AmiMoJo quotes SlashGear: We're still many years away from casual consumer trips to the Moon, but it's easy to fantasize about such trips. NASA is getting in on the fun with a new campaign presenting the public with a simple question: what would you pack if you were taking your own lunar trip? NASA is encouraging anyone interested to share a picture of what's in their bag (for this imagined Moon trip) using its new #NASAMoonKit social campaign...

NASA is encouraging the public to get a container that meets this volume limitation, pack it with the precious few items they'd bring along on the trip, then take a picture and share it on social media — either Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter — using the #NASAMoonKit hashtag. NASA says that it may share your post on its own social accounts if it likes what it sees.
"What can't you leave the planet without?" asks the campaign's official web page. "Is it your camera? Your drawing pad? Or maybe your musical instrument?

"How would you organize everything you need for your next giant leap?"

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: NASA will fund a project by Nokia to build a 4G cellular communication network on the moon with $14.1 million, the space agency announced. That project was part of $370 million in new contracts for lunar surface research missions NASA announced Wednesday. Most of the money went to large space companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance to perfect techniques to make and handle rocket propellant in space. The space agency must quickly develop new technologies for living and working on the moon if it wants to realize its goal to have astronauts working at a lunar base by 2028, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a live broadcast.

NASA has announced more than a third of a billion dollars worth of "Tipping Point" contracts awarded to over a dozen companies pursuing potentially transformative space technologies. The projects range from in-space testing of cryogenic tech to a 4G LTE network for the Moon. From a report: The space agency is almost always accepting applications for at least one of its many grant and contract programs, and Tipping Point is directly aimed at commercial space capabilities that need a bit of a boost. According to the program description, "a technology is considered at a tipping point if an investment in a demonstration will significantly mature the technology, increase the likelihood of infusion into a commercial space application, and bring the technology to market for both government and commercial applications."

shirappu writes: AI technology is getting better and better at improving old video footage by adding new frames to improve smoothness and adding color to black and white footage (a great explainer for the techniques can be found here). Now, YouTube channel DutchSteamMachine is applying the same techniques to the moon landing in 1969. The AI-restored footage stabilizes the shaky old footage, adds frames, and motion smooths the whole thing to essentially bring the footage into the present. Though it can be difficult to improve these videos because high-quality source footage is a necessity, it's still a good example of how improved these technologies are becoming with the development of AI support. The actual improved video of the moon landing can be found here.

An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose has said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics. From a report: Sir Roger, 89, who won the honour for his seminal work proving that black holes exist, said he had found six 'warm' points in the sky (dubbed 'Hawking Points') which are around eight times the diameter of the Moon. They are named after Prof Stephen Hawking, who theorised that black holes 'leak' radiation and eventually evaporate away entirely. The timescale for the complete evaporation of a black hole is huge, possibly longer than the age of our current universe, making them impossible to detect. However, Sir Roger believes that 'dead' black holes from earlier universes or 'aeons' are observable now. If true, it would prove Hawking's theories were correct.

Sir Roger shared the World Prize in physics with Prof Hawking in 1988 for their work on black holes. Speaking from his home in Oxford, Sir Roger said: "I claim that there is observation of Hawking radiation. The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future. We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon. So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points. We are seeing them. These points are about eight times the diameter of the Moon and are slightly warmed up regions. There is pretty good evidence for at least six of these points." Sir Roger has recently published his theory of 'Hawking Points' in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An independent panel that assesses the safety of NASA activities has raised serious questions about the space agency's plan to test flight software for its Moon missions. During a Thursday meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, one of its members, former NASA Flight Director Paul Hill, outlined the panel's concerns after speaking with managers for NASA's first three Artemis missions. This includes a test flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for Artemis I, and then human flights on the Artemis II and III missions. Hill said the safety panel was apprehensive about the lack of "end-to-end" testing of the software and hardware used during these missions, from launch through landing. Such comprehensive testing ensures that the flight software is compatible across different vehicles and in a number of different environments, including the turbulence of launch and maneuvers in space.

"The panel has great concern about the end-to-end integrated test capability plans, especially for flight software," Hill said. "There is no end-to-end integrated avionics and software test capability. Instead, multiple and separate labs, emulators, and simulations are being used to test subsets of the software." The safety panel also was struggling to understand why, apparently, NASA had not learned its lessons from the recent failed test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, Hill said. (Boeing is also the primary contractor for the Space Launch System rocket's core stage). Prior to a test flight of the Starliner crew capsule in December 2019, Boeing did not run integrated, end-to-end tests for the mission that was supposed to dock with the International Space Station. Instead of running a software test that encompassed the roughly 48-hour period from launch through docking to the station, Boeing broke the test into chunks. As a result, the spacecraft was nearly lost on two occasions and did not complete its primary objective of reaching the orbiting laboratory.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: Scientists were able to, for the first time, measure radiation levels on the lunar surface, reports UPI, and nine days ago they published their results: that the radiation levels on the moon are 200 times stronger than on earth — and 2.6 times higher than those on the International Space Station. One of the scientists behind the study calls that exposure level "considerable." On the moon there's radiation from galactic cosmic rays, from solar particle events, and also a third component from the interaction of that radiation with the lunar soil.

"We humans are not really made to withstand space radiation," study co-author Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber, a researcher at Kiel University in Germany, tells UPI. "However, astronauts can and should shield themselves as far as possible during longer stays on the moon, for example by covering their habitat with a thick layer of lunar soil."

Or, as Business Insider puts it, "Scientists say a lunar base should be built underground to protect astronauts." Wimmer-Schweingruber tells them that "If you think about people staying on the moon for extended periods of time — say, on a scientific research station for a year or two — then these levels start getting problematic. Covering your habitat with sufficient amounts of lunar dirt should do the trick.... Ideally you'd like to be under as much material as is equivalent to Earth's atmosphere," Wimmer-Schweingruber said, adding that "an optimal depth is 30 inches of lunar soil."

NASA's first new space potty in decades -- a $23 million titanium toilet better suited for women -- is getting a not-so-dry run at the International Space Station before eventually flying to the moon. The Associated Press reports: Barely 100 pounds (45 kilograms) and just 28 inches (71 centimeters) tall, the new toilet is roughly half as big as the two Russian-built ones at the space station. It's more camper-size to fit into the NASA Orion capsules that will carry astronauts to the moon in a few years. Station residents will test it out for a few months. If the shakedown goes well, the toilet will be open for regular business. The old toilets cater more toward men. To better accommodate women, NASA tilted the seat on the new toilet and made it taller. The new shape should help astronauts position themselves better for No. 2, said Johnson Space Center's Melissa McKinley, the project manager. "Cleaning up a mess is a big deal. We don't want any misses or escapes," she said.

As for No. 1, the funnels also have been redesigned. Women can use the elongated and scooped-out funnels to urinate while sitting on the commode to poop at the same time, McKinley said. Until now, it's been one or the other for female astronauts, she noted. Like earlier space commodes, air suction, rather than water and gravity, removes the waste. Urine collected by the new toilet will be routed into NASA's long-standing recycling system to produce water for drinking and cooking. Titanium and other tough alloys were chosen for the new toilet to withstand all the acid in the urine pretreatment.

An anonymous reader quotes Teslarati: On August 19th this year, astronomers using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System observatory in Hawaii spotted an object destined to enter Earth orbit this fall. Designated as object 2020 SO, the item is now believed to be a rocket booster from NASA's Surveyor 2 mission which crash landed on the Moon in 1966 during the Apollo-era of the Cold War's space race.

"I suspect this newly discovered object 2020 SO to be an old rocket booster because it is following an orbit about the Sun that is extremely similar to Earth's, nearly circular, in the same plane, and only slightly farther away the Sun at its farthest point," Dr. Paul Chodas, the director of NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, explained in comments to CNN.

"That's precisely the kind of orbit that a rocket stage separated from a lunar mission would follow, once it passes by the Moon and escapes into orbit about the Sun. It's unlikely that an asteroid could have evolved into an orbit like this, but not impossible," he said. This specific type of event has only happened once before, namely in 2002 with a Saturn V upper stage from Apollo 12, according to Dr. Chodas.

First, PetaPixel reminds us that Estee Lauder's products will be launching into space this week: The cosmetics giant Estee Lauder is paying NASA $128,000 for a product photography shoot onboard the International Space Station. Bloomberg reports that the company will be paying the space agency to fly 10 bottles of its Advanced Night Repair skin serum to the orbiting space station on a cargo run that will launch from Virginia on Tuesday and dock on Saturday. Once the product is on board, astronauts will be tasked with shooting product photos of the serum floating in the cupola module, which has sweeping panoramic views of Earth and space.

NASA charges a "professional fee" of $17,500 per hour for the astronauts' time.
In a possibly-related story, the same flight will also be carrying a new $23 million space toilet to the station as part of a routine resupply mission "to test it out before it's used on future missions to the moon or Mars."

Last year, NASA had said that in four years, it would be landing the first woman ever on the moon, and returning to Earth's only natural satellite for the first time since 1972, through its Artemis programme. Now, in a release on September 22, NASA has shared an update outlining its plan, announcing a whopping $28 billion plan for the return to the lunar surface. From a report: The funds are all going to be used for the development of machinery; one billion dollars of the budget will go directly to the development of a commercial human lunar system that will take humans to the moon's surface. An allotment of $651 million will be used to support the Orion Spacecraft and the rocket that Boeing is building for the moon mission -- called the Space Launch System or SLS, on which NASA has already spent at least $11.9 billion.

The mission is named Artemis after the Greek goddess of the moon and the twin sister of Apollo. It's the antithesis to the NASA mission which last landed humans on the moon, Apollo 17. Only 12 humans, all male, have ever walked on the moon and they were all American, according to Bettina Inclan, NASA Communications Director. And with Artemis, they are finally planning to launch women on our satellite too. Currently, there are just 12 active women astronauts, excluding the five other female astronauts who graduated from training earlier this year. The crew for the 2024 mission, however, has not yet been named. According to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, the first woman to walk on the moon would be somebody "who has been proven, somebody who has flown, somebody who has been on the International Space Station already."

There is something funky going on in the clouds of Venus. Telescopes have detected unusually high concentrations of the molecule phosphine -- a stinky, flammable chemical typically associated with feces, farts and rotting microbial activity -- in an atmospheric layer far above the planet's scorching surface. From a report: The finding is curious because here on Earth, phosphine is essentially always associated with living creatures, either as a by-product of metabolic processes or of human technology such as industrial fumigants and methamphetamine labs. Although toxic to many organisms, the molecule has been singled out as a potentially unambiguous signature of life because it is so difficult to make through ordinary geological or atmospheric action. Swathed in sulfuric acid clouds and possessing oppressive surface pressures and temperatures hot enough to melt lead, Venus is a hellish world. But the particular cloud layer where the phosphine is present happens to be relatively balmy, with ample sunlight and Earth-like atmospheric pressure and temperature. The results will have to be carefully vetted by the scientific community. Yet they seem likely to spark renewed interest in exploring our sister planet next door.

"It's a really puzzling discovery because phosphine doesn't fit in our conception of what kinds of chemicals should be in Venus's atmosphere," says Michael Wong, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington. Planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin-Madison agrees. "The bottom line is we don't know what's going on," he says. (Neither Wong nor Sanjay were involved in the work.) After the sun and moon, Venus is the brightest object visible to the naked eye in Earth's sky. For thousands of years, people told stories about the glittering jewel that appeared around sunrise and sunset. Venus's brilliance is what made it attractive to Jane Greaves, a radio astronomer at Cardiff University in England. She typically focuses her attention on distant newborn planetary systems but wanted to test her molecular identification abilities on worlds within our cosmic backyard. In 2017 Greaves observed Venus with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, searching for bar code-like patterns of lines in the planet's spectrum that would indicate the presence of different chemicals. While doing so, she noticed a line associated with phosphine. The data suggested the molecule was present at around 20 parts per billion in the planet's atmosphere, a concentration between 1,000 and a million times greater than that in Earth's atmosphere. "I was stunned," Greaves says. Further reading: The original paper in the journal Nature Astronomy; and the case for life on Venus.

NASA aims to pay private companies to collect moon dirt in an effort to stimulate and normalize the extraction and sale of lunar resources. Space.com reports: The agency just issued a request for proposals (RFP) to this effect, [NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine] explained in a blog post today. NASA wants private companies, from the United States or abroad, to snag 1.8 ounces to 18 ounces (50 to 500 grams) of lunar material by 2024 and officially transfer ownership of the stuff to the space agency on the lunar surface. NASA will pay $15,000 to $25,000 for each of these caches, with 80% of the money delivered after sample collection. Companies will get 10% upon signing a contract and 10% after launching their spacecraft, Bridenstine added.

NASA will eventually bring the lunar material down to Earth, if all goes according to plan. (The space agency already has a considerable stash of moon rocks here, of course. The Apollo astronauts brought home 842 lbs., or 382 kilograms, of lunar material between 1969 and 1972.) The main goal of the new RFP, which you can find here, is to stimulate and normalize the extraction and sale of lunar resources, Bridenstine said. For example, participating companies may choose to collect far more than 18 ounces of material and sell the excess to non-NASA buyers.

Entrepreneur magazine writes: Although his days are presumably filled with Tesla, SpaceX, cyber pigs and lots and lots of tweeting, it seems Elon Musk also finds the time to make reading part of his routine. The billionaire businessman is known for sharing (and oversharing) all his recommendations and thoughts on Twitter, so it's no surprise that books are part of that.

Most Recommended Books compiled a list of all the books Musk has commented on in the past several years, and you can see all 61 here. But if you're short on time today, click through to see 11 of the most interesting picks from his list.
The list includes Peter Thiel's 2014 best-seller Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, as well as business magnate Richard Branson's 2011 book Screw Business As Usual.

Musk also calls a 2004 biography of Howard Hughes "a cautionary tale," and a 2005 biography of Stalin "One of the few books so dark I had to stop reading." And for a 2011 biography of Catherine the Great, he wrote "I know what you're probably thinking ... did she really f* a horse?"

His favorite books about space include John Drury Clark's Ignition! as well as Modern Engineering for Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines. But there's also Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. ("My favorite spaceship ever is in [this book].") And he calls Isaac Asimov's Foundation series "fundamental to [the] creation of SpaceX."

Also on the list is Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (which Bill Gates also named as one of his 10 favorite books about technology) as well as Frank Herbert's Dune, which Musk calls "Brilliant," while noting that Herbert "advocates placing limits on machine intelligence." In fact, for eight different books on the list he'd added the same cautionary warning: "Hopefully not too optimistic about AI."

He also says he read Karl Marx's Das Kapital at the age of 14, and also read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (which Musk called "a counterpoint to communism and useful as such, but should be tempered with kindness.")

But Musk says his favorite book ever is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

"But is that such a bad thing?" asks Popular Mechanics: Earlier this week, Elon Musk said there's a "good chance" settlers in the first Mars missions will die. And while that's easy to imagine, he and others are working hard to plan and minimize the risk of death by hardship or accident. In fact, the goal is to have people comfortably die on Mars after a long life of work and play that, we hope, looks at least a little like life on Earth...

[T]he trip itself will take a year based on current estimates, and applicants to settlement programs are told to expect this trip to be one way. It follows, statistically, that there's an almost certain "chance" these settlers will die on Mars, because their lives will continue there until they naturally end. Musk is referring to accidental death in tough conditions, but people are likely to stay on Mars for the duration either way.

When Mars One opened applications in 2013, people flocked to audition to die on Mars after a one-way trip and a lifetime of settlement. As chemist and applicant Taylor Rose Nations said in a 2014 podcast episode: "If I can go to Mars and be a human guinea pig, I'm willing to sort of donate my body to science...."
Musks exact words: "I want to emphasize that this is a very hard and dangerous, difficult thing, not for the faint of heart. Good chance you'll die, it's going to be tough going, but it will be pretty glorious if it works out."

"SpaceX took another step forward Thursday in developing its next-generation Starship rocket, conducting the second short flight test of a prototype in the past month," reports CNBC: Starship prototype Serial Number 6, or SN6, took off from the launchpad at SpaceX's facility in Boca Chica, Texas. It gradually rose to about 500 feet above the ground before it returned back to land, touching down on a concrete area near the launchpad. The flight test appeared to be identical to the test SpaceX conducted of prototype SN5 on Aug. 5...

The company is developing Starship with the goal of launching cargo and as many as a 100 people at a time on missions to the Moon and Mars.

SpaceX has been steadily building multiple prototypes at a time at the company's growing facility in Boca Chica. While SpaceX's fleet of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets are partially reusable, Musk's goal is to make Starship fully reusable — envisioning a rocket that is more akin to a commercial airplane, with short turnaround times between flights where the only major cost is fuel. After SpaceX in May launched a pair of NASA astronauts in its first crewed mission, Musk pivoted the company's attention, declaring that the top SpaceX priority is now development of Starship. Musk said in an email obtained by CNBC that Starship's program must accelerate "dramatically and immediately..."

He expects Starship's first flight tests to orbit won't come until 2021, saying that SpaceX is in "uncharted territory."
Commenting on the test launch of the bulky spacecraft, Elon Musk tweeted "Turns out you can make anything fly haha."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, the Trump administration released its fifth Space Policy Directive, this one designed to come up with a list of best practices for the space industry on how to protect their spacecraft from cyber threats. The goal is to encourage the government and space industry to create their space vehicles with cybersecurity plans in place, incorporating tools like encryption software and other protections when designing, building, and operating their vehicles. [...] To combat these threats, Space Policy Directive 5 lays out guidelines that companies should try to adhere to as they launch satellites and other vehicles to space. The administration is recommending operators use various types of software to ensure that the data they receive from their spacecraft is encrypted. The directive also encourages companies to use trusted supply chains and oversee the safety of their ground systems -- the facilities they use to send signals and retrieve data from their spacecraft. The report also recommends protecting against jamming and spoofing of satellites. "Sometimes the jamming can be fairly crude; other cases, some of the spoofing can be fairly sophisticated if somebody's trying to get on board," one official said. "So there's a whole range of things that you need to look at kind of end-to-end."

Ultimately, the directive says that government agencies should work with commercial companies to further refine what these best cybersecurity practices should be, especially since many in the space industry already implement these strategies when building and launching vehicles. [...] SPD-5 is the latest policy directive from the Trump administration designed to shape the U.S. space agenda. Trump's first directive instructed NASA to send humans back to the Moon, while other directives have focused on coming up with a way to oversee space traffic and streamlining regulations for space licenses.

Rust requires oxygen, water, and the right conditions, all of which the Moon lacks. So where did a newly discovered iron oxide come from? Earth is one possibility. From a report: Contrary to what was thought to be a scientific impossibility, scientists detected rust -- a product that requires oxygen, water, and oxidative conditions -- on the surface of the Moon, a famously oxygen-poor, liquid water-less, and reducing environment that prohibits oxidation. The scientists speculated that the oxygen needed for the reaction that forms rust had been carried to the poles of the Moon by wind from the Earth, and a paper detailing the discovery was published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. Rust is the reddish-brown material left behind when iron atoms react with oxygen and water in what is known as an oxidizing, or electron-losing, reaction. The Moon's very thin atmosphere does not trap much oxygen, and solar winds constantly blast the surface of the Moon with charged hydrogen, causing it to have highly reducing, or electron-gaining, conditions.

So while rust is common on Earth, its discovery on the Moon caught researchers by surprise. "I don't think anyone expected this on the Moon's surface," said Shaui Li, the first author of the paper and a researcher at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. "This is basic chemistry -- we all know that the lunar surface is highly reducing, so there is no reason you would be able to see a high-valence iron like hematite." By comparing reflectance data collected by the Indian Chandrayaan-1 mission to pure samples of rust, Li's group identified material at latitudes above 60 degrees on the Moon's surface as hematite, or iron (III) oxide. Li said that the comparison was fairly straightforward, and he is very confident that the reflectance spectra were of hematite.

The latest prototype of Elon Musk's Starship prototype has only flown about 500 feet (150 meters) in the air, but the SpaceX CEO said Monday his rocket company may begin construction of a booster prototype to pair with Starship as soon as this week. CNET reports: Starship is SpaceX's platform for taking humans to the moon, Mars and beyond, but to reach those deep-space destinations, the plan is to pair Starship with a powerful first-stage booster called Super Heavy. So far we've only seen early prototypes of Starship make short test flights or "hops." Musk added that Super Heavy may have fewer engines than originally planned -- possibly 28 Raptor engines rather than 31. "That's still a lot of engines. We'll up cranking up the thrust on those engines." He mused that it might be possible for Raptor to eventually be able to lift 200 times its own weight.

As for when we might see a Starship prototype fly higher than just a hop, Musk said "probably next year" and aimed to reduce expectations a bit. "The first ones might not work," he said. "This is uncharted territory. Nobody's ever made a fully reusable orbital rocket ... and then having something twice the size of a Saturn V (the rocket that astronauts to the moon) that's also fully reusable... that's really something else, that's profound. That's the gateway to the galaxy or at least the solar system."

"The moon is drifting away," reports the New York Times. Every year, it gets about an inch and a half farther from us. Hundreds of millions of years from now, our companion in the sky will be distant enough that there will be no more total solar eclipses.

For decades, scientists have measured the moon's retreat by firing a laser at light-reflecting panels, known as retroreflectors, that were left on the lunar surface, and then timing the light's round trip. But the moon's five retroreflectors are old, and they're now much less efficient at flinging back light. To determine whether a layer of moon dust might be the culprit, researchers devised an audacious plan: They bounced laser light off a much smaller but newer retroreflector mounted aboard a NASA spacecraft that was skimming over the moon's surface at thousands of miles per hour. And it worked...

Dust can be kicked up by meteorites striking the moon's surface. It coated the astronauts' moon suits during their visits, and it is expected to be a significant problem if humans ever colonize the moon. While it has been nearly 50 years since a retroreflector was placed on the moon's surface, a NASA spacecraft launched in 2009 carries a retroreflector roughly the size of a paperback book. That spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, circles the moon once every two hours, and it has beamed home millions of high-resolution images of the lunar surface...

In 2017, Dr. Erwan Mazarico, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and his collaborators began firing an infrared laser from a station near Grasse, France — about a half-hour drive from Cannes — toward the orbiter's retroreflector. At roughly 3 a.m. on Sept. 4, 2018, they recorded their first success: a detection of 25 photons that made the round trip... After accounting for the smaller size of the orbiter's retroreflector, Dr. Mazarico and his colleagues found that it often returned photons more efficiently than the Apollo retroreflectors... "For me, the dusty reflector idea is more supported than refuted by these results" he said.
Laser-reflection measurements over long periods of time and across several reflectors "have revealed that the Moon has a fluid core," NASA notes. "Scientists can tell by monitoring the slightest wobbles as the Moon rotates."