Meet ploonets: planets of moonish origin. In other star systems, some moons could escape their planets and start orbiting their stars instead, new simulations suggest. Scientists have dubbed such liberated worlds "ploonets," and say that current telescopes may be able to find the wayward objects. From a report: Astronomers think that exomoons -- moons orbiting planets that orbit stars other than the sun -- should be common, but efforts to find them have turned up empty so far. Astrophysicist Mario Sucerquia of the University of Antioquia in MedellÃn, Colombia and colleagues simulated what would happen to those moons if they orbited hot Jupiters, gas giants that lie scorchingly close to their stars. Many astronomers think that hot Jupiters weren't born so close, but instead migrated toward their star from a more distant orbit.

As the gas giant migrates, the combined gravitational forces of the planet and the star would inject extra energy into the moon's orbit, pushing the moon farther and farther from its planet until eventually it escapes, the researchers report June 29 [PDF] at arXiv.org. "This process should happen in every planetary system composed of a giant planet in a very close-in orbit," Sucerquia says. "So ploonets should be very frequent." Some ploonets may be indistinguishable from ordinary planets. Others, whose orbits keep them close to their planet, could reveal their presence by changing the timing of when their neighbor planet crosses, or transits, in front of the star.

PolygamousRanchKid quotes a report from The Independent: A mistake made during the Apollo 11 moon landing could have brought lunar germs to the Earth, astronauts have revealed. When the three astronauts flew to the Moon and back, exactly 50 years ago this month, NASA worked hard to ensure that no bugs were brought back from the lunar surface. All three of the Apollo 11 crew were put into special clothes, scrubbed down and taken to a quarantine facility where they lived until scientists could be sure the Earth would not be contaminated. But interviews from a new documentary -- filmed by PBS and revealed by Space.com -- show that the plan to keep Earth could easily have failed, and that space bugs could have got into the Earth's atmosphere despite Nasa's best efforts. The astronauts noted that Nasa did not think there would be anything alive on the Moon that could be brought back down to the Earth. But the precautions were taken in case there were. "Look at it this way," astronaut Michael Collins said. "Suppose there were germs on the moon. There are germs on the moon, we come back, the command module is full of lunar germs. The command module lands in the Pacific Ocean, and what do they do? Open the hatch. You got to open the hatch! All the damn germs come out!"

Slashdot reader stevent1965 writes: The costs of running the International Space Station are a burden for NASA's budget. It has cost over $100 billion to construct and annual operating expenses run between $3 and $4 billion per year, representing a substantial percentage [about half] of NASA's manned space exploration budget. What to do, what to do?

A potential solution is to turn over operations (if not ownership) to private enterprise (Elon, are you listening?) Commercialization of space exploration may be anathema to some, but there is ample precedent for the government ceding control of publicly-funded endeavors to private enterprises. The Internet is the obvious example.

Why not give corporations control of the ISS? Are there drawbacks? Benefits? Which will prevail? Let's hear your opinions.
Sunday NPR noted that a few weeks ago NASA held a press event at Nasdaq's MarketSite to announce and promote "the commercialization of low Earth orbit," with astronaut Christina Koch beaming down a video from space to say that the crew was "so excited" to be a part of NASA "as our home and laboratory in space transitions into being accessible to expanded commercial and marketing opportunities" (as well as to "private astronauts.")

But there are big logistical and financial hurdles. (Even NASA admits to NPR that revenue-generating opportunities first "need to be cultivated by the creative and entrepreneurial private sector.") So leave your own best thoughts in the comments -- the how, why, what if, or why not.

Should the International Space Station go commercial?

"From JFK's real motives to the Soviets' secret plot to land on the Moon at the same time, a new behind-the-scenes view of an unlikely triumph 50 years ago," writes schwit1 sharing a new article from Smithsonian magazine titled "What You Didn't Know About the Apollo 11 Mission."

It's an excerpt from the recently-released book ONE GIANT LEAP: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon. The Moon has a smell. It has no air, but it has a smell... All the astronauts who walked on the Moon noticed it, and many commented on it to Mission Control.... Cornell University astrophysicist Thomas Gold warned NASA that the dust had been isolated from oxygen for so long that it might well be highly chemically reactive. If too much dust was carried inside the lunar module's cabin, the moment the astronauts repressurized it with air and the dust came into contact with oxygen, it might start burning, or even cause an explosion. (Gold, who correctly predicted early on that the Moon's surface would be covered with powdery dust, also had warned NASA that the dust might be so deep that the lunar module and the astronauts themselves could sink irretrievably into it.) Among the thousands of things they were keeping in mind while flying to the Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin had been briefed about the very small possibility that the lunar dust could ignite....

The Apollo spacecraft ended up with what was, for its time, the smallest, fastest and most nimble computer in a single package anywhere in the world. That computer navigated through space and helped the astronauts operate the ship. But the astronauts also traveled to the Moon with paper star charts so they could use a sextant to take star sightings -- like 18th-century explorers on the deck of a ship -- and cross-check their computer's navigation. The software of the computer was stitched together by women sitting at specialized looms -- using wire instead of thread. In fact, an arresting amount of work across Apollo was done by hand: The heat shield was applied to the spaceship by hand with a fancy caulking gun; the parachutes were sewn by hand, and then folded by hand. The only three staff members in the country who were trained and licensed to fold and pack the Apollo parachutes were considered so indispensable that NASA officials forbade them to ever ride in the same car, to avoid their all being injured in a single accident. Despite its high-tech aura, we have lost sight of the extent to which the lunar mission was handmade...

The space program in the 1960s did two things to lay the foundation of the digital revolution. First, NASA used integrated circuits -- the first computer chips -- in the computers that flew the Apollo command module and the Apollo lunar module. Except for the U.S. Air Force, NASA was the first significant customer for integrated circuits. Microchips power the world now, of course, but in 1962 they were little more than three years old, and for Apollo they were a brilliant if controversial bet. Even IBM decided against using them in the company's computers in the early 1960s. NASA's demand for integrated circuits, and its insistence on their near-flawless manufacture, helped create the world market for the chips and helped cut the price by 90 percent in five years. NASA was the first organization of any kind -- company or government agency -- anywhere in the world to give computer chips responsibility for human life. If the chips could be depended on to fly astronauts safely to the Moon, they were probably good enough for computers that would run chemical plants or analyze advertising data.
The article also notes that three times as many people worked on Apollo as on the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.

Gene Kranz may be the most famous flight director in NASA's history. He directed the actual landing portion of the first mission to put men on the moon, Apollo 11, and led Mission Control in saving the crew of Apollo 13 after an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the lunar surface. Now Kranz, 85, has completed another undertaking: the reopening of Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. From a report: The room where Kranz directed some of NASA's most historic missions, heralding U.S. exploration of space, was decommissioned in 1992. Since then, it had become a stop on guided tours of the space center but had fallen into disrepair. Kranz led a $5 million multiyear effort to restore Mission Control in time for the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing on July 20.

"I walked into that room last Monday for the first time when it was fully operational, and it was dynamite. I literally wept," Kranz said in an interview with NPR. "The emotional surge at that moment was incredible. I walked down on the floor, and when we did the ribbon-cutting the last two days, believe it or not, I could hear the people talking in that room from 50 years ago. I could hear the controllers talking." The room also brought back memories for Kranz of a shared sense of purpose. "That group of people united in pursuit of a cause, and basically the result was greater than the sum of the parts. There was a chemistry that was formed," Kranz said. "[The room] also has a meaning related to the American psyche, that what America will dare, America will do," Kranz said.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Spain and the U.S. has announced that they have discovered a new property of light -- self-torque. Their findings have been published in the journal Science. Phys.Org reports: Scientists have long known about such properties of light as wavelength. More recently, researchers have found that light can also be twisted, a property called angular momentum. Beams with highly structured angular momentum are said to have orbital angular momentum (OAM), and are called vortex beams. They appear as a helix surrounding a common center, and when they strike a flat surface, they appear as doughnut-shaped. In this new effort, the researchers were working with OAM beams when they found the light behaving in a way that had never been seen before.

The experiments involved firing two lasers at a cloud of argon gasâ"doing so forced the beams to overlap, and they joined and were emitted as a single beam from the other side of the argon cloud. The result was a type of vortex beam. The researchers then wondered what would happen if the lasers had different orbital angular momentum and if they were slightly out of sync. This resulted in a beam that looked like a corkscrew with a gradually changing twist. And when the beam struck a flat surface, it looked like a crescent moon. The researchers noted that looked at another way, a single photon at the front of the beam was orbiting around its center more slowly than a photon at the back of the beam. The researchers promptly dubbed the new property self-torque -- and not only is it a newly discovered property of light, it is also one that has never even been predicted. Their technique may be used to modulate the orbital angular momentum of light in ways very similar to modulating frequencies in communications equipment, leading to the development of novel devices that make use of manipulating extremely tiny materials.

NASA announced Thursday that it is sending a drone-style quadcopter to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Dragonfly, as the mission is called, will be capable of soaring across the skies of Titan and landing intermittently to take scientific measurements, studying the world's mysterious atmosphere and topography while searching for hints of life (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) on the only world other than Earth in our solar system with standing liquid on its surface. The New York Times reports: The mission will be developed and led from the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Md. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch in 2026. Once at Titan in 2034, Dragonfly will have a life span of at least two-and-a-half years, with a battery that will be recharged with a radioactive power source between flights. Cameras on Dragonfly will stream images during flight, offering people on Earth a bird's-eye view of the Saturn moon. In addition to a camera, Dragonfly will carry an assortment of scientific instruments: spectrometers to study Titan's composition; a suite of meteorology sensors; and even a seismometer to detect titanquakes when it lands on the ground. Drills in the landing skids will collect samples of the Titan surface for onboard analysis.

Earlier this week, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos explained how its spacecraft will eventually be powered with fuel harvested from the moon. CNBC reports: "We know things about the moon now we didn't know about during the Apollo days," Bezos said, speaking at the JFK Space Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. One of the things learned since Apollo that Bezos highlighted is that there are deposits of water ice at the bottom of craters on the moon. "We can harvest that ice and use to make hydrogen and oxygen, which are rocket propellants," Bezos said.

Blue Origin is developing its "Blue Moon" lunar lander, which Bezos unveiled last month. Bezos said Blue Moon is powered by a BE-7 engine, which uses hydrogen and oxygen as its two fuel sources. "The reason we chose those propellants is because... we know one day we'll be refueling that vehicle on the surface of the moon from propellants made on the surface of the moon from that water ice," Bezos said.

An anonymous reader writes: Americans are less interested in NASA sending humans to the moon or Mars than they are in the U.S. space agency focusing on potential asteroid impacts and using robots for space exploration. That's according to a poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released Thursday, one month before the 50th anniversary of the first walk on the moon. Two-thirds of respondents said monitoring asteroids, comets and "other events in space that could impact Earth" was "very or extremely important." According to NASA, which watches for objects falling from space, about once a year an "automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth's atmosphere," but it usually burns up before it hits the surface. And the instances of larger objects actually making it past Earth's atmosphere and causing any damage happen thousands of years apart, NASA says. The poll also found that Americans want NASA to focus on conducting space research to expand knowledge of the Earth, solar system and universe and they want "robots without astronauts" to do it. If you want to build capabilities for dealing with dangerous asteroids, asteroid mining should be the technology we prioritize, because there's a lot of crossover there.

NASA has touted its bold plan to return American astronauts to the moon by 2024 for months. Now we're starting to get an idea of how much it will cost. From a report: The space agency will need an estimated $20 billion to $30 billion over the next five years for its moon project, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told CNN Business on Thursday. That would mean adding another $4 billion to $6 billion per year, on average, to the agency's budget, which is already expected to be about $20 billion annually. Bridenstine's remarks are the first time that NASA has shared a total cost estimate for its moon program, which is called Artemis (after the Greek goddess of the moon) and could send people to the lunar surface for the first time in half a century. NASA wants that mission to include two astronauts: A man and the first-ever woman to walk on the moon.

India plans to have its own space station in the future and conduct separate missions to study Sun and Venus, it said on Thursday, as the nation moves to bolster its status as a leader in space technologies and inspire the young minds to take an interest in scientific fields. From a report: India's space agency said today that it will begin working on its space station following its first manned mission to space, called Gaganyaan, in 2022 -- just in time to commemorate 75 years of the country's independence from Britain. The government has sanctioned Rs 10,000 crores ($1.5 billion) for Gaganyaan mission, it was unveiled today. "We have to sustain the Gaganyaan program after the launch of the human space mission. In this context, India is planning to have its own space station," said Dr Kailasavadivoo Sivan, chairman of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). ISRO is India's equivalent to NASA. "While navigation, communication, and earth observation are going to be the bread and butter for us, it is missions such as Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan, and Gaganyaan that excite the youth, unite the nation, and also pave a technological seed for the future." The ambitious announcements come a day after the space agency said it will launch a lunar mission on July 15 this year in an attempt to become only the fourth nation to land on the moon.

India said on Wednesday it will launch its second lunar mission in mid-July, as it moves to consolidate its status as a leader in space technology by achieving a controlled landing on the moon. From a report: The mission, if successful, would make India only the fourth country behind the United States, Russia and China to perform a "soft" landing on the moon and put a rover on it. China successfully landed a lunar rover in January. The unmanned mission, called Chandrayaan-2, which means "moon vehicle" in Sanskrit, will involve an orbiter, a lander and a rover, which have been built by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The mission is scheduled to launch on July 15 aboard ISRO's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III. It will cost about 10 billion rupees ($144 million), ISRO said. After a journey of more than 50 days, ISRO's lander will attempt a "soft," controlled landing on the lunar surface on around Sept. 6.

pgmrdlm shares a report from CBS News: A previously unknown deposit of an unidentified physical substance larger than the size of Hawaii has been discovered beneath the surface of the moon. Scientists at Baylor University published a study detailing their findings of this "anomaly" beneath the moon's largest crater, at its South Pole. They believe the mass may contain metal carried over from an earlier asteroid crash. According to the study -- "Deep Structure of the Lunar South Pole-Aitken Basin" -- which was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in April, the large mass of material was discovered beneath the South Pole-Aitken crater, an oval-shaped crater that is 2,000 kilometers (about 1,243 miles) wide and roughly 4 billion years old. According to Baylor University, the unidentified mass was discovered "hundreds of miles" beneath the basin and is "weighing the basin floor downward by more than half a mile." The scientists discovered the mass by analyzing data taken from a spacecraft used during NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, which was a lunar gravity mapping exploration to study the moon's interior and thermal history.

According to the published study, "Plausible sources for this anomaly include metal from the core of a differentiated impactor or oxides from the last stage of magma ocean crystallization," which hypothesizes the moon's surface was once a molten liquid ocean of magma. They also believe the mass could be suspended iron-nickel core from an asteroid that previously impacted the moon's surface.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: NASA's trip to the Moon's surface in July 1969 was preceded by a lot of preparatory missions -- including Apollo 10, which involved a mock mission with everything but the actual landing. Astronauts Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan flew a lunar module, nicknamed "Snoopy" by the agency, nearly all the way to the Moon during Apollo 10, and then shot the module off into space once they'd completed their task. There was never any intent to return Snoopy to Earth -- it was sent into an orbit around the sun beyond the Moon after the astronauts completed their maneuvers and returned to the command module, and NASA did not track its trajectory. The effort to discover its location began in 2011, undertaken by a group of amateur U.K. astronomers led by Nick Howes -- the same who now claim they're "98 percent convinced" they've discovered where it ended up, according to Sky News. Howes' further speculated that if they confirm its location, someone like Elon Musk could recover it and preserve it as a key cultural artifact.

"NASA has chosen its first commercial partner for a proposed space station, known as the Lunar Gateway, to be built near the Moon," reports Ars Technica: On Thursday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Maxar Technologies would build the first component of the Gateway -- the power and propulsion element. Like the name suggests, it will provide electricity to the Gateway and help move it around. "This time when we go to the Moon, we're actually going to stay," Bridenstine said in making the announcement... Under NASA's current plans to land humans on the Moon by 2024, this is where astronauts will launch to from Earth before climbing aboard pre-positioned landers to take them down to the lunar surface....

The contract announced Thursday is worth a maximum of $375 million. Intriguingly, Maxar said Blue Origin and Draper will join the team in designing, building, and operating the spacecraft. Such a partnership raises the possibility that the power and propulsion element, which will weigh about 5 tons fully fueled, could be launched on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. During a teleconference with media, Maxar's Mike Gold said the company would choose a commercial rocket for the power and propulsion element launch in the next 12 to 18 months...

The station will use solar electric propulsion to maintain its orbit and have the ability to maneuver into other orbits around the Moon. Before humans visit the Gateway in 2024, the space agency plans to add a small "habitat" module.

A top NASA executive hired in April to guide strategy for returning astronauts to the moon by 2024 has resigned, the space agency said on Thursday, the culmination of internal strife and dwindling congressional support for the lunar initiative. From a report: Mark Sirangelo, named six weeks ago as special assistant to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, left the agency as NASA abandoned a reorganization plan due to a chilly reception on Capitol Hill, Bridenstine said in a statement. His departure came after lawmakers rejected NASA's proposal to create a separate directorate within the space agency to oversee future lunar missions and ultimately develop human exploration of Mars. [...] Last week, the Trump administration asked Congress to increase NASA's spending next year by $1.6 billion as a "down payment" on the accelerated goal of landing Americans back on the moon by 2024, more than half a century after the end of the U.S. Apollo lunar program.

SpaceX is planning to launch test flights of its Starhopper test vehicle to a height of up to 16,400 feet. "The short tests, which will take place out of SpaceX's launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, will send the rocket to just under 1,640 feet (500 meters) high for its low-altitude flights and up to 16,400 feet (5,000 meters) high for its high-altitude flights," reports The Verge, citing a modified application filed with the FCC. The heights match those that the company indicated in a similar filing last year. From the report: The Starhopper is a very basic version of Starship, the massive passenger rocket that SpaceX wants to build to send people to the Moon and Mars. In order to prepare for the first Starship's flight to space, SpaceX has been tinkering with the test Starhopper in Boca Chica. The vehicle boasts a similar structure to the final rocket, though it's slightly smaller in size. Starhopper's most important task is to test out the new, powerful Raptor engines that SpaceX has developed for the future deep-space rocket.

SpaceX fired up a Raptor engine on the bottom of the Starhopper for the first time in April. It only lifted a few inches since the vehicle was tethered to the ground. But now, SpaceX plans to perform what are known as "hop" tests with the vehicle (hence the nickname Starhopper), which will send the rocket to a low altitude above the Earth. The company will then attempt to touch the Starhopper back down on the ground with the vehicle's three landing legs. The idea is to test out the landing capabilities the rocket's going to use to touch down on Earth and other worlds. SpaceX performed similar tests with a vehicle known as Grasshopper back in 2012 and 2013 to try out the landing technique its Falcon 9 rockets now use.

China's Chang'e-4 mission to the dark side of the moon has discovered signs of mantle material at the moon's surface, "effectively setting an 'X' on lunar maps for future explorers seeking this not-so-buried geological treasure," reports Scientific American. From the report: China's Chang'e-4 mission touched down near the south pole on the lunar far side on January 3, 2019, the first spacecraft ever to land intact on this largely unexplored region of the moon. Consisting of a lander and rover, the mission is still going strong today, with the rover -- called Yutu-2 -- continuing its journey across the surface. On board are a variety of instruments, and today in Nature scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing report the mission's first scientific results, suggesting lunar mantle material has at last been located.

"We found that the material of the Chang'e-4 landing site is mainly composed of olivine and low-calcium pyroxene," says Dawei Liu, one of the paper's co-authors. "This mineral combination is the candidate mantle-derived material." Chang'e-4 rests inside the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, which, at 2,500 kilometers across, is one of the solar system's oldest and largest known impact craters. Specifically, the mission touched down in the 186-kilometer-wide Von Karman crater within this larger basin. Von Karman was produced billions of years ago by the impact of a large comet or asteroid; such collisions can excavate mantle material from deep underground, allowing it to be scattered across the surface by subsequent impacts.

The mantle material was discovered using the Visible and Near Infrared Spectrometer on Yutu-2, which can ascertain the chemical composition of rocks by studying their reflected light. Both olivine and pyroxene are believed to be among the first minerals that froze out from the moon's magma ocean as it cooled, falling to its solid base deeper in the mantle. Because previous surveys from orbit have revealed much of Von Karman's floor to be composed of lava from volcanic eruptions rather than excavated mantle, the paper's authors suspect the material detected by Yutu-2 was actually blasted into Von Karman from the upper mantle beneath another nearby impact structure, the 72-kilometer-wide Finsen crater.

The moon is getting smaller, which causes wrinkles in its surface and moonquakes, according to a new study sponsored by NASA. Time Magazine reports: As the moon's interior cools, it shrinks, which causes its hard surface to crack and form fault lines, according to research sponsored by NASA. The moon has gotten about 150 feet skinnier over the last few hundred million years. Astronauts have placed seismometers on the moon over a series of past missions. Scientists, who determined that the moonquakes are close enough to the fault lines to establish causality, published their analysis in a study in Nature Geoscience on Monday, according to NASA. The space agency has also recorded evidence of fault lines in a series of images. "Our analysis gives the first evidence that these faults are still active and likely producing moonquakes today as the Moon continues to gradually cool and shrink," said Thomas Watters, lead author of the study. Watters says that the quakes can register around a five on the Richter scale.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Jeff Bezos, chairman of Amazon and founder of Blue Origin, unveiled his space company's lunar lander for the first time on Thursday. "This vehicle is going to the moon," Bezos said during an invite-only presentation to media and space industry executives. "We were given a gift -- this nearby body called the moon," Bezos said. He added that the moon is a good place to begin manufacturing in space due to its lower gravity than the Earth. Getting resources from the moon "takes 24 times less energy to get it off the surface compared to the Earth," Bezos said, and "that is a huge lever."

Bezos also unveiled the company's BE-7 rocket engine at the event. The engine will be test fired for the first time this summer, Bezos said. "It's time to go back to the moon and this time stay," Bezos said. "I love Vice President Pence's 2024 lunar landing goal," Bezos said, adding that Blue Origin can meet that timeline "because we started this three years ago." Blue Origin's most visible program has been its New Shepard rocket system, which the company is developing to send tourists to the edge of space for 10 minutes. New Shepard has flown on 11 test flights, with its capsule, built to carry six passengers, reaching an altitude of more than 350,000. The capsule features massive windows, providing expansive views of the Earth once in space. The company plans to send its first humans onboard a New Shepard rocket sometime in the next year. But it has yet to begin selling tickets.