The government of India said on Tuesday that it plans to put an astronaut on the moon by 2040 and build an Earth-orbiting space station by 2035. Space.com reports: On Aug. 23, India became just the fourth nation ever to soft-land a spacecraft -- its Chandrayaan-3 lander-rover duo -- on the surface of the moon. In a recent meeting with the Indian government department that manages the country's space program, Prime Minister Narendra Modi "directed that India should now aim for new and ambitious goals," according to an official statement. India's future moon exploration efforts will include a series of additional robotic Chandrayaan missions, a new launch pad and a heavy-lift launch vehicle, the statement added.

India's delayed Gaganyaan human spaceflight program, now aiming to fly three astronauts to low Earth orbit in 2025, will feature 20 major tests, including three uncrewed missions to test the launch vehicle over the course of the remainder of this year and all of next. [...] By the middle of the 2030s, India hopes to have a 20-ton space station in a fixed orbit 248 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, with capabilities to host astronauts for 15 to 20 days at a time, K. Sivan, former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), has previously said.

Further down the pipeline of missions, ISRO is planning a Venus orbiter called Shukrayaan-1 to study the surface of that hellishly hot planet. The payloads for that mission are currently being developed, current ISRO chairman S. Somanath had said last month. A second orbiter mission to Mars is also on the books, according to the latest statement. The nation's first, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), was launched in 2013 and studied the Red Planet's atmosphere for eight years before it lost contact with Earth in April 2022. The follow-up mission, Mars Orbiter Mission 2 or MOM 2, will likely include cameras to study the planet's crust and may also include a lander, although many of the mission plans are yet to be finalized.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On May 4, 2022, NASA's InSight lander detected the largest quake yet recorded on Mars, one with a 4.7 magnitude -- fairly modest by Earth standards but strong for our planetary neighbor. Given Mars lacks the geological process called plate tectonics that generates earthquakes on our planet, scientists suspected a meteorite impact had caused this marsquake. But a search for an impact crater came up empty, leading scientists to conclude that this quake was caused by tectonic activity -- rumbling in the planet's interior -- and giving them a deeper understanding about what makes Mars shake, rattle and roll.

"We concluded that the largest marsquake seen by InSight was tectonic, not an impact. This is important as it shows the faults on Mars can host hefty marsquakes," said planetary scientist Ben Fernando of the University of Oxford in England, lead author of the research published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "We really thought that this event might be an impact." "This represents a significant step forward in our understanding of Martian seismic activity and takes us one step closer to better unraveling the planet's tectonic processes," added Imperial College London planetary scientist and study co-author Constantinos Charalambous, co-chair of InSight's Geology Working Group.

NASA retired InSight in 2022 after four years of operations. In all, InSight's seismometer instrument detected 1,319 marsquakes. Earth's crust - its outermost layer - is divided into immense plates that continually shift, triggering quakes. The Martian crust is a single solid plate. But that does not mean all is quiet on the Martian front. "There are still faults that are active on Mars. The planet is still slowly shrinking and cooling, and there is still motion within the crust even though there are no active plate tectonic processes going on anymore. These faults can trigger quakes," Fernando said.

Michael Kan reports via PCMag: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has announced a new spacecraft that promises to help humanity build and maintain projects in outer space. The company today debuted Blue Ring, a so-called "space platform" that can orbit Earth, but also travel around the Moon, with the goal of providing delivery and logistics support to other space projects. To do so, Blue Ring functions as a maneuverable platform that can host, transport, and refuel other spacecraft. In addition, it can relay data while also offering an "in-space" cloud computing capability, according to Blue Origin's announcement.

Other rockets, particularly those from rival SpaceX, can already send satellites up into predictable orbits around Earth. In contrast, Blue Ring is designed to serve customers for more "dynamic" space projects at varying orbits, Blue Origin Lars Hoffman VP tells Aviation Week. "It has a lot of capability and a lot of energy. It is a platform that has versatility across multiple missions and multiple customers on any given launch," Hoffman says.

The company adds that Blue Ring can travel with payloads of over 6,600 pounds. According to Aviation Week, Blue Origin is eyeing 2025 as a realistic launch date for the spacecraft, which has already received some interest from customers. Hoffman also says Blue Ring will be "launch-vehicle agnostic," allowing it to fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket or Blue Origin's own New Glenn, which is aiming to be used in its first mission next year.

This week Bloomberg explored so-called "zombie viruses" — that is, long-dormant microbes which they call "yet another risk that climate change poses to public health" as ground that's been frozen for "milleniums" suddenly starts thawing — for example, in the Arctic, which they write is warming "faster than any other area on earth." With the planet already 1.2C warmer than pre-industrial times, scientists are predicting the Arctic could be ice-free in summers by 2030s. Concerns that the hotter climate will release trapped greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere as the region's permafrost melts have been well-documented, but dormant pathogens are a lesser explored danger. Last year, virologist Jean-Michel Claverie's team published research showing they'd extracted multiple ancient viruses from the Siberian permafrost, all of which remained infectious...

Ways in which this could present a threat are still emerging. A heat wave in Siberia in the summer of 2016 activated anthrax spores, leading to dozens of infections, killing a child and thousands of reindeer. In July this year, a separate team of scientists published findings showing that even multicellular organisms could survive permafrost conditions in an inactive metabolic state, called cryptobiosis. They successfully reanimated a 46,000-year-old roundworm from the Siberian permafrost, just by re-hydrating it...

Claverie first showed "live" viruses could be extracted from the Siberian permafrost and successfully revived in 2014. For safety reasons his research focused only on viruses capable of infecting amoebas, which are far enough removed from the human species to avoid any risk of inadvertent contamination. But he felt the scale of the public health threat the findings indicated had been under-appreciated or mistakenly considered a rarity. So, in 2019, his team proceeded to isolate 13 new viruses, including one frozen under a lake more than 48,500 years ago, from seven different ancient Siberian permafrost samples — evidence to their ubiquity. Publishing the findings in a 2022 study, he emphasized that a viral infection from an unknown, ancient pathogen in humans, animals or plants could have potentially "disastrous" effects.

"50,000 years back in time takes us to when Neanderthal disappeared from the region," he says. "If Neanderthals died of an unknown viral disease and this virus resurfaces, it could be a danger to us."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Phys.org: If global temperatures increase by 1 degrees Celsius (C) or more than current levels, each year billions of people will be exposed to heat and humidity so extreme they will be unable to naturally cool themselves, according to interdisciplinary research from the Penn State College of Health and Human Development, Purdue University College of Sciences and Purdue Institute for a Sustainable Future... Humans can only withstand certain combinations of heat and humidity before their bodies begin to experience heat-related health problems, such as heat stroke or heart attack. As climate change pushes temperatures higher around the world, billions of people could be pushed beyond these limits...

Results of the study indicate that if global temperatures increase by 2 degreesC above pre-industrial levels, the 2.2 billion residents of Pakistan and India's Indus River Valley, the one billion people living in eastern China and the 800 million residents of sub-Saharan Africa will annually experience many hours of heat that surpass human tolerance... Troublingly, researchers said, these regions are also in lower-to-middle income nations, so many of the affected people may not have access to air conditioning or any effective way to mitigate the negative health effects of the heat.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared the Washington Post's speculation about the possibility of a gigantic solar storm leaving millions without phone or internet access, and requiring months or years of rebuilding: The odds are low that in any given year a storm big enough to cause effects this widespread will happen. And the severity of those impacts will depend on many factors, including the state of our planet's magnetic field on that day. But it's a near certainty that some form of this catastrophe will happen someday, says Ian Cohen, a chief scientist who studies heliophysics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr remains skeptical. "I've only heard of two major events in the last 1300 years, one estimated to be between A. D. 744 and A. D. 993, and the other being the Carrington Event in 1859.

But efforts are being made to improve our readiness, reports the Washington Post: To get ahead of this threat, a loose federation of U.S. and international government agencies, and hundreds of scientists affiliated with those bodies, have begun working on how to make predictions about what our Sun might do. And a small but growing cadre of scientists argue that artificial intelligence will be an essential component of efforts to give us advance notice of such a storm...

At present, no warning system is capable of giving us more than a few hours' notice of a devastating solar storm. If it's moving fast enough, it could be as little as 15 minutes. The most useful sentinel — a sun-orbiting satellite launched by the U.S. in 2015 — is much closer to Earth than the sun, so that by the time a fast-moving storm crosses its path, an hour or less is all the warning we get. The European Space Agency has proposed a system to help give earlier warning by putting a satellite dubbed Vigil into orbit around the Sun, positioned roughly the same distance from the Earth as the Earth is from the Sun. It could potentially give us up to five hours of warning about an incoming solar storm-enough time to do the main thing that can help preserve electronics: Switch them all off.

But what if there were a way to predict this better, by analyzing the data we've got? That's the idea behind a new, AI-powered model recently unveiled by scientists at the Frontier Development Lab — a public-private partnership that includes NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Department of Energy. The model uses deep learning, a type of AI, to examine the flow of the solar wind, the usually calm stream of particles that flow outward from our sun and through the solar system to well beyond the orbit of Pluto. Using observations of that solar wind, the model can predict the "geomagnetic disturbance" an incoming solar storm observed by sun-orbiting satellites would cause at any given point on Earth, the researchers involved say. This model can predict just how big the flux of the Earth's magnetic field will be when the solar storm arrives, and thus how big the induced currents in power lines and undersea internet cables will be...

Already, the first primitive ancestor of future AI-based solar-weather alert systems is live. The DstLive system, which debuted on the web in December 2022, uses machine learning to take data about the state of Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind and translate both into a single measure for the entire planet, known as DST. Think of it as the Richter scale, but for solar storms. This number is intended to give us an idea of how intense a storm's impact will be on earth, an hour to six hours in advance.

Unfortunately, we may not know how useful such systems are until we live through a major solar storm.

More than 40% of Antarctica's ice shelves have shrunk since 1997 with almost half showing "no sign of recovery," a study has found, linking the change to the climate breakdown. From a report: Scientists at the University of Leeds have calculated that 67tn tonnes of ice was lost in the west while 59tn tonnes was added to the east between 1997 and 2021, resulting in a net loss of 7.5tn tonnes. Warm water on the western side of Antarctica has been melting ice, whereas in the east, ice shelves have either stayed the same or grown as the water is colder there. The ice shelves sit at the end of glaciers and slow their rate of flow into the sea. When they shrink, glaciers release larger amounts of freshwater into the sea which can disrupt the currents of the Southern Ocean.

Dr Benjamin Davison, an expert in Earth observation and the study's lead, said: "There is a mixed picture of ice-shelf deterioration, and this is to do with the ocean temperature and ocean currents around Antarctica. The western half is exposed to warm water, which can rapidly erode the ice shelves from below, whereas much of east Antarctica is currently protected from nearby warm water by a band of cold water at the coast." Scientists measured year-by-year changes to the ice using satellites that can see through the thick cloud during long polar nights.

Is the asteroid Psyche really a hunk of mostly metal? Is the object, which is nearly as wide as Massachusetts, the core of a baby planet whose rocky outer layers were knocked off during a cataclysmic collision in the early days of the solar system? Right now, all that astronomers can say is maybe, maybe not. NASA launched a spacecraft on Friday morning, also named Psyche, on a journey to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to find out. From a report: "We're really going to see a kind of new object, which means that a lot of our ideas are going to be proven wrong," said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a professor of earth and space exploration at Arizona State University who serves as the mission's principal investigator.

Being proven wrong, she added, "is, I think, the most exciting thing in science." That voyage in search of answers kicked off Friday at 10:19 a.m. Eastern time. Falcon Heavy, the largest of SpaceX's operational rockets, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending the massive spacecraft on a journey that will last about six years and travel billions of miles. Friday's flight overcame early, unfavorable weather forecasts for a seemingly flawless flight. About eight minutes into the flight, the rocket's upper stage entered a 45-minute coasting period during which it will prepare to deploy the spacecraft on its flight away from Earth. The asteroid named Psyche has long been a curious enigma. Spotted in 1852 by Annibale de Gasparis, an Italian astronomer, it is named for the Greek goddess of the soul, and it was just the 16th asteroid to be discovered. In the early observations, it was, like the other asteroids, a starlike point of light that moved in an orbit around the sun, and not much more.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: One e-toy for every person on Earth -- that's the staggering amount of electric trains, drones, talking dolls, R/C cars, and other children's gadgets tossed into landfills every year. Some of what most consumers consider to be e-waste -- like electronics such as computers, smartphones, TVs, and speaker systems -- are usual suspects. Others, like power tools, vapes, LED accessories, USB cables, anything involving rechargeable lithium batteries and countless other similar, "nontraditional" e-waste materials, are less obviously in need of special disposal. In all, people across the world throw out roughly 9 billion kilograms (19.8 billion pounds) of e-waste commonly not recognized as such by consumers.

This "invisible e-waste" is the focal point of the sixth annual International E-Waste Day on October 14, organized by Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum. In anticipation of the event, the organization recently commissioned the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) to delve into just how much unconventional e-waste is discarded every year -- and global population numbers are just some of the ways to visualize the issue.

According to UNITAR's findings, for example, the total weight of all e-cig vapes thrown away every year roughly equals 6 Eiffel Towers. Meanwhile, the total weight of all invisible e-waste tallies up to "almost half a million 40 [metric ton] trucks," enough to create a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam stretching approximately 3,504 miles -- the distance between Rome and Nairobi. From a purely economic standpoint, nearly $10 billion in essential raw materials is literally thrown into the garbage every year. Further reading: Half a Billion Cheap Electrical Items Go To UK Landfills in a Year, Research Finds

A Croatian energy company has discovered an underwater lake of superheated water that meets all the requirements for the construction of a 16MW geothermal power plant. The Next Web reports: The find was the result of a two-year study by state-run power company Bukotermal that sought to find suitable sites for the exploitation of the energy source, generated by heat from the Earth's core. The research verified the presence of a geothermal water source at Lunjkovec -- Kutnjak field, located in the Varazdin County, close to the border with Hungary. The underground lake, located at a depth of 2.4 kilometers, has an average temperature of 142.03 degrees Celsius.

To date, over 2.5 million euros has been invested in the project. However, according to Alen Pozgaj, CEO of Bukotermal, the total cost to build the plant would be around 50 million euros. The news comes just days after the Croatian Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development awarded five licenses for the exploration of geothermal waters to firms from Croatia, the United Kingdom, and Turkey. [...] For now, Bukotermal has a six-month timeframe to propose how it will exploit the newly discovered geothermal pool. The company plans to construct one or more geothermal power plants and heat utilization facilities at the site, with construction expected to start within two years time.

The jackpot from a seven-year mission to bring back bits of an asteroid was unveiled on Wednesday. From a report: NASA officials in Houston displayed images of salt-and-pepper chunks of rock and particles of dark space dust that were brought back to Earth from the asteroid, Bennu, and described initial scientific observations about the material. The mission, Osiris-Rex, concluded in September when a capsule full of asteroid was jettisoned through Earth's atmosphere and recovered in the Utah desert. The first pieces of materials that leaked outside the container were analyzed using a variety of laboratory techniques, revealing just the earliest findings.

Scientists found water molecules trapped in clay minerals -- water from asteroids similar to Bennu could have filled Earth's oceans. "The reason that Earth is a habitable world, that we have oceans and lakes and rivers and rain, is because these clay minerals, like minerals, like the ones we're seeing from Bennu, landed on Earth four billion years ago," Dante Lauretta, the mission's principal investigator, said during a NASA event on Wednesday. The materials also contained sulfur, key for many geological transformations in rocks.

"It determines how quickly things melt and it is also critical for biology," said Dr. Lauretta, who displayed microscopic images and 3-D visualizations of the material. The scientists also found magnetite, an iron oxide mineral that can play an important role as a catalyst in organic chemical reactions. "We're looking at the kinds of minerals that may have played a central role in the origin of life on Earth," Dr. Lauretta said. The samples are also chock-full of carbon, the element that is the building block for life.

A team of scientists drove hundreds of miles through the steppes of Kazakhstan in search of what may be one of the largest and most diverse fungi ecosystems on Earth.

The Washington Post believes their efforts "could help make the planet more resilient to climate change." When these underground fungi come together, they form sophisticated systems known as "mycorrhizal networks...." Mycorrhizal fungi often form mutually beneficial relationships with plants. They trade essential nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, and act as an extended root system, allowing plants to access water they can't reach. These networks may also prove to be invaluable for transporting carbon underground, a study published in June found. About 13 gigatons of carbon fixed by vegetation — equivalent to about one-third of all carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in one year — flows through underground fungi, according to an analysis of nearly 200 data sets.

In the steppe, these plant-fungal benefits may be short-lived, however. While deserts are a natural part of Kazakhstan's ecosystem, more than half of the country's vegetation and drylands is at risk of becoming desert as well. The main drivers are large-scale intensive agriculture and increasingly warm and dry temperatures brought by climate change.... Knowing what species of fungi live here is key to understanding how to protect them, said Bethan Manley, project officer at the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks who was on the expedition. It will help determine "where we might be able to have the most effective measures of not poisoning them with fungicides or not having harmful farming practices," she said.

Amazon has launched its first two satellites for its Project Kuiper, the tech giant's initiative to build a massive constellation of satellites that can provide internet coverage to Earth. From a report: An Atlas V rocket, operated by United Launch Alliance, lofted the pair of satellites en route to orbit from Florida at 2:06 p.m. local time Friday. The mission is still ongoing, and it's unclear when the satellites will be deployed from the rocket.

Project Kuiper's goal is to eventually put 3,326 satellites into low Earth orbit, where they will beam broadband internet service to the ground below, similar to Elon Musk's SpaceX Starlink. The two launched Friday, KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2, are test satellites that will allow Amazon to demonstrate the ability to send and receive broadband signals. This mission has been long delayed. Amazon originally hoped to launch these satellites a year ago on a different, experimental rocket. However, the company wound up switching the launch vehicle for these satellites multiple times, eventually landing on ULA's workhorse Atlas V rocket, in order to get the satellites into space more quickly.

The global average temperature for September broke records by such an absurd margin that climate experts are struggling to describe the phenomenon. From a report: "This month was -- in my professional opinion as a climate scientist -- absolutely gobsmackingly bananas," Zeke Hausfather, a researcher with Berkeley Earth, said on the social media platforms Bluesky and X. The numbers are stark. September 2023 beat the previous record for the month, set in 2020, by 0.5C (0.9F), according to data sets maintained by the Japan Meteorological Agency and the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service. The temperature anomaly for the month was roughly 1.7C above pre-industrial levels, which is above the symbolic 1.5C mark set as the stretch goal in the Paris Agreement.

"We've never really seen a jump anything quite of this magnitude," Hausfather said. "Half a degree C is analogous to slightly less than half of all the warming we've seen from pre-industrial [temperatures]." Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main driver of rising temperatures. The global average temperature this year has also seen a boost from El Nino, a natural climate shift in the Pacific. Other factors may also be pushing temperatures up incrementally, such as a decline in cooling aerosol pollution from ships. Hausfather said next September may be unlikely to have all the same compounding factors, and consequently may be not as extreme. But either way, he described September 2023 as a "sneak peek" of what the back-to-school month may feel like in a decade as climate change pushes temperatures higher.

Becky Ferreira writes via the New York Times: Last November, a satellite in low-Earth orbit unfurled into an expansive array that extends across nearly 700 square feet, about the size of a studio apartment. The satellite, BlueWalker 3, has since become one of the brightest objects in the sky, outshining some of the most radiant stars in the Milky Way, according to a study published on Monday in Nature -- and it is just the first of dozens of similar satellites that are in development by AST SpaceMobile, a company that aims to keep smartphones connected from orbit. "The issue is not necessarily that one satellite," said Siegfried Eggl, an astrophysicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and an author of the new study, "but that it is a predecessor or prototype of a constellation, so there's going to be a lot of those out there eventually."

Initially launched in September 2022, BlueWalker 3 is the forerunner of AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird satellites, which aim to serve as a network of orbital cell towers with the goal "to democratize access to knowledge and information regardless of where people live and work," a spokesperson for AST SpaceMobile said. Last month, BlueWalker 3 successfully relayed its first 5G connection to a smartphone in a cellular coverage gap on Earth. AST SpaceMobile is one of many companies racing to capture the surging demand for global broadband connectivity. "At the moment, there are 18 constellations that we know are planned all over the world," Dr. Eggl said. "The total number of satellites is a stunning half a million that people are planning to put up there. This is 100 times more than we already have."

AST SpaceMobile made BlueWalker 3's array so large in order to beam strong cellular coverage directly to phones on Earth. The satellite is made of many small antennas that can connect existing smartphones, which is an approach that distinguishes the company from Starlink and other planned constellations that currently rely on ground antennas or dishes. [...] AST SpaceMobile said that it was working with astronomers on techniques to reduce disruptions. It also contrasted the number in its constellation with the tens of thousands planned by other companies. The spokesperson said it could "provide substantial global coverage with around 90 satellites." Though BlueBird satellites would be far fewer in number, they are at least 64 times as big and bright as a Starlink satellite. The SpaceX orbiters are also brightest in the days after their deployment, but they become much fainter once they settle into their target orbits. Astronomers expect that the BlueBird satellites will remain bright in the sky throughout most of their lifetime. As a consequence, one of these satellites could interfere with data captured by astronomical observatories.

Several scientists from NASA told the New York Times that the agency is planning to build houses on the moon by 2040. Forbes reports: The agency is set to return to the moon and is hoping its astronauts can stay long-term -- in a house built on the moon via a 3D printer. The idea is to build the house structure out of a special lunar concrete from the moon's surface, and NASA has found just the company to do it: Austin-based 3D printing company, ICON. In what's been dubbed Project Olympus, ICON

ICON created its first 350-square-foot prototype home in Austin in March 2018 with a proprietary machine called Vulcan. This year, it showcased its first model home at Wolf Ranch in Georgetown, Texas, which is part of its 3D-printed 100-home community project. The start-up first received funding from NASA in 2020, and in 2022 it announced an additional $60 million for a space-based construction system that can be used beyond earth. The idea is to send a 3D printer up to the moon via a rocket, and the printer completes its job from there. "We've got all the right people together at the right time with a common goal, which is why I think we'll get there," NASA's director of technology maturation, Niki Werkheiser told The New York Times. "Everyone is ready to take this step together, so if we get our core capabilities developed, there's no reason it's not possible."

Tablizer shares a report from Space.com: In a solar system called TRAPPIST-1, 40 light years from the sun, seven Earth-sized planets revolve around a cold star. Astronomers obtained new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on TRAPPIST-1 b, the planet in the TRAPPIST-1 solar system closest to its star. These new observations offer insights into how its star can affect observations of exoplanets in the habitable zone of cool stars. In the habitable zone, liquid water can still exist on the orbiting planet's surface.

The team, which included University of Michigan astronomer and NASA Sagan Fellow Ryan MacDonald, published its study in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Our observations did not see signs of an atmosphere around TRAPPIST-1 b. This tells us the planet could be a bare rock, have clouds high in the atmosphere or have a very heavy molecule like carbon dioxide that makes the atmosphere too small to detect," MacDonald said. "But what we do see is that the star is absolutely the biggest effect dominating our observations, and this will do the exact same thing to other planets in the system.

Todd Shields and Loren Grush reporting via Bloomberg: Dish Network Corp. was fined $150,000 by US regulators for leaving a retired satellite parked in the wrong place in space, reflecting official concern over the growing amount of debris orbiting Earth and the potential for mishaps. The Federal Communications Commission called the action its first to enforce safeguards against orbital debris. "This is a breakthrough settlement, making very clear the FCC has strong enforcement authority and capability to enforce its vitally important space debris rules," Loyaan A. Egal, the agency's enforcement bureau chief, said in a statement.

Dish's EchoStar-7 satellite, which relayed pay-TV signals, ran short of fuel, and the company retired it at an altitude roughly 76 miles (122 kilometers) above its operational orbit. It was supposed to have been parked 186 miles above its operational orbit, the FCC said in an order (PDF). The company admitted it failed to park EchoStar-7 as authorized. It agreed to implement a compliance plan and pay a $150,000 civil penalty, the FCC said.

We have discovered a lot in this universe. Planets that orbit stars at right angles. Forbidden worlds that have cheated death. Space explosions that defy explanation. Yet the cosmos continues to surprise us. The latest spectacle, observed by the James Webb Space Telescope, is an agglomeration of nearly 150 free-floating objects amid the Orion Nebula, not far in mass from Jupiter. From a report: Dozens of these worlds are even orbiting each other. The scientists who discovered them have called them Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs, and the reason for their appearance is a complete mystery. "There's something wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation -- or both," said Samuel Pearson, a scientist at the European Space Agency who worked on the observations that were shared on Monday, which have not yet been peer reviewed. "They shouldn't exist."

The Orion Nebula is a region of star formation 1,350 light-years from Earth, located in the belt of the northern hemisphere constellation of Orion. It has long been studied by astronomers, but the scientists involved in the new Webb telescope study of the area, also released on Monday, say the new images are "by far" the best views yet. "We have better than Hubble resolution but now in the infrared," said Mark McCaughrean, a senior adviser for science and exploration at the ESA. He said the latest observations revealed reams of star formation and fledgling planetary systems in a manner never seen before.

At the beginning of The Creator a narrator describes AI-powered robots that are "more human than human." From the movie site Looper: It's in reference to the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick, which was adapted into the seminal sci-fi classic, "Blade Runner." The phrase is used as the slogan for the Tyrell Corporation, which designs the androids that take on lives of their own. The saying perfectly encapsulates the themes of "Blade Runner" and, by proxy, "The Creator." If a machine of sufficient intelligence is indistinguishable from humans, then shouldn't it be considered on equal footing as humanity?
The Huffington Post calls its "the pro-AI movie we don't need right now" — but they also praise it as "one of the most astonishing sci-fi theatrical experiences this year." Variety notes the film was co-written and directed by Gareth Edwards (director of the 2014 version of Godzilla and the Star Wars prequel Rogue One), working with Oscar-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser (Dune) after the two collaborated on Rogue One. But what's unique is the way they filmed it: adding visual effects "almost improvisationally afterward.

"Achieving this meant shooting sumptuous natural landscapes in far-flung locales like Thailand or Tibet and building futuristic temples digitally in post-production..."

IndieWire gushes that "This movie looks fucking incredible. To a degree that shames most blockbusters that cost three times its budget." They call it "a sci-fi epic that should change Hollywood forever." Once audiences see how "The Creator" was shot, they'll be begging Hollywood to close the book on blockbuster cinema's ugliest and least transportive era. And once executives see how much (or how little) "The Creator" was shot for, they'll be scrambling to make good on that request as fast as they possibly can.

Say goodbye to $300 million superhero movies that have been green-screened within an inch of their lives and need to gross the GDP of Grenada just to break even, and say hello — fingers crossed — to a new age of sensibly budgeted multiplex fare that looks worlds better than most of the stuff we've been subjected to over the last 20 years while simultaneously freeing studios to spend money on the smaller features that used to keep them afloat. Can you imagine...? How ironic that such fresh hope for the future of hand-crafted multiplex entertainment should come from a film so bullish and sanguine at the thought of humanity being replaced by A.I [...]

The real reason why "The Creator" is set in Vietnam (and across large swaths of Eurasia) is so that it could be shot in Vietnam. And in Thailand. And in Cambodia, Nepal, Indonesia, and several other beautiful countries that are seldom used as backdrops for futuristic science-fiction stories like this one. This movie was born from the visual possibilities of interpolating "Star Wars"-like tech and "Blade Runner"-esque cyber-depression into primordially expressive landscapes. Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer's dusky and tactile cinematography soaks up every inch of what the Earth has to offer without any concession to motion capture suits or other CGI obstructions, which speaks to the truly revolutionary aspect of this production: Rather than edit the film around its special effects, Edwards reverse-engineered the special effects from a completed edit of his film... Instead of paying a fortune to recreate a flimsy simulacrum of our world on a computer, Edwards was able to shoot the vast majority of his movie on location at a fraction of the price, which lends "The Creator" a palpable sense of place that instantly grounds this story in an emotional truth that only its most derivative moments are able to undo... [D]etails poke holes in the porous border that runs between artifice and reality, and that has an unsurprisingly profound effect on a film so preoccupied with finding ghosts in the shell. Can a robot feel love? Do androids dream of electric sheep? At what point does programming blur into evolution...?

[T]he director has a classic eye for staging action, that he gives his movies room to breathe, and that he knows that the perfect "Kid A" needle-drop (the album, not the song) can do more for a story about the next iteration of "human" life than any of the tracks from Hans Zimmer's score... [T]here's some real cognitive dissonance to seeing a film that effectively asks us to root for a cuter version of ChatGPT. But Edwards and Weitz's script is fascinating for its take on a future in which people have programmed A.I. to maintain the compassion that our own species has lost somewhere along the way; a future in which technology might be a vessel for humanity rather than a replacement for it; a future in which computers might complement our movies rather than replace our cameras.