own right.

Observations that captured the formation of a double ridge feature in Greenland suggest the ice shell of Europa may have an abundance of water pockets beneath similar features that are common on the surface. Study senior author Dustin Schroeder, an associate professor of geophysics at Stanford University's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth), said: "Because it's closer to the surface, where you get interesting chemicals from space, other moons and the volcanoes of Io, there's a possibility that life has a shot if there are pockets of water in the shell. If the mechanism we see in Greenland is how these things happen on Europa, it suggests there's water everywhere."

Double ridges on Europa appear as dramatic gashes across the moon's icy surface, with crests reaching nearly 1,000 feet. Study author Riley Culberg, a PhD student in electrical engineering at Stanford, said: "In Greenland, this double ridge formed in a place where water from surface lakes and streams frequently drains into the near-surface and refreezes. One way that similar shallow water pockets could form on Europa might be through water from the subsurface ocean being forced up into the ice shell through fractures -- and that would suggest there could be a reasonable amount of exchange happening inside of the ice shell." The researchers describe their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

"After three attempts to complete a critical fueling test of the Space Launch System rocket, NASA has decided to take a break," reports Ars Technica: On Saturday night the space agency announced plans to roll the large SLS rocket from the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center to the Vehicle Assembly Building in the coming days. This marks a notable step back for the program, which has tried since April 1 to complete a "wet dress rehearsal" test, during which the rocket is fueled and brought to within 10 seconds of launch. The decision comes after three tries during the last two weeks. Each fueling attempt was scuttled by one or more technical issues with the rocket, its mobile launch tower, or ground systems that supply propellants and gases. During the most recent attempt, on Thursday April 14, NASA succeeded in loading 49 percent of the core-stage liquid oxygen fuel tank and 5 percent of the liquid hydrogen tank. [NASA reports that the team ended the test after "observing a liquid hydrogen leak on the tail service mast umbilical."]

While this represents progress, it did not include the most dynamic portion of the test, during which the rocket is fully fueled and pressurized; and it, the ground systems, and computer systems are put into a terminal countdown when every variable is closely monitored. NASA had hoped to complete this wet dress rehearsal test to work out the kinks in the complicated launch system so that, when the rocket is rolled out later this year for its actual launch, the countdown will proceed fairly smoothly. NASA said that its contractors, as well as its agency's, will use the next several weeks to address problems that cropped up during the fueling tests when the SLS rocket returns to the large Vehicle Assembly Building. For example, gaseous nitrogen system supplier Air Liquide will upgrade its capabilities. NASA will also replace a faulty check valve on the upper stage of the rocket, as well as fix a leak on the mobile launch tower's "tail service mast umbilical," a 10-meter-tall structure that provides propellant and electricity lines to the rocket on the pad....

Still, NASA seems confident that it will get through this painful teething process for the SLS rocket: a program that is now 11 years old and in which NASA has invested more than $30 billion in the rocket and ground systems now being tested. "There's no doubt in my mind that we will finish this test campaign, and we will listen to the hardware, and the data will lead us to the next step," Blackwell-Thompson said Friday. "And we will take the appropriate steps, and we will launch this vehicle. I don't know exactly what that date is, but there's no doubt in my mind that we'll finish the test campaign, and we will be ready to go fly."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Putin said Russia is working on a "next-generation transport ship," as well as a nuclear-powered space tug. And, according to Russian media reports, Putin added, "We will resume the lunar program." The next-generation ship presumably refers to the "Orel," or Eagle, spacecraft that would be capable of launching cosmonauts into low Earth orbit as well as to the Moon. The problem with this is that Orel, under various guises and names, has been in development for nearly two decades and is likely years away from flying -- if it ever does. And the nuclear-powered space tug is a concept that is years or more likely decades-to-never away from launching.

That leaves the lunar program Putin mentioned. He is referring to a series of three robotic missions planned for launch to the Moon, Luna 25, Luna 26, and Luna 27. These missions, too, have been in the planning stages for a long, long time. Luna 25 was originally scheduled to launch on a Soyuz rocket a decade ago, and its current launch date is now August 2022. There is reason to be skeptical about all of the above happening, because even before the war in Ukraine, Putin significantly slashed Roscosmos' budget. Now, more resources than ever will likely be devoted to the war effort. Hours after Putin made his announcements, the European Space Agency (ESA) Council agreed to discontinue cooperative activities with Russia on the three Luna missions. "The Russian aggression against Ukraine and the resulting sanctions put in place represent a fundamental change of circumstances and make it impossible for ESA to implement the planned lunar cooperation," the space agency said in a statement.

Instead, the council said it would now work with NASA and its commercial partners.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The mysterious Antikythera mechanism -- an ancient device believed to have been used for tracking the heavens -- has fascinated scientists and the public alike since it was first recovered from a shipwreck over a century ago. Much progress has been made in recent years to reconstruct the surviving fragments and learn more about how the mechanism might have been used. And now, members of a team of Greek researchers believe they have pinpointed the start date for the Antikythera mechanism, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv repository. Knowing that "day zero" is critical to ensuring the accuracy of the device.

"Any measuring system, from a thermometer to the Antikythera mechanism, needs a calibration in order to [perform] its calculations correctly," co-author Aristeidis Voulgaris of the Thessaloniki Directorate of Culture and Tourism in Greece told New Scientist. "Of course it wouldn't have been perfect -- it's not a digital computer, it's gears -- but it would have been very good at predicting solar and lunar eclipses." [...] In 1951, a British science historian named Derek J. de Solla Price began investigating the theoretical workings of the device. Based on X-ray and gamma ray photographs of the fragments, Price and physicist Charalambos Karakalos published a 70-page paper in 1959 in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Based on those images, they hypothesized that the mechanism had been used to calculate the motions of stars and planets -- making it the first known analog computer. [...]

Voulgaris and his co-authors based their new analysis on a 223-month cycle called a Saros, represented by a spiral inset on the back of the device. The cycle covers the time it takes for the Sun, Moon, and Earth to return to their same positions and includes associated solar and lunar eclipses. Given our current knowledge about how the device likely functioned, as well as the inscriptions, the team believed the start date would coincide with an annular solar eclipse. [...] "The eclipse predictions on the [device's back] contain enough astronomical information to demonstrate conclusively that the 18-year series of lunar and solar eclipse predictions started in 204 BCE," Alexander Jones of New York University told New Scientist, adding that there have been four independent calculations of this. "The reason such a dating is possible is because the Saros period is not a highly accurate equation of lunar and solar periodicities, so every time you push forward by 223 lunar months the quality of the prediction degrades."

CNET points out the far side of the moon — the one that never faces earth — is "rugged, spotted with tons of craters" and "filled with totally different elements."

"In essence, our moon has two faces, and scientists are still trying to solve the mystery of why they're so different." But a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances might finally have an explanation for one major aspect of this enigmatic lunar duality. It has to do dark shadows, a massive impact many billions of years ago, and... lava....

They used computer simulations to see what might've gone on long, long (long) ago, way before there was any volcanic activity on the moon's surface. More specifically, they re-created a massive impact that, billions of years ago, changed the base of the moon, forming a gigantic crater that we now refer to as the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin.... What they found is that this huge smash would've created a plume of heat that carried a bunch of specific chemical elements to the near side of the moon, and not the far side. "We expect that this contributed to the mantle melting that produced the lava flows we see on the surface," Jones said.

In other words, those elements presumably contributed to an era of volcanism on the lunar face we can see from Earth but it left the far side untouched.

Ars Technica looks at the "in-space propulsion company" Impulse Space, which just announced $20 million in seed funding this week to help it build something called an "orbital transfer vehicle."

The company was founded by rocket scientist Tom Mueller, who the article describes as the first employee hired by Elon Musk for SpaceX, leading the development of SpaceX's Merlin rocket engine.

Impulse Space is apparently positioning itself for its own role in a future with lots of reusable rockets and cheaper launch costs: Founded last September, Impulse Space will initially seek to provide "last mile" delivery services for satellites launched as part of rideshare missions, likely including on SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.... While the company is not ready to discuss its specific technology, the goal is to deliver the most delta-V capability [velocity from fuel-burning] in the most efficient manner.

Impulse Space released a teaser video on this earlier this month. [The video's title? "Hello, Solar System...!" And it concludes with the words "Big things have small beginings."]

Impulse Space will seek to complement launch services with sustainable delivery in space, using green propellants and having vehicles with de-orbit capability. Barry Matsumori, who recently joined as the company's chief operating officer, said the company recognizes that if tens or hundreds of satellites will be launching on these heavy-lift rockets, they're going to need to reach different orbits and have different purposes... The company's initial business strategy involves low Earth orbit, but it envisions the need for sustainable transportation from the Earth to the Moon — in the form of a tug — and the storage and movement of propellant in both low Earth orbit and the lunar environment.

Once a company mines a space resource, after all, it will have to go somewhere.

SpaceX has ended production of new Crew Dragon astronaut capsules, a company executive told Reuters, as Elon Musk's space transportation company heaps resources on its next-generation spaceship program. From the report: Capping the fleet at four Crew Dragons adds more urgency to the development of the astronaut capsule's eventual successor, Starship, SpaceX's moon and Mars rocket. Starship's debut launch has been delayed for months by engine development hurdles and regulatory reviews. It also poses new challenges as the company learns how to maintain a fleet and quickly fix unexpected problems without holding up a busy schedule of astronaut missions.

"We are finishing our final (capsule), but we still are manufacturing components, because we'll be refurbishing," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told Reuters, confirming the plan to end Crew Dragon manufacturing. She added that SpaceX would retain the capability to build more capsules if a need arises in the future, but contended that "fleet management is key." Musk's business model is underpinned by reusable spacecraft, so it was inevitable the company would cease production at some point. But the timing was not known, nor was his strategy of using the existing fleet for its full backlog of missions. "Crew Dragon has flown five crews of government and private astronauts to space since 2020, when it flew its first pair of NASA astronauts and became the U.S. space agency's primary ride for getting humans to and from the International Space Station," notes Reuters.

NASA plans to encourage the development of another commercial vehicle that can land its Artemis astronauts on the moon. Space.com reports: In April 2021, NASA picked SpaceX to build the first crewed lunar lander for the agency's Artemis program, which is working to put astronauts on the moon in the mid-2020s and establish a sustainable human presence on and around Earth's nearest neighbor by the end of the decade. But SpaceX apparently won't have the moon-landing market cornered: NASA announced today (March 23) that it plans to support the development of a second privately built crewed lunar lander.

"This strategy expedites progress toward a long-term, sustaining lander capability as early as the 2026 or 2027 timeframe," Lisa Watson-Morgan, program manager for the Human Landing System Program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, said in a statement today. "We expect to have two companies safely carry astronauts in their landers to the surface of the moon under NASA's guidance before we ask for services, which could result in multiple experienced providers in the market," Watson-Morgan added. [...] Congress is "committed to ensuring that we have more than one lander to choose [from] for future missions," [NASA Administrator Bill Nelson] said during a news conference today, citing conversations he's had with people on Capitol Hill over the past year. "We're expecting to have both Congress support and that of the Biden administration," Nelson said. "And we're expecting to get this competition started in the fiscal year [20]23 budget."

Exact funding amounts and other details should be coming next week when the White House releases its 2023 federal budget request, he added. "So what we're doing today is a bit of a preview," Nelson said. "I think you'll find it's an indication that there are good things to come for this agency and, if we're right, good things to come for all of humanity." NASA plans to release a draft request for proposals (RFP) for the second moon lander by the end of the month and a final RFP later this spring, agency officials said. If all goes according to plan, NASA will pick the builder of the new vehicle in early 2023. That craft will have the ability to dock with Gateway, the small moon-orbiting space station that NASA plans to build, and take people and scientific gear from there to the surface (and back). This newly announced competition will be open to all American companies except SpaceX. But Elon Musk's company will have the opportunity to negotiate the terms of its existing contract to perform additional lunar development work, NASA officials said during today's news conference.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: For years, scientists have believed frigid craters at the Moon's poles hold water ice, which would be both a scientific boon and a potential resource for human missions. Now, researchers have discovered (PDF) a reason why the ice has persisted on an otherwise bone-dry world: Some polar craters may be protected by ancient magnetic fields. Researchers have known about the anomalies ever since the Apollo 15 and 16 missions in 1971 and 1972, when astronauts measured regions of unusual magnetic strength on the surface. Some anomalies are now known to be up to hundreds of kilometers across. Although their origin is debated, one possibility is they were created more than 4 billion years ago when the Moon had a magnetic field and iron-rich asteroids crashed into its surface. The resultant molten material may have been permanently magnetized.

Thousands of the anomalies are thought to exist across the lunar surface, but the team mapped ones at the south pole in detail using data from Japan's Kaguya spacecraft, which orbited the Moon from 2007 to 2009. They found at least two permanently shadowed craters that were overlapped by these anomalies, the Sverdrup and Shoemaker craters, and there are likely more. Although the remnant fields are thousands of times weaker than Earth's, they could be sufficient to deflect the solar wind. Craters with known anomalies could become prime targets for science and exploration. NASA is already planning to visit the south polar region with a rover due for launch next year, called VIPER, and the agency intends to send humans there later this decade as part of its Artemis program. Studying the ice could reveal how it was delivered, which may in turn shed light on how Earth got its water.

This week Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum posted a PDF transcript (and video excerpts) from an interview with 81-year-old Margaret Hamilton, the programmer/systems designer who in the 1960s became director of the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory which developed the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. Prior to that Hamilton had worked on software to detect an airplane's radar signature, but thought, "You know, 'I guess I should delay graduate school again because I'd like to work on this program that puts all these men on the Moon....'"

"There was always one thing that stood out in my mind, being in the onboard flight software, was that it was 'man rated,' meaning if it didn't work a person's life was at stake if not over. That was always uppermost in my mind and probably many others as well."

Interestingly, Hamilton had originally received two job offers from the Apollo Space Program, and had told them to flip a coin to settle it. ("The other job had to do with support systems. It was software, but it wasn't the onboard flight software.") But what's fascinating is the interview's glimpses at some of the earliest days of the programming profession: There was all these engineers, okay? Hardware engineers, aeronautical engineers and all this, a lot of them out of MIT... But the whole idea of software and programming...? Dick Battin, Dr. Battin, when they told him that they were going to be responsible for the software...he went home to his wife and said he was going to be in charge of software and he thought it was some soft clothing...
Hamilton also remembers in college taking a summer job as a student actuary at Travelers Insurance in the mid-1950s, and "all of a sudden one day word was going around Travelers that there were these new things out there called computers that were going to take away all of their jobs... Pretty soon they wouldn't have jobs. And so everybody was talking about it. They were scared they wouldn't have a way to make a living.

"But, of course, it ended up being more jobs were created with the computers than there were...."

Hamilton's story about Apollo 8 is amazing...

Right now an asteroid is zooming past earth "at a relatively close distance" reports Newsweek, "and the event can be viewed live." The asteroid, called 2022 ES3, will be traveling at 41,000 miles per hour when it comes between the moon and the Earth at around 2:18 p.m. ET on Sunday, March 13, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).

The space rock isn't expected to hit Earth. Instead, it will pass by at a distance of about 206,000 miles, which is about 87 percent of the distance between us and the moon.

The event provides a great viewing opportunity. An Italian astronomy organization called the Virtual Telescope Project, which often tracks asteroids and other space objects through the sky, is due to host a livestream of what it calls 2022 ES3's "very close, but safe, encounter with us" on its WebTV page starting at 18:30 UTC on March 13th.

Astronomers don't consider 2022 ES3 to be potentially hazardous, probably due to its size. The asteroid is predicted to be somewhere between 33 and 72 feet in diameter — about as wide as the length of a bowling lane.... [S]cientists track more than 28,000 near-Earth asteroids as they travel through the solar system. Around 900 of these are more than one kilometer, or 3,280 feet, in size.

"The European Space Agency has announced it has chosen a team to make oxygen on the moon," reports Digital Trends.

"The team, led by aerospace manufacturer Thales Alenia Space, will design and build a payload to create oxygen from lunar soil." [C]arrying oxygen into space using rockets is inefficient, so it would be better if astronauts could find ways to make what they need in the places they are exploring. This principle is called in-situ resource utilization and is a key idea for future missions to the moon and Mars.

The payload for the moon will be designed to create between 50 and 100 grams of oxygen from the dusty material which covers the moon, called regolith. The aim is to extract 70% of the available oxygen in the sample within a 10 day period. That time limit is because it will need to operate within the window of available solar power in a lunar day, which is around two weeks long.

Previous experiments and concepts have shown that it is possible to extract oxygen from lunar regolith, which is made up of around 40 — 45% oxygen by weight. Now, the challenge is to make a workable system within the constraints of size and materials.
A systems engineer from the space agency's design facility has high hopes for the project, according to a statement released Wednesday. "Being able to extract oxygen from moonrock, along with useable metals, will be a game-changer for lunar exploration, allowing the international explorers set to return to the Moon to 'live off the land' without being dependent on long and expensive terrestrial supply lines."

Scientists at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston are preparing to open the first tube that one of the astronauts on the Apollo missions hammered into the surface of the moon. As NPR reports, it's "remained tightly sealed all these years since that 1972 Apollo 17 mission -- the last time humans set foot on the moon." From the report: The unsealed tube from that mission was opened in 2019. The layers of lunar soil had been preserved, and the sample offered insight into subjects like landslides in airless places. Because the sample being opened now has been sealed, it may contain something in addition to rocks and soil: gas. The tube could contain substances known as volatiles, which evaporate at normal temperatures, such as water ice and carbon dioxide. The materials at the bottom of the tube were extremely cold at the time they were collected. The amount of these gases in the sample is expected to be very low, so scientists are using a special device called a manifold, designed by a team at Washington University in St. Louis, to extract and collect the gas.

Another tool was developed at the European Space Agency (ESA) to pierce the sample and capture the gases as they escape. Scientists there have called that tool the "Apollo can opener." The careful process of opening and capturing has begun, and so far, so good: the seal on the inner sample tube seems to be intact. Now, the piercing process is underway, with that special "can opener" ready to trap whatever gases might come out. If there are gases in the sample, scientists will be able to use modern mass spectrometry technology to identify them. (Mass spectrometry is a tool for analyzing and measuring molecules.) The gas could also be divided into tiny samples for other researchers to study.

If Congress' sweeping new spending bill is signed, it would finally provide full funding to some major NASA projects that have been underfunded over the last few years. From a report: Notably, NASA's program to develop a new human lunar lander would be fully funded as the president's budget requested, as will a program to develop new commercial space stations in low Earth orbit. Overall, NASA would receive $24.041 billion for 2022 in this new bill, which will fund the US government for fiscal year 2022. NASA's portion is roughly $800 million less than the $24.8 billion that President Joe Biden's budget request called for in May of 2021. However, NASA would still see a slight bump from its total funding for fiscal year 2021, which sat at $23.27 billion.

Though Congress's plan would not fully meet the president's budget request, there are a few projects that House and Senate lawmakers are finally agreeing to fund in their entirety. The bill would give NASA's human landing system the full $1.195 billion that the request asked for. Currently, NASA is developing a new human lunar lander as part of its Artemis program, an initiative to send the first woman and first person of color to the Moon. Previously, Congress showed its reluctance to give NASA the money it requested for the lander. For 2021, appropriators only provided $850 million of the requested $3.4 billion for the lander.

After years of zooming through deep space, a presumed leftover piece of a Chinese rocket slammed into the Moon today, just as space tracking experts expected it would. From a report: At least, it should have hit the Moon around 7:30AM ET this morning, as long as the law of gravity has not changed. The collision brings an end to the rocket's life in space and likely leaves a fresh new crater on the Moon that may be up to 65 feet wide. The now-expired rocket has caused quite a buzz this past month. First of all, the vehicle was never intended to crash into the Moon, making it a rare piece of space debris to find its way to the lunar surface by accident. Additionally, there was some confusion over its identity, with various groups trying to nail down exactly where the rocket came from.

Originally, space trackers thought it was a leftover piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that had launched a weather satellite back in 2015. But after careful analysis, various groups of space trackers confirmed that the rocket was likely leftover from the launch of China's Chang'e 5-T1 mission -- a flight that launched in 2014 to test out technology needed to bring samples back from the Moon. That mission, launched on a Chinese Long March 3C rocket, sent a spacecraft looping around the Moon in an attempt to see if China could send a vehicle to the Moon and then bring it back to Earth. Given the flight profile of the Chang'e 5-T1 mission and the tracking of the mystery object, astronomers are fairly certain that a chunk of the Long March 3C rocket has remained in an extremely elongated orbit around Earth ever since, only to find its way to the far side of the Moon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the US Air Force Research Laboratory released a video on YouTube that didn't get much attention. But it made an announcement that is fairly significant -- the US military plans to extend its space awareness capabilities beyond geostationary orbit, all the way to the Moon. "Until now, the United States space mission extended 22,000 miles above Earth," a narrator says in the video. "That was then, this is now. The Air Force Research Laboratory is extending that range by 10 times and the operations area of the United States by 1,000 times, taking our reach to the far side of the Moon into cislunar space."

The US military had previously talked about extending its operational domain, but now it is taking action. It plans to launch a satellite, likely equipped with a powerful telescope, into cislunar space. According to the video, the satellite will be called the Cislunar Highway Patrol System or, you guessed it, CHPS. The research laboratory plans to issue a "request for prototype proposals" for the CHPS satellite on March 21 and announce the contract award in July. The CHPS program will be managed by Michael Lopez, from the lab's Space Vehicles Directorate. (Alas, we were rooting for Erik Estrada).

This effort will include the participation of several military organizations, and it can be a little confusing to keep track of. Essentially, though, the Air Force lab will oversee the development of the satellite. The US Space Force will then procure this capability for use by the US Space Command, which is responsible for military operations in outer space. Effectively, this satellite is the beginning of an extension of operations by US Space Command from geostationary space to beyond the Moon. [...] So why is US Space Command interested in expanding its theater of operations to include the Moon? The primary reason cited in the video is managing increasing space traffic in the lunar environment, including several NASA-sponsored commercial missions, the space agency's Artemis program, and those of other nations. Another strategic element includes the ability to detect space objects, such as those placed into cislunar space by other governments, that could swing around the Moon and potentially come back to attack a U.S. military satellite in geostationary space.

"I think that's far fetched, but it is feasible from a physics perspective and would definitely exploit a gap in their current space domain awareness," said Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation. "I think they are far more concerned about that than any actual threats in cislunar space because the US doesn't have any military assets in cislunar space right now."