After manufacturing crystals of an HIV drug in space, the first orbital factory is stuck in orbit after being denied reentry back to Earth due to safety concerns. Gizmodo reports: The U.S. Air Force denied a request from Varda Space Industries to land its in-space manufacturing capsule at a Utah training area, while the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) did not grant the company permission to reenter Earth's atmosphere, leaving its spacecraft hanging as the company scrambles to find a solution, TechCrunch first reported. A spokesperson from the FAA told TechCrunch in an emailed statement that the company's request was not granted at this time "due to the overall safety, risk and impact analysis."

Gizmodo reached out to Varda Space to ask which regulatory requirements have not been met, but the company responded with a two-word email that ominously read, "no comment." The California-startup did provide an update on its spacecraft through X (formerly Twitter). "We're pleased to report that our spacecraft is healthy across all systems. It was originally designed for a full year on orbit if needed," Varda Space wrote on X. "We look forward to continuing to collaborate w/ our gov partners to bring our capsule back to Earth as soon as possible." Varda Space Industries launched its first test mission on June 12, "successfully sending a 200-pound (90-kilogram) capsule designed to carry drug research into Earth's orbit," reported CNN. "The experiment, conducted in microgravity by simple onboard machines, aims to test whether it would be possible to manufacture pharmaceuticals in space remotely."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro vowed to send "the first Venezuelan man or woman to the moon" in a Chinese spacecraft as part of a new strategic partnership between the two countries, he said Wednesday during a state visit to Beijing. Maduro and Chinese President Xi Jinping, meeting in person for the first time in five years, agreed to boost cooperation in several areas, Maduro said, including oil, trade, finance, mining -- and space exploration.

"Very soon, Venezuelan youth will come to prepare as astronauts, here in Chinese schools," Maduro said, as part of a "new era" of collaboration between China and Venezuela. After years of drifting away from Beijing, Maduro is strengthening ties with China as he seeks help reviving Venezuela's crumbling economy and oil industry. Venezuela is also in talks with the United States exploring the possibility of lifting some U.S. sanctions on Venezuela's oil sector in exchange for Maduro's promise to hold free and fair presidential elections next year. "Venezuela became the first outside nation to join the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project, which was jointly announced by China and Russia in 2021," notes Space.com.

It may be some time before any Venezuelans visit the moon, however. The report notes that Venezuela owes over $15 billion to China at the moment, which will likely impact how much the country would be able to contribute to the China-led ILRS. Venezuela also faces severe economic, political and social crises that have fueled an exodus that has surpassed 7 million.

Humanity is slowly losing access to the night sky, and astronomers have invented a new term to describe the pain associated with this loss: "noctalgia," meaning "sky grief." Space.com reports: Along with our propensity for polluting air and water and the massive amounts of carbon we're dumping into the atmosphere to trigger climate change, we have created another kind of pollution: light pollution. [...] Given the harmful effects of light pollution, a pair of astronomers has coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it. Their term, as reported in a brief paper in the preprint database arXiv and a letter to the journal Science, is "noctalgia." In general, it means "sky grief," and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.

Thankfully, there is a way to tackle noctalgia, just as there are ways to combat climate change. On the ground, efforts have sprung up across the globe to create dark-sky reserves, where surrounding communities pledge not to encroach with further expansions of light pollution. [...] Tackling satellite-based pollution is another matter, as that will require international cooperation and pressure on companies like SpaceX to be better stewards of the skies they are filling with equipment.

In late August the blog of Harvard professor Avi Loeb declared he had "Wonderful news! For the first time in history, scientists analyzed materials from a meter-size object that originated from outside the solar system."

In July Loeb retrieved parts of a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua, New Guinea in 2014. A local New York newscast describes the find as "metallic marbles, less than a millimeter in diameter," while Loeb called them "beautiful spheres that were colored — blue, brown or gold."

Now USA Today reports: Early analysis shows that some spherules from the meteor path contain "extremely high abundances" of an unheard-of composition of heavy elements. Researchers on the team say the composition of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, labeled as a "BeLaU" composition, does not match terrestrial alloys natural to Earth or fallout from nuclear explosions. Additionally, the composition is not found in magma oceans of Earth, nor the moon, Mars or other natural bodies in the solar system.

Other elements are thought to have been lost by evaporation during IM1's passage through the Earth's atmosphere, researchers said, leading them to theorize that the spherules could originate in a magma ocean on an exoplanet with an iron core outside the solar system.
Long-time Slashdot reader Okian Warrior writes that "Technical details can be found here, and a readable accounting of the analysis and results can be found on Avi Loeb's blog." Loeb writes that the exact composition of those spheres are now being studied at three separate laboratories, including one at Harvard.

In July the New York Times published reactions to Loeb's claim that "It's most likely a technological gadget with artificial intelligence." "People are sick of hearing about Avi Loeb's wild claims," said Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University. "It's polluting good science — conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room." Dr. Desch added that several of his colleagues were now refusing to engage with Dr. Loeb's work in peer review, the process by which scholars evaluate one another's research to ensure that only high-quality studies are published... "What the public is seeing in Loeb is not how science works. And they shouldn't go away thinking that."
Last week Salon also had a few questions for Loeb: In your book, you called Carl Sagan's adage that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" a "logical fallacy." How and why do you think that statement is somewhat flawed or a logical fallacy?

It's used as an excuse for people who don't want to deal with an exciting possibility. They don't seek the evidence and they argue, "Well, we don't have any evidence...."

If or when we encounter extraterrestrial life, do you think we'll find it or it will find us? Why?

I think we will find it near us because most stars [formed] billions of years before the sun, so it's more likely that some other civilizations preceded us because their star, if it's like the sun, already went through what we in the future might go through. We just need to be humble and modest, not assume that we are unique and special — that Albert Einstein was the smartest scientist who ever lived since the Big Bang — and engage in the search.

That's what I'm trying to do, and the pushback is really strange under these circumstances because the people who argue against it have very strong opinions. But if you look at the history of science, they were very often wrong: the people [who] thought that the earth was the center of the universe, for example.
From Loeb's blog post: During my routine jog at sunrise on the deck of Silver Star, I was asked: "Are you running away from something or towards something?" My answer was: "Both. I am running away from colleagues who have strong opinions without seeking evidence, and I am running towards a higher intelligence in interstellar space."

When Linus Torvalds announced Linux kernel 6.6's first release candidate, it included a newly-stable version of KSMBD, which is Samsung's in-kernel server for the SMB protocol (for sharing files/folders/printers over a network).

An announcement in 2021 had said that "For many cases the current userspace server choices were suboptimal either due to memory footprint, performance or difficulty integrating well with advanced Linux features."

LWN noted at the time that Linux has been using "the user-space Samba solution since shortly after the beginning." In a sense, ksmbd is not meant to compete with Samba; indeed, it has been developed in cooperation with the Samba project. It is, however, meant to be a more performant and focused solution than Samba is; at this point, Samba includes a great deal of functionality beyond simple file serving. Ksmbd claims significant performance improvements on a wide range of benchmarks...One other reason — which tends to be spoken rather more quietly — is that a new implementation can be licensed under GPLv2, while Samba is GPLv3.
The Register notes that when Samba switched to GPL 3, "one result was that Apple dropped Samba from Mac OS X and replaced it with its own, in-house server called SMBX." And they also remember that a month after its debut in 2021, "Linux sysadmins got to enjoy KSMBD's first security exploit." What's changed now is that it has faced considerable security testing and as a result it is no longer marked as experimental. It's been developed with the assistance of the Samba team, which itself documents how to use it. It's compatible with existing Samba configuration files. As the team says, "It is not meant to replace the existing Samba fileserver 'smbd', but rather be an extension and will integrate with Samba in the future...."

KSMBD is also important in that placing such core server functionality right inside the kernel represents a significant potential attack surface for crackers... The new bcachefs file system will not be going into kernel 6.6, and its developer is not happy.
"It's taken some time to get KSMBD to a state that was considered stable," points out Linux magazine. That time has come, and KSMBD is planned for Linux kernel 6.6.: But why is KSMBD important? First off, it promises considerable performance gains and better support for modern features such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)... KSMBD also adds enhanced security, considerably better performance for both single and multi-thread read/write, better stability, and higher compatibility. In the end, hopefully, this KSMBD will also mean easier share setups in Linux without having to jump through the same hoops one must with the traditional Samba setup.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Firefly Aerospace just set a new responsive-launch record. The company's Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Thursday (Sept. 14) at 10:28 p.m. EDT (7:28 p.m. local California time; 0228 GMT on Sept. 15), kicking off a mission for the U.S. Space Force called Victus Nox. The rocket roared off the pad just 27 hours after the U.S. Space Force gave the order -- less time than on any previous national security mission. The wheels for Victus Nox (Latin for "conquer the night") began turning in September 2022, when the Space Force awarded contracts to Texas-based Firefly and Millennium Space Systems, a Boeing subsidiary headquartered in the Los Angeles area that built the mission's payload.

On Aug. 30 of this year, Firefly and Millennium entered the mission's "hot standby" phase, a six-month period during which they could receive a launch-alert notice at any time. After receipt of that notice, Millennium and Firefly would have 60 hours to get the satellite from Millennium's Southern California facilities to Vandenberg, fuel it up and mate it to the Alpha rocket's payload adapter. The alert came through recently, and the mission teams hit their ambitious timeline. "Upon activation, the space vehicle was transported 165 miles [266 kilometers] from Millennium's El Segundo facility to Vandenberg Space Force Base where it was tested, fueled and mated to the launch adapter in just under 58 hours, significantly faster than the typical timeline of weeks or months," Space Force officials said in the emailed statement.

The teams then had to wait for the launch order, which would give them Victus Nox's orbital requirements. They would then have just 24 hours to update Alpha's trajectory and guidance software, encapsulate the satellite in its payload fairing, get the payload to the pad, mate it to Alpha and get the rocket ready to launch, Firefly wrote in a statement. The teams managed that task as well. They were ready to launch as soon as the first window opened, which was 27 hours after the Space Force gave the order. Victus Nox's speed goals didn't end with the successful liftoff. The teams now aim to get the satellite up and running within 48 hours of its deployment. The report notes that the previous response-launch record for a U.S. national security mission was 21 days, which was set in June 2021.

A spacecraft left behind by U.S. astronauts on the lunar surface could be causing small tremors known as moonquakes, according to a new study. CNN reports: Researchers revealed the previously unknown form of seismic activity on the moon for the first time through an analysis of Apollo-era data using modern algorithms. Massive temperature swings that occur on the moon can cause human-made structures to expand and contract in a way that produces these vibrations, the report suggests. The lunar surface is an extreme environment, oscillating between minus 208 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 133 degrees Celsius) in the dark and 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius) in direct sun, according to a news release about the study.

In fact, the entire surface of the moon expands and contracts in the cold and heat, noted the study published September 5 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. Yet scientists were able to use a form of artificial intelligence to gain such an intimate understanding of the Apollo-era data that they could pinpoint gentle tremors that emitted from an Apollo 17 lunar lander module sitting a few hundred yards away from instruments recording the moonquakes, according to a synopsis of the study, which was led by Francesco Civilini, a recent California Institute of Technology postdoctoral researcher and a research space scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. (NASA provided funding for the study.)

The analysis offers new insights into how the moon responds to its surroundings and what can affect its seismic activities. The rumbles were not dangerous and likely would be imperceptible to humans standing on the moon's surface.

Analysts are concerned that a lack of skilled labor in the space industry "could impact aerospace's growth in recent years, putting key projects on hold or preventing space startups from gaining traction," reports ExtremeTech. From the report: According to the Space Foundation's annual Space Report, job opportunities within the U.S. space industry have grown 18% over the past five years. Meanwhile, American colleges saw a decline in engineering students across the same period, prompting the industry to wonder whether the workforce could keep up with demand. Indeed, the Space Foundation says only 17% of NASA's workforce is under 35; not only does the agency tend to hire workers who have accumulated a lot of experience, but there aren't as many young professionals under consideration as there could be.

The industry isn't just short on engineers, though. Although STEM degrees requiring an intimate familiarity with astronomy, physics, robotics, computing, mathematics, and other technical topics are certainly one path toward space, the industry relies on workers proficient in a much wider range of skills. Welders, electricians, crane operators, and other blue-collar workers are essential to manufacturing and ground operations. In contrast, marketers, PR representatives, bookkeepers, lawyers, and other office workers keep things running in the background. In fact, as of writing, SpaceX is even hiring a barista.

As Space Foundation CEO Tom Zelibor put it in the nonprofit's Q1 2023 report, the space industry might benefit from informing the public of the benefits of space exploration. These benefits are apparent to some, but others find space exploration nonessential or frivolous. Other people interested in the space industry might be scared off from pursuing it as a career, thanks to its reputation for requiring advanced degrees and mathematical prowess. From the Space Foundation's own educational projects to those run by The Planetary Society and Space for Humanity, public outreach could be the key to bolstering industry engagement. The report notes that the "space economy" has ballooned to $464 billion (up 159% from 2010) and is predicted to reach a $1 trillion valuation by 2030, according to some analysts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Imperial College is developing a rocket thruster called the Iridium Catalysed Electrolysis CubeSat Thruster (ICE-Cube Thruster) that is so small that it can only be fabricated using techniques originally designed for making silicon chips. The entire thruster chip is about the length of a fingernail, with the combustion chamber and nozzle only measuring 1 mm long. It also requires only 20 watts of electric current to operate and in a test campaign generated 1.25 millinewtons of thrust at a specific impulse of 185 seconds on a sustained basis. To put that into perspective, that's half a billion times less thrust than the engines used on the Space Shuttle.

However, the party trick of the ICE-Cube Thruster is that it uses ordinary water as its propellant, which is about as non-explosive and non-flammable as you can get. Onboard electric current creates electrolysis to break down the water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is fed into the combustion chamber to ignite, generating thrust to maneuver the CubeSat. Using water is not only very green, it also reduces payload because no pressurization is needed to store it, so storage and handling systems can be lighter and simpler. However, fabricating the combustion chamber and nozzle for the thruster in what is essentially two dimensions required taking a page from microelectronics by using the Micro-Electrical Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technique normally employed for machining silicon wafers for processors to sub-micrometer tolerances.

The cloud-based system the Air Force is co-developing with Canada to enable instantaneous combat data-sharing is just about ready for prime time, although the looming threat of a budget gap may slow its global deployment. The Drive reports: Cloud-based command-and-control (CBC2), a pillar of the service's Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), will hit initial operating capability roughly on schedule next month, Brig. Gen. Luke Cropsey, integrating program officer for Command, Control, Communications and Battle Management, told The War Zone and other outlets this week at the Air, Space, and Cyber conference near Washington, D.C. It's headed to three unspecified base locations within the first half of 2024, Cropsey said, with others to follow at "more scale" as what's anticipated to be a five-year rollout plan gets underway. [...] CBC2 is designed to replace the hardware-based Battle Control System-Fixed, which provides command-and-control for Canada and the U.S., including Alaska and Hawaii. Officially made a program in 2022, CBC2 is "a set of microservice applications," according to an Air Force release, that can take in more than 750 radar feeds and deliver them to a single user interface. "The system then allows operators to create machine-generated courses of action to help shorten the tactical C2 kill chain and send a desired effect via machine-to-machine connections," the release adds.

In addition to delivering data faster and streamlining communication, CBC2 will build in new artificial intelligence elements. A January Government Accountability Office report states that it will build upon Pathfinder, an AI-empowered prototype that ingests "data that would in the past have been ... left on the cutting room floor," as North American Aerospace Defense Command chief Gen. Glen VanHerck put it in remarks reported by C4ISRNet. A September 2020 paper (PDF) from the Canada Institute described Pathfinder as "giving new life to old sensors" for NORAD's defense. "In a recent demonstration," the paper stated, "The Pathfinder system was tied to Federal Aviation Administration radars, and without any modification to the radars themselves, consistently demonstrated an ability to effectively detect and track very small unmanned aircraft, previously thought to be beyond the capability of the system."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: Meta Avatars in Horizon Worlds now have virtual legs. If you launch Horizon Worlds and look in the mirror in the menu space, you'll see your avatar's full body, and you'll see it for other people too when you enter a world. The company's virtual avatars had previously faced widespread ridicule for their upper-body-only appearance. If you look down however you still won't see your own legs. This legs update only applies to third person avatars -- other people and yourself in the mirror -- not in first person.

Many VR apps & games already give you virtual legs in both first and third person. But no shipping VR system has built-in leg tracking, so virtual legs don't match the actual movement of your real legs. Further, there's not really a graceful way to handle the transition between sitting and standing, nor to make the legs look natural when moving around with the thumbstick. Some people don't mind these issues with fake virtual legs, but it feels disconcerting to others.

Legs had already arrived in the Quest home space (branded Horizon Home) two weeks ago for Quest firmware Public Test Channel users, but this is the first time they've arrived in a VR app. Third party apps using Meta Avatars (such as GOLF+) can't yet add legs though, as the SDK hasn't been updated. Horizon's developers seem to have early access to a new version.

NASA on Thursday said it has named a new director of research into what the government calls "unidentified anomalous phenomenon," or UAP, while the U.S. space agency's chief said an expert panel that urged deeper fact-finding on the matter found no evidence of an extraterrestrial origin for these objects. You can read the study team's full report here (PDF). Reuters reports: Administrator Bill Nelson made the announcement about the new research chief -- without disclosing the person's identity -- after the independent panel of experts recommended in a new report that NASA increase its efforts to gather information on UAP and play a larger role in helping the Pentagon detect them. [...] The NASA panel, comprising experts in fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, was formed last year and held its first public meeting in June. "The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don't know what these UAP are," Nelson said, adding that a goal of the agency is to "shift the conversation about UAP from sensationalism to science."

"The mission of NASA is to find out the unknown," Nelson said. "Whatever we find, we're going to tell you," Nelson added, promising transparency on any discoveries. The new UAP research director will handle "centralized communications, resources and data analytical capabilities to establish a robust database for the evaluation of future UAP," NASA said. Nelson told Reuters he does not know the name of the new director. Dan Evans, a senior research official in NASA's science unit and a member of the study team, said harassment that other panel members had received from the public during their work was "in part" why the new director's identity was being kept secret.

HP is the latest company to announce a foldable-screen PC. From a report: The 17-inch Spectre Foldable PC has a keyboard that can be used wirelessly with the device propped up on its kickstand. Or you could magnetically attach the keyboard to the screen's bottom half or even slide the keyboard toward you for a 1.5-screen-like experience. The OLED device addresses concerns around battery life and portability by including two battery packs instead of one. But the bendy, Intel 12th-gen computer will have to do quite a lot to even begin rationalizing its staggering $5,000 price. The Spectre Fold works as a 17-inch, 0.33-inch (8.5 mm) thick OLED tablet. Uniquely, it has an integrated kickstand for propping the PC up at a 120-degree angle. This is key because HP cites the kickstand as one of the reasons the computer is so costly, but this also means you don't have to deal with separate origami stands/sleeves.

With the PC propped up, it should be easy to work with the included wireless keyboard or stylus, which both charge wirelessly on the device. The Bluetooth keyboard can attach to the bottom half of the PC's screen for a 12.3-inch laptop view. If you slide the keyboard down toward you, revealing more of the OLED, the PC will automatically display windows north of the keyboard. This scenario is like working on a 14-inch laptop. HP says it worked with Microsoft to customize Windows 11's Snap feature so it's easy to bring a window or two to the space above the docked keyboard. Lenovo's Yoga Book 9i, a clamshell laptop with a second OLED screen where you'd expect the keyboard and touchpad to be, also lets you place windows on top of a docked keyboard. But when I tested that laptop, I typically found looking down physically uncomfortable.

The Ohio-based Smart Tire Company has started a Kickstarter campaign for its shape memory airless bicycle tires that were created in partnership with NASA. New Atlas reports: At the heart of each Metl tire is a Slinky-like spring that runs all the way around the tire. That spring is made of a shape memory nickel-titanium alloy known as NiTinol, which is described as being strong like titanium yet also stretchy like rubber. Importantly, when NiTinol is placed under pressure, it initially deforms but then goes back to its original shape. This characteristic allows the Metl tire to gently compress and rebound, providing a smooth ride just like a pneumatic tire.

The spring is encased in a poly-rubber material which forms the tire's transparent sidewalls and replaceable tread. According to the company, this setup incorporates only half as much rubber as a regular tire. Additionally, while the tread may have to be replaced roughly every 5,000 to 8,000 miles (8,047 to 12,875 km), the main tire should reportedly last for the life of the bike. For this commercial introduction of the technology, the Smart Tire Company is offering a road/gravel tire in size choices of 700 x 32c, 35c and 38c. The 35c model is claimed to weigh 450 grams (16 oz), which is around the middle of the weight range for comparable pneumatic tires.

And we're told that while this first version of the tire will be of a fixed firmness, future models may allow users to increase the firmness by pumping in more air. So they'll be semi-pneumatic, but they will still never go completely flat. Assuming the Metl tires reach production, a pledge of $500 will get you a set of two -- getting them retreaded should cost about $10. Complete aluminum or carbon fiber Metl-clad wheelsets are also available for pledges of $1,300 and $2,300, respectively. Potential backers should note, estimated delivery isn't until next June.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Human actions have pushed the world into the danger zone on several key indicators of planetary health, threatening to trigger dramatic changes in conditions on Earth, according to a new analysis from 29 scientists in eight countries. The scientists analyzed nine interlinked "planetary boundaries," which they define as thresholds the world needs to stay within to ensure a stable, livable planet. These include climate change, biodiversity, freshwater and land use, and the impact of synthetic chemicals and aerosols. Human activities have breached safe levels for six of these boundaries and are pushing the world outside a "safe operating space" for humanity, according to the report, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

The nine boundaries, first set out in a 2009 paper, aim to establish a set of defined "limits" on changes humans are making to the planet -- from pumping out planet-heating pollution to clearing forests for farming. Beyond these limits, the theory goes, the risk of destabilizing conditions on Earth increases dramatically. The limits are designed to be conservative, to enable society to solve the problems before reaching a "very high risk zone," said Katherine Richardson, a professor in biological oceanography at the University of Copenhagen and a co-author on the report. She pointed to the unprecedented summer of extreme weather the world has just experienced at 1.2 degrees Celsius of global warming. "We didn't think it was going to be like this at 1 degree [Celsius]" she said. "No human has experienced the conditions that we're experiencing right now," she added.

Of the three boundaries that scientists found are still within a safe space, two of them -- ocean acidification and the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere -- are moving in the wrong direction. There is some good news, however. The ozone layer was on the wrong side of the boundary in the 1990s, Richardson said. But thanks to international cooperation to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals, it is on track to recover completely. Crossing planetary boundaries does not mean the world has reached a disastrous tipping point. Hitting one does not mean "falling off a cliff," Richardson said. But it is a clear warning signal. The significance of the planetary boundaries model is that it doesn't analyze climate and biodiversity in isolation, the report authors said. Instead, it looks at the interaction of both, as well as a host of other ways humans are affecting the planet. Breaching one boundary is likely to have knock-on effects for others.

One year ago NASA crashed its DART spacecraft into the asteroid "Dimorphos" (which orbits around a much larger asteroid named "Didymos"). The BBC calls the mission "part of an experiment to change the space rock's direction and test Earth's defences against asteroids in the future.

"However, a teacher and his class studying the rock have now discovered that since the collision, it has moved in a strange and unexpected way." [U]sing their school telescope, a team of children and their teacher Jonathan Swift at Thacher School in California have found that more than a month after the collision, Dimorphos' orbit continuously slowed after impact... which is unusual and unexpected. As reported in the New Scientist, the team presented their findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

After discovering the unusual behaviour of Dimorphos, it's likely that Nasa will have to factor in the high school's findings, if they ever launch another asteroid redirection mission in the future... One explanation for the asteroid's orbit continuing to change so long after the Dart collision is that material thrown up by the impact, including rocks several metres across, eventually fell back onto the surface of the asteroid, changing its orbit even more. The European Space Agency is launching a mission called Hera, which will arrive at Dimorphos in 2026 and could reveal more details as to what happened to the asteroid following the impact.

The Washington Post reports: Japan launched a lunar mission Thursday, overcoming multiple failures and delays to become the fifth country to head to the moon — just weeks after India — in a global race to better understand Earth's closest neighbor... It is scheduled to enter the moon's orbit in three to four months and land early next year.

The rocket is carrying two space missions: a new X-ray telescope to help scientists better understand the origins of the universe and a lightweight high-precision moon lander that will serve as the basis for future moon landing technology. The telescope separated at 8:56 a.m., and the moon lander separated at 9:29 a.m...

Japan has made several attempts to reach the moon, including its Omotenashi project to land an ultrasmall probe. In November, Japan abandoned the project after failing to restore communications with the spacecraft. Earlier this year, Tokyo-based space company ispace also pulled the plug on the first Japanese private-sector attempt to land on the moon.
Japan's high-precision lander hopes to land within 328 feet (100 meters) of its target — which the article says it "much closer than conventional lunar landers, which usually have an accuracy of several kilometers."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the senior space editor at Ars Technica: In a new report, the federal department charged with analyzing how efficiently U.S. taxpayer dollars are spent, the Government Accountability Office, says NASA lacks transparency on the true costs of its Space Launch System rocket program. Published on Thursday, the new report (see .pdf) examines the billions of dollars spent by NASA on the development of the massive rocket, which made a successful debut launch in late 2022 with the Artemis I mission. Surprisingly, as part of the reporting process, NASA officials admitted the rocket was too expensive to support its lunar exploration efforts as part of the Artemis program. "Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable," the new report states...

Moreover, the report indicates that NASA has not regularly updated its five-year production cost estimates for the rocket. The report also cites concerns about development costs of future hardware for NASA's big-ticket rocket program, including the Exploration Upper Stage. Another problem with NASA's cost estimates is that they do not appear to account for delays to Artemis missions. It is probable that the Artemis II mission, a crewed flight around the Moon, will launch no earlier than 2025. The Artemis III crewed landing will likely slip to at least 2026, if not more, with additional delays down the line...

NASA officials interviewed by the Government Accountability Office acknowledged that they were concerned about the costs of the SLS rocket. "NASA recognizes the need to improve the affordability of the SLS program and is taking steps to do so," the report states. "Senior agency officials have told us that at current cost levels the SLS program is unsustainable and exceeds what NASA officials believe will be available for its Artemis missions."

According to Android specialist Mishaal Rahman, Android miscalculates the storage space taken up by system components, leading to inflated system storage utilization and potentially misleading users. Chandraveer Mathur writes via Android Police. From the report: We usually rely on Android's storage utilization utility to find apps and files eating up storage space, so we can uninstall or delete them if required. However, Android specialist Mishaal Rahman discovered that Google's calculation of the space consumed by Android system components is flawed. He executed shell commands to create a 3GB file in the /data/media/0 storage directory, which isn't a file path used for Android system files. However, the phone's storage breakdown showed a marked 3GB increase under the System heading, suggesting the OS suddenly became bigger.

This happens because Android calculates system storage as the space used up by anything other than what's covered by other categories in the storage breakdown, including audios, videos, images, documents, trash, and games. This means the System heading in the break doesn't just include Android system files. Android 14 also uses this dangerously flawed logic for calculating storage usage. Moreover, the Files app by Google also shows similar storage utilization by Android system components, perhaps because it uses the same incredulous attribution logic. By association, all other Android skins use flawed calculation of used storage space, but Samsung reportedly fixed this issue with the One UI 6 update. After running similar ADB commands as in the previous experiment, Rahman could confirm the increased utilization showed up under the Other files heading in the storage breakdown, instead of the System heading.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Artificial intelligence, according to Nicolai Tangen, head of Norway's huge $1.4tn oil fund, is like being "in a rocket on the way into space ... It's hugely exciting, but it's also scary." Stretching the metaphor to its limits, the head of the world's largest sovereign wealth fund adds: "We hope we're in Apollo 11, not Challenger. The mission statement is to return safely." All this might just seem to be a glib soundbite, but the Norwegian fund is among the most advanced of any of the world's big traditional investors in publicly articulating its thoughts on AI. This is not just on the balance between risk and opportunity from AI but also what it thinks the companies it invests in should be doing. As the importance of AI only grows, the oil fund's stance is going to be well worth following.

[...] The first is ensuring boards are accountable for the responsible development and use of AI. Here, Tangen is damning. "Boards are absolutely not on top of this," he says. Given how many companies have long struggled to get enough expertise on cyber security, AI is likely to be an even tougher ask. The oil fund could vote against those that do nothing, Tangen adds. The second relates to how transparent companies are on how they use AI and how they explain how those systems have been designed and tested. As well as the tech industry itself, the fund is paying particular attention to those sectors using AI with consumers such as healthcare, financial and consumer goods. The final element is risk management. The fund argues that companies should be proactive, and ensure outside verification and auditing of their AI systems and risk management processes.