An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Space Agency is in talks with SpaceX about the possibility of Elon Musk's space venture joining an international charter designed to reduce a growing swarm of debris in space, Director General Josef Aschbacher told Reuters. The 22-nation agency is spearheading one of several efforts to roll back the mass of space junk swirling round the planet from past missions that poses a risk to active satellites. Aschbacher said 110 countries or entities have joined ESA's Zero Debris charter, which aims to stop any new orbital garbage being generated by 2030.

Asked whether SpaceX, whose satellites now make up some two thirds of spacecraft active in low Earth orbit, had signed up, Aschbacher said: "Not yet, but we are in discussion with them... This is a charter that keeps evolving and... we will keep raising the topics because they are so fundamental." [...] There are currently 18,897 pieces of trackable space junk in orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks such objects. Space debris and junk are often used interchangeably, but some consider space junk to include inactive payloads and rocket bodies as well as debris, or errant shards of broken satellites. There are no international laws on debris, but countries and space agencies have begun in recent years to devise proposals and national rules for tackling the problem.

"Boeing has had a series of issues over the past few years," writes Slashdot reader quonset. "From planes crashing, lost service records, to a recent strike which cost them $6 billion, now comes word a satellite they made has exploded in space." CBS News reports: The Intelsat 33e satellite, which was launched in 2016 and provides communications across Europe, Asia and Africa, experienced "an anomaly" on Saturday, Intelsat said in a news release. Attempts were made to work with Boeing and repair the satellite, but on Monday, the U.S. Space Force confirmed that the satellite had exploded. The satellite's breakup left some customers without power or communications services. Intelsat said it is working with third-party providers to limit service interruptions, and is in communication with customers.

Since the breakup, the U.S. Space Force is now tracking "around 20 associated pieces" of the satellite in space. The agency said that there are "no immediate threats" and routine assessments to ensure safety are ongoing. Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said it had recorded "more than 80 fragments" of the destroyed satellite. Analysis of the pieces' trajectory determined that the destruction of the satellite was "instantaneous and high-energy," Roscosmos said.

NASA has revealed a full-scale prototype for six telescopes designed to detect gravitational waves. Phys.Org reports: The LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) mission is led by ESA (European Space Agency) in partnership with NASA to detect gravitational waves by using lasers to measure precise distances -- down to picometers, or trillionths of a meter -- between a trio of spacecraft distributed in a vast configuration larger than the sun. Each side of the triangular array will measure nearly 1.6 million miles, or 2.5 million kilometers.

The Engineering Development Unit Telescope, which was manufactured and assembled by L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York, arrived at Goddard in May. The primary mirror is coated in gold to better reflect the infrared lasers and to reduce heat loss from a surface exposed to cold space, since the telescope will operate best when close to room temperature.

The prototype is made entirely from an amber-colored glass-ceramic called Zerodur, manufactured by Schott in Mainz, Germany. The material is widely used for telescope mirrors and other applications requiring high precision because its shape changes very little over a wide range of temperatures. The LISA mission is slated to launch in the mid-2030s.

NASA will rely on SpaceX's Crew Dragon for two crewed missions to the ISS in 2025 while evaluating whether Boeing's Starliner requires another test flight for certification. SpaceNews reports: In an Oct. 15 statement, NASA said it will use Crew Dragon for both the Crew-10 mission to the ISS, scheduled for no earlier than February 2025, and the Crew-11 mission scheduled for no earlier than July. Crew-10 will fly NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers along with astronaut Takuya Onishi from the Japanese space agency JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. NASA has not yet announced the crew for the Crew-11 mission.

Earlier this year, NASA had hoped that Boeing's CST-100 Starliner would be certified in time to fly the early 2025 mission. Problems with the Crew Flight Test mission, which launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, led NASA to conclude in July that the spacecraft would not be certified in time. It delayed that Starliner-1 mission from February to August 2025, moving up Crew-10 to February. NASA also announced then that it would prepare Crew-11 in parallel with Starliner-1 for launch in that August 2025 slot. "The timing and configuration of Starliner's next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing's path to system certification is established," NASA said in its statement about the 2025 missions. "NASA is keeping options on the table for how best to achieve system certification, including windows of opportunity for a potential Starliner flight in 2025."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hollywood Reporter: A production company for Blade Runner 2049 has sued (PDF) Tesla, which allegedly fed images from the movie into an artificial intelligence image generator to create unlicensed promotional materials. Alcon Entertainment, in a lawsuit filed Monday in California federal court, accuses Elon Musk and his autonomous vehicle company of misappropriating the movie's brand to promote its robotaxi at a glitzy unveiling earlier this month. The producer says it doesn't want Blade Runner 2049 to be affiliated with Musk because of his "extreme political and social views," pointing to ongoing efforts with potential partners for an upcoming TV series.

The complaint, which brings claims for copyright infringement and false endorsement, also names Warner Bros. Discovery for allegedly facilitating the partnership. "Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk's massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account," states the complaint. "Alcon did not want BR2049 to be affiliated with Musk." [...] The lawsuit cites an agreement, the details of which are unknown to Alcon, for Warners to lease or license studio lot space, access and other materials to Tesla for the event. Alcon alleges that the deal included promotional elements allowing Tesla to affiliate its products with WBD movies. WBD was Alcon's domestic distributor for the 2017 release of Blade Runner 2049. It has limited clip licensing rights, though not for Tesla's livestream TV event, the lawsuit claims.

Alcon says it wasn't informed about the brand deal until the day of the unveiling. According to the complaint, Musk communicated to WBD that he wanted to associate the robotaxi with the film. He asked the company for permission to use a still directly from the movie, which prompted an employee to send an emergency request for clearance to Alcon since international rights would be involved, the lawsuit says. The producer refused, spurring the creation of the AI images. [...] Alcon seeks unspecified damages, as well as a court order barring Tesla from further distributing the disputed promotional materials. Musk referenced Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner movie during the robotaxi event. "You know, I love Blade Runner, but I don't know if we want that future," he said. "I believe we want that duster he's wearing, but not the, uh, not the bleak apocalypse."

I, Robot director Alex Proyas also took to X last week, writing: "Hey Elon, Can I have my designs back please?"

For the first time in 50 years, humans will walk on the moon again. Currently planned for as soon as 2026, the Artemis III mission "will be one of the most complex undertakings of engineering and human ingenuity in the history of deep space exploration..." writes NASA. "Two crew members will descend to the surface and spend approximately a week near the South Pole of the Moon conducting new science before returning to lunar orbit..."

And they'll be wearing Prada, according to a Space News report from Milan: At a briefing at the International Astronautical Congress here October 16, Axiom and Prada revealed details about the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) suit that Axiom is creating for use by NASA on lunar landing missions starting with Artemis 3... Axiom emphasized the advanced capabilities in the suit, particularly when compared to the suits worn by the Apollo astronauts on moonwalks more than a half-century ago [including greater redundancy and healthy monitoring systems not available in Apollo-era suits]...

The unveiling came just over a year after Axiom announced it was working with luxury goods company Prada, an unconventional partnership intended to leverage Prada's expertise in materials and design... [Axiom's executive VP of extravehicular activity Russell Ralston] said Axiom has leveraged Prada's expertise in fabrics and garment design in helping create the outer layer of the suit, which reflects sunlight and keeps dust from getting into interior layers... "If you look across all the different technologies that are needed within the suit, the uniqueness of those technologies and their application, the supply chain has tended to be pretty unstable," he said. "So, one of the things that Prada has really helped us with is bringing stability to that base, especially on the fabric side...."

Not surprisingly, Prada also contributed to the appearance of the suit. "One of the things that was important to us was the appeal of the suit, the look of the suit," Ralston said. "Something that Prada brought to the table was helping with the general aesthetic of the suit." One design aspect that brought the two companies together was a prominent red stripe on the suit. Ralston noted that was a nod to a NASA tradition where the mission commander's suit would have that red stripe to distinguish them from another spacewalker...

While the current focus of the suit is for walking on the moon, Ralston said the suit can be easily adapted for applications in low Earth orbit, such as spacewalks from the International Space Station or Axiom's future commercial space station.
The article adds that 30 people worked on the suit (full- or part-time). "These suits will give the astronauts increased range of motion and flexibility to explore more of the landscape than on previous lunar missions," according to NASA.

With "the ability to send high quality images and video to the ground with advanced communication technology, they will be sharing a unique new human experience with the world."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

"Six years after the Spectre transient execution processor design flaws were disclosed, efforts to patch the problem continue to fall short," writes the Register: Johannes Wikner and Kaveh Razavi of Swiss University ETH Zurich on Friday published details about a cross-process Spectre attack that derandomizes Address Space Layout Randomization and leaks the hash of the root password from the Set User ID (suid) process on recent Intel processors. The researchers claim they successfully conducted such an attack.... [Read their upcomong paper here.] The indirect branch predictor barrier (IBPB) was intended as a defense against Spectre v2 (CVE-2017-5715) attacks on x86 Intel and AMD chips. IBPB is designed to prevent forwarding of previously learned indirect branch target predictions for speculative execution. Evidently, the barrier wasn't implemented properly.

"We found a microcode bug in the recent Intel microarchitectures — like Golden Cove and Raptor Cove, found in the 12th, 13th and 14th generations of Intel Core processors, and the 5th and 6th generations of Xeon processors — which retains branch predictions such that they may still be used after IBPB should have invalidated them," explained Wikner. "Such post-barrier speculation allows an attacker to bypass security boundaries imposed by process contexts and virtual machines." Wikner and Razavi also managed to leak arbitrary kernel memory from an unprivileged process on AMD silicon built with its Zen 2 architecture.

Videos of the Intel and AMD attacks have been posted, with all the cinematic dynamism one might expect from command line interaction.

Intel chips — including Intel Core 12th, 13th, and 14th generation and Xeon 5th and 6th — may be vulnerable. On AMD Zen 1(+) and Zen 2 hardware, the issue potentially affects Linux users. The relevant details were disclosed in June 2024, but Intel and AMD found the problem independently. Intel fixed the issue in a microcode patch (INTEL-SA-00982) released in March, 2024. Nonetheless, some Intel hardware may not have received that microcode update. In their technical summary, Wikner and Razavi observe: "This microcode update was, however, not available in Ubuntu repositories at the time of writing this paper." It appears Ubuntu has subsequently dealt with the issue.

AMD issued its own advisory in November 2022, in security bulletin AMD-SB-1040. The firm notes that hypervisor and/or operating system vendors have work to do on their own mitigations. "Because AMD's issue was previously known and tracked under AMD-SB-1040, AMD considers the issue a software bug," the researchers explain. "We are currently working with the Linux kernel maintainers to merge our proposed software patch."
BleepingComputer adds that the ETH Zurich team "is working with Linux kernel maintainers to develop a patch for AMD processors, which will be available here when ready."

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an op-ed written by Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, and chair of the Defense Innovation Board: There are government boondoggles, and then there's NASA's Artemis program. More than a half century after Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind, Artemis was intended to land astronauts back on the moon. It has so far spent nearly $100 billion without anyone getting off the ground, yet its complexity and outrageous waste are still spiraling upward. The next US president should rethink the program in its entirety. As someone who greatly respects science and strongly supports space exploration, the more I have learned about Artemis, the more it has become apparent that it is a colossal waste of taxpayer money. [...]

A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary. A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon -- no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required -- at a small fraction of the cost. Its successful landing of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated how far beyond NASA it is moving. Meanwhile, NASA is canceling or postponing promising scientific programs -- including the Veritas mission to Venus; the Viper lunar rover; and the NEO Surveyor telescope, intended to scan the solar system for hazardous asteroids -- as Artemis consumes ever more of its budget. Taxpayers and Congress should be asking: What on Earth are we doing? And the next president should be held accountable for answers.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: From dumping iron into the ocean to launching mirrors into space, proposals to cool the planet through 'geoengineering' tend to be controversial -- and sometimes fantastical. A new idea isn't any less far-out, but it may avoid some of the usual pitfalls of strategies to fill the atmosphere with tiny, reflective particles. In a modeling study published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists report that shooting 5 million tons of diamond dust into the stratosphere each year could cool the planet by 1.6C -- enough to stave off the worst consequences of global warming. The scheme wouldn't be cheap, however: experts estimate it would cost nearly $200 trillion over the remainder of this century -- far more than traditional proposals to use sulfur particles. [...]

The researchers modeled the effects of seven compounds, including sulfur dioxide, as well as particles of diamond, aluminum, and calcite, the primary ingredient in limestone. They evaluated the effects of each particle across 45 years in the model, where each trial took more than a week in real-time on a supercomputer. The results showed diamond particles were best at reflecting radiation while also staying aloft and avoiding clumping. Diamond is also thought to be chemically inert, meaning it would not react to form acid rain, like sulfur. To achieve 1.6C of cooling, 5 million tons of diamond particles would need to be injected into the stratosphere each year. Such a large quantity would require a huge ramp up in synthetic diamond production before high-altitude aircraft could sprinkle the ground-up gems across the stratosphere. At roughly $500,000 per ton, synthetic diamond dust would be 2,400 times more expensive than sulfur and cost $175 trillion if deployed from 2035 to 2100, one study estimates.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space News: SpaceX has been awarded contracts for eight launches under the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 program, the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command announced Oct. 18. The contracts worth $733.5 million span seven missions for the Space Development Agency (SDA) and one for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) projected to launch in 2026. These are part of the NSSL Phase 3 procurement of launch services for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

The NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 program is structured as an Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract, a flexible procurement method often used in government contracting. The total value of the Lane 1 contract is estimated at $5.6 billion over five years, with Blue Origin, SpaceX, and United Launch Alliance (ULA) selected as the primary vendors to compete for individual task orders. The Space Development Agency is utilizing SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to launch small satellites into a low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellation, a network of satellites designed to enhance military communications and intelligence capabilities. SpaceX has already completed two successful launches for the Tranche 0 portion of SDA's constellation.

"The Phase 3 Lane 1 construct allows us to execute launch services more quickly for risk-tolerant payloads, putting more capabilities in orbit faster to support national security," said Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space at the Space Force. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket has yet to perform its first launch and will need to complete at least two successful flights to qualify for NSSL certification, while ULA's Vulcan Centaur, which has completed two flights, is still awaiting final certification for the program.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The big financial moments in life used to be marked with a flourish of a pen. Buying a house. A car. Breakfast. Not anymore. Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express dropped the requirement to sign for charges like restaurant checks in 2018. They don't look at our scribbles to verify identity or stop fraud. Taps, clicks and electronic signatures took over the heavy lifting for many everyday purchases -- and many contracts, loan applications and even Social Security forms. The John Hancock was written off as a relic useful mainly to inflate the value of sports memorabilia. But signatures didn't die.

We continue to be asked to sign with ink on paper or using fingers on touch screens at many restaurants, bars and other businesses. And people keep signing card receipts out of habit -- even when there is no blank space for it -- because it feels weird not to, payment networks and retail groups say. "Traditions have this odd way of sticking around," said Doug Kantor, general counsel of the National Association of Convenience Stores. Signatures had been used to verify identity and agree to financial terms for centuries. Banks kept records of customer signatures to check against, but the sheer number of transactions and advancements in technology eventually made that impractical.

By the 1980s, charges could be processed electronically. Signatures were still used in cases of fraud or stolen cards. Banks could call merchants and ask them to present a signed receipt. Yet given how easy signatures are to forge, they proved limited as a fraud prevention tool. Now there are more sophisticated ways to determine whether cards are stolen or misused, according to Mark Nelsen, global head of consumer payments at Visa.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Households on individual streets will be targeted with personalised adverts under plans being rolled out by Channel 4. The channel is to use new technology which will allow brands to tailor who sees their advert by enabling them to select a demographic within a specific location down to street level. For example, someone watching Made in Chelsea on Channel 4's streaming service could be served an ad for a fashion brand in a local outlet to them if a particular fashion trend is being discussed.

Advertisers can further optimise their campaign by selecting from 26 programme genres, as well as time of day and device the show is being watched on. It forms part of a wider update to Channel 4's streaming platform that the broadcaster hopes could boost revenues by as much as $13m. The company will launch a new private marketplace enabling brands to buy advertising space directly in real-time. This will allow advertisers to amend their campaigns to respond to events, whether that be real-world events such as local weather or developments in fictional storylines within TV shows. Channel 4's new ad targeting also includes more detailed data to track whether a viewer has made a purchase after seeing an ad, as well as new viewer profiles for brands to target.

The University of Toronto is constructing a 14-story building using mass timber, one of the largest and most recent projects to employ this innovative building technology. "Mass timber is an appealing alternative to energy-intensive concrete and steel, which together account for almost 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions," reports Knowable Magazine. "Though experts are still debating mass timber's role in fighting climate change, many are betting it's better for the environment than current approaches to construction. It relies on wood, after all, a renewable resource." From the report: Today, the tallest mass timber building is the 25-story Ascent skyscraper in Milwaukee, completed in 2022. As of that year, there were 84 mass timber buildings eight stories or higher either built or under construction worldwide, with another 55 proposed. Seventy percent of the existing and future buildings were in Europe, about 20 percent in North America and the rest in Australia and Asia, according to a report (PDF) from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. When you include smaller buildings, at least 1,700 mass timber buildings had been constructed in the United States alone as of 2023. [...]

In principle, mass timber is like plywood but on a much larger scale: The smaller pieces are layered and glued together under pressure in large specialized presses. Today, beams up to 50 meters long, usually made of what's called glue-laminated timber, or glulam, can replace steel elements. Panels up to 50 centimeters thick, typically cross-laminated timber, or CLT, replace concrete for walls and floors. These wood composites can be surprisingly strong -- stronger than steel by weight. But a mass timber element must be bulkier to achieve that same strength. As a building gets higher, the wooden supports must get thicker; at some point, they simply take up too much space. So for taller mass timber buildings, including the Ascent skyscraper, architects often turn to a combination of wood, steel and concrete.

The Euclid mission has revealed the first part of a 3D map of the universe, showcasing 14 million galaxies and tens of millions of stars with unprecedented detail. "The Euclid mission, launched in 2023 and run by the European Space Agency (Esa) with contributions from Nasa, sent its first snapshots in November of that year and in May 2024," reports The Guardian. "The goal of Euclid is to enable the creation of a 3D map in time and space of the universe, in an attempt to elucidate its evolution and, as a result, shed light on the mysterious phenomena of dark energy and dark matter that together make up 95% of the universe." From the report: The newly released data is a mosaic of 208 gigapixels and covers 1% of what will be the final map. The completed map is expected to involve six years of observations and will take in a third of the sky, with observations expected to capture billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light years. [...] Images released by Esa highlight the area of the sky covered by the new mosaic, together with the mosaic itself and zoomed-in views within it.

Esa said regions of light blue that can be seen in the mosaic were galactic cirrus clouds that sit between stars in the Milky Way. These wispy clouds, composed of gas and dust, reflect optical light, allowing them to be captured by the mission's super-sensitive visible light camera. Zoom in on the mosaic further and other features can be seen, including the spiral galaxy NGC 2188 and the galaxy cluster Abell 3381. In a view zoomed in 600 times relative to the original mosaic, a distant swirling galaxy is visible in incredible detail.

In a press release this morning, Apple announced a new iPad Mini with a faster A17 Pro chip that supports Apple Intelligence. The Verge reports: The new Mini is mostly a spec bump: it runs a new A17 Pro chip, which Apple says has a 30 percent faster CPU, 25 percent faster GPU, and a Neural Engine twice as fast as the previous model. The device also supports the new Apple Pencil Pro, which is a nice touch for the Mini-toting artists out there, and comes with 128GB of storage in the base model rather than 64GB. (Those AI models need all the space they can get.) The Wi-Fi 6E chip is faster, the USB-C port is faster, everything about the iPad Mini is the same as before only faster this time.

The only real design change with the new Mini is the colors. Apple's gone more colorful with a lot of its products this year, and the Mini comes in new purple and blue models. In photos they look muted rather than vivid, though, so don't expect the eye-popping new colors on the iPhone 16.

A new study reveals that the human sense of smell is far more sensitive than previously thought, capable of distinguishing odors and their sequences within just 60 milliseconds. CNN reports: In a single sniff, the human sense of smell can distinguish odors within a fraction of a second, working at a level of sensitivity that is "on par" with how our brains perceive color, "refuting the widely held belief that olfaction is our slow sense," a new study finds. Humans also can discern between various sequences of odors -- distinguishing a sequence of "A" before "B" from sequence "B" before "A" -- when the interval between odorant A and odorant B is merely 60 milliseconds, according to the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior. [...]

The new findings challenge previous research in which the timing it took to discriminate between odor sequences was around 1,200 milliseconds, Dr. Dmitry Rinberg, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Physiology at NYU Langone Health in New York, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in Nature Human Behavior. "The timing of individual notes in music is essential for conveying meaning and beauty in a melody, and the human ear is very sensitive to this. However, temporal sensitivity is not limited to hearing: our sense of smell can also perceive small temporal changes in odor presentations," he wrote. "Similar to how timing affects the perception of notes in a melody, the timing of individual components in a complex odor mixture that reaches the nose may be crucial for our perception of the olfactory world."

The ability to tell apart odors within a single sniff might be an important way in which animals detect both what a smell is and where it might be in space, said Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta, a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the new study. "The demonstration that humans can tell apart smells as they change within a sniff is a powerful demonstration that timing is important for smell across species, and therefore is a general principle underlying olfactory function. In addition, this study sheds important light on the mysterious mechanisms that support human odor perception," Datta wrote in an email. "The study of human olfaction has historically lagged that of vision and hearing, because as humans we think of ourselves as visual creatures that largely use speech to communicate," he said, adding that the new study helps "fill a critical gap in our understanding of how we as humans smell."

NASA's Europa Clipper mission lifted off successfully on Monday, marking the agency's first mission to Jupiter in over a decade. The $5.2 billion spacecraft aims to investigate whether Europa, Jupiter's fourth-largest moon, could harbor conditions suitable for life. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:06 p.m. Eastern time, lifting the Europa Clipper spacecraft into orbit around Earth.

Europa Clipper, NASA's largest-ever interplanetary craft, weighs 12,500 pounds and boasts solar panels spanning 100 feet. Its nine scientific instruments will study Europa's surface and interior in unprecedented detail. After a 1.8 billion-mile journey, the spacecraft will reach Jupiter in April 2030. It will then conduct 49 flybys of Europa over four years, coming within 16 miles of the moon's surface.

Scientists believe Europa's subsurface ocean could contain twice as much water as Earth's oceans. The mission will measure ocean depth, analyze surface compounds, and map Europa's magnetic field to gather clues about its internal composition. Instruments will search for warm spots indicating thin ice, potential cryovolcanoes, and plumes of water vapor. The spacecraft will also attempt to identify carbon-based molecules that could serve as building blocks for life. "Europa is certainly the most likely place for life beyond Earth in our solar system," Robert Pappalardo, Europa Clipper project scientist, told the New York Times.

Early this morning SpaceX successfully launched its Starship rocket on its fifth test flight. But more importantly, CNBC points out, SpaceX "made a dramatic first catch of the rocket's more than 20-story tall booster."

Watch the footage here. It's pretty exciting... The achievement marks a major milestone toward SpaceX's goal of making Starship a fully reusable rocket system... The rocket's "Super Heavy" booster returned to land on the arms of the company's launch tower nearly seven minutes after launch.

"Are you kidding me?" SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said on the company's webcast. "What we just saw, that looked like magic," Huot added...

Starship separated and continued on to space, traveling halfway around the Earth before reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean as intended to complete the test. There were no people on board the fifth Starship flight. The company's leadership has said SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the rocket launches with any crew...

With the booster catch, SpaceX has surpassed the fourth test flight's milestones... The company sees the ambitious catch approach as critical to its goal of making the rocket fully reusable. "SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing for the booster catch attempt, with technicians pouring tens of thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances for success," the company wrote on its website.

NASA confirmed that it's working with international partners and standards organizations to create a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) for future lunar exploration. This time standard will account for relativity and be scalable for other celestial bodies, supporting long-term missions like Artemis and commercial space activities. From the report: The lunar time will be determined by a weighted average of atomic clocks at the Moon, similar to how scientists calculate Earth's globally recognized Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Exactly where at the Moon is still to be determined, since current analysis indicates that atomic clocks placed at the Moon's surface will appear to 'tick' faster by microseconds per day. A microsecond is one millionth of a second. NASA and its partners are currently researching which mathematical models will be best for establishing a lunar time.

To put these numbers into perspective, a hummingbird's wings flap about 50 times per second. Each flap is about .02 seconds, or 20,000 microseconds. So, while 56 microseconds may seem miniscule, when discussing distances in space, tiny bits of time add up. "For something traveling at the speed of light, 56 microseconds is enough time to travel the distance of approximately 168 football fields," said Cheryl Gramling, lead on lunar position, navigation, timing, and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "If someone is orbiting the Moon, an observer on Earth who isn't compensating for the effects of relativity over a day would think that the orbiting astronaut is approximately 168 football fields away from where the astronaut really is."

In a rare disclosure, the U.S. Space Force announced that its secretive X-37B spaceplane will execute a series of maneuvers before returning back to Earth. SpaceNews reports: The reusable spacecraft, which has been in orbit since December 28, 2023, will perform aerobraking maneuvers to alter its trajectory around Earth, the Space Force said Oct. 10. This technique involves making multiple passes through the planet's upper atmosphere, using atmospheric drag to modify the vehicle's orbit while conserving fuel. These maneuvers also are intended to showcase responsible space operations, the Space Force said. The aerobraking enables the spaceplane to change orbits and comply with space debris mitigation rules by safely discarding the service module.

The X-37B, manufactured by Boeing, is jointly operated by the U.S. Space Force and the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. Since its launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the spaceplane has been conducting radiation effect experiments and testing space domain awareness technologies in a highly elliptical orbit. [...] After completing its aerobraking maneuvers, the X-37B will resume its testing and experimentation objectives. Once these are accomplished, the vehicle will de-orbit and return to Earth, utilizing its autonomous landing system to touch down horizontally like a conventional aircraft. The Space Force has not disclosed the expected duration of the current mission.