An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The geology of Brazil's volcanic Trindade Island has fascinated scientists for years, but the discovery of rocks made from plastic debris in this remote turtle refuge is sparking alarm. Melted plastic has become intertwined with rocks on the island, located 1,140 km (708 miles) from the southeastern state of Espirito Santo, which researchers say is evidence of humans' growing influence over the earth's geological cycles. "This is new and terrifying at the same time, because pollution has reached geology," said Fernanda Avelar Santos, a geologist at the Federal University of Parana.

Santos and her team ran chemical tests to find out what kind of plastics are in the rocks called "plastiglomerates" because they are made of a mixture of sedimentary granules and other debris held together by plastic. "We identified (the pollution) mainly comes from fishing nets, which is very common debris on Trinidade Island's beaches," Santos said. "The (nets) are dragged by the marine currents and accumulate on the beach. When the temperature rises, this plastic melts and becomes embedded with the beach's natural material."

The discovery stirs questions about humans' legacy on the earth, says Santos. "We talk so much about the Anthropocene, and this is it," Santos said, referring to a proposed geological epoch defined by humans' impact on the planet's geology and ecosystems. "The pollution, the garbage in the sea and the plastic dumped incorrectly in the oceans is becoming geological material ... preserved in the earth's geological records."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Choked by a smog of sulfuric acid and scorched by temperatures hot enough to melt lead, the surface of Venus is sure to be lifeless. For decades, researchers also thought the planet itself was dead, capped by a thick, stagnant lid of crust and unaltered by active rifts or volcanoes. But hints of volcanism have mounted recently, and now comes the best one yet: direct evidence for an eruption. Geologically, at least, Venus is alive.

The discovery comes from NASA's Magellan spacecraft, which orbited Venus some 30 years ago and used radar to peer through the thick clouds. Images made 8 months apart show a volcano's circular mouth, or caldera, growing dramatically in a sudden collapse. On Earth, such collapses occur when magma that had supported the caldera vents or drains away, as happened during a 2018 eruption at Hawaii's Kilauea volcano. Witnessing this unrest during the short observation period suggests either Magellan was spectacularly lucky, or, like Earth, Venus has many volcanoes spouting off regularly, says Robert Herrick, a planetary scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Herrick, who led the study, says, "We can rule out that it's a dying planet."

The discovery, published today in Science and presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, makes Venus only the third planetary body in the Solar System with active magma volcanoes, joining Earth and Io, Jupiter's fiery moon. It means future missions to Venus will be able to study "bare, gorgeous new rock" that provides a sample of the planet's interior, Gilmore says. The discovery of more volcanoes, in old or future data, will also help scientists understand how Venus is shedding its interior heat and evolving. And it will shake scientists out of their long-standing view that a spasm of activity a half-billion years ago repaved the planet's surface -- as evidenced by a relative paucity of impact craters -- and was followed by a long period of quiet.

Amazon.com plans to launch its first internet satellites to space in the first half of 2024 and offer initial commercial tests shortly after, the company said Tuesday, as it prepares to vie with Elon Musk's SpaceX and others to provide broadband internet globally. Reuters reports: Amazon's satellite internet unit, Project Kuiper, will begin mass-producing the satellites later this year, the company said. Those will be the first of over 3,000 satellites the technology giant plans to launch in low-Earth orbit in the next few years. "We'll definitely be beta testing with commercial customers in 2024," Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon devices, said at a conference in Washington.

The 2024 deployment target would keep Amazon on track to fulfill a regulatory mandate to launch half its entire Kuiper network of 3,236 satellites by 2026. Limp, who oversees Amazon's consumer devices powerhouse, said the company plans to make "three to five" satellites a day to reach that goal. With plans to pump more than $10 billion into the Kuiper network, Amazon sees its experience producing millions of devices from its consumer electronics powerhouse as an edge over rival SpaceX, the Musk-owned space company whose Starlink network already has roughly 4,000 satellites in space.

Amazon plans to launch a pair of prototype satellites early this year aboard a new rocket from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance. The 2024 launch, carrying the initial production satellites, is expected to be the first of many more in a swift deployment campaign using rockets Amazon procured in 2021 and 2022. The company on Tuesday also revealed a slate of three different terminals, or antennas, that will connect customers with its Kuiper satellites in orbit. In a blog post on Tuesday, Amazon detailed its new terminals with photos and pricing.

Standard Customer Terminal: "Project Kuiper's standard customer terminal measures less than 11 inches square and 1 inch thick. It weighs less than five pounds without its mounting bracket. Despite this modest footprint, the device will be one of the most powerful commercially available customer terminals of its size, delivering speeds up to 400 megabits per second (Mbps). Amazon expects to produce these terminals for less than $400 each."

"Most Affordable" Terminal: "A 7-inch square design will be Project Kuiper's smallest and most affordable customer terminal. Weighing just 1 pound and offering speeds up to 100 Mbps, its portability and affordability will create opportunities to serve even more customers around the world. This design will connect residential customers who need an even lower-cost model, as well as government and enterprise customers pursuing applications like ground mobility and internet of things (IoT)."

"Most Capable" Antenna Model: "Project Kuiper's largest, most capable model is designed for enterprise, government, and telecommunications applications that require even more bandwidth. The device measures 19 inches by 30 inches, and will deliver speeds up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps)."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Biden administration on Monday gave the green light to a sprawling oil drilling project in Alaska, opening the nation's largest expanse of untouched land to energy production. The multibillion-dollar project will be located inside the National Petroleum Reserve, about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and could produce nearly 600 million barrels of crude oil over the next 30 years, according to the Interior Department. The department noted in announcing the approval that it reduced the scope of the plan, called the Willow Project, by denying two of the five drill sites proposed by ConocoPhillips, Alaska's largest crude oil producer. The department estimated that the project could produce nearly a quarter of a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

The project had received forceful pushback from environmentalists, who pointed to its potential climate and environmental effects. The Native American community closest to the site has also opposed (PDF) the project, though others have supported it. The oil industry and Alaskan lawmakers had urged the president to approve the project for its energy production potential and its ability to create jobs. [...] But Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, said the harm the project will cause "may not ever be able to be undone. This is the equivalent of putting dozens and dozens of coal-fired power plants back online. It makes it almost impossible to understand how the administration will ever meet its promises to reduce emissions from public lands."

A source familiar with the decision said that the Biden administration had little choice, faced with the prospect of legal action and costly fines. Administration lawyers determined that the courts would not have allowed Biden to reject the project outright, as ConocoPhillips has long held leases on land in the petroleum reserve and could have levied fines on the government, the source added. The Interior Department announced Monday that ConocoPhillips would relinquish rights to about 68,000 acres of its existing leases in the petroleum reserve, most of which are close to the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area, a major habitat for caribou and other wildlife that Native communities rely on. On Sunday, the Biden administration declared about 2.8 million acres of the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean as indefinitely off-limits for future oil and gas leasing. The Interior Department said it is also considering additional protections for more than 13 million acres within the reserve that have significant natural or historical value.

"Based on initial data review, vehicle is healthy," Relativity Space tweeted today. "More info to follow on cause of aborts today. Thanks for playing."

Remaining back on the launchpad is the largest 3D printed object ever to exist. And they're still hoping to launch it into space.

They'd planned a launch this morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida of a 110-foot rocket (33.5 meters) on a mission they're calling GLHF — "Good Luck, Have Fun".

The rocket's makers — California-based Relativity Space — call it "the world's first 3D printed rocket." A full 85% of the rocket's weight comes from 3D printed parts, explains Wired, and "only the computing system, electronics, and readily available parts like fasteners were not." Named Terran 1, the 7.5-foot-wide rocket (2.2 meters) inaugurates the company's ambitious plans for 3D printing in space: Relativity Space wants to use Terran 1 to (comparatively) cheaply lift satellites for other companies and NASA into Earth orbit. It also plans to construct Terran R, a larger, more powerful, fully reusable rocket that the company hopes will compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9, which has a smaller payload capacity and only reuses the rocket's first stage. In late 2024, Relativity plans to test using Terran R to launch payloads to Mars; another startup, Impulse Space, will provide the lander.
From the company's web site: Like its structure, all Relativity engines are 3D printed and use liquid oxygen and liquid natural gas, which are not only the best for rocket propulsion, but also for reusability, and the easiest to eventually transition to methane on Mars.
The tagline for the company's Twitter feed says they're "Building humanity's multiplanetary future." And excitement is running high, reports Spaceflight Now" "There are a number of firsts here potentially on this rocket," said Josh Brost, vice president of revenue operations at Relativity Space....

"Hard to believe the day is nearly here to launch Terran 1, our first rocket!" Tim Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Relativity Space tweeted Tuesday....

The company now boasts some 1,000 employees, a million-square-foot headquarters and factory in Long Beach, California, and $1.3 billion in venture capital and equity fundraising, including an early $500,000 investment from billionaire Mark Cuban. In 2021, the company reached a valuation of $4.2 billion before launching any rockets....

"No new company has ever had their liquid rocket make it to space on their first attempt," Brost, also a former engineer and manager at SpaceX, told Spaceflight Now in a pre-launch interview. "So if everything goes incredibly well, and we achieve orbit on our first launch ... that would be a remarkable milestone for us, which we would be, of course, over the moon excited about. But that doesn't define success for us."
Wired adds that they're not the only company working on space-related 3D printing: Australia's Fleet Space has already been producing lightweight, 3D-printed radio frequency antennas for satellites. Next year, using printers half the size of a bus, they plan to create a satellite constellation called Alpha that will be entirely 3D-printed.... Flavia Tata Nardini, the company's CEO, believes space-based 3D printing is coming next. "In my ideal future, in 10 to 15 years, I won't have to launch satellites from here; I can build them up there."

Slashdot reader beforewisdom shared this report from CNN: Scientists have set out a way to suck planet-heating carbon pollution from the air, turn it into sodium bicarbonate and store it in oceans, according to a new paper. The technique could be up to three times more efficient than current carbon capture technology, say the authors of the study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances....

The team have used copper to modify the absorbent material used in direct air capture. The result is an absorbent "which can remove CO2 from the atmosphere at ultra-dilute concentration at a capacity which is two to three times greater than existing absorbents," Arup SenGupta, a professor at Lehigh University and a study author, told CNN. This material can be produced easily and cheaply and would help drive down the costs of direct air capture, he added. Once the carbon dioxide is captured, it can then be turned into sodium bicarbonate — baking soda — using seawater and released into the ocean at a small concentration.

The oceans "are infinite sinks," SenGupta said. "If you put all the CO2 from the atmosphere, emitted every day — or every year — into the ocean, the increase in concentration would be very, very minor," he said. SenGupta's idea is that direct air capture plants can be located offshore, giving them access to abundant amounts of seawater for the process.

Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study, told CNN that the chemistry was "novel and elegant." The process is a modification of one we already know, he said, "which is easier to understand, scale-up and develop than something totally new."

The world's leading carbon credit certifier -- used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations for climate claims -- has said it will phase out and replace its rainforest offsets programme by mid-2025 after a Guardian investigation found it was flawed. From a report: Verra, the main guarantee of credibility for the rapidly growing $2bn voluntary offsets market, has committed to scrapping its rainforest protection programme by July 2025 and introducing new rules, which it is developing. A senior Verra figure said this week it was time to move on from the current system.

In January, a nine-month investigation by the Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and SourceMaterial found widespread problems with the system. Analysis of a significant proportion of Verra projects indicated more than 90% of its rainforest offset credits do not represent genuine carbon reductions. Human rights issues are a serious concern in at least one of the offsetting projects co-run by the NGO Conservation International and the Peruvian governments, with evidence people had been forced from their homes. From the band Pearl Jam to easyJet, Lavazza to the housebuilder Berkeley Group, Verra's rainforest carbon offsets have been used by internationally renowned companies. Some have labelled their products "carbon neutral," or told their consumers they can fly, buy new clothes or eat certain foods without making the climate crisis worse. In Singapore and Colombia, companies can buy the offsets instead of paying carbon taxes.

A newly discovered asteroid roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool has a "small chance" of colliding with Earth in 23 years, with a potential impact on Valentine's Day in 2046, according to NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. From a report: The asteroid has a 1 in 625 chance of striking Earth, based on data projections from the European Space Agency, though NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Sentry system calculated the odds closer to 1 in 560. The latter tracks potential collisions with celestial objects. But the space rock -- named 2023 DW -- is the only object on NASA's risk list that ranks 1 out of 10 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, a metric for categorizing the projected risk of an object colliding with Earth. All other objects rank at 0 on the Torino scale.

NASA officials have warned that the odds of impact could be dramatically altered as more observations of 2023 DW are collected and additional analysis is performed. It may be a few days before new data can be collected because of the asteroid's proximity to the moon [...]. The last full moon was two days ago, and it still appears bright and large in the sky, likely obscuring 2023 DW from immediate observation.

The asteroid measures about 160 feet (about 50 meters) in diameter, according to NASA data. As 2023 DW orbits the sun, it has 10 predicted close approaches to Earth, with the nearest landing on February 14, 2046, and nine others between 2047 and 2054. The closest the asteroid is expected to travel to Earth is about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), NASA's Eyes on Asteroids website notes. The space rock was first spotted in our skies on February 2. It's traveling about 15.5 miles per second (25 kilometers per second) at a distance of more than 11 million miles (18 million kilometers) from Earth, completing one loop around the sun every 271 days.

NASA's Orion spacecraft performed better than expected on its first deep-space flight despite experiencing unpredicted loss of its heat shield material. Space.com reports: During Tuesday's call, NASA program managers revealed that Orion's heat shield did not perform as expected, losing more material than the agency had planned for. Nevertheless, NASA leadership is confident that everything will be ready for the crewed around-the-moon flight of Artemis 2, which is planned for next year. Howard Hu, manager of NASA's Orion Program, lauded the crew module's performance during the test flight, noting that NASA was able to accomplish 161 overall test objectives planned for the mission, even adding an additional 21 during the flight based on the spacecraft's performance.

"We also accomplished what our number one objective was, which is returning the crew module back to Earth safely from 24,500 miles per hour to a landing about 16 miles per hour when it touched down, and we were able to land within 2.4 miles of our target," Hu said during Tuesday's teleconference. "Our requirement was 6.2 miles. So, really great performance as we were able to return back from the moon." "Some of the expected char material that we would expect coming back home ablated away differently than what our computer models and what our ground testing predicted," Hu said. "So we had more liberation of the charred material during reentry before we landed than we had expected."

Hu explained that NASA teams are investigating a wide range of data related to the performance of Orion's heat shield, including images and videos of reentry, onboard sensor readings, and even X-ray images of sample materials taken from the shield. "Overall, there's a lot of work to be done in this investigation going forward," Hu said. "We are just starting that effort because we've just gotten together all those pieces of information. Those samples, the videos, images, and the data from the spacecraft itself and correlated them together. And now we're assessing that data and moving forward with that assessment." Despite the heat shield issue, NASA says they feel confident that the crewed Artemis 2 mission will be able to launch on schedule in 2024.

"NASA is currently aiming to launch Artemis 2 in November 2024," adds Space.com. "The mission will send a crew of astronauts on an eight-day mission around the moon and back to test Orion's performance, crew interfaces, and guidance and navigation systems."

Unprecedented access to space is leading to all sorts of cool new ideas, including the prospect of storing data on the lunar surface. Cloud computing startup Lonestar Data Holdings announced the results of its latest funding round, taking it one step closer to this very goal. Gizmodo reports: The Florida-based company raised $5 million in seed funding to establish lunar data centers, Lonestar announced in a press release on Monday. Lonestar wants to build a series of data centers on the Moon and establish a viable platform for data storage and edge processing (i.e. the practice of processing data near the source, as a means to reduce latency and improve bandwidth) on the lunar surface. "Data is the greatest currency created by the human race," Chris Stott, founder of Lonestar, said in an April 2022 statement. "We are dependent upon it for nearly everything we do and it is too important to us as a species to store in Earth's ever more fragile biosphere. Earth's largest satellite, our Moon, represents the ideal place to safely store our future."

In December 2021, Lonestar successfully ran a test of its data center on board the International Space Station. The company is now ready to launch a small data center box to the lunar surface later this year as part of Intuitive Machines's second lunar mission, IM-2 (the company's first mission, IM-1, is expected to launch in June). Intuitive Machines is receiving funding from NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program for delivering research projects to the Moon as part of the space agency's Artemis program. The lunar data centers will initially be geared towards remote data storage and disaster recovery, allowing companies to back up their data and store it on the Moon. In addition, the data centers could assist with both commercial and private ventures to the lunar environment.

The miniature data center weighs about 2 pounds (1 kilogram) and has a capacity of 16 terabytes, Stott told SpaceNews. He said the first data center will draw power and communications from the lander, but the ones that will follow (pending its success) will be standalone data centers that the company hopes to deploy on the lunar surface by 2026. The test is only supposed to last for the duration of the IM-2 mission, which is expected to be around 11-14 days, an Intuitive Machines spokesperson told SpaceNews.

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) is investigating the potentials and dangers of solar geoengineering technologies, stating that these controversial interventions are humanity's "only option" to quickly cool the planet within years. An anonymous shares an excerpt from a Motherboard article: In a report published by UNEP in February, an independent panel describes what's currently known about so-called solar radiation modification, also called solar geoengineering, and concludes that, despite its great potential, it's not viable or even safe right now. Nonetheless, amid growing calls from governments to find an emergency brake for climate change -- and ongoing, independent efforts to develop solar geoengineering technology -- the UNEP is calling for a full-scale global review of the tech and eventual multinational framework for how it should be governed. The recommendations have some opponents fearing that this amounts to endorsement of adopting the technology -- a move that could create an even worse environmental crisis by messing with intertwined natural climate systems or pulling the focus away from mitigation measures, as well as further widening the inequalities that already exist as a result of climate change.

Solar radiation modification describes a range of technologies that aim to cool our overheated planet by reflecting incoming sunlight back out into space, or making it easier for heat coming off the earth to escape. Blocking out just two percent of sunlight could, according to some estimates, totally offset the warming that comes from doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from pre-industrial levels. It's a tantalizing prospect, but comes with a raft of issues. For one, as the report notes, the best large-scale evidence we have that it could even work is from volcanic eruptions, where the smog cooled the globe for a couple of years afterwards. Most of the actual research has involved climate modeling, theoretical analyses or cost estimates. Some groups have conducted small-scale indoor experiments of how the tech might work. No one's taken the trials outdoors yet.

Even if we knew more, it's not a be-all-end-all climate solution, said UNEP's chief scientist, Andrea Hinwood. "SRM technologies, should they be considered at some point in the future, do not solve the climate crisis because they do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions nor reverse the impacts of climate change. The world must be crystal clear on this point," she said in a UN media release. What solar geoengineering might do though, is buy the planet some time. The UNEP report highlights that even if we fully halted CO2 emissions right now, it could take at least until the end of the century to see a drop in temperature. "Make no mistake: there are no quick fixes to the climate crisis," wrote UNEP executive director Inger Andersen in the report. "Increased and urgent action to slash greenhouse gas emissions and invest in adapting to the impacts of climate change is immutable. Yet current efforts remain insufficient." Despite firm opposition from some, the message from the UNEP report seems to be to proceed with caution. "While UNEP is concerned, it is naive to think research will cease and the issues will disappear. We cannot afford to bury our heads in the sand," said chief scientist Hinwood.

With more lunar missions than ever on the horizon, the European Space Agency wants to give the moon its own time zone. The Associated Press reports: This week, the agency said space organizations around the world are considering how best to keep time on the moon. The idea came up during a meeting in the Netherlands late last year, with participants agreeing on the urgent need to establish "a common lunar reference time," said the space agency's Pietro Giordano, a navigation system engineer. "A joint international effort is now being launched towards achieving this," Giordano said in a statement.

For now, a moon mission runs on the time of the country that is operating the spacecraft. European space officials said an internationally accepted lunar time zone would make it easier for everyone, especially as more countries and even private companies aim for the moon and NASA gets set to send astronauts there. [...] The international team looking into lunar time is debating whether a single organization should set and maintain time on the moon, according to the European Space Agency.

There are also technical issues to consider. Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said. Further complicating matters, ticking occurs differently on the lunar surface than in lunar orbit. Perhaps most importantly, lunar time will have to be practical for astronauts there, noted the space agency's Bernhard Hufenbach. "This will be quite a challenge" with each day lasting as long as 29.5 Earth days, Hufenbach said in a statement. "But having established a working time system for the moon, we can go on to do the same for other planetary destinations."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: At least two companies in British Columbia, Canada, say they've received exemptions from the federal government allowing them to produce and distribute cocaine, heroin, MDMA, or magic mushrooms. But it's not clear under what circumstances the companies will be able to sell the drugs, and B.C. Premier David Eby said he was "astonished" to hear the announcement. On Thursday, Sunshine Earth Labs, a psychedelics manufacturer announced that Health Canada, a federal government agency, is allowing the company to legally produce and distribute the coca leaf and cocaine; MDMA; opium; morphine, heroin and psilocybin, the active ingredient in shrooms. The company said it plans to "bring a safer supply of drugs to the global market."

Meanwhile, cannabis extractions company Adastra announced it's now legally allowed to both produce and distribute psilocybin and cocaine. In a statement to VICE News, Health Canada said Adastra is licensed to produce the drugs for scientific and medical purposes but cannot sell products to the general public. "They are only permitted for sale to other licence holders who have cocaine listed on their licence, pharmacists, practitioners, hospitals, or the holder of a section 56(1) exemption for research purposes," the agency said.

Both companies claim they received amendments under Health Canada's Dealer's Licenses, which grant manufacturers, doctors, and researchers exemptions to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, allowing them to legally possess and make banned drugs. In a news conference, Eby said the licenses were granted without consultation from the province. "It is not part of our provincial plan," he said, noting that he would be following up with Health Canada about the announcements. Adastra said it's license allows it to "interact with up to 250 grams of cocaine and to import coca leaves to manufacture and synthesize the substance."

Britain's failed attempt to send satellites into orbit was a "disaster" and MPs are being urged to redirect funding to hospitals, with the country now seen as "toxic" for future launches. The Guardian reports: Senior figures at the Welsh company Space Forge, which lost a satellite when Virgin Orbit's Start Me Up mission failed to reach orbit, said a "seismic change" was needed for the UK to be appealing for space missions. Lengthy delays by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), as well as the launch failure, had left Space Forge six months behind its competition in the race to be the first company to bring a satellite back down to Earth, when it had been six months ahead, the science and technology committee heard.

Patrick McCall, a non-executive director at Space Forge, said: "The CAA is taking a different approach to risk, and a bit to process and timing as well. But I think unless there is, without wanting to be too dramatic, a seismic change in that approach, the UK is not going to be competitive from a launch perspective. I think the conclusion I've reached is right now it's not a good use of money, because our regulatory framework is not competitive." He added that the UK ought to consider spending the money it was investing in launch capability on other areas, such as hospitals.

Greg Clark, the chair of the committee, said it was a "disaster" that an attempt to show what the UK was capable of had turned "toxic for a privately funded launch." "We had the first attempted launch but the result is that you as an investor in space are saying there is no chance of investors supporting another launch from the UK with the current regulator conditions." Dan Hart, the CEO of Virgin Orbit, told MPs he had expected the CAA to work more similarly to the Federal Aviation Authority in the US but he had found the UK regulator more conservative. The company has since ended its contract with Spaceport Cornwall at Newquay airport but said it was still hoping to launch from the site in the future. Sir Stephen Hillier, the chair of the CAA, said: "Our primary duty is to ensure that the space activity in the UK is conducted safely. The CAA licensed in advance of technical readiness."

After analyzing the data collected from NASA's successful Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) last year, the DART team found that the kinetic impactor mission "can be effective in altering the trajectory of an asteroid, a big step toward the goal of preventing future asteroid strikes on Earth." The findings were published in four papers in the journal Nature. From a NASA press release: The first paper reports DART's successful demonstration of kinetic impactor technology in detail: reconstructing the impact itself, reporting the timeline leading up to impact, specifying in detail the location and nature of the impact site, and recording the size and shape of Dimorphos. The authors, led by Terik Daly, Carolyn Ernst, and Olivier Barnouin of APL, note DART's successful autonomous targeting of a small asteroid, with limited prior observations, is a critical first step on the path to developing kinetic impactor technology as a viable operational capability for planetary defense. Their findings show intercepting an asteroid with a diameter of around half a mile, such as Dimorphos, can be achieved without an advance reconnaissance mission, though advance reconnaissance would give valuable information for planning and predicting the outcome. What is necessary is sufficient warning time -- several years at a minimum, but preferably decades. "Nevertheless," the authors state in the paper, DART's success "builds optimism about humanity's capacity to protect the Earth from an asteroid threat."

The second paper uses two independent approaches based on Earth-based lightcurve and radar observations. The investigation team, led by Cristina Thomas of Northern Arizona University, arrived at two consistent measurements of the period change from the kinetic impact: 33 minutes, plus or minus one minute. This large change indicates the recoil from material excavated from the asteroid and ejected into space by the impact (known as ejecta) contributed significant momentum change to the asteroid, beyond that of the DART spacecraft itself. The key to kinetic impact is that the push to the asteroid comes not only from colliding spacecraft, but also from this ejecta recoil. The authors conclude: "To serve as a proof-of-concept for the kinetic impactor technique of planetary defense, DART needed to demonstrate that an asteroid could be targeted during a high-speed encounter and that the target's orbit could be changed. DART has successfully done both."

In the third paper, the investigation team, led by Andrew Cheng of APL, calculated the momentum change transferred to the asteroid as a result of DART's kinetic impact by studying the change in the orbital period of Dimorphos. They found the impact caused an instantaneous slowing in Dimorphos' speed along its orbit of about 2.7 millimeters per second -- again indicating the recoil from ejecta played a major role in amplifying the momentum change directly imparted to the asteroid by the spacecraft. That momentum change was amplified by a factor of 2.2 to 4.9 (depending on the mass of Dimorphos), indicating the momentum change transferred because of ejecta production significantly exceeded the momentum change from the DART spacecraft alone. DART's scientific value goes beyond validating kinetic impactor as a means of planetary defense. By smashing into Dimorphos, the mission has broken new ground in the study of asteroids. DART's impact made Dimorphos an "active asteroid" -- a space rock that orbits like an asteroid but has a tail of material like a comet -- which is detailed in the fourth paper led by Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute.

An anonymous reader shares this report from the Washington Post: Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky — or "direct air capture," as it is known by experts and scientists — is a bit like a time machine for climate change. It removes CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it deep underground, almost exactly the reverse of what humanity has been doing for centuries by burning fossil fuels. Its promise? That it can help run back the clock, undoing some of what we have done to the atmosphere and helping to return the planet to a cooler state.

The problem with direct air capture, however, has been that it takes energy — a lot of energy.... But if the energy powering that comes from fossil fuels, direct air capture starts to look less like a time machine than an accelerator: a way to emit even more CO2. Now, however, a company is working to combine direct air capture with a relatively untapped source of energy: Heat from Earth's crust. Fervo Energy, a geothermal company headquartered in Houston, announced on Thursday that it will design and engineer the first purpose-built geothermal and direct air capture plant. With the help of a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the company hopes to have a pilot facility online in 3 to 5 years.

If it works, it will be a way to produce carbon-free electricity, while reducing CO2 in the atmosphere at the same time. In short, a win-win for the climate. "You have to have your energy from a carbon-free source" for direct air capture to make sense, said Timothy Latimer, the CEO of Fervo Energy. "Geothermal is a great match...." Geothermal wells don't, of course, get anywhere close to Earth's core, but a geothermal well drilled just 1 to 2 miles into hot rocks below the surface can reach temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees. Water is pumped into the well, heated and returned to the surface, where it can be converted into steam and electricity. Even after generating electricity, most geothermal plants have a lot of waste heat — often clocking in around 212 degrees. And conveniently, that happens to be the exact temperature needed to pull carbon dioxide out of an air filter and bury it underground.
The article notes a study which found that if air capture were combined with all the geothermal plants currently in America, the country "could suck up around 12.8 million tons of carbon dioxide every year."

And "Unlike wind and solar, a geothermal plant can be on all of the time, producing electricity even when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining."

The inner core of the Earth appears to hold an innermost secret. From a report: Geology textbooks almost inevitably include a cutaway diagram of the Earth showing four neatly delineated layers: a thin outer shell of rock that we live on known as the crust; the mantle, where rocks flow like an extremely viscous liquid, driving the movement of continents and the lifting of mountains; a liquid outer core of iron and nickel that generates the planet's magnetic field; and a solid inner core. Analyzing the crisscrossing of seismic waves from large earthquakes, two Australian scientists say there is a distinctly different layer at the very center of the Earth. "We have now confirmed the existence of the innermost inner core," said one of the scientists, Hrvoje Tkalcic, a professor of geophysics at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Dr. Tkalcic and Thanh-Son Pham, a postdoctoral researcher, estimate that the innermost inner core is about 800 miles wide; the entire inner core is about 1,500 miles wide. Their findings were published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. While the cutaway diagram appears to depict clear-cut divisions, knowledge about the deep interior of Earth is unavoidably fuzzy. It is nearly 4,000 miles to the center of Earth, and it is impossible to drill more than a few miles into the crust. Most of what is known about what lies beneath comes from seismic waves -- the vibrations of earthquakes traveling through and around the planet. Think of them as a giant sonogram of Earth.

Two Harvard seismologists, Miaki Ishii and Adam Dziewonski, first proposed the idea of the innermost inner core in 2002 based on peculiarities in the speed of seismic waves passing through the inner core. Scientists already knew that the speed of seismic waves traveling through this part of the Earth varied depending on the direction. The waves traveled fastest when going from pole to pole along the Earth's axis and slowest when traveling perpendicular to the axis. The difference in speeds -- a few percent faster along polar paths -- arises from the alignment of iron crystals in the inner core, geophysicists believe. But in a small region at the center, the slowest waves were those traveling at a 45-degree angle to the axis instead of 90 degrees, the Harvard seismologists said. The data available then were too sparse to convince everyone.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Vast Space, a company that emerged from stealth last September with the aim of building artificial gravity space stations in low Earth orbit, has acquired space tug startup Launcher, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The acquisition, a first for Vast, will give the company access to Launcher's Orbiter space tug and payload platform and its liquid rocket engine, E-2. Under the terms of the deal, Vast will also absorb all of Launcher's talent, including Launcher founder Max Haot, who will join as president. The two companies told TechCrunch that the deal has been in the works for months, with both signing a Letter of Intent to acquire back in November.

The deal could be a big accelerator for Vast; the company's founder, billionaire crypto pioneer Jed McCaleb, said Vast will use the Orbiter tug to test space station subsystems and components in orbit as soon as June of this year, and then again around October. Those two missions, which will be Orbiter's second and third flights, will also carry customer payloads. Vast will continue to operate Orbiter as a commercial product; Haot said they had more than five customer contracts and are signing more. Haot added that the space tug's abilities, like approaching and moving away from spacecraft and hosting payloads, as well as its technologies like flight software, avionics and guidance, navigation and control systems will complement development of the space station. "The two companies declined to provide much more detail about the upcoming missions using Orbiter, nor did they offer any detail about future timelines for development, partnerships or form factor of the station," notes TechCrunch. "But they did say that the first station the company sends to space will be zero G, with artificial gravity stations following."

More generally, McCaleb said that acquisitions are not part of Vast's larger strategy. "Acquisitions typically go pretty wrong," he said. "For the most part, the combined team now plus a few more folks, we'll be able to do quite a bit."

The growing conflict between China and the U.S. extends from computer-chip factories to a suspected spy balloon over American skies. Running through it all is a struggle for technological superiority. From a report: China has striven for years to develop cutting-edge technologies, in part through heavy spending on research. Now, according to Western officials and executives, it also has mobilized its legal system to pry technology from other nations. Officials in the U.S. and European Union accuse China of using its courts and patent panels to undermine foreign intellectual-property rights and help Chinese businesses. They say China is focusing such efforts on industries it deems important, including technology, pharmaceuticals and rare-earth minerals.

A U.S. manufacturer of X-ray equipment had a decade-old patent invalidated by a Chinese legal panel. A Spanish mobile-antenna designer lost a similar fight in a Shanghai court. Another Chinese court ruled that a Japanese conglomerate broke antitrust law by refusing to license its technology to a Chinese rival. At China's Communist Party congress in October, when Xi Jinping secured a third term as party leader, he praised the country for becoming a global innovator and pledged to help it prosper further. "We will increase investment in science and technology through diverse channels and strengthen legal protection of intellectual property rights, in order to establish a foundational system for all-around innovation," he told Chinese lawmakers.

"Astronomers spotted an unexpected trail in the gas surrounding a dwarf galaxy while using the Hubble Space Telescope...." writes Hot Hardware. "The light emitting from the trail traveled more than 7.5 billion years to reach Earth and is thought to be traveling at a breakneck speed of 1,600km/s (3.5 million mph).

Science Alert says it could be "the smoking gun pointing to a runaway supermassive black hole."

More from Universe Today: Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) lurk in the center of large galaxies like ours. From their commanding position in the galaxy's heart, they feed on gas, dust, stars, and anything else that strays too close, growing more massive as time passes. But in rare circumstances, an SMBH can be forced out of its position and hurtle through space as a rogue SMBH.

In a new paper, researchers from Canada, Australia, and the USA present evidence of a rogue SMBH that's tearing through space and interacting with the circumgalactic medium (CGM.) Along the way, the giant is creating shock waves and triggering star formation.... The paper hasn't been peer-reviewed yet....

In their paper, the authors explain how an SMBH can be cast out of its host galaxy. It always starts when galaxies merge. That leads to the formation of a binary SMBH at the center of the merger remnant. The binary SMBH can be very long-lived, surviving for as long as one billion years before merging. If during that time, a third SMBH reaches the galactic center, then a three-body interaction can give one of the SMBHs a velocity boost, and it can be driven from the galaxy.
Hot Hardware adds that "This is not the first time a supermassive black hole has been found ejected from the center of its host galaxy. However, this is the first time one has been detected speeding across intergalactic space and believed to be inactive."

And RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) explains that "After the collision and ejection from the galaxy core, the passage of the black hole through the galaxy and it's surrounding material produced a burst of star formation along that line, which we now see as a faint linear streak of light....

"Those who like doom-laden prophecies will be upset to hear that, because we can see this moving across the plane of the sky, it is never going to come any where near us."