silverjacket writes: A feature for The New Yorker describes a plan to use robots to mine lunar materials and build a radio telescope on the far side of the moon that will help answer questions about the early universe. An excerpt from the story: he dream of a lunar telescope dates to the nineteen-sixties. The moon has the advantage of being hundreds of thousands of miles away from earthly electronics; on the far side of the moon, in particular, there's virtually no noise from human technology or the Earth's magnetosphere. After the Apollo landings, however, interest in the moon waned. Jack Burns, an astrophysicist who is now at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been advocating for a moon-based telescope since 1984. "I never, never would have guessed that it would take this long," he told me. "I just won't accept no for an answer." Today, Burns is the chief scientist of FarView, as well as the primary investigator of a sort of mini-FarView: FARSIDE, which would have one or two hundred antennas instead of a hundred thousand.

If FarView is built, it would be able to detect some of the oldest light in existence. The universe began 13.8 billion years ago as a dense, fast-expanding soup of matter and energy; around three hundred and eighty thousand years later, it had cooled enough for hydrogen atoms to hold together. After that came the Cosmic Dark Ages: millions of years without stars or galaxies, a period we know very little about. But hydrogen occasionally releases light with a wavelength of twenty-one centimetres -- radio waves. Some of that light is still around.

Because twenty-one-centimetre radiation is stretched by the steady expansion of the universe -- it's now tens to hundreds of metres long -- scientists can figure out how old it is, and how far away. (The longer the wavelength, the older the light and the more distant its source.) This means that if scientists can build a radio telescope on the moon, they will be able to create a three-dimensional picture of the early universe.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Pacific country of Kiribati might be surrounded by water, but on land its population is running dry. The ocean around them is steadily encroaching, contaminating underground wells and leeching salt into the soil. "Our waters have been infected," climate activist and law student Christine Tekanene says. "Those who are affected, they now can't survive with the water that changed after sea level rise." The freshwater crisis is just one of the many threats driven by rising seas in Kiribati. Its people live on a series of atolls, peaking barely a couple of metres above a sprawling tract of the Pacific Ocean. As global temperatures rise and ice sheets melt, Kiribati -- and other low-lying nations like it -- are experiencing extreme and regular flooding, frequent coastal erosion and persistent food and water insecurity.

This week the United Nations general assembly will hold a high-level meeting to address the existential threats posed by sea level rise as the issue climbs the international agenda; last year the UN security council debated it for the first time. Wednesday's meeting aims to build political consensus on action to address the widespread social, economic and legal consequences of rising seas. Samoa's UN representative, Fatumanava Dr Pa'olelei Luteru, says the upcoming UN meeting is long overdue and "extremely important" for island nations. "Economically, militarily, we're not powerful," says Luteru, who also serves as the current chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). "At least within the context of the UN and the multilateral system we have the possibility and the opportunity to engage and achieve some of the things that are a priority for us."

WordPress hosting service WP Engine on Monday sent a cease-and-desist letter to Automattic after the latter's CEO Matt Mullenweg called WP Engine a "cancer to WordPress" last week. From a report: The notice asks Automattic and Mullenweg to retract their comments and stop making statements against the company. WP Engine, which (like Automattic itself) commercializes the open-source WordPress project, also accused Mullenweg of threatening WP Engine before the WordCamp summit held last week. "Automattic's CEO Matthew Mullenweg threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic -- his for-profit entity -- a very large sum of money before his September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, he was going to embark on a self-described 'scorched earth nuclear approach' toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond, the letter read. "When his outrageous financial demands were not met, Mr. Mullenweg carried out his threats by making repeated false claims disparaging WP Engine to its employees, its customers, and the world," the letter added.

Google is getting ready to show off updated Street View imagery in nearly 80 countries. The Verge: In a now-removed blog post seen by The Verge, Google announced that the new images are coming to countries like Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Japan, the Philippines, Rwanda, Serbia, South Africa, and more. Google is also bringing Street View to a handful of countries where it's never been available, including Bosnia, Namibia, Lichtenstein, and Paraguay. The company said its more portable Street View camera, which launched in 2022, will help offer images of "even more places in the future."

Google Maps and Google Earth are getting sharper satellite imagery as well, thanks to the company's cloud-removal AI tool that takes out clouds, shadows, haze, and mist. This should result in "brighter, more vibrant" images, according to Google.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Paper or paper? In California, shoppers will have only one bag option at the checkout line starting in 2026. A decade ago, California became the first U.S. state to ban single-use plastic bags, the flimsy sacks that regularly blew into waterways, littered streets and collected in landfills. The prohibition, in the nation's most populous state, was considered a turning point in the effort to reduce plastic waste. But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California's recycling agency. A loophole in the initial ban allowed retailers to provide thick-walled plastic bags and charge 10 cents a piece for them. Though technically reusable and recyclable, the heavier-duty sacks still ended up in many trash cans after a shopping trip.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation on Sunday banning the sale at grocery checkouts of all plastic bags (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), regardless of thickness. The only option for customers who lack their own reusable shopping bags will be buying paper bags for 10 cents each. "We deserve a cleaner future for our communities, our children and our earth," said Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, a Democratic assemblywoman and co-author of the bill, in a statement. "It's time for us to get rid of these plastic bags and continue to move forward with a more pollution-free environment." Plastic bags are typically used for 12 minutes before being discarded, according to the California Public Interest Research Group, a consumer advocacy group. But those bags live in oceans and landfills for hundreds of years, and can contaminate drinking water and food in the form of microplastics. SB 1053 will go into effect on January 1st, 2026. It also changes the definition of a "recycled paper bag," requiring all bags with that label to be made of at least 50% post-consumer recycled materials starting January 1st, 2028.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil on Monday alleging the company carried out a "decades-long campaign of deception" in which the oil and gas giant misled the public on the merits of plastic recycling. The complaint accuses the company of using slick marketing and misleading public statements for half a century to claim recycling was an effective way to deal with plastic pollution, according to a press release from Bonta's office published Monday. It alleges the company continues to perpetuate the "myth" of recycling today. The case, filed in the San Francisco County Superior Court, seeks to compel ExxonMobil "to end its deceptive practices that threaten the environment and the public," the statement said.

Bonta is also asking the court to rule ExxonMobil must pay civil penalties, among other payments, for the harm inflicted by plastic pollution in California. "Plastics are everywhere, from the deepest parts of our oceans, the highest peaks on earth, and even in our bodies, causing irreversible damage -- in ways known and unknown -- to our environment and potentially our health," Bonta said. "For decades, ExxonMobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn't possible. ExxonMobil lied to further its record-breaking profits at the expense of our planet and possibly jeopardizing our health," he said. [...]

Lawsuits against oil and gas companies for their role in climate change and air pollution are becoming more common, but Monday's is the first in the country to take on a fossil fuel company for its messaging around plastic recycling. The statement said that ExxonMobil "falsely promoted all plastic as recyclable, when in fact the vast majority of plastic products are not and likely cannot be recycled, either technically or economically." The lawsuit also alleges Exxon "continues to deceive the public by touting "advanced recycling" as the solution to the plastic waste and pollution crisis." Advanced -- or chemical -- recycling is a technology promoted by many oil companies, but which has been plagued by missed targets, closed or shelved plants and reports of fires and spills. [...] At the heart of the suit is the allegation ExxonMobil's messaging caused consumers to buy and use more single-use plastic than they otherwise would have. In response to the lawsuit, ExxonMobil pointed the finger back at California, which it said has an ineffective recycling system that officials have known about for decades: "They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others. Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills."

ExxonMobil contends chemical recycling does work. "We're bringing real solutions, recycling plastic waste that couldn't be recycled by traditional methods," the company said in a statement.

A copy of the Attorney General's complaint can be found here (PDF).

Industrial civilisation is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary, and may already have crossed it, according to scientists who have compiled the latest report on the state of the world's life-support systems. From a report: "Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold," particularly in higher-latitude regions, says the latest report on planetary boundaries. "The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems." The report, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), builds on years of research showing there are nine systems and processes -- the planetary boundaries -- that contribute to the stability of the planet's life-support functions.

Thresholds beyond which they can no longer properly function have already been breached in six. Climate change, the introduction of novel entities, change in biosphere integrity and modification of biogeochemical flows are judged to be in high-risk zones, while planetary boundaries are also transgressed in land system change and freshwater change but to a lesser extent. All have worsened, according to the data. Stratospheric ozone depletion has remained stable, however, and there has been a slight improvement in atmospheric aerosol loading, the research says. At a briefing outlining the findings, Levke Caesar, a climate physicist at PIK and co-author of the report, said there were two reasons the levels of ocean acidification were concerning.

SpaceX plans to launch about five uncrewed Starship missions to Mars in two years, CEO Elon Musk said on Sunday. From a report: Earlier this month, Musk had said that the first Starships to Mars would launch in two years "when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens."

The CEO on Sunday said that the first crewed mission timeline will depend upon the success of the uncrewed flights. If the uncrewed missions land safely, crewed missions will be launched in four years. However, in case of challenges, crewed missions will be postponed by another two years, Musk said.

In 2022 about 346,000 electric cars were reportedly sold in California. But the same year its greenhouse gas emissions dropped a whopping 9.3 million metric tons — the amount produced by 2.2 million gas-powered cars — lowering emissions 2.4% from the year before. "The biggest drop came from transportation, due largely to the increased use of renewable fuels," according to the state's Air Resources Board, touting a newly-released report. (And electricity sector emissions also fell by 2.6 million metric tons, or 4.1%, "even as electricity usage rose," according to The Hill — "a dichotomy that the regulators attributed to an increase in solar and wind power generation.")

So despite a growing economy, "the latest data underscores a continued trend of steady emissions decline..." according to a statement from the Board. "Between 2000 to 2022, emissions fell by 20% while California's gross domestic product increased by 78%, pointing to the effectiveness of the state's climate change and air quality programs." And the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent emitted per unit of economic output ("carbon intensity") has also dropped 55% in the last 20 years: [In 2022] the electricity sector had its lowest carbon intensity since 2000. Wind and solar now represent 30% of generation and in-state solar increased by 15% from 2021, driven by requirements under the state's Cap-and-Trade Program and Renewables Portfolio Standard. Furthermore, California increased its battery storage by 757% from 2019 through 2023, bolstering its renewable energy efforts. The storage capacity is enough to power 6.6 million homes for up to four hours.

Industrial emissions declined by 2%, also falling to the lowest level in 22 years. While refinery emissions remained essentially flat, emissions from oil and gas extraction declined, as did emissions from other fuel use, cement manufacturing, and cogeneration facilities. [The Hill says 2022's industrial emissions were 21.7% below year-2000 levels, according to the report.]

Livestock emissions, which are responsible for 70% of agriculture's greenhouse gas emissions, peaked in 2012 and once again saw reductions in 2022. The decrease is driven by the use of methane digesters funded by the California Climate Investments and incentivized by the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which capture emissions at the source and convert them to clean fuel.

Landfill methane emissions also continued to decline in 2022. This decline can be attributed in part to the state's efforts to reduce disposal of organic waste, as well as the California Landfill Methane Regulation, which requires landfill operators to monitor and capture emissions escaping from their facilities.
One local news site calls the drop in emissions "shocking," but adds that "the trend is expected to continue. In the second quarter of 2024, 118,181 zero-emission vehicles were purchased in the state, good for about one-quarter of all new car sales."

California governor Gavin Newsom said his state "is proving that climate action goes hand-in-hand with economic growth. We've slashed carbon pollution by a whopping 20% since the turn of the century all while building the world's fifth largest economy. Cleaner air, more good jobs — that's the California way."

It's hypothetically capable of "delivering an exquisite portrait of the detailed surface features of any exoplanet within 100 light-years..." writes Space.com.

"It would be better than any telescope we could possibly build in any possible future for the next few hundred years..." While the sun may not look like a traditional lens or mirror, it has a lot of mass. And in Einstein's theory of general relativity, massive objects bend space-time around them. Any light that grazes the surface of the sun gets deflected and, instead of continuing in a straight line, heads toward a focal point, together with all the other light that grazes the sun at the same time... The "solar gravitational lens" leads to an almost unbelievably high resolution. It's as if we had a telescope mirror the width of the entire sun. An instrument positioned at the correct focal point would be able to harness the gravitational warping of the sun's gravity to allow us to observe the distant universe with a jaw-dropping resolution of 10^-10 arcseconds. That's roughly a million times more powerful than the Event Horizon Telescope.

Of course, there are challenges with using the solar gravitational lens as a natural telescope. The focal point of all this light bending sits 542 times greater than the distance between Earth and the sun. It's 11 times the distance to Pluto, and three times the distance achieved by humanity's most far-flung spacecraft, Voyager 1, which launched in 1977. So not only would we have to send a spacecraft farther than we ever have before, but it would have to have enough fuel to stay there and move around. The images created by the solar gravitational lens would be spread out over tens of kilometers of space, so the spacecraft would have to scan the entire field to build up a complete mosaic image.

Plans to take advantage of the solar lens go back to the 1970s. Most recently, astronomers have proposed developing a fleet of small, lightweight cubesats that would deploy solar sails to accelerate them to 542 AU. Once there, they would slow down and coordinate their maneuvers, building up an image and sending the data back to Earth for processing...

The telescope already exists — we just have to get a camera in the right position.
Thanks to Tablizer (Slashdot reader #95,088) for sharing the article.

A massive Antarctic glacier, dubbed the "Doomsday Glacier," is melting at an accelerating rate and could be approaching irreversible collapse, international researchers are reporting. The Thwaites Glacier, holding enough ice to raise global sea levels by over two feet, has seen rapid retreat in the past 30 years.

Scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration used ice-breaking ships and underwater robots to study the glacier up close since 2018. Their findings reveal warm ocean water funneling through deep cracks in the ice, causing unexpected melting patterns. While computer modeling suggests catastrophic cliff collapse is less likely than feared, researchers project Thwaites and the Antarctic Ice Sheet could disintegrate within 200 years. This collapse could ultimately lead to 10 feet of sea level rise, devastating coastal communities worldwide.

A national "butterfly emergency" has been declared by Butterfly Conservation after the lowest Big Butterfly Count since records began. From a report: An average of just seven butterflies per 15-minute count were recorded by participants in this summer's butterfly count, the lowest in the survey's 14-year history. It was the worst year on record for once-ubiquitous species, including the common blue, small tortoiseshell, small white and green-veined white. Eight out of the 10 most-seen species have declined -- in many cases dramatically -- over the count's history. Previous lowest-ever numbers of butterflies-per-count were logged in 2022, 2021 and 2020.

Butterfly Conservation is calling for the government to declare a "nature emergency" and ban insect-killing neonicotinoid pesticides, with no exceptions. Britain and the EU banned neonicotinoids in 2018 but the UK government has authorised an exemption for the pesticides to be used on sugar beet every year since 2021. Before the election, Labour promised to ban all neonicotinoids. Further reading: UK Nature Chief Sounds Alarm Over Ecosystem Collapse as Butterfly Numbers Halve.

Electric cars now outnumber petrol cars in Norway for the first time, an industry organisation has said, a world first that puts the country on track towards taking fossil fuel vehicles off the road. From a report: Of the 2.8m private cars registered in the Nordic country, 754,303 are all-electric, against 753,905 that run on petrol, the Norwegian road federation (OFV) said in a statement. Diesel models remain the most numerous at just under 1m, but their sales are falling rapidly. "This is historic. A milestone few saw coming 10 years ago," said OFV director Oyvind Solberg Thorsen. "The electrification of the fleet of passenger cars is going quickly, and Norway is thereby rapidly moving towards becoming the first country in the world with a passenger car fleet dominated by electric cars."

A small asteroid, 2024 PT5, will temporarily become a mini-moon for Earth, orbiting in a horseshoe shape from September 29 to November 25, 2024. CBS News reports: Researchers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, an asteroid monitoring system funded by NASA, spotted the asteroid using an instrument in Sutherland, South Africa and labeled it 2024 PT5. Scientists from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid have tracked the asteroid's orbit for 21 days and determined its future path. 2024 PT5 is from the Arjuna asteroid belt, which orbits the sun, according to their study published in Research Notes of the AAs. But Earth's gravitational pull will draw 2024 PT5 towards it and, much like our moon, it will orbit our planet -- but only for 56.6 days. 2024 PT5, which is larger than some of the other mini-moons, will also return to Earth's orbit -- in 2055. [...]

The study's lead author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos told Space.com the mini-moon will be too small to see with amateur telescopes or binoculars but professional astronomers with stronger tools will be able to spot it.

Young corals bred using in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and planted in reefs around the US, Mexico and the Caribbean have surprised scientists, after most survived last year's record marine heatwave, while older corals struggled. From a report: A study has found that 90% of the young IVF-created corals surveyed remained healthy and colourful, holding on to the algae that live within them and supply them with nutrition. In contrast, only about a quarter of older non-IVF corals remained healthy. The rest, including large colonies that may have lived for centuries, were either bleached by the heat -- expelling the algae from their tissues and turning white -- or paled, expelling some of the algae. Some died in the heatwave before the survey was conducted.

Dr Margaret Miller, lead author and research director at Secore International, a reef conservation organisation, said: "[The heatwave] was a horrible time. But I was impressed and surprised that the data came out with such an extreme pattern." The young corals were bred over the past five years using a version of IVF developed by Secore. Divers collected coral spawn, which was used to fertilise eggs in the laboratory. The resultant baby corals were then planted on reefs across the Caribbean to form colonies.

Most coral restoration efforts have historically focused on fragmentation techniques -- where corals are broken into smaller pieces and transplanted to a new location. Rather than producing exact clones, as fragmentation does, breeding corals by IVF increased the genetic diversity, giving them a higher chance of adapting to heat over time. "Natural selection back in the reef environment will choose the best ones," said Miller. The 771 young corals in the study -- a fraction of the thousands bred each year by Secore and partner institutions -- live in restored reefs off Mexico, the Dominican Republic, the US Virgin Islands, and the Dutch Caribbean territories of Bonaire and Curacao.

Fossil fuel companies pumped at least $5.6bn of sponsorship money into motorsports, football, golf and even snow sports in an effort to "buy social licence to operate," according to a new report. From a report: Almost no major spectator sport remains untouched by oil and gas money, according to research carried out by the New Weather Institute (NWI), a climate thinktank, which traced more than 200 sponsorship deals between sports teams and the industry. In addition, sports stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have all been successfully recruited to spend time in the Middle East as part of sponsorship deals, the report says.

It comes as concern grows about the fossil fuel industry's increasing efforts to launder its global standing through "sportswashing" -- a practice, long used by nation states, of building associations with sporting events to improve tarnished reputations. In 2023, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, said: "If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by 1%, then we'll continue doing sportswashing." According to NWI's Dirty Money report, Aramco, Saudi Arabia's national oil company, was the biggest single investor in sports sponsorship identified by NWI's report, handing out almost $1.3bn across 10 deals. The petrochemical company Ineos was second, with $777m in sponsorship deals; Shell had sponsored sports to the tune of $470m; and TotalEnergies, France's leading oil company, had $340m in deals.

Google's philanthropic arm is partially funding a new initiative that "aims to deploy more than 50 small satellites in low-Earth orbit to pinpoint flare-ups as small as a classroom anywhere in the world," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The FireSat constellation, managed by a nonprofit called Earth Fire Alliance (EFA), will be the first satellite fleet dedicated to detecting and tracking wildfires. Google announced a fresh investment of $13 million in the FireSat constellation Monday, building on the tech giant's previous contributions to support the development of custom infrared sensors for the FireSat satellites. Google's funding commitment will maintain the schedule for the launch of the first FireSat pathfinder satellite next year, EFA said. The first batch of satellites to form an operational constellation could launch in 2026.

The FireSat satellites will be built by Muon Space, a California-based satellite manufacturing startup. Each of the Muon Space-built microsatellites will have six-band multispectral infrared instruments, eyeing a swath of Earth some 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) wide, to pinpoint hotspots from wildfires. The satellites will have the sensitivity to find wildfires as small as 16 by 16 feet (5 by 5 meters). The network will use Google AI to rapidly compare observations ofany area of this size with previous imagery to determine if there is a fire, according to Google. AI will also take into account factors like nearby infrastructure and local weather in each fire assessment.

Google said it validated its detection model for smaller fires and established a baseline dataset for the AI by flying sensors over controlled burns. FireSat's partners announced the constellation in May after five years of development. The Environmental Defense Fund, the Moore Foundation, and the Minderoo Foundation also support the FireSat program. After detecting a wildfire, it's crucial for FireSat to quickly disseminate the location and size of a fire to emergency responders. With the first three satellites, the FireSat constellation will observe every point on Earth at least twice per day. "At full capability with 50+ satellites, the revisit times for most of the globe improve to 20 minutes, with the most wildfire-prone regions benefitting from sampling intervals as short as nine minutes," Muon Space said in a statement. "Today's announcement marks a significant milestone and step towards transforming the way we interact with fire," Earth Fire Alliance said in a statement. "As fires become more intense, and spread faster, we believe radical collaboration is key to driving much needed innovation in fire management and climate action."

NASA will coordinate with U.S. government stakeholders, partners, and international standards organizations to establish a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) following a policy directive from the White House in April. From a report: The agency's Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) program is leading efforts on creating a coordinated time, which will enable a future lunar ecosystem that could be scalable to other locations in our solar system. The lunar time will be determined by a weighted average of atomic clocks at the Moon, similar to how scientists calculate Earth's globally recognized Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Exactly where at the Moon is still to be determined, since current analysis indicates that atomic clocks placed at the Moon's surface will appear to 'tick' faster by microseconds per day. A microsecond is one millionth of a second. NASA and its partners are currently researching which mathematical models will be best for establishing a lunar time. To put these numbers into perspective, a hummingbird's wings flap about 50 times per second. Each flap is about .02 seconds, or 20,000 microseconds. So, while 56 microseconds may seem miniscule, when discussing distances in space, tiny bits of time add up.

"It is with great relief that I welcome you home!" SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell posted on X. "This mission was even more extraordinary than I anticipated."

"SpaceX's Polaris Dawn crew is home," reports CNN, "capping off a five-day mission to orbit — which included the world's first commercial spacewalk — by splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico." The Crew Dragon capsule carrying four astronauts landed off the coast of Dry Tortugas, Florida, at 3:37 a.m. ET Sunday.

The Polaris Dawn mission made history as it reached a higher altitude than any human has traveled in five decades. [870 miles (1,400 kilometers) — beating the 853-mile record set in 1966 by NASA's Gemini 11 mission.] A spacewalk conducted early Thursday morning also marked the first time such an endeavor has been completed by a privately funded and operated mis.sion.

But returning to Earth is among the most dangerous stretches of any space mission. To safely reach home, the Crew Dragon capsule carried out what's called a "de-orbit burn," orienting itself as it prepared to slice through the thickest part of Earth's atmosphere. The spacecraft then reached extremely hot temperatures — up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,900 degrees Celsius) — because of the pressure and friction caused by hitting the air while still traveling around 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kilometers per hour). The crew, however, should have remained at comfortable temperatures, protected by the Crew Dragon's heat shield, which is located on the bottom of the 13-foot-wide (4-meter-wide) capsule. Dragging against the air began to slow the vehicle down before the Crew Dragon deployed parachutes that further decelerated its descent. Having hit the ocean, the spacecraft briefly bobbed around in the water until rescue crews waiting nearby hauled it out of the ocean and onto a special boat, referred to as the "Dragon's nest." Final safety checks took place there before the crew disembarked from the capsule and began the journey back to dry land.
You can watch video of the splashdown on YouTube.

While in space, the crew performed 40 science experiments and research, according to the article. "Gillis, a trained violinist, also brought her instrument along for the mission and delivered a rendition of 'Rey's Theme' from "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." (Slashdot reader SuperKendall points out that the "Rey's Theme" rendition "was not just the astronaut playing violin in space, but was in conjunction with young adult orchestras around the world.")

SpaceX's COO said the performance "made me tear up. Thank you all for taking this journey."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: Stranded astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams said Friday it was hard to watch their Boeing capsule return to Earth without them. It was their first public comments since last week's return of the Boeing Starliner capsule that took them to the International Space Station in June. They remained behind after NASA determined the problem-plagued capsule posed too much risk for them to ride back in. "That's how it goes in this business," said Williams, adding that "you have to turn the page and look at the next opportunity."

Wilmore and Williams are now full-fledged station crew members, chipping in on routine maintenance and experiments. They, along with seven others on board, welcomed a Soyuz spacecraft carrying two Russians and an American earlier this week, temporarily raising the station population to 12, a near record. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams spoke to the press on Friday for the first time since their Boeing Starliner capsule returned to Earth without them. The two, who have been on the International Space Station since June 6, said they are taking the mission's unexpected extension into 2025 in stride -- even if it means they've had to change their voting plans. The transition to station life was "not that hard" since both had previous stints there, said Williams, who will soon take over as station commander. "This is my happy place. I love being up here in space," she said.

The two Starliner test pilots -- both retired U.S. navy captains and longtime NASA astronauts — will stay at the orbiting laboratory until late February. They have to wait for a SpaceX capsule to bring them back. That spacecraft is due to launch later this month with a reduced crew of two, with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams for the return leg. The duo said they appreciated all the prayers and well wishes from strangers back home. Wilmore said he will miss out on family milestones such as being around for his youngest daughter's final year of high school. The astronauts, who prepared for eight days in space, will now be up there for eight months, which could have a greater impact on the body. "It is a bit of a change from a sprint to a marathon," said Dr. Adam Sirek of the Canadian Society of Aerospace Medicine.