A Starlink satellite broke apart in orbit after suffering an unexplained "anomaly," apparently due to an "internal energetic source" rather than a collision. "The incident appears to have created some debris, with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks," reports Scientific American. From the report: The satellite lost communication at about 560 kilometers above Earth, Starlink said. While the statement from Starlink, which is a subsidiary of Musk's rocket company SpaceX, merely noted that investigations are ongoing, LeoLabs said its radar observations of the event indicated an "internal energetic source" as the likely cause rather than a collision.

The incident underscores the potential hazards of the increasingly large numbers of satellites and other spacecraft in low-Earth orbit -- some 10,000 Starlinks are currently in orbit and counting. Starlink's statement said that "the event poses no new risk" to the International Space Station or to the upcoming launch of NASA's Artemis II mission, targeted for April 1.

Project Hail Mary has now grossed $300.8 million globally after earning another $54.1 million this weekend from 86 markets, reports Variety, noting that after just nine days it's now Amazon MGM's highest-grossing film ever.

And last weekend it had the best opening for a "non-franchise" movie in three years, adds the Associated Press — the best since 2023's Oppenheimer: Project Hail Mary, which cost nearly $200 million to produce... is on an enviable trajectory. Its second weekend hold was even better than that of Oppenheimer, which collected $46.7 million in its follow-up frame.
But the movie is based on a book by The Martian author Andy Weir, described by one news outlet as "a former software engineer and self-proclaimed 'lifelong space nerd'... known for his realistic and clear-eyed approach to scientifically technical stories." Project Hail Mary has plenty of real science in it, whether it be space mathematics, physics, or astrobiology... The film's namesake project is even comprised of the space programs of other nations, such as Roscosmos from Russia, the Chinese space program, and the European Space Agency...

The story relies on work NASA has done regarding exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system... [This includes a nearby star named Tau Ceti approximately 12 light years from Earth which is orbited by four planets — two once thought to be in "the habitable zone" where liquid water can exist.] Tau Ceti has long been the setting used by sci-fi authors and storytellers. Isaac Asimov used it for his Robot series. Arthur C. Clarke's "Rama" spacecraft came across a mysterious tetrahedron in the Tau Ceti system. Authors Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson also set stories in Tau Ceti, and it also serves as the extrasolar setting of the 1968 Jane Fonda film Barbarella. Most recently, the Bungie video game Marathon is set in the far-off system, serving as part of the background story for the extraction shooter, about a large-scale plan to colonize the Tau Ceti system.
The movie also mentions 40 Eridani A, according to the article, a real star about 16 light-years away that was said to be orbited by the fictional planet Vulcan, home to Star Trek's Mr. Spock. It's also mentioned in Frank Herbert's Dune as the star system of the planets Ix and Richese ("noted for their machine culture and miniaturisation," according to the Stellar Australis site's "Project Dune" page).

And in a video on IMAX's YouTube channel, the film's directors explain how for a crucial scene they used non-visible-light photography, which is also an important part of modern astronomy. "Even the credits incorporate real astrophotography into the final moments," the article points out, using the work of award-winning Australian astrophotographer Rod Prazeres. "The only difference between his work of capturing space data in images and what ended up on the big screen was that he gave them 'starless versions' of his photographs to make it easier to place credit text over them."

Prazeres wrote on his web site that he was touched the producers "wanted the real thing... In a world where CGI and AI are everywhere, it meant a lot..."

How powerful is Jupiter's lightning? Thick clouds cover the view, notes Science magazine. But using an instrument on NASA's Juno spacecraft (orbiting Jupiter for the past decade), researchers determined Jupiter's lightning bolts are 100 to 10,000 times more energetic than earth's: A single bolt of lightning on Earth releases about 1 billion joules of energy. That means the most extreme bolts of jovian lightning carry 10 trillion joules of energy, equivalent to 2400 tons of TNT, or one-sixth the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Based on the rates of flashes seen by Juno, storms on this tempestuous world can unleash the force of multiple nuclear weapons every minute...

The four storms Juno studied were monstrous, says Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the study's authors. There were three flashes per second on average, often emerging from the hearts of storms that are 3000 kilometers across, longer than the distance from New York City to Denver.
The researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope (and photographs from Juno's camera) to track Jupiter's storms with such precision that their radiometer could then pick out individual lightning flashes, according to the article. "It's just a massive ball of gas. It makes sense that there's very energetic lightning happening," says Daniel Mitchard, a lightning physicist at Cardiff University who wasn't involved with the new study. But confirming such suspicions "is exciting," he says, because lightning plays an important role in forging complex chemistry — including the sort that primordial life is built on.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

Thirty years after the alleged 1996 "ET of Varginha" encounter, debate continues to rage over the events that happened in Brazil's self-styled UFO capital. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the Guardian: The skies over this far-flung coffee-growing hub went charcoal black, the heavens opened and one of Brazil's greatest mysteries was born. "It really was something unique," recalls Marco Antonio Reis, a zoo director, who was at his ranch outside Varginha one stormy day in January 1996 when, he says, an otherworldly creature came to town. Reis and other locals claim the unusually ferocious downpour heralded a series of disturbing and seemingly paranormal events. At least six of the zoo's animals, including a spider monkey, a tapir and a raccoon, died mysteriously after a horned interloper with bulging red eyes was spotted in the vicinity by a woman who had gone out for a smoke. When a vet examined their corpses, "they were all black inside," Reis claims.

On a nearby wasteland, three young women spotted a peculiar and malodorous being with a heart-shaped face and three lumps on its head cowering beside a wall. "I've seen the devil," one of those witnesses would later tell her mum. Soon afterwards, an unexplained infection was rumored to have killed a strapping police intelligence officer who was said to have grappled with the oleaginous unidentified being. Three decades later, Reis says he is convinced Varginha received a non-human visit. His only doubt was from where it came.

"We don't know if it was extraterrestrial or intraterrestrial," the 71-year-old says as he climbs a staircase to the veranda where the smoker claims to have seen what, in reference to Steven Spielberg's 1982 film, became known as the "ET of Varginha". A 2ft statue of a two-toed alien now marks the spot. "It's possible it was an intraterrestrial, from inside the Earth They don't just come from space," Reis says. "It might have come from the depths of the Earth, too. We don't even know what it's like at the bottom of the sea, do we?"

"Billionaire Elon Musk has announced plans to build a $20 billion chip plant in Austin, Texas" reports a local news station: Musk announced on Saturday night during a livestream on his social media platform X that the plant, called "Terafab," will be built near Tesla's campus and gigafactory in eastern Travis County. The long-anticipated project is a joint venture between Musk-owned properties Tesla, SpaceX and xAI... The Terafab plant is expected to begin production in 2027.
Musk "has said the semiconductor industry is moving too slow to keep up with the supply of chips he expects to need," writes Bloomberg — quoting Musk as saying "We either build the Terafab or we don't have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the Terafab." Musk detailed some specific plans, including producing chips that can support 100 to 200 gigawatts a year of computing power on Earth, and chips that can support a terawatt in space, but gave no timelines for the facility or its output... The facility is expected to make two types of chips, one of which will be optimized for edge and inference, primarily for his vehicle, robotaxi and Optimus humanoid robots. The other will be a high-power chip, designed for space that could be used by SpaceX and xAI... Musk said he expects xAI to use the vast majority of the chips.

During the presentation, Musk also unveiled a speculative rendering of a future "mini" AI data center satellite, one piece of a much larger satellite system that he wants SpaceX to build to do complex computing in space. In January, SpaceX requested a license from the Federal Communications Commission to launch one million data center satellites into orbit around Earth. Musk said that the mini satellite he revealed would have the capacity for 100 kilowatts of power. "We expect future satellites to probably go to the megawatt range," Musk said.

Raising money to build and launch AI data centers in space is one of the driving forces behind SpaceX's planned IPO later this year. SpaceX is expected to raise as much as $50 billion in a record-setting IPO this summer which could value it at more than $1.75 trillion, Bloomberg News reported earlier.

Longtime Slashdot reader SchroedingersCat writes: Chuck Norris, known for his roles in action films and as Texas Ranger Cordell Walker on the TV show "Walker, Texas Ranger," passed away on March 19, leaving behind a legacy of inspiring millions around the world. He was 86.

He became Internet phenomenon after "Chuck Norris Facts" went viral online with such wildly hyperbolic statements as, "Chuck Norris had a staring contest with the sun -- and won," and, "When Chuck Norris does push-ups, he doesn't push himself up, he pushes the Earth down."

His death was announced by his family through his official Instagram account, but no further details were immediately available. He was hospitalized earlier that day in Hawaii after experiencing a medical emergency, the family said.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: In The Martian, fictional astronaut Mark Watney survives the wasteland of Mars by growing potatoes in lunar soil -- with a bit of help from human poop. The idea may not be so far-fetched. In a preprint posted this month on bioRxiv, researchers show potatoes can indeed grow in the equivalent of Moon dust, though they need a lot of help from compost found on Earth. To make the discovery, scientists first had to re-create lunar regolith -- the loose, powdery layer that blankets the Moon's surface. To replicate that in the lab, David Handy, a space biologist at Oregon State University (OSU), and his colleagues used a mix of crushed minerals and volcanic ash that matched the chemistry of the Moon.

But lunar regolith is entirely devoid of the organic matter that plants need to grow. "Turning an inorganic, inhospitable bucket of glorified sand into something that can support plant growth is complex," says Anna-Lisa Paul, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Florida not involved with the work. So Handy and his colleagues added vermicompost -- organic waste from worms -- into the regolith. They found that a mix with 5% compost allowed the potatoes to grow while still emulating the stressful conditions of the lunar environment. After almost 2 months of growth, the team harvested the tubers, freeze-dried them, and ground them up for further testing.

Analysis of the potatoes' DNA showed stress-related genes had been activated. The potatoes also had higher concentrations of copper and zinc than Earth-grown ones, which may make them dangerous for human consumption. The plants' nutritional value, though, was similar to traditional potatoes -- a surprise to the scientists, who expected lower levels of nutrition "because the plants might have been working overtime to overcome certain stressors," Handy says.

Samples from the asteroid Ryugu contain all five nucleobases -- the key building blocks of DNA and RNA. "This strengthens the idea that asteroids may have brought the ingredients for the first living organisms to Earth long ago," reports New Scientist. From the report: Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft visited Ryugu in 2018, where it shot two projectiles -- one small and one large -- into the surface of the asteroid and collected the resulting debris. It arrived back at Earth with the samples in 2020 and researchers have been analyzing these in detail ever since. Yasuhiro Oba at Hokkaido University in Japan and his colleagues examined two samples, one from the asteroid's surface and one comprised of subsurface materials excavated by the projectiles. In both, the team found all five primary nucleobases, which are the compounds that make up the nucleic acids DNA and RNA when combined with sugars and phosphoric acid.

This isn't the first time that nucleobases have been found in asteroid samples: they have been seen in meteorites, too, and in samples from the asteroid Bennu. The researchers did find different abundances of the various nucleobases among the various samples, though, which hints that these compounds might be useful for tracing asteroids and meteorites back to the parent bodies that they broke off from in the distant past, as well as understanding the evolution of those parent bodies over time. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick launched a new venture that "will focus on creating 'gainfully employed robots' for the food, mining and transport industries," Bloomberg reports.

"I left Uber in 2017 heartbroken," writes Kalanick on the new company's web site. Kalanick resigned under pressure in 2017, and complains he was "torn away from an idea and a movement that I had poured my life into... I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena, back to my calling. Back to building. Digitizing the Physical World is my life's work... " Kalanick is remaking his real estate company, City Storage Systems, which owns ghost-kitchen operator CloudKitchens, and renaming it Atoms, according to a manifesto posted on the new company's website. [Bloomberg notes that the company's food robotics division "makes a food assembly machine called Bowl Builder, according to its website."] In addition to its work on food, Los Angeles-based Atoms is expanding into robotics technology for mining and automotive transport. Kalanick said on the livestreamed tech talk show TBPN Friday that Atoms has effectively been in stealth for eight years and has "thousands" of employees....

Kalanick wrote on the Atoms website that the company will make "specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large." That will include "infrastructure for better food," he wrote, as well as "more productive mines to power Earth's industries" in addition to "wheelbase for robots" in transportation. "The industrial thing is probably our main jam," he said on TBPN. "Once you crack movement in the physical world, there are lots of people who want access to that..." Kalanick also said he was the biggest investor in Pronto, a self-driving trucking startup that currently focuses on closed sites like mines.

Van Allen Probe A, a 1,300-pound (600 kg) NASA satellite launched in 2012 to study Earth's radiation belts, is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere this week. While most of it is expected to burn up during descent, "some components may survive," reports the BBC. "The space agency said there is a one in 4,200 chance of being harmed by a piece of the probe, which it characterized as 'low' risk." From the report: The spacecraft is projected to re-enter around 19:45 EST (00:45 GMT) on Tuesday the U.S. Space Force predicted, according to Nasa, though there is a 24-hour margin of "uncertainty" in the timing. [...] The spacecraft and its twin, Van Allen Probe B, were on a mission to gather unprecedented data on Earth's two permanent radiation belts. It was not immediately clear where in Earth's atmosphere the satellite is projected to re-enter. NASA and the U.S. Space Force has said it will monitor the re-entry and update any predictions. [...] Van Allen Probe B is not expected to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere before 2030.

A startup called Reflect Orbital wants to launch thousands of mirror-bearing satellites to reflect sunlight onto Earth at night and "power solar farms after sunset, provide lighting for rescue workers and illuminate city streets, among other things," reports the New York Times. From the report: It is an idea seemingly out of a sci-fi movie, but the company, Reflect Orbital of Hawthorne, Calif., could soon receive permission to launch its first prototype satellite with a 60-foot-wide mirror. The company has applied to the Federal Communications Commission, which issues the licenses needed to deploy satellites. If the F.C.C. approves, the test satellite could get a ride into orbit as soon as this summer. The F.C.C.'s public comment period on the application closes on Monday. "We're trying to build something that could replace fossil fuels and really power everything," Ben Nowack, Reflect Orbital's chief executive, said in an interview. The company has raised more than $28 million from investors.

[...] Reflect Orbital's first prototype, which will be roughly the size of a dorm fridge, is almost complete. Once in space, about 400 miles up, the test satellite would unfurl a square mirror nearly 60 feet wide. That would bounce sunlight to illuminate a circular patch about three miles wide on the Earth's surface. Someone looking up would see a dot in the sky about as bright as a full moon. Two more prototypes could follow within a year. By the end of 2028, Reflect Orbital hopes to launch 1,000 larger satellites, and 5,000 of them by 2030. The largest mirrors are planned to be nearly 180 feet wide, reflecting as much light as 100 full moons. The company said its goal was to deploy the full constellation of 50,000 satellites by 2035.

How much does it cost to order sunlight at night? Mr. Nowack said the company would charge about $5,000 an hour for the light of one mirror if a customer signed an annual contract for 1,000 hours or more. Lighting for one-time events and emergencies, which might require numerous satellites and more effort to coordinate, would be more expensive. For solar farms, he envisions splitting revenue from the electricity generated by the additional hours of light.

NASA heralded a new study published Friday documenting a first for humanity — "the first time a human-made object has measurably altered the path of a celestial body around the Sun."

It was 2022's DART mission where NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid — and the experiment "could have implications for protecting Earth from future asteroid strikes," writes ScienceNews: A spacecraft slowed the orbit of a pair of asteroids around the sun by more than 10 micrometers per second... Within a month, researchers showed that the impact shortened Dimorphos' 12-hour orbit by 32 minutes. Some of the rocks knocked off of Dimorphos fled the vicinity completely, escaping the gravitational influence of the Dimorphos-Didymos pair, says planetary defense researcher Rahil Makadia of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Those rocky runaways took some momentum away from the duo and changed their joint motion around the sun.

To figure out how much that motion was affected, astronomers watched the asteroids pass in front of distant stars, dimming some of the stars' light like a tiny eclipse. These blinks, called stellar occultations, can be visible from anywhere on Earth and are predictable in advance... Calculating how far off occultation timings were from predictions revealed that the asteroids' orbit around the sun was about 150 milliseconds slower than before the DART impact...

Didymos and Dimorphos are not a threat to Earth, Makadia says, and weren't before DART. But knowing how a deliberate impact changes one asteroid's orbit can help make defense plans against another, "in case we need to do a kinetic impact for real."
The researchers spent nearly two and a half years to collect 22 measurements of the asteroid's post-crash position, relying on amateur astronomers "to go out into the middle of nowhere and observe the necessary stellar occultations," acvcording to their paper. Planetary defense researcher even tells ScienceNews "There was an observer who drove two days each way into the Australian outback to get these measurements."

Astronomers have spotted a galaxy they believe is made of 99.9% dark matter, reports CNN — and it's so faint, it's almost invisible: CDG-2, which is about 300 million light-years from Earth, appears to be so rich in dark matter that it could belong to a hypothesized subset of low surface brightness galaxies called "dark galaxies," which are believed to contain few or no stars.... [Post-doctoral astrophysics/statistics fellow Dayi Li at the University of Toronto was lead author on a study about the discovery, and tells CNN] There is no strict definition of dark galaxies... but their existence is predicted by dark matter theories and cosmological simulations. "Where exactly do we draw the line in terms of how many stars they should have is still ambiguous, because not everything in astronomy is as clear-cut as we like," he said. "To be technically correct, CDG-2 is an almost-dark galaxy. But the importance of CDG-2 is that it nudges us much closer to getting to that truly dark regime, while previously we did not think a galaxy this faint could exist."

To observe CDG-2, the researchers used data from three telescopes — Hubble, the European Space Agency's Euclid space observatory and the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii — along with a novel approach that involved looking for objects called globular clusters. "These are very tight, spherical groupings of very olds stars, basically the relics of the first generation of star formation," Li said. Globular clusters are bright even if the surrounding galaxy is not, and previous observations have shown a relationship between them and the presence of dark matter in a galaxy, Li added. Because CDG-2 appears to have very few stars, there must be something else providing the mass that the clusters need to hold themselves together. Li and his colleagues assume that the source of the mass is dark matter.

The researchers found a set of four globular clusters in the Perseus Cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies immersed in a cloud of gas and one of the most massive objects in the universe. Further observations revealed a glow or halo around the globular clusters, suggesting the presence of a galaxy... Astronomers believe, Li explained, that after the formation of the clusters early in the galaxy's existence, larger surrounding galaxies stripped it of the hydrogen gas required to make more individual stars like our sun. "The material that this galaxy needed to continue to form stars was no longer there, so it was left with basically just a dark matter halo and the four globular clusters." The process, he added, would leave behind a skeleton or ghost of "a galaxy that pretty much just failed." As a result of this formation mechanism, the galaxy only has 0.005% of the brightness of our own galaxy, Li said...

Studying potential dark galaxies is important because they provide nearly pristine views of the behavior of dark matter, according to Neal Dalal, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, who was not involved with the study.
Robert Minchin, an astronomer at New Mexico's National Radio Astronomy Observatory, told CNN that "it seems likely that other very dark galaxies will be found by this method in the future."

Ancient Slashdot reader alanw shares a report from the European Space Agency (ESA): Last year, an approximately 60 meter near-Earth object captured global attention. For a brief period, asteroid 2024 YR4 became the most dangerous asteroid discovered in the last 20 years. While an Earth impact was soon ruled out, the asteroid faded from view with a lingering 4% chance of striking the Moon on 22 December 2032. Now, that risk has been eliminated. Astronomers have confirmed that 2024 YR4 will not impact the Moon using new observations made by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Instead, it will safely pass the Moon at a distance of more than 20 000 km.

An anonymous reader The Guardian: Humanity is heating the planet faster than ever before, a study has found. Climate breakdown is occurring more rapidly with the heating rate almost doubling, according to research that excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures. It found global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35C per decade over the past 10 years. The rate is higher than scientists have seen since they started systematically taking the Earth's temperature in 1880.

"If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5C (2.7F) limit of the Paris agreement before 2030," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the study. [...] The researchers applied a noise-reduction method to filter out the estimated effect of nonhuman factors in five major datasets that scientists have compiled to gauge the Earth's temperature. In each of them, they found an acceleration in global heating emerged in 2013 or 2014. The findings have been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

A recently-revised Senate authorization bill (PDF), co-sponsored by Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz, would extend the International Space Station's lifespan from 2030 to 2032 while pushing NASA to accelerate plans for commercial space stations to replace it. Ars Technica's Eric Berger reports: Regarding NASA's support for the development of commercial space stations, the bill mandates the following, within specified periods, of passage of the law:

- Within 60 days, publicly release the requirements for commercial space stations in low-Earth orbit
- Within 90 days, release the final "request for proposals" to solicit industry responses
- Within 180 days, enter into contracts with "two or more" commercial providers for such stations

Cruz is trying to inject urgency into NASA as several private companies -- including Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Vast, and Voyager -- are finalizing designs for space stations. All have expressed a desire for clarity from NASA on how long the space agency would like its astronauts to stay on board, the types of scientific equipment needed, and much more. These are known as "requirements" in NASA parlance.

[...] Cruz and other senators on the committee appear to share those concerns, as their legislation extends the International Space Station's lifespan from 2030 to 2032 (an extension must still be approved by international partners, including Russia). Moreover, the authorization bill states, "The Administrator shall not initiate the de-orbit of the ISS until the date on which a commercial low-Earth orbit destination has reached an initial operational capability." With this legislation, the U.S. Senate is making clear that it views a permanent human presence in low-Earth orbit as a high priority. This version of the authorization legislation must still be passed by the full Senate and work its way through the House of Representatives.

Dustin Destree shares a report from Phys.org: Although plastic particles in the air are increasingly coming into focus, knowledge about their distribution and effects is still limited. Chemical analyses from Leipzig now provide details from Germany for the first time: Around 4% of the particulate matter consists of plastic. Around two-thirds of this comes from tire abrasion. Extrapolated, this means that people in a city like Leipzig inhale approximately 2.1 micrograms of plastic per day through the air, which increases the risk of death from cardiovascular disease by 9% and from lung cancer by 13%. These findings underscore the need to take global action against plastic pollution and to examine air quality and health at the regional level, write researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) and Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. "With around two-thirds of microplastics coming from tire abrasion, this shows that action is needed and that the fine dust problem cannot be solved by switching to electric mobility alone. To protect health, it would be important to also take tire abrasion into account when regulating air quality and to set limits for microplastics in the air," demands Prof. Hartmut Herrmann from TROPOS, who led the study.

The study has been published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

In a library in Florence, Italy, historian Ivan Malara noticed handwritten notes on a book printed in the 1500s — and recognized the handwriting as Galileo's. The finding "promises new insights into one of the most famous ideological transitions in the history of science," writes Science magazine — since the book Galileo annotated was a reprint of Ptolemy's second-century work arguing that the earth was the center of the universe. Galileo's notes, perhaps written around 1590, or roughly 2 decades before his groundbreaking telescope observations of the Moon and Jupiter, reveal someone who both revered and critically dissected Ptolemy's work. And they imply, Malara argues, that Galileo ultimately broke with Ptolemy's cosmos because his mastery of the traditional paradigm's reasoning convinced him that a heliocentric [sun-centered] system would better fulfill Ptolemy's own mathematical logic.

A start-up called Reflect Orbital "proposes to use large, mirrored satellites to redirect sunlight to Earth at night," reports the Washington Post, "with plans to bathe solar farms, industrial sites and even entire cities in light that could, if desired, reach the intensity of daylight...."

Slashdot noted their idea in 2022 — but Reflect Orbital now expects to launch its first satellite in April, according to the article. "But its grand vision is largely 'aspirational,' as its young founder, Ben Nowack, told me..." Reflect Orbital's Nowack describes a scene right out of sci-fi: An extremely bright star appears on the northern horizon and makes its way across the sky, illuminating a 5-kilometer circle on Earth, then setting on the southern horizon about five minutes later, just as another such "star" appears in the north. To make the night even brighter, a customer could make 10 "stars" appear at once in the north by ordering them on an app. Two such artificial stars are in development in Reflect Orbital's factory. Nowack showed them to me on a Zoom call. The first to launch is 50 feet across, but he plans later to build them three times that size. If all goes according to plan, he'll have 50,000 of them circling the Earth in 2035 at an altitude of around 400 miles.

Nowack plans to start selling the service "in mostly developing nations or places that don't have streetlights yet." Eventually, he thinks, he can illuminate major cities, turn solar fields and farms into round-the-clock operations for any business or municipality that pays for it. He likened his technology to the invention of crop irrigation thousands of years ago. "I see this as much the same thing," he said, arguing that people would no longer have to "wait for the sun to shine."
The article adds that Elon Musk's SpaceX "wants to launch as many as a million satellites to serve as orbiting data centers — 70 times the number of satellites now in orbit." (America's satellite-regulation Federal Communications Commission grants a "categorical exclusion" from environmental review to satellites on the grounds that their operations "normally do not have significant effects on the human environment.")

The public comment periods for the two proposals close on March 6 and March 9.

South Korea has reversed a two-decade policy and approved the export of high-precision map data, paving the way for a fully functional Google Maps in the country. Reuters reports: The approval was made "on the condition that strict security requirements are met," the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said in a statement. Those conditions include blurring military and other sensitive security-related facilities, as well as restricting longitude and latitude coordinates for South Korean territory on products such as Google Maps and Google Earth, it said.

The decision is expected to hurt Naver and Kakao -- local internet giants which currently dominate the country's market for digital map services. But it will appease Washington, which has urged Seoul to tackle what it says is discrimination against U.S. tech companies. South Korea, still technically at war with North Korea, had shot down Google's previous bids in 2007 and 2016 to be allowed to export the data, citing the risks that information about sensitive military and security facilities could be exposed. "Google can now come in, slash usage fees, and take the market," said Choi Jin-mu, a geography professor at Kyung Hee University. "If Naver and Kakao are weakened or pushed out and Google later raises prices, that becomes a monopoly. Then, even companies that rely on map services -- logistics firms, for example -- become dependent, and in the long run, even government GIS (geographic information) systems could end up dependent on Google or Apple. That's the biggest concern."