Meghan Bartels writes via Space.com: One of Earth's premier instruments for studying nearby asteroids is back to work after being rattled by earthquakes, and its first new observations show that a newly discovered space rock is actually two separate asteroids. The instrument is the planetary radar system at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The observatory was closed for most of January, after a series of earthquakes hit the island beginning on Dec. 28, 2019. The observatory reopened on Jan. 29. Meanwhile, on Jan. 27, scientists using a telescope on Mauna Loa in Hawaii spotted an asteroid that astronomers hadn't seen before. The team dubbed the newfound space rock 2020 BX12 based on a formula recognizing its discovery date.

Because of the size of 2020 BX12 and the way its orbit approaches that of Earth, it is designated a potentially hazardous asteroid. However, the space rock has already come as close to Earth as it will during this pass (2.7 million miles or 4.3 million kilometers); astronomers have calculated the asteroid's close approaches with Earth for the next century, and all will be at a greater distance than this one was. [...] Based on the observations, the scientists discovered that 2020 BX12 is a binary asteroid, with a smaller rock orbiting the larger rock. About 15% of larger asteroids turn out, on closer inspection, to be binary, according to NASA. The larger rock is likely at least 540 feet (165 meters) across, and the smaller one is about 230 feet (70 m) wide, according to the observations gathered by Arecibo. When the instrument observed the two space rocks on Feb. 5, they appeared to be separated by about 1,200 feet (360 m).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nearly 10 months after Vice President Mike Pence directed NASA to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024, the space agency has estimated how much its Artemis Program will cost. NASA says it will need an additional $35 billion over the next four years -- on top of its existing budget -- to develop a Human Landing System to get down to the Moon's surface from lunar orbit while also accelerating other programs to make the 2024 date. NASA's human spaceflight chief, Doug Loverro, shared this number Monday at Johnson Space Center, as the Trump White House released its fiscal year 2021 budget. It calls for a big increase in NASA's budget, 12 percent over last year's budget request, with a top-line number of $25.2 billion.

The biggest increase will go toward the Human Landing System, $3.37 billion in fiscal year 2021 alone. NASA says, if funded by Congress, this would mark the first time the United States has directly spent money on a lunar lander since the Apollo program in the 1960s. The human spaceflight budget also funds a small space station in orbit around the Moon, called the Lunar Gateway. This is a sizable budget request and, other NASA programs aside, represents the kind of funding the space agency needs if it is to make progress toward landing humans on the Moon in the mid-2020s. The president's budget also supports a lunar program that does meaningful things on the Moon, providing hundreds of millions of dollars to study the extraction of ice from the lunar poles and establishing a habitat on the surface. "In contrast to a recent authorization bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, the White House budget proposes using lunar landers developed via public-private partnerships, with contractors investing in their own landers," the report adds. "Those landers would also be launched on privately developed rockets, helping to contain costs of the Artemis Program."

minstrelmike shares a report. From the article: The best way to get a feel for what NASA's job was like is to read some of the code, now immortalized in a GitHub repository. Choose a file at random. GROUND_TRACKING_DETERMINATION_PROGRAM.agc, for instance, has 204 lines and more than 85 of them are comments. Each of the lines consists of only one operation, unlike modern languages, which can pack dozens of operations with multiple options into one line. The simplicity becomes obvious .... The Apollo Guidance Computer had only 36k of ROM to hold the compiled version."

You didn't need security, function was the only thing that counted, and you only had to do one thing. A Go app compiled with version 1.7 that only prints "Hello World" is 1.6 megabytes alone, and the Go world was totally thrilled with this news because it was 2.3 megabytes before." And you didn't need to deal with lawyers. There are 22 thousand words in the basic Terms of Service for renting a machine in Amazon's cloud. There is also an entirely different TOS for using the website to rent the machine. Then each individual product often has its own TOS, like this one for Activate. Add them up and they're much longer than the 36 thousand instruction words in the ROM in the Lunar Lander's computer.

Last June NASA announced plans to host visitors on the International Space Station for just $35,000 a day.

"And now we know where they'll be sleeping," reports the Motley Fool: Earlier this week, NASA announced that it has selected Axiom Space to build "at least one habitable commercial module to be attached to the International Space Station...." In this particular demonstration project, Axiom will deliver to the ISS an "element" which "will attach to the space station's Node 2 forward port," giving access to the rest of the space station, and also a place for weary private astronauts to lay their heads at night...

"Developing commercial destinations in low-Earth orbit" is a priority for NASA, explains the agency -- whether those destinations are attached to the ISS or not... The "habitable commercial module" that Axiom is building will facilitate onboarding private businesses to do work on the ISS, creating potential new revenue streams to subsidize NASA's more adventurous endeavors farther out from Low Earth Orbit. With NASA's budget today stuck below where it was in 1972 -- the year of America's last crewed mission to the moon -- the agency's going to need significant new funding to perform planned missions to Mars and beyond in future years. If Congress won't pony up additional cash, therefore, the agency may hope to raise cash from private industry...

NASA says it "also plans to issue a final opportunity to partner with the agency in the development of a free-flying, independent commercial destination" at some point in the future. This latter opportunity should be of particular interest to both Axiom and Bigelow -- which, like Axiom, has expressed interest in building its own space stations independent of the ISS.
"If Axiom succeeds in building and operating a commercial space station," writes Axios, "it will mark a turning point for how space is used and who has access to it..."

They also report that Axiom expects to procure flights to the ISS from both SpaceX and Boeing. And when the International Space Station reaches its end-of-life, "Axiom plans to remove its modules and become a free-standing station that can be accessed by the company's customers."

New research from the University of Rochester provides evidence that the magnetic field that first formed around Earth was even stronger than scientists previously believed. The research, published in the journal PNAS, will help scientists draw conclusions about the sustainability of Earth's magnetic shield and whether or not there are other planets in the solar system with the conditions necessary to harbor life. Phys.Org reports: Using new paleomagnetic, electron microscope, geochemical, and paleointensity data, the researchers dated and analyzed zircon crystals -- the oldest known terrestrial materials -- collected from sites in Australia. The zircons, which are about two-tenths of a millimeter, contain even smaller magnetic particles that lock in the magnetization of the earth at the time the zircons were formed. Previous research by [John Tarduno, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Dean of Research for Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at Rochester] found that Earth's magnetic field is at least 4.2 billion years old and has existed for nearly as long as the planet. Earth's inner core, on the other hand, is a relatively recent addition: it formed only about 565 million years ago, according to research published by Tarduno and his colleagues earlier this year.

While the researchers initially believed Earth's early magnetic field had a weak intensity, the new zircon data suggests a stronger field. But, because the inner core had not yet formed, the strong field that originally developed 4 billion years ago must have been powered by a different mechanism. "We think that mechanism is chemical precipitation of magnesium oxide within Earth," Tarduno says. The magnesium oxide was likely dissolved by extreme heat related to the giant impact that formed Earth's moon. As the inside of Earth cooled, magnesium oxide could precipitate out, driving convection and the geodynamo. The researchers believe inner Earth eventually exhausted the magnesium oxide source to the point that the magnetic field almost completely collapsed 565 million years ago. But the formation of the inner core provided a new source to power the geodynamo and the planetary magnetic shield Earth has today.

"European researchers are working on a system that can churn out breathable oxygen from simulated samples of moon dust," reports Gizmodo:
"Being able to acquire oxygen from resources found on the Moon would obviously be hugely useful for future lunar settlers, both for breathing and in the local production of rocket fuel," explained Beth Lomax, a chemist from the University of Glasgow, in an European Space Agency (ESA) press release. Lomax, along with ESA research fellow Alexandre Meurisse, are currently plugging away at a prototype that could eventually lead to exactly that: oxygen production from lunar dust. They're currently testing their system at the Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory of the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), which is based in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

Their prototype is working, but adjustments will be required to make it suitable for use on the Moon, such as reducing its operating temperature....

Interestingly, ESTEC is not treating the metals as an unwanted byproduct. The team is currently looking into various ways of exploiting these metals in a lunar environment, such as transforming them into compounds for 3D printing.
The European Space Agency points out that samples returned from the lunar surface were made up of 40-45% percent oxygen by weight.

"The first core stage for the Space Launch System, intended to get us back to the moon by 2024, has left Boeing's manufacturing center in New Orleans for launch readiness test," writes long-time Slashdot reader Excelcia: This is very good news for the troubled project which has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. Back when it was thought the system would launch in 2017, the cost estimate was $19-$22 billion for the program. But now the race is on in earnest to see who can get super-heavy lift into orbit, and it looks like NASA is finally out of the starting gate. The next step is a full-power burn of the four Space Shuttle RS-25 engines.
"Some in the space community believe it would be better to launch deep space missions on commercial rockets," reports the BBC. "But supporters of the programme say that NASA needs its own heavy-lift launch capability... The SLS was designed to re-use technology originally developed for the space shuttle programme, which ran from 1981-2011."

All I know is that's an amazing photo of the enormous core stage -- the largest one ever built in NASA's Louisiana factory -- heading down a Louisiana highway.

India has approved its third lunar mission months after its last one failed to successfully land on the moon, its space agency said on Wednesday, the latest effort in its ambitions to become a low-cost space power. From a report: The Chandrayaan-3 mission will have a lander and a rover, but not an orbiter, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman K. Sivan told reporters at its headquarters in Bengaluru, according to an official telecast. The Chandrayaan-2 mission in September successfully deployed a lunar orbiter that relays scientific data back to earth, but was unable to place a rover on the lunar surface after a "hard" landing. That mission had aimed to land on the south pole of the moon, where no other lunar mission had gone before. The region is believed to contain water as craters in the region are largely unaffected by the high temperatures of the sun.

schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: China's biggest rocket, the Long March 5, returned to flight for the first time since a 2017 failure Friday (Dec. 27) in a dazzling nighttime launch for the Chinese space program. The Long March 5 Y3 rocket lifted off at 8:45 p.m. Beijing Time carrying the experimental Shijian 20 communications satellite into a geosynchronous orbit. The satellite, which weighs a reported 8 metric tons, is China's heaviest and most advanced satellite to date, according to state media reports. The successful launch is the first Long March 5 since a first-stage booster failure in 2017 destroyed the Shijian 18 satellite. The failure prompted redesigns in the rocket's first-stage engines, which led to a two-year gap between missions. The first Long March 5 rocket lifted off in 2016.

The Long March 5 is an essential booster for China's space ambitions. The heavy-lift booster will be the one to launch China's space station modules into orbit, as well as a Mars lander in 2020 and the Chang'e 5 moon sample-return mission. China is also expected to use a version of the Long March 5, called the Long March 5B, to launch a new crewed spacecraft -- the successor to its current Shenzhou crew capsule.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The spectacle of Earth suspended in space was so overwhelming for Edgar Mitchell that the Apollo 14 astronaut and sixth man on the moon wanted to grab politicians by the scruff of the neck and drag them into space to witness the view. Such drastic measures may not be necessary, however. Scientists are about to welcome the first participants on an unprecedented clinical trial that aims to reproduce the intense emotional experience, known as the "Overview effect," from the comfort of a health spa. If the trial goes well, what led Mitchell to develop "an instant global consciousness" and a profound connection to Earth and its people could be recreated with nothing more than a flotation tank, a half tonne of Epsom salts, and a waterproof virtual reality (VR) headset.

Pratscher will recruit about 100 volunteers who are willing to don the VR headset and clamber into a dark, salt-laden flotation tank at the city's Clarity Float spa. The silence and buoyancy will mimic the sensation of floating in space, while the VR headset plays high-definition, 360 degree immersive video recorded by the Silicon Valley startup, SpaceVR. The volunteers will be randomly assigned to have either the full flotation tank VR experience, to float without VR, or have VR while lying on a bed. Before and after their one-hour session, the participants will complete a series of questionnaires to assess whether they had any mystical experiences, felt more connected to others, or had what psychologists call an "emotional breakthrough" moment. The persistence of any effects will be assessed after one week and again a month later. Pratscher does not expect everyone who steps into the tank wearing a VR headset to emerge having experienced the Overview effect. But the experiment will reveal what, if anything, people do experience when their senses are fooled into believing they are looking down on Earth from space.

Researchers aim to recreate intense emotional experience astronauts reported on seeing Earth from space for the first time. From a report: The spectacle of Earth suspended in space was so overwhelming for Edgar Mitchell that the Apollo 14 astronaut and sixth man on the moon wanted to grab politicians by the scruff of the neck and drag them into space to witness the view. Such drastic measures may not be necessary, however. Scientists are about to welcome the first participants on an unprecedented clinical trial that aims to reproduce the intense emotional experience, known as the "Overview effect," from the comfort of a health spa. If the trial goes well, what led Mitchell to develop "an instant global consciousness" and a profound connection to Earth and its people could be recreated with nothing more than a flotation tank, a half tonne of Epsom salts, and a waterproof virtual reality (VR) headset. "There's a lot of division and polarisation and disconnection between people," said Steven Pratscher, a psychologist and principal investigator on the trial at the University of Missouri. "We'd like to see if we can recreate the Overview effect on Earth to have an impact on those issues." Pratscher will recruit about 100 volunteers who are willing to don the VR headset and clamber into a dark, salt-laden flotation tank at the city's Clarity Float spa. The silence and buoyancy will mimic the sensation of floating in space, while the VR headset plays high-definition, 360 degree immersive video recorded by the Silicon Valley startup, SpaceVR.

Thousands of skywatchers gathered across parts of the Middle East and Asia on Thursday to glimpse the sun forming a ring of fire around the moon in a rare annular solar eclipse. From a report: An annular eclipse occurs when the moon covers the sun's center but leaves its outer edges visible to form a ring. Thursday's was visible in Saudi Arabia as well as Singapore, India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

America's Air Force is seeking proposals for technologies "for operations far beyond geosynchronous Earth orbit, near the moon's orbit," reports SpaceNews: Specific items the Air Force wants: payloads for providing space domain awareness from the lunar surface, lightweight sensors for space-based space domain awareness, and methodologies for orbit determination and catalog maintenance in cislunar space. The Air Force also is interested in concepts for providing position, navigation and timing solutions for cislunar space operations; visualization of cislunar orbits; and terrestrial-based concepts for achieving space domain awareness of cislunar space.

The inclusion of cislunar space capabilities in the Small Business Innovation Research program was unexpected, said Shawn Usman, an astrophysicist and founder of the space consulting firm Rhea Space Activity. The industry sees this as a sign that the Air Force, and the future Space Force, are responding to advances made by China, Usman told SpaceNews. "This is definitely a pretty big turning point for the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. 'new space' industry, our near-peer competitors, and for the upcoming Space Force."

A NASA satellite has found India's Vikram lander, which crashed on the lunar surface in September. The Guardian reports: Nasa released an image taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that showed the site of the spacecraft's impact and associated debris field, with parts scattered over almost two dozen locations spanning several kilometers. In a statement, Nasa said it had released a mosaic image of the site on 26 September, inviting the public to search it for signs of the lander.

It added that a person named Shanmuga Subramanian contacted the LRO project with a positive identification of debris -- with the first piece found about 750 meters north-west of the main crash site. Blasting off in July, emerging Asian giant India had hoped with its Chandrayaan-2 ("moon vehicle 2") mission to become just the fourth country after the U.S., Russia and regional rival China to make a successful moon landing, and the first on the lunar south pole.

"A new photo shows the solar system's second confirmed interstellar visitor in an impressive new light," writes Space.com.

elainerd (Slashdot reader #94,528) quotes their report: A team of astronomers from Yale University in Connecticut imaged Comet 2I/Borisov last Sunday (Nov. 24) using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, revealing the object's tail to be nearly 100,000 miles (160,000 kilometers) long. That's about 14 times Earth's diameter, and more than 40% the distance from our planet to the moon. "It's humbling to realize how small Earth is next to this visitor from another solar system," Yale astronomy professor Pieter van Dokkum said in a statement. Borisov's tail dwarfs its body, of course; researchers think the comet's nucleus is just 1 mile (1.6 km) or so across.

The comet was discovered in late August by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov. Analysis of the object's speed and trajectory revealed that it came into our solar system from afar, making it the second known interstellar interloper after the mysterious body 'Oumuamua, which was first spotted in October 2017. Astronomers didn't see 'Oumuamua until it had already zoomed past Earth on its way toward the outer solar system, limiting the opportunity for detailed study. But Comet Borisov is a more obliging target.

NPR reports: Back in September, India's hopes for a historic first ended -- inconclusively. High hopes had been riding on its Chandrayaan-2 orbiter. The spacecraft was sending a landing vehicle down to the moon -- an operation that, if successful, would be the first robotic mission at the moon's unexplored south pole and that would make India only the fourth country in history to make a moon landing. Unfortunately, it was not to be. At the time, the Indian Space Research Organisation didn't offer much explanation for the operation's failure besides an ill-timed loss of contact, adding little more than a terse, "Data is being analyzed." Now, the Indian government has offered its first conclusive statement on the incident, in a brief report responding to a lawmaker's question last Wednesday: Put simply, the Vikram lander's braking thrusters malfunctioned, and it crashed.

"During the second phase of descent, the reduction in velocity was more than the designed value. Due to this deviation, the initial conditions at the start of the fine braking phase were beyond the designed parameters," said Jitendra Singh, minister of state for the Department of Space, the ISRO's parent department. "As a result, Vikram hard landed within 500 m of the designated landing site." Singh did not clarify what caused the malfunction in the lander's landing system. The statement is believed to be the first formal acknowledgment by India's government that the craft crashed. In the ISRO's previous public updates on Vikram -- the latest on its website was released back on Sept. 10, several days after the intended landing date -- the agency noted only that it had located the lander but had made "no communication with it yet."

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. From a report: In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past. A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night -- for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5C to 2.5C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536-539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says. Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice -- a spike in airborne lead -- marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.

In the search for life in our solar system, Mars tends to steal the spotlight. But in recent years Jupiter's fourth largest moon, Europa, has emerged as a promising extraterrestrial nursery. Planetary scientists have long suspected Europa may harbor a vast liquid water ocean beneath its thick, icy crust. If Europa's ocean also has a source of energy -- think hydrothermal vents -- and a few choice chemical elements, there's a decent chance it could support basic lifeforms. From a report: This theory makes a lot of assumptions, but on Monday it received one of its biggest boosts yet. An international team of astronomers announced they directly detected water vapor in Europa's atmosphere for the first time. As detailed in a paper published in Nature Astronomy, this method of detection is strong evidence that liquid water exists beneath the surface of Europa. "This doesn't necessarily mean the water vapor is coming from an ocean," says NASA planetary scientist Lucas Paganini. "But it does seem like this detection is connected to liquid water under the surface." A lot of what we know about Europa was gleaned from data collected by the Galileo spacecraft on its tour of Jupiter in the late '90s. One of the most remarkable findings from that mission was that something was messing with Jupiter's magnetic field. Based on this finding, planetary scientists hypothesized Europa might be home to an electrically conductive fluid, like salt water, that was causing the magnetic disturbances.

A test version of SpaceX's next-generation rocket, Starship, partially burst apart during ground tests in Texas today, erupting plumes of gas and sending some pieces of hardware soaring into the sky. The Verge reports: The explosive result occurred while SpaceX was seemingly conducting some pressure tests with the vehicle at the company's test site in Boca Chica, Texas. The local live streams showed the vehicle venting gas periodically throughout the day, indicating that testing was underway. This prototype was meant to test the design of Starship -- a monster spacecraft the company is working on to transport cargo and people to deep space destinations like the Moon and Mars. In fact, this same vehicle is the one that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk showed off to reporters in September. At the time, he claimed the test vehicle could be doing flights to low altitudes within the next couple of months and that some version of Starship could reach Earth orbit within six months.

Now, that timeline is almost certain to shift. After the explosion, Musk indicated on Twitter that SpaceX may no longer fly this particular prototype and will instead conduct flight tests with a newer, more up-to-date model that the company planned to build. "This had some value as a manufacturing pathfinder, but flight design is quite different," Musk wrote, referring to the prototype that burst.

In 2005, the Cassini space probe orbited Saturn's frozen moon Enceladus to photograph "enormous jets of water ice and vapor emanating from four parallel slashes near its south pole," reports Science. "Since then, researchers have detected organic molecules and hydrogen in the jets -- potential food for microbes -- making Enceladus one of the top destinations in the search for life elsewhere in the Solar System."

But a new paper posted this week on the preprint server arXiv claims to finally understand the mystery of that moon's "tiger stripes": The stripes...are 130 kilometers long and are spaced roughly 35 kilometers apart -- rather large features on a moon only 500 kilometers in diameter. Nobody quite understood their origin, or why they were only seen at one pole...

As it orbits around Saturn, Enceladus experiences gravitational tidal forces that squeeze and heat it. Cassini data had already shown that a liquid water ocean sits underneath the outer ice shell, which is thinnest at the north and south poles. According to the new study, led by Douglas Hemingway of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., as the moon cooled over time and some of the ocean water refroze, the new ice generated strain that built up in the surface until it broke. "It's like your pipes freezing on a cold day," says planetary scientist Francis Nimmo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study... That first fissure, extending down to the ocean, allowed a geyser to spray snow on its two flanks. The weight of this extra material produced more strains. In their study, the researchers calculate that these forces should have cracked additional grooves on either side, roughly 35 kilometers from the original one...

The moon's low gravity means that fractures can bust all the way through its outer shell and persist. On a more massive moon, the researchers say in their study, the weight of heavier ice would tend to squeeze cracks shut.