NASA's Juno spacecraft made its closest flyby yet of Io, one of Jupiter's largest moons, sending back images of "sharp cliffs, edgy mountain peaks, lakes of pooled lava and even a volcanic plume," reports the New York Times. From the report: The Juno spacecraft, designed to study the origin and evolution of Jupiter, arrived at the planet in 2016. NASA extended the mission in 2021, and the orbiter has since captured photos of the Jovian moons Ganymede, Europa and most recently Io. [...] Juno conducted a number of more distant observations of Io in recent years. Its latest flyby occurred on Dec. 30, when the spacecraft came within 932 miles of the moon. The images captured during this visit were made with an instrument called JunoCam and are in visible wavelengths. They are some of the highest resolution views of Io's global structure. The mission's managers shared six images of Io on the mission's website, and members of the public have since uploaded digitally enhanced versions that highlight features on Io's surface.

Mission scientists are already at work analyzing these images, searching for differences across Io's surface to learn how often its volcanoes erupt, how bright and hot those eruptions are and how the resulting lava flows. According to Dr. Bolton, the team will also compare Juno's images to older views of the Jovian moon to determine what has changed on Io over a variety of encounters. And they'll get a second set of data to work with in a month, when Juno completes another close flyby of the explosive world on Feb. 3.

India launched its first satellite on Monday to study black holes as it seeks to deepen its space exploration efforts ahead of an ambitious crewed mission next year. From a report: The spacecraft, named X-ray Polarimeter Satellite, was propelled into an orbit of 350 kilometers from an island near India's main spaceport of Sriharikota, off the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, according to S. Somanath, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation. The satellite, weighing about 470 kilograms, will carry out research on X-rays emanating from around 50 celestial objects with the help of two payloads built by ISRO and a Bengaluru-based research institute.

NASA launched a similar mission, the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, in 2021 to answer questions such as why black holes spin and build on the findings of its flagship telescope Chandra X-ray Observatory that blasted off more than two decades ago. China's National Space Administration launched the country's first X-ray space telescope to observe black holes, pulsars and gamma-ray bursts in 2017.

This summer 80 million Americans were experiencing 105-degree heat. And tonight the Washington Post identifies what was unique about 2023's weather: "the heat's all-consuming relentlessness.

"It went day by day, continent by continent, until people all over the map, whether in the Amazon or the Pacific islands or rural Greece, had glimpsed a climate future for which they are not prepared..." Even if its extremes are ultimately eclipsed, as seems inevitable, 2023 will mark a point when humanity crossed into a new climate era — an age of "global boiling," as United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called it. The year included the hottest single day on record (July 6) and the hottest ever month (July), not to mention the hottest June, the hottest August, the hottest September, the hottest October, the hottest November, and probably the hottest December. It included a day, November 17, when global temperatures, for the first time ever, reached 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial levels.

Discomfort, destruction, and death are the legacy of those records.

In Phoenix, a heat wave went on for so long, with 31 consecutive days above 110 Fahrenheit, that one NASA atmospheric scientist called it "mind-boggling." The surrounding county recorded a record number of heat deaths, nearly 600. In Brazil, drought sapped the normally lush Amazon, causing towns to ration drinking water, contributing to the deaths of endangered pink dolphins, and choking off the river-based system of travel and commerce... At one point the coastal Florida Keys waters reached 100 degrees, comparable to a hot tub...

One explanation for 2023's extreme heat is El Niño — a recurring oceanic phenomenon that warms the waters in the Pacific and causes a global ripple of consequences. But the scale of this year's heat — amplified by human-caused factors and the burning of fossil fuels — is still well beyond what most scientists had thought possible. Some have theorized that planetary warming may be accelerating. Others have said there's not enough evidence. What they agree upon, though, is that the earth is trending toward more extreme heat. That means that the experiences of 2023 can seem astonishing in the short-term but will one day look tame.

This year, then, will wind up as the first — and almost surely not the last — in which temperatures were at or near 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold the Paris agreement has aimed to avoid.
The article includes two more sobering statistics:

• "The University of Maine's Climate Change Institute logs daily global temperatures going back to 1940. From this July on, almost without fail, every daily temperature in 2023 topped the daily temperature from the same date in any of the prior 83 years."

• "In Brazil, the Rio Negro, one of the Amazon's main tributaries, fell to its lowest level since record keeping began more than a century earlier."

"Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren has asked NASA to delay a scheduled launch to the Moon that could include cremated remains," reports Arizona Public Radio station KNAU: Nygren says he recently learned of the January 8 launch of the Vulcan Centaur carrying the Peregrine Mission One. The lander will carry some payloads from a company known to provide memorial services by shipping human cremated remains to the Moon. Nygren wants the launch delayed and the tribe consulted immediately. He noted the Moon is sacred to numerous Indigenous cultures and that depositing human remains on it is "tantamount to desecration."

NASA previously came under fire after the ashes of former geologist and planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker were sent to the Moon in 1998. Then-Navajo Nation President Albert Hale said the action was a gross insensitivity to the beliefs of many Native Americans. NASA later apologized and promised to consult with tribes before authorizing any similar missions in the future.

What would happen if we built a concert venue in near-Earth orbit? A science policy journalist explores the question in the Washington Post: Forget U2 in the Las Vegas Sphere. Take me to a real concert in the round, where I can float 360 degrees around the stage, watching a guitarist shred from the perspective of a fly and inventing dance moves that Earth's gravity would forbid.

Before you dismiss this as a hallucination, consider that we're on the cusp of a new era of space travel. Engineer and space architect Ariel Ekblaw, founder of MIT's Space Exploration Initiative, says that within a decade, a trip off the planet could become as accessible as a first-class airline ticket — and that, in 15 or 20 years, we can expect space hotels in near-Earth orbit. She's betting on it, having founded a nonprofit to design spherical, modular habitats that can assemble themselves in space so as to be lightweight and compact at launch, much like the James Webb Space Telescope that NASA vaulted into deep space two years ago.

"The first era of space travel was about survival," she told me as I recently toured her lab. "We're transitioning now to build spaces that are friendlier and more welcoming so that people can thrive in space as opposed to just survive." There's no reason, Ekblaw said, that a concert hall can't be one of those structures.
The article ultimately calls this "an impulse for space travel I can get behind: curiosity about who we are and what more we can create when we reach beyond Earth. This is the realm of not just scientists and engineers but of all kinds of dreamers. It's a rendition of space exploration that can engage anyone to imagine what's possible."

As the year comes to a close, "one constant, reliable source of awe and beauty is the sky over our head..." writes astronomer Phil Plait in Scientific America

"And every year we see new things, or old things in new ways, and I've been set the wonderful task of selecting my favorites and relaying them and their import to you." End-of-year lists, especially those displaying astronomical imagery, tend to be splashy and colorful. That's understandable, but what they sometimes miss are the more subtle photographs, those that hide momentous discoveries in minor visual details or offer fresh perspectives on familiar objects. They may not leap off the page, but they still have an impact. That's what I've kept in mind while sorting through this year's celestial treasure trove. This gallery is by no means complete, but it shows what I think are some of the most interesting astronomical portraits to have emerged in 2023.

No gallery such as this would be complete without something from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), our newest infrared eye on the sky. This monster observatory has already brought so many small revolutions to astronomy that picking one from the past year is no small task. Should it be a baby star throwing an immense tantrum or a massive old star shedding material at colossal rates before it inevitably explodes as a supernova? Or should it be a map of a mind-stomping 100,000 galaxies?

Well, how about something very, very different — such as the skeletal structure of a nearby galaxy's intricate web of dust [also displayed at the top of Scientiic American's article]...? [I]t has a beautiful spiral structure and shows the effects of a smaller galaxy colliding with it. In the phenomenally sharp and decidedly eerie false-color view from JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument, we see countless clouds of cosmic dust in a skeletonlike pattern. Each of these clouds is made up of small grains of rocky and sooty carbon-based molecules expelled by dying stars...

Astronomers captured this image to better understand how stars are born in stellar nurseries and how they evolve over time.

SpaceX on Thursday launched two rockets into orbit, only three hours apart, bringing its total number of launches to 98 in 2023. Space.com reports: The first SpaceX mission to take to the skies Thursday (Dec. 28) was a Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the U.S. military's secretive X-37B space plane, designed mission USSF-52. That blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8:07 p.m. EST (0107 GMT on Dec. 29). This marked the second Falcon Heavy flight of 2023. Second up on the launch docket for Thursday, hours later, was a Falcon 9 liftoff carrying 23 SpaceX Starlink units to low Earth orbit from nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This launch took place at 11:01 p.m. EST (0401 GMT on Dec. 29). This was SpaceX's 98th and final launch of 2023, and the 96th flight for a Falcon 9 rocket this year.

SpaceX's 97th launch overall for this year marked the seventh flight for X-37B, but the first time the space plane hitched a lift atop a Falcon Heavy rocket. The X-37B/Falcon Heavy launch had been scrubbed several times previously due to bad weather and an issue with ground equipment. The launch of 23 Starlink broadband satellites from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida that capped off 2023 was also the 96th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket during this year. SpaceX's next launch is targeted for Jan. 2, 2024 and will see a further 21 Starlink satellites lift to orbit to join the over 5,500 internet supplying units currently orbiting Earth.

Andy Maxwell reports via TorrentFreak: As the crew of Artemis 2 prepare to become the first humans to fly to the moon since 1972, the possibilities of space travel are once again igniting imaginations globally. More than 92% of internet users who want to learn more about this historic mission and the program in general are statistically likely to use Google search. Behind the scenes, however, the ability to find relevant content is under attack. Blundering DMCA takedown notices sent by a company calling itself DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. claim to protect the rights of an OnlyFans/Instagram model working under the name 'Artemis'. Instead, keyword-based systems that fail to discriminate between copyright-infringing content and that referencing the word Artemis in any other context, are flooding towards Google. They contain demands to completely deindex non-infringing, unrelated content, produced by innocent third parties all over the world.

A recent deindexing demand dated December 13, 2022, lists DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. of Canada as the sender. The name of the content owner is redacted but the notice itself states that the company represents a content creator performing under the name Artemis. The notice demands the removal of 3,617 URLs from Google search. If successful, those URLs would be completely unfindable by more than 92% of the world's population who use that search engine. [...] At least 9 of the first 20 URLs in the notice demand the removal of non-infringing articles and news reports referencing the Artemis space program. None have anything to do with the content the sender claims to protect. [...]

Theories as to who might own and/or operate DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. aren't hard to find but the company does exist and is registered as a corporate entity in Canada. Registered at the same address is a company with remarkably similar details. BranditScan is a corporate entity operating in exactly the same market offering similar if not identical services. BranditScan has sent DMCA takedown notices to Google under three different notifier accounts.

During a meeting of the National Space Council, Vice President Kamala Harris said an international astronaut will land on the Moon during one of NASA's Artemis missions. "Today, in recognition of the essential role that our allies and partners play in the Artemis program, I am proud to announce that alongside American astronauts, we intend to land an international astronaut on the surface of the Moon by the end of the decade," Harris said. Ars Technica reports: Although the National Space Council is useful in aggregating disparate interests across the US government to help form more cohesive space policies, public meetings like the one Wednesday can seem perfunctory. Harris departed the stage soon after her speech, and other government officials read from prepared remarks during the rest of the event. Nevertheless, Harris' announcement highlighted the role the space program plays in elevating the soft power of the United States. It was widely assumed an international astronaut would eventually land on the Moon with NASA. Harris put a deadline on achieving this goal.

NASA has long included astronauts from its international partners on human spaceflight missions, dating back to the ninth flight of the space shuttle in 1983, when West German astronaut Ulf Merbold joined five Americans on a flight to low-Earth orbit. This was seen by US government officials as a way to foster closer relations with like-minded countries. The inclusion of foreign astronauts on US missions also repays partner nations who make financial commitments to US-led space projects with a high-profile flight opportunity for one of their citizens.

Among the international partners contributing to Artemis, it seems most likely a European astronaut would get the first slot for a landing with NASA. ESA funded the development of the service modules used on NASA's Orion spacecraft, which will ferry astronauts from Earth to the Moon and back. These modules provide power and propulsion for Orion. ESA is also developing refueling and communications infrastructure for the Gateway mini-space station to be constructed in orbit around the Moon.

A Japanese astronaut might also have a shot at getting a seat on an Artemis landing. Japan's government has committed to providing the life-support system for the Gateway's international habitation module, along with resupply services to deliver cargo to Gateway. Japan is also interested in building a pressurized rover for astronauts to drive across the lunar surface. In recognition of Japan's contributions, NASA last year committed to flying a Japanese astronaut aboard Gateway. Canada is building a robotic arm for Gateway, but a Canadian astronaut already has a seat on NASA's first crewed Artemis mission, albeit without a trip to the lunar surface.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket took off from West Texas and flew to the edge of space on Tuesday with a package of scientific research and technology demonstration experiments. This was the first flight of Blue Origin's 60-foot-tall (18-meter) New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed the booster and triggered an in-flight abort for the vehicle's pressurized capsule. There were no passengers aboard for that mission, and the capsule safely separated from the failed booster and parachuted to a controlled landing.

The flight on Tuesday also didn't carry people. Instead, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, lofted 33 payloads from NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies. Some of these payloads were flown again on Tuesday's launch after failing to reach space on the failed New Shepard mission last year. Among these payloads were an experiment to demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity and an investigation studying the strength of planetary soils under different gravity conditions. Blue Origin's capsule, mounted on top of the rocket, also flew 38,000 postcards submitted by students through Club for the Future, the company's nonprofit.

For Tuesday's return-to-flight mission, the New Shepard rocket ignited its BE-3PM engine and climbed away from Blue Origin's remote launch site near Van Horn, Texas, at 10:42 am CST (16:42 UTC). The hydrogen-fueled engine fired for more than two minutes, then shut down as scheduled as the rocket continued coasting upward, reaching an altitude of more than 347,000 feet (106 kilometers). The booster returned for a precision propulsive landing a short distance from the launch pad, and Blue Origin's capsule deployed three parachutes to settle onto the desert floor, completing a 10-minute up-and-down flight. Blue Origin has launched 24 missions with its reusable New Shepard rocket, including six flights carrying people just over the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 100 kilometers above Earth.

NASA has successfully beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video from a record-setting 19 million miles away. The Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, as it is called, is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming HD video from deep space to enable future human missions beyond Earth orbit. From a NASA press release: The [15-second test] video signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system's maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second (Mbps). Capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals, the instrument beamed an encoded near-infrared laser to the Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, where it was downloaded. Each frame from the looping video was then sent "live" to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the video was played in real time.

The laser communications demo, which launched with NASA's Psyche mission on Oct. 13, is designed to transmit data from deep space at rates 10 to 100 times greater than the state-of-the-art radio frequency systems used by deep space missions today. As Psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the technology demonstration will send high-data-rate signals as far out as the Red Planet's greatest distance from Earth. In doing so, it paves the way for higher-data-rate communications capable of sending complex scientific information, high-definition imagery, and video in support of humanity's next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.

Uploaded before launch, the short ultra-high definition video features an orange tabby cat named Taters, the pet of a JPL employee, chasing a laser pointer, with overlayed graphics. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche's orbital path, Palomar's telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater's heart rate, color, and breed are also on display. There's also a historical link: Beginning in 1928, a small statue of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat was featured in television test broadcast transmissions. Today, cat videos and memes are some of the most popular content online. "Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections," said Ryan Rogalin, the project's receiver electronics lead at JPL. "In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space. JPL's DesignLab did an amazing job helping us showcase this technology -- everyone loves Taters."

A system of lagoons has been discovered in Argentina hosting a rare range of microbial communities previously unknown to scientists. The microbial communities form giant mounds of rock as they grow — like corals building a reef millimeter by millimeter. And the University of Colorado points out that "the communities could also provide scientists with an unprecedented look at how life may have arisen on Mars, which resembled Earth billions of years ago."

"If life ever evolved on Mars to the level of fossils, it would have been like this," said geologist Brian Hynek, a professor in the department of geological sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, who helped document the ecosystem. "Understanding these modern communities on Earth could inform us about what we should look for as we search for similar features in the Martian rocks."
more details from CNN: Stromatolites are layered rocks created by the growth of blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, through photosynthesis. The structures are considered to be one of the oldest ecosystems on Earth, according to NASA, representing the earliest fossil evidence for life on our planet from at least 3.5 billion years ago. "These are certainly akin to some of the earliest macrofossils on our planet, and in really a rare type of environment on modern Earth," said Hynek...

While the stromatolites are in an environment containing oxygen, Hynek said he believes the layers farther down in the rock have little to no access to oxygen and are actively formed by microbes using anoxygenic photosynthesis. This would make the structures similar to the ones found on ancient Earth... "We've identified more than 600 ancient lakes on Mars; there may have even been an ocean. So, it was a lot more Earth-like early on," he said.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Scientists have long viewed Saturn's moon Enceladus, which harbors an ocean beneath its thick, icy shell, as one of the best places to search for life beyond Earth. Now, a new analysis of data collected by NASA's Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn and its moons between 2004 and 2017, has uncovered intriguing evidence that further supports the idea of Enceladus as a habitable ocean world.

Enceladus initially captured the attention of scientists in 2005 because plumes of ice grains and water vapor were observed rising through cracks in the moon's ice shell and releasing into space. The spacecraft flew through the plumes and "sampled" them, with data suggesting the presence of organic compounds within the plumes, some of which are key for life. The latest data analysis of Cassini's flybys of Enceladus revealed the detection of a molecule called hydrogen cyanide that's toxic to humans but crucial to processes driving the origin of life. What's more, the team also found evidence to support that Enceladus' ocean has organic compounds that provide a source of chemical energy that could potentially be used as powerful fuel for any form of life...

The combination of these elements together suggested a process called methanogenesis, or the metabolic creation of methane, may be at play on Enceladus. Scientists suspect methanogenesis may have also played out on early Earth, contributing to the origin of life. But the new research indicates more varied and powerful chemical energy sources are occurring within Enceladus' ocean... Now, the study authors want to investigate how diluted the organic compounds are within the subsurface ocean because the dilution of these compounds could determine whether Enceladus could support life. In the future, astronomers hope to send a dedicated mission to investigate Enceladus, which could provide a definitive answer as to whether life exists in the ocean world.
"Our work provides further evidence that Enceladus is host to some of the most important molecules for both creating the building blocks of life and for sustaining that life through metabolic reactions," accoding to one of the study's lead authors.

"Not only does Enceladus seem to meet the basic requirements for habitability, we now have an idea about how complex biomolecules could form there, and what sort of chemical pathways might be involved."

In 2020 a NASA spacecraft visited the asteroid Bennu. In October it returned to earth with a sample. Monday scientists got their first data about it at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union — which is a truly big deal.

"Before Earth had biology, it had chemistry," writes the Washington Post. "How the one followed from the other — how a bunch of boring molecules transformed themselves into this special thing we call life — is arguably the greatest unknown in science." The mission's top scientist, Dante Lauretta... showed slides with a long list of intriguing molecules, including carbon-based organics, in the grains and pebbles retrieved from Bennu. They will shine light on the molecular building blocks of the solar system and "maybe — still early phase — maybe insights into the origin of life." This analysis has only just started. The team has not yet released a formal scientific paper. In his lecture, Lauretta cited one interesting triangular, light-colored stone, which he said contained something he'd never seen before in a meteorite. "It's a head-scratcher right now. What is this material?" he said.

In an interview after the lecture, Lauretta said almost 5 percent of the sample is carbon. "That is a very carbon-rich sample — the richest we have in all our extraterrestrial material. ... We're still unraveling the complex organic chemistry, but it looks promising to really understand: Did these carbon-rich asteroids deliver fundamental molecules that may have gone on to contribute to the origin of life...?"

This space dirt has astrobiological import, though. By looking at prebiotic chemistry on Bennu, scientists will have a better idea what they are looking at if and when they find suspicious molecules elsewhere in the solar system, such as on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus. "This is almost the perfect laboratory control from non-biological chemistry," Glavin said. "This better prepares us for our search for life on Mars, or Europa or Enceladus — places that might have had life at one point."
Space.com quotes Lauretta as saying "We definitely have hydrated, organic-rich remnants from the early solar system, which is exactly what we were hoping when we first conceived this mission almost 20 years ago."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A NASA telescope has captured the biggest solar flare in years, which temporarily knocked out radio communication on Earth. The sun spit out the huge flare on Thursday, resulting in two hours of radio interference in parts of the U.S. and other sunlit parts of the world. Scientists said it was the biggest flare since 2017. Multiple pilots reported communication disruptions, with the impact felt across the country, said the government's Space Weather Prediction Center.

Scientists are now monitoring this sunspot region and analyzing for a possible outburst of plasma from the sun, also known as a coronal mass ejection, directed at Earth. The eruption occurred in the far northwest section of the sun, according to the center. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the action in extreme ultraviolet light, recording the powerful surge of energy as a huge, bright flash. Launched in 2010, the spacecraft is in an extremely high orbit around Earth, where it constantly monitors the sun. The sun is nearing the peak of its 11-year or so solar cycle. Maximum sunspot activity is predicted for 2025.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is, once again, having trouble transmitting any scientific or systems data back to Earth. "The 46-year-old spacecraft is capable of receiving commands, but a problem seems to have arisen with the probe's computers," reports Space.com. Slashdot readers quonset and ArchieBunker shared the news. From the report: Voyager 1's flight data system (FDS), which collects onboard engineering information and data from the spacecraft's scientific instruments, is no longer communicating as expected with the probe's telecommunications unit (TMU), according to a NASA blog post on Dec. 12. When functioning properly, the FDS compiles the spacecraft's info into a data package, which is then transmitted back to Earth using the TMU. Lately, that data package has been "stuck," the blog post said, "transmitting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros." Voyager's engineering team traced the problem back to the FDS, but it could be weeks before a solution is found. In May 2022, Voyager 1 experienced transmitting issues for several months before a workaround was found. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 experienced an unplanned "communications pause" earlier this year after a routine sequence of commands triggered a 2-degree change in the spacecraft's antenna orientation. This prevented it from receiving commands or transmitting data back to Earth until NASA fixed the issue a week later.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared an interesting article from ScienceAlert: Undersea volcanic eruptions account for more than three-quarters of all volcanism on Earth, but rarely do we see the impacts. The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption of 2022 was a dramatic exception. Its furious explosion from shallow waters broke the ocean surface and punched through the stratosphere, generating supercharged lighting and an atmospheric shock wave that circled the globe several times.

But there was far more to the fallout than satellite images could possibly capture or observers could report. We know the human toll this explosion took, but now a new study investigating the underwater impacts of the Hunga-Tonga eruption has detailed just how ferociously the explosion tore open the seafloor, ripped up undersea cables, and smothered marine life... The team also compiled a trove of data from ship-based sonar, sediment cores, geochemical analyses, water column samples, and video footage to chart the devastatingly powerful upheaval...

Their analyses show at least 6 cubic kilometers (km3) of seafloor was lost from within the caldera — 20 times the eruptive volume of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption — and an additional 3.5 km3 of material was blasted out of the Hunga volcano's submerged flanks... That leaves roughly four-fifths of the ejected material in the ocean; material that was funneled into fast-moving density flows that scoured out tracks 30 meters deep in the seafloor and accumulated 22 meters (72 feet) thick in some places.

"A tomato lost for eight months on the orbiting lab has been located, " reports Gizmodo, "absolving astronaut Frank Rubio of playful allegations that he ate it." NASA's Veg-05 experiment, a project focusing on growing fruits and vegetables in space, experienced an unusual turn of events when a Red Robin dwarf tomato vanished shortly after being harvested in March. This tomato, part of a study to explore the feasibility of continuous fresh-food production in space, was finally found, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli revealed during a livestream on December 6...

The Veg-05 project expanded the scope of in-space farming to include dwarf tomatoes, exploring how lighting and fertilizer variations influence fruit growth, safety, and nutritional value (and yes, tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables)... Following the harvest in March, each astronaut received a tomato sample stored in a Ziploc bag. However, concerns about potential fungal contamination led NASA to instruct the astronauts not to consume the fruit, as Space.com reported.

News of the missing tomato first emerged on September 13, during an event commemorating Rubio's one-year stay in orbit. Rubio, who had an extended mission on the ISS due to a malfunctioning Russian Soyuz spacecraft, lamented the loss of his tomato share, which had floated away before he could take a bite. Rubio, who spent a record 371 days in space, mused about the missing tomato, saying: "I spent so many hours looking for that thing. I'm sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future."
In the livestream Moghbeli "did not specify where on the 356-foot space station the one-inch-wide red dwarf tomato was located," notes the Guardian, "or in what condition." The Rubio tomato turned out to be one of only 12 red dwarves successfully germinated and grown to ripeness in space during the Veg-05 project, compared with more than 100 in a parallel experiment conducted on Earth, according to NASA.
Thanks to Slashdot reader christoban for sharing the news.

"The United States military is preparing to launch its secretive X-37B space plane on a seventh mission in orbit," reports NBC News.

Shaped like a small space shuttle, "It's an itty-bitty spaceplane, not quite 30 feet long and under 10 feet tall," writes the Washington Post, "with a pair of stubby wings and a rounded, bulldog-like nose." Space.com says the launch window for the uncrewed vehicle opens Monday at 8:14 p.m. EST.

From NBC News: For the first time, the X-37B will ride into orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Since its debut more than a decade ago, the X-37B has been a source of intrigue within the space community, mostly owing to the mysterious nature of its activities in low Earth orbit. Despite not knowing its true purpose or location, skywatchers have occasionally spotted and photographed the space plane in the night sky using telescopes... The military is tight-lipped about such operations, but the Space Force said the X-37B missions "are key to ensuring safe and responsible operations in space for all users of the space domain..."
The "U.S. Space Force says that launching on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket will allow testing "in new orbital regimes, experimenting with space domain awareness technologies and investigating the radiation effects to NASA materials."

The Washington Post notes that "The reference about 'space domain awareness' could mean that it will be keeping an eye on other satellites, potentially watching for threats": At least one part of the mission is known. The vehicle will "expose plant seeds to the harsh radiation environment of long-duration spaceflight" in an experiment for NASA. In the past, the Pentagon has also used the X-37B to test some of its cutting edge technologies, including a small solar panel designed to transform solar energy into microwaves, a technology that one day could allow energy harnessed in space to be beamed back to Earth...

If Sunday's X-37B mission is like previous ones, the spaceplane could be in space for a while. Its first flight, which launched in 2010, lasted 224 days.

In an exclusive interview with PetaPixel, astronaut Don Pettit reveals the changes that Nikon makes to its firmware especially for NASA. From the report: Galactic cosmic rays are high-energy particles that originate from outside the solar system that likely come from explosive events such as a supernova. They are bad news for cameras in space -- damaging the sensor and spoiling photos -- so Nikon made special firmware for NASA to limit the harm. Pettit tells PetaPixel that Nikon changed the in-camera noise reduction settings to battle the cosmic rays -- noise is unwanted texture and blur on photos.

Normal cameras have in-camera noise reduction for exposures equal to or longer than one second. This is because camera manufacturers don't think photographers need noise reduction for shorter exposures because there's no noise to reduce. But in space, that's not true. "Our cameras in space get sensor damage from galactic cosmic rays and after about six months we replace all the cameras but you still have cameras with significant cosmic ray damage," explains Pettit. "It shows up at fast shutter speeds, not just the slow ones. So we got Nikon to change the algorithm so that it can do in-camera noise reduction at shutter speeds of up to 500th of a second."

Pettit says Nikon's in-camera noise reduction "does wonders" for getting rid of the cosmic ray damage and that "trying to get rid of it after the fact is really difficult." That's not the only special firmware feature that Nikon makes for NASA; photographers who shoot enough photos know that the file naming system resets itself eventually which is no good for the space agency's astronauts. "The file naming system on a standard digital system will repeat every so often and we can't have two pictures with the same number," explains Pettit. "We'll take half a million pictures with the crew on orbit and so Nikon has changed the way the RAW files are numbered so that there will be no two with the same file number." The report notes that NASA started using Nikon film cameras in 1971, shortly after the Apollo era; "in part because Nikon is so good at making custom modifications that help the astronauts." Previously, the agency used boxy, black Hasselblad cameras.