NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) hope to take custody of the samples Perseverance has been patiently collecting and return them safely to Earth, and they'll need the help of two more helicopters. IFLScience reports: NASA and the ESA are collaborating on putting a lander on Mars that is capable of taking off again and making a rendezvous with an orbiter which will then bring the cargo back to Earth. Rather than collect its own samples, the return mission will take over those collected by Perseverance, and the biggest change to the plans lies in how that transfer will occur. The project has not got funding yet but the space agencies are refining their plans. In a quest for the backing they need new details have been announced, along with a return date -- 2033 -- only slightly further off than 1969 was when Kennedy promised a Moon landing "before this decade is out."

Previously the Sample Return Lander was planned to carry a Sample Fetch Rover and its associated second lander. Instead, NASA and the ESA are now proposing to equip the lander with two helicopters based on the phenomenally successful Ingenuity. They will be able to traverse the gap between the Mars Ascent Vehicle and where Perseverance left them much more quickly and having two offers redundancy if one fails. There's also a possibility that Perseverance could deliver the samples directly to the Mars Ascent Vehicle if it is still operating when the ascent vehicle lands.

If everything goes to plan the Earth Return Orbiter and Sample Retrieval Lander will launch in 2027 and 2028 respectively. Although delays are common for space missions, the fact Ingenuity has continued to operate -- and even set records for its flights -- well beyond its anticipated mission time has increased the sample return team's optimism.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The Moon isn't necessarily there if you don't look at it. So says quantum mechanics, which states that what exists depends on what you measure. Proving reality like that usually involves the comparison of arcane probabilities, but physicists in China have made the point in a clearer way. They performed a matching game [Mermin-Peres game] in which two players leverage quantum effects to win every time -- which they can't if measurements merely reveal reality as it already exists. [...] In each round of the game, Alice and Bob share not one, but two pairs of entangled photons on which to make any measurements they like. Each player also has a three-by-three grid and fills each square in it with a 1 or a -1 depending on the result of those measurements. In each round, a referee randomly selects one of Alice's rows and one of Bob's columns, which overlap in one square. If Alice and Bob have the same number in that square, they win the round.

Sounds easy: Alice and Bob put 1 in every square to guarantee a win. Not so fast. Additional "parity" rules require that all the entries across Alice's row must multiply to 1 and those down Bob's column must multiply to -1. If hidden variables predetermine the results of the measurements, Alice and Bob can't win every round. Each possible set of values for the hidden variables effectively specifies a grid already filled out with -1s and 1s. The results of the actual measurements just tell Alice which one to pick. The same goes for Bob. But, as is easily shown with pencil and paper, no single grid can satisfy both Alice's and Bob's parity rules. So, their grids must disagree in at least one square, and on average, they can win at most eight out of nine rounds.

Quantum mechanics lets them win every time. To do that, they must use a set of measurements devised in 1990 by David Mermin, a theorist at Cornell University, and Asher Peres, a onetime theorist at the Israel Institute of Technology. Alice makes the measurements associated with the squares in the row specified by the referee, and Bob, those for the squares in the specified column. Entanglement guarantees they agree on the number in the key square and that their measurements also obey the parity rules. The whole scheme works because the values emerge only as the measurements are made. The rest of the grid is irrelevant, as values don't exist for measurements that Alice and Bob never make. Generating two pairs of entangled photons simultaneously is impractical, Xi-Lin Wang says. So instead, the experimenters used a single pair of photons that are entangled two ways -- through polarization and so-called orbital angular momentum, which determines whether a wavelike photon corkscrews to the right or to the left. The experiment isn't perfect, but Alice and Bob won 93.84% of 1,075,930 rounds, exceeding the 88.89% maximum with hidden variables, the team reports in a study in press at Physical Review Letters. The researchers have a real-world use in mind for the demonstration: verifying the work of a quantum computer.

"That task is essential but difficult because a quantum computer is supposed to do things an ordinary computer cannot," reports Science Magazine. "[I]f the game were woven into a program, monitoring it could confirm that the quantum computer is manipulating entangled states as it should."

NASA is aiming to launch its new monster rocket, the Space Launch System, on its first trip to deep space as early as late August, the agency announced today. The Verge reports: NASA says it has placeholder dates for August 29th, September 2nd, and September 5th for the rocket's debut, though there is still plenty of work left to do on the vehicle between now and then. NASA officials stressed that they are not committing to any of these dates at the moment, but the announcement puts the rocket closer than it's ever been to its launch. The SLS has been in development for roughly a decade, and its inaugural launch date has been an ever-moving target. NASA originally planned to launch as early as 2017, but schedule delays, development mishaps, and poor management have caused the rocket's debut to slip again and again.

But after conducting a mostly full dress rehearsal with the rocket back in June, NASA is in the development end game, and an actual launch looms on the horizon. A more solid launch date should come closer to actual liftoff. "We'll make the agency commitment at the flight readiness review, just a little over a week before launch," NASA's Jim Free, associate administrator for exploration systems development, said during a press conference. "But these are the dates that the team is working to and have a plan to."

If NASA rolls out SLS to the launchpad in mid-August but cannot launch by September 5th, then the rocket's liftoff could see a significant delay. It all has to do with the SLS's flight termination system, which is used to destroy the rocket if something goes catastrophically wrong during the launch and the vehicle starts to veer off course. Teams must fully test the flight termination system before launch, and that work can only be done inside the VAB. Once the SLS is rolled out from the VAB, there is a 20-day time limit for the flight termination system before it has to be tested again. That means the rocket has to launch within 20 days of its rollout, or it must be returned to the VAB so that the flight termination system can get checked out again. That testing takes time, so if SLS is forced to come back to the VAB after rolling out in August, chances are it wouldn't be ready to fly until late October.

"Researchers and engineers from Kyoto University and the Kajima Corporation have released their joint proposal for a three-pronged approach to sustainable human life on the Moon and beyond," reports Gizmodo. The first element involves "The Glass," which aims to bring simulated gravity to the Moon and Mars through centrifugal force. From the report: Gravity on the Moon and Mars is about 16.5% and 37.9% of that on Earth, respectively. Lunar Glass and Mars Glass could bridge that gap; they are massive, spinning cones that will use centrifugal force to simulate the effects of Earth's gravity. These spinning cones will have an approximate radius of 328 feet (100 meters) and height of 1,312 feet (400 meters), and will complete one rotation every 20 seconds, creating a 1g experience for those inside (1g being the gravity on Earth). The researchers are targeting the back half of the 21st century for the construction of Lunar Glass, which seems unreasonably optimistic given the apparent technological expertise required to pull this off.

The second element of the plan is the "core biome complex" for "relocating a reduced ecosystem to space," according to a Google-translated version of the press release. The core biome complex would exist within the Moon Glass/Mars Glass structure and it's where the human explorers would live, according to the proposal. The final element of the proposal is the "Hexagon Space Track," or Hexatrack, a high-speed transportation infrastructure that could connect Earth, Mars, and the Moon. Hexatrack will require at least three different stations, one on Mars's moon Phobos, one in Earth orbit, and one around the Moon.

This month will mark a new chapter in the search for extraterrestrial life, when the most powerful space telescope yet built will start spying on planets that orbit other stars. Astronomers hope that the James Webb Space Telescope will reveal whether some of those planets harbor atmospheres that might support life. New York Times: Identifying an atmosphere in another solar system would be remarkable enough. But there is even a chance -- albeit tiny -- that one of these atmospheres will offer what is known as a biosignature: a signal of life itself. "I think we will be able to find planets that we think are interesting -- you know, good possibilities for life," said Megan Mansfield, an astronomer at the University of Arizona. "But we won't necessarily be able to just identify life immediately."

So far, Earth remains the only planet in the universe where life is known to exist. Scientists have been sending probes to Mars for almost 60 years and have not yet found Martians. But it is conceivable that life is hiding under the surface of the Red Planet or waiting to be discovered on a moon of Jupiter or Saturn. Some scientists have held out hope that even Venus, despite its scorching atmosphere of sulfur dioxide clouds, might be home to Venusians. Even if Earth turns out to be the only planet harboring life in our own solar system, many other solar systems in the universe hold so-called exoplanets. In 1995, Swiss astronomers spotted the first exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star. Known as 51 Pegasi b, the exoplanet turned out to be an unpromising home for life -- a puffy gas giant bigger than Jupiter, and a toasty 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. In the years since, scientists have found more than 5,000 other exoplanets. Some of them are far more similar to Earth -- roughly the same size, made of rock rather than gas and orbiting in a "Goldilocks zone" around their star, not so close as to get cooked but not so far as to be frozen.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: The BBC looks at a 100-year art project in which famous authors write books that will not be published until the year 2113. An annual ceremony takes place near a forest of sapling trees which will be turned into paper in the year 2113 and then used for printing those books.
From the article: It began with the author Margaret Atwood, who wrote a story called Scribbler Moon, and since then the library has solicited submissions from all over the world... All the manuscripts will be stored for almost a century inside locked glass drawers in a hidden corner of Oslo's main public library, within a small, wooden repository called the Silent Room. In 2114, the drawers will be unlocked, and the trees chopped down — and 100 stories hidden for a century will finally be published in one go.
It's part of Scottish artist Katie Paterson's fascination with the passage of time: One of her first works, Vatnajokull (the sound of) [included] a phone number that anyone could call to listen to an Icelandic glacier melting. Dial the number, and you'd be routed to a microphone beneath the water in the Jökulsárlón lagoon on Iceland's south coast, where blue-tinged icebergs calve away and float towards the sea....

One of her most recent exhibitions in Edinburgh, Requiem at Ingleby Gallery, featured 364 vials of crushed dust, each one representing a different moment in deep time. Vial #1 was a sample of presolar grains older than the Sun, followed by powdered four-billion-year-old rocks, corals from prehistoric seas, and other traces of the distant past. A few visitors were invited to pour one of the vials into a central urn: when I was there in June, I poured #227, a four-million-year-old Asteroidea fossil, a kind of sea star....

Of all her work exploring the long-term though, Future Library is the project most likely to be remembered across time itself. Indeed, it was deliberately created to be. And this year its longevity was ensured: Oslo's city leaders signed a contract formally committing them and their successors to protect the forest and library over the next 100 years.

CNN reports that a professor and his students at Stanford's Autonomous Systems Lab have received "phase II" funding from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (which supports space robotics research) after proving the feasibility of their plan for robots to crawl through space caves. "The team will use the next two years to work on 3D simulations, a robot prototype, develop strategies that help the robot avoid risk, and test out [their cave robot] in a realistic mission environment — likely a cave site in New Mexico or California."

One of the students explains to CNN that "Caves are risky environments, but they're scientifically interesting. Our idea for this robot is to go far before people would get there to do interesting science and scope out the area."

CNN explains why space caves are so crucial: New research suggests that the best chance of finding past or present evidence of life on Mars requires going below its surface — at least 6.6 feet (2 meters) below. Mars has an incredibly thin atmosphere, which means that the surface of the red planet is bombarded by high energy radiation from space, and that could quickly degrade substances like amino acids that provide fragile evidence of life. Those harsh surface conditions also present a challenge for astronauts, which is one reason scientists have suggested that caves on other planets could be the key to future exploration. Vast cave systems on the moon and Mars could act as shelters for future space travelers.

Caves could also contain resources like water, reveal more about the history of a planet — and be havens for evidence of microbial life. On Earth, there are a varied range of cave systems, many of which remain unexplored, and they support diverse groups of microorganisms. But caves are dangerous — and since we've never peered inside a Martian cave, it's difficult to know what to expect.
The cave robot would presumably to be equipped with cameras, microscopes and LIDAR remote sensing, and the team envisions it will be tethered to a power-supplying rover on the surface.

One team member even told CNN the robots could be adapted to perform maintenance and upkeep on the planned "Gateway" lunar outpost between Earth and the moon.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The short version of this story is that skywatchers led by Bill Gray had been tracking an object for months that, based on their calculations, would soon impact the moon. It was obviously a piece of rocket trash (rockets produce a ton of trash), but no one stepped up to say "yes, that's ours, sorry about that." Based on their observations and discussions, these self-appointed (though by no means lacking in expertise) object trackers determined that it was likely a piece of a SpaceX launch vehicle from 2015. But SpaceX didn't cop to it, and after a while Gray and others, including NASA, decided it was more likely to be the 2014 Chang'e 5-T1 launch out of China. China denied this is the case, saying the launch vehicle in question burned up on reentry.

Maybe they're telling the truth; maybe they don't want to be responsible for the first completely inadvertent lunar impact in history. Other spacecraft have struck the moon, but it was on purpose or part of a botched landing (in other words, the impact was intentional, just a little harder than expected) -- not just a wayward piece of space junk. Perhaps we'll never know, and really, that's the weirdest part of all. With hundreds of terrestrial telescopes and radars, space-based sensor networks and cameras pointing every which way -- and that's just the space monitoring we know about! -- it seems amazing that a whole rocket stage managed to sit in orbit for six or seven years, eventually getting all the way to the moon, without being identified.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Scientists at top universities in China propose sending a spacecraft powered by nuclear fission to orbit Neptune -- the outermost planet in our solar system -- in 2030. Astronomers have not yet been able to look at Uranus and Neptune in much detail. The best data collected so far comes from NASA's Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to have flown by the big blue orbs way back in 1986 and 1989. [...] The challenges involved are considerable. The outer solar system is cold, dark, and cruel. Spacecraft flying far from the Sun cannot rely on solar power, and need other sources of energy to maintain steady orbits and keep their instruments from freezing.

The Chinese authors envisioned a spacecraft with a mass up to 3,000 kilograms powered by a nuclear fission reactor at one end. It would also carry four smaller satellites -- two to study Neptune's atmosphere and another two to probe Triton, its largest moon, The Planetary Society first reported. Triton is an odd object -- it orbits in the opposite direction to its host planet, is geologically active, and may harbor liquid oceans beneath its icy crust. The best time to launch such a spacecraft would be 2030, the scientists reckoned. It could fly aboard China National Space Administration's Long March 5 rocket, and would reach Neptune a decade later after flying by the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn.

A small NASA-financed spacecraft launched from New Zealand on Tuesday, kicking off the space agency's plans to send astronauts back to the moon in a few years. From a report: The spacecraft, called CAPSTONE, is about the size of a microwave oven. It will study a specific orbit where NASA plans to build a small space station for astronauts to stop at before and after going to the moon's surface. At 9:55 p.m. local time (5:55 a.m. Eastern time), a 59-foot-tall rocket carrying CAPSTONE lifted off from a launchpad along the eastern coast of New Zealand. Although the mission is gathering information for NASA, it is owned and operated by a private company, Advanced Space, based in Westminster, Colo.

For a spacecraft headed to the moon, CAPSTONE is inexpensive, costing just under $30 million including the launch by Rocket Lab, a U.S.-New Zealand company. The first two stages of Electron rocket placed CAPSTONE into an elliptical orbit around Earth. For this mission, Rocket Lab essentially added a third stage that will methodically raise the altitude of the spacecraft over the next six days. At that point, CAPSTONE will head on its way to the moon, taking a slow but efficient path, arriving on Nov. 13.

"China's Mars sample return mission aims to collect samples from the Red Planet and deliver them to Earth in 2031, or two years ahead of a NASA and ESA joint mission," reports SpaceNews: Lifting off in late 2028... the complex, multi-launch mission will have simpler architecture in comparison with the joint NASA-ESA project, with a single Mars landing and no rovers sampling different sites. However, if successful, it would deliver to Earth the first collected Martian samples; an objective widely noted as one of the major scientific goals of space exploration....

The mission will build on the Mars entry, descent and landing technologies and techniques demonstrated by Tianwen-1 in May 2021, as well as the regolith sampling, automated lunar orbit rendezvous and docking, and high velocity atmospheric reentry success achieved by the 2020 Chang'e-5 lunar sample return mission.... Landing on Mars would take place around September 2029. Sampling techniques will include surface sampling, drilling and mobile intelligent sampling, potentially using a four-legged robot.

The ascent vehicle will consist of two stages, using either solid or liquid propulsion, and will be required to reach a speed of 4.5 kilometers per second, according to the presentation. After rendezvous and docking with the waiting orbiter, the spacecraft will depart Mars orbit in late October 2030 for a return to Earth in July 2031.

Sun Zezhou [chief designer of the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter and rover mission], added that the Tianwen-1 orbiter will conduct an aerobraking test in Mars orbit later this year as part of the sample return mission preparation.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the story!

The grave of a rocket body that slammed into the moon more than three months ago has been found. Space.com reports: Early this year, astronomers determined that a mysterious rocket body was on course to crash into the lunar surface on March 4. Their calculations suggested that the impact would occur inside Hertzsprung Crater, a 354-mile-wide (570 kilometers) feature on the far side of the moon. Their math was on the money, it turns out. Researchers with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission announced last night (June 23) that the spacecraft had spotted a new crater in Hertzsprung -- almost certainly the resting place of the rogue rocket.

Actually, LRO imagery shows that the impact created two craters, an eastern one about 59 feet (18 meters) wide superimposed over a western one roughly 52 feet (16 m) across. "The double crater was unexpected and may indicate that the rocket body had large masses at each end," Mark Robinson of Arizona State University, the principal investigator of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), wrote in an update last night. "Typically a spent rocket has mass concentrated at the motor end; the rest of the rocket stage mainly consists of an empty fuel tank," he added. "Since the origin of the rocket body remains uncertain, the double nature of the crater may help to indicate its identity."

As Robinson noted, the moon-crashing rocket remains mysterious. Early speculation held that it was likely the upper stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) mission for NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in February 2015. But further observations and calculations changed that thinking, leading many scientists to conclude that the rocket body was probably part of the Long March 3 booster that launched China's Chang'e 5T1 mission around the moon in October 2014. China has denied that claim.

Engineers at the European Space Agency (ESA) are getting ready for a Windows 98 upgrade on an orbiter circling Mars. The Verge reports: The Mars Express spacecraft has been operating for more than 19 years, and the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) instrument onboard has been using software built using Windows 98. Thankfully for humanity and the Red Planet's sake, the ESA isn't upgrading its systems to Windows ME. The MARSIS instrument on ESA's Mars Express was key to the discovery of a huge underground aquifer of liquid water on the Red Planet in 2018. This major new software upgrade "will allow it to see beneath the surfaces of Mars and its moon Phobos in more detail than ever before," according to the ESA. The agency originally launched the Mars Express into space in 2003 as its first mission to the Red Planet, and it has spent nearly two decades exploring the planet's surface.

MARSIS uses low-frequency radio waves that bounce off the surface of Mars to search for water and study the Red Planet's atmosphere. The instrument's 130-foot antenna is capable of searching around three miles below the surface of Mars, and the software upgrades will enhance the signal reception and onboard data processing to improve the quality of data that's sent back to Earth. "We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS," explains Carlo Nenna, a software engineer at Enginium who is helping ESA with the upgrade. "Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!"

A rare, five-planet alignment will peak on June 24, allowing a spectacular viewing of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as they line up in planetary order. From a report: The event began at the beginning of June and has continued to get brighter and easier to see as the month has progressed, according to Diana Hannikainen, observing editor of Sky & Telescope. A waning crescent moon will be joining the party between Venus and Mars on Friday, adding another celestial object to the lineup. The moon will represent the Earth's relative position in the alignment, meaning this is where our planet will appear in the planetary order. This rare phenomenon has not occurred since December 2004, and this year, the distance between Mercury and Saturn will be smaller, according to Sky & Telescope.

The fourth and most recent attempt at a full launch rehearsal of NASA's Space Launch System went reasonably well, and despite some lingering issues and uncertainties, the agency is sending the rocket back to the hangar for final preparations in advance of its first flight. That inaugural launch will represent Artemis 1, the first mission in NASA's Artemis lunar program. Gizmodo reports: In a press release today, NASA -- to my surprise -- said it is done testing SLS after reviewing data from the recent launch rehearsal. That another full-blown rehearsal would be required seemed likely to me on account of an unresolved hydrogen leak linked to a faulty quick-connect fitting, which subsequently prevented ground teams from practicing the fully scheduled launch countdown on Monday. The goal was to reach T-10 seconds, but the launch controllers decided to quit the rehearsal at T-29 seconds for safety reasons. "NASA plans to return SLS and Orion to the pad for launch in late August," says the release. "NASA will set a specific target launch date after replacing hardware associated with the leak."

Despite the hydrogen leak and the incomplete countdown, Monday's wet dress did appear to go well. The ground teams finally managed to fully load SLS with propellants. Upwards of 755,000 gallons of cryogenic liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen were supplied to the rocket's two stages, which the teams had failed to do during the first three attempts. What's more, all of the issues experienced during the first three wet dress rehearsals appear to have been resolved. The Orion spacecraft, currently sitting atop the rocket, also performed well during the test. Said Tom Whitmeyer, NASA's exploration systems manager, during a media teleconference on Tuesday: "We think that we had a really successful rehearsal," adding that there is "relative risk" is running a fifth wet dress, with the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket standing fully exposed on the launch pad.

NASA announced on Tuesday that it's contracting three suppliers to provide concept designs for nuclear fission energy systems designed for use on the moon. TechCrunch reports: The winning bids for this award came from Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse and IX (a joint venture from Intuitive Machines and X-Energy). Each will be working with a few partners to develop their systems, which will be "initial concepts" only for the purposes of satisfying this particular contract, and each will receive roughly $5 million for their work, expected to take around 12 months.

NASA is aptly partnering with the Department of Energy (DOE) on this project, and the specs include a 40-kilowatt power generation capability, capable of generating that for at least a decade. That's about what a full charge on a current entry-level Nissan Leaf contains -- but as a fission generator it would obviously provide that continuously. It may not seem like much, but deployed singularly or in groups to support a lunar base, it could solve a lot of the challenges of the kind of prolonged occupancy of the moon that NASA plans to eventually establish through its Artemis program, which seeks to return humans to our largest natural satellite for ongoing science missions. NASA also notes that the work done for this contract could have other future applications for propulsion systems for long-range spacecraft for deep space explorations.

There are no environmental showstoppers in SpaceX's plans to launch a giant new rocket to orbit from South Texas, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Monday. From a report: An environmental assessment by the agency has concluded that SpaceX's plans for orbital launches will have "no significant impact" on the region along the Gulf Coast near Brownsville, Texas. But the F.A.A. is also requiring the company to undertake more than 75 actions to minimize the impact on the surrounding areas as it begins flights of Starship, a vehicle that is central to NASA's plans to return to the moon as well as the vision of Elon Musk, the company's founder and chief executive, to colonize Mars. The actions Mr. Musk's company must take include earlier notice of launches, monitoring of vegetation and wildlife by a biologist, coordination with state and federal agencies to remove launch debris from sensitive habitats and adjustment of lighting to lessen impact on wildlife and a nearby beach. The mitigation measures required by the F.A.A. also restrict closures of a highway that passes the SpaceX site during launches so that people can visit the nearby beach, park and wildlife refuge. The agency said the highway could not be closed on 18 holidays and not on more than five weekends a year.

New spacesuits made by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace could be worn by astronauts that land on the moon later this decade through NASA's Artemis program, the agency announced Wednesday. The suits will also be worn by crew members living and working on the International Space Station. CNN reports: The contracts were awarded by NASA as part of its strategy of growing commercial partnerships. Both companies have been selected to move forward in developing the next generation of spacesuits. Depending on how the two companies deliver on the suits and their spacewalking capabilities, one company could prevail over the other. That flexibility has been built into the task awards as the two companies progress in product development.

The Artemis program seeks to land the first woman and the first person of color at the lunar south pole by 2025, and eventually prepare for landing crewed missions on Mars. Experts from NASA have developed the required safety and technical standards for the spacesuits. Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace will design, develop and potentially produce the suits and any necessary equipment for space station crew and Artemis astronauts. [...] The suits are expected to be ready by the mid-2020s.

New research explains how meteorites called aubrites may actually be shattered pieces of the planet closest to the sun from the early days of the solar system. From a report: Mercury does not make sense. It is a bizarre hunk of rock with a composition that is unlike its neighboring rocky planets. "It's way too dense," said David Rothery, a planetary scientist at the Open University in England. Most of the planet, the closest to the sun, is taken up by its core. It lacks a thick mantle like Earth has, and no one is quite sure why. One possibility is that the planet used to be much bigger -- perhaps twice its current bulk or more. Billions of years ago, this fledgling proto-Mercury, or super Mercury, could have been hit by a large object, stripping away its outer layers and leaving the remnant we see behind.

While a nice idea, there has never been direct evidence for it. But some researchers think they have found something. In work presented [PDF] at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston in March, Camille Cartier, a planetary scientist at the University of Lorraine in France, and colleagues said pieces of this proto-Mercury may be hiding in museums and other meteorite collections. Studying them could unlock the planet's mysteries. "We don't have any samples of Mercury" at the moment, said Dr. Cartier. Gaining such specimens "would be a small revolution" in understanding the natural history of the solar system's smallest planet. According to the Meteoritical Society, nearly 70,000 meteorites have been gathered around the world from places as remote as the Sahara and Antarctica, finding their way into museums and other collections. Most are from asteroids ejected from the belt between Mars and Jupiter, while more than 500 come from the moon. More than 300 are from Mars.

Boeing's Starliner successfully docked to the International Space Station Friday night for the first time.

And right now, Boeing is beginning the official hatch-opening ceremon, in which the space station astronauts already on the ISS "open the hatch to the vehicle and retrieve some cargo that's packed inside," explains the Verge: NASA tasked Boeing with conducting an uncrewed flight demonstration of Starliner to show that the capsule can hit all of the major milestones it'll need to hit when it is carrying passengers... This mission is called OFT-2 since it's technically a do-over of a mission that Boeing attempted back in 2019, called OFT. During that flight, Starliner launched to space as planned, but a software glitch prevented the capsule from getting in the right orbit it needed to reach to rendezvous with the ISS. Boeing had to bring the vehicle home early, and the company never demonstrated Starliner's ability to dock with the ISS....

Using a series of sensors, the capsule autonomously guided itself onto an open docking port on the space station.... Docking occurred a little over an hour behind schedule, due to some issues with Starliner's graphics and docking ring, which were resolved ahead of the docking....

[Thursday] At 6:54PM ET, Starliner successfully launched to space on top of an Atlas V rocket, built and operated by the United Launch Alliance. Once Starliner separated from the Atlas V, it had to fire its own thrusters to insert itself into the proper orbit for reaching the space station. However, after that maneuver took place, Boeing and NASA revealed that two of the 12 thrusters Starliner uses for the procedure failed and cut off too early. The capsule's flight control system was able to kick in and rerouted to a working thruster, which helped get Starliner into a stable orbit.... Today, Boeing revealed that a drop in chamber pressure had caused the early cutoff of the thruster, but that system behaved normally during follow-up burns of the thrusters. And with redundancies on the spacecraft, the issue "does not pose a risk to the rest of the flight test," according to Boeing.

Boeing also noted today that the Starliner team is investigating some weird behavior of a "thermal cooling loop" but said that temperatures are stable on the spacecraft.
From the space station, NASA astronaut Bob Hines said the achievement "marks a great milestone towards providing additional commercial access to low Earth orbit, sustaining the ISS and enabling NASA's goal of returning humans to the Moon and eventually to Mars.

"Great accomplishments in human spaceflight are long remembered by history. Today will be no different."

A long-time Slashdot reader shares this schedule (EST): 5/20, 3:30 pm — Starliner docking with ISS.
5/21, 11:30 am — Safety checks completed. Hatches opened.
5/24, 12:00 pm — Starliner loading completed. Hatched closed.
5/25, 2:00 pm — Starliner undocking from ISS.
5/25, 5:45 pm — Coverage of Starliner landing begins.

Again, the streams will be broadcast at NASA Television. I don't know about any of you, but I know what I'm doing this weekend.