The Washington Post says that when it comes to making New Year's resolutions, the Smithsonian has a better idea. "What if instead of relying on our own resolutions we asked an AI what it thinks we should do?" Starting this weekend, the "Futures" exhibit both online and at its Arts and Industries Building offers a "Resolutions Generator," an AI that makes suggestions on what commitments we should undertake for 2022.... It sounds like a slightly weird idea, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't turn up some weird results. "Change my name to one of my favorite shapes," it suggests, or "Every Friday for a year I will wear a different hat." And, "Every time I hear bells for a month, I will paint a potato."

Designed by AI researcher-writer Janelle Shane, the generator's odd results are deliberate; she purposely trained the AI (the powerful GPT-3) with some of the wackier resolutions humans have put online, then set its parameters wide. "We wanted the AI to come up with the kind of interesting resolutions we're not thinking of," Shane said. "We wanted whimsy," added Rachel Goslins, the director of the Arts and Industries Building, "with a little bit of real."

Okay, so probably not many people will really "Go into a library, climb up onto a shelf, yell down 'I am a giant giraffe!'" But it's a lot easier than trying to lose those 15 pounds. And this way you end up in a library.

Plus they have a point. The truth is by accessing the collective corpus of human resolutions, AI might conceive of ideas that our pale human pea brains cannot... [T]here are growing piles of evidence that deploying AI that can think faster and even differently will pay dividends in the real world. A Stanford study last month concluded that AI sped up discoveries on coronavirus antiviral drugs by as much as a month, potentially saving lives. Canadian researchers in September found that AI made consistently better choices than doctors in treating behavioral problems. Even a button-down institution like Deloitte has a staffer who has persuasively argued that we should use AI, not humans, to update government regulations.
The exhibit's AI also generated these New Year's resolutions:

• "Treat every dog I meet like a celebrity."

• "Every time I see a mirror I will remember that it is the gateway to another dimension."

The AI researcher behind the project also generated Slashdot headlines back in 2017, using 162,000 headlines from the site's first 20 years. Some of my favorites:

• More Pong Users for Kernel Project

• Red Hat Releases Linux Games And Moon

• Why Open Source Power Man Sues Java

• Microsoft Releases New Months

• Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?

Last night we asked what books you'd enjoyed reading this year.

Here's how Bill Gates had answered the same question on his personal blog Gates Notes: When I was a kid, I was obsessed with science fiction. Paul Allen and I would spend countless hours discussing Isaac Asimov's original Foundation trilogy. I read every book by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Heinlein. (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was a particular favorite.) There was something so thrilling to me about these stories that pushed the limits of what was possible.

As I got older, I started reading a lot more non-fiction. I was still interested in books that explored the implications of innovation, but it felt more important to learn something about our real world along the way. Lately, though, I've found myself drawn back to the kinds of books I would've loved as a kid.

My holiday reading list this year includes two terrific science fiction stories. One takes place nearly 12 light-years away from our sun, and the other is set right here in the United States — but both made me think about how people can use technology to respond to challenges. I've also included a pair of non-fiction books about cutting-edge science and a novel that made me look at one of history's most famous figures in a new light.

I read a lot of great books this year — including John Doerr's latest about climate change — but these were some of my favorites...
Gates' picks include a dystopian science fiction novel by nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro (Klara and the Sun) and Project Hail Mary. ("It requires a leap of faith, but it's got a lot of science in it...") The nonfiction titles included Walter Isaacson's book about CRISPR, The Code Breaker and Jeff Hawkins' A Thousand Brains.

Gates reveals his recommendations in a fanciful video where Christmas-y window displays include icons from his recommended books — including William Shakespeare.

"China has formally approved three missions targeting the south pole of the moon, with the first to launch around 2024..." reports Space.com, "each with different goals and an array of spacecraft." The trio make up the so-called fourth phase for the Chinese lunar exploration program, which most recently landed on the moon last December with a sample-return mission dubbed Chang'e 5. Wu Yanhua, deputy head of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), told China Central Television (CCTV) in a recent interview that the three missions had been approved.

Chang'e 7 will be the first to launch; Wu did not provide a timeline, but previous reporting indicates a hoped-for launch around 2024, with the mission to include an orbiter, a relay satellite, a lander, a rover and a "mini flying craft" designed to seek out evidence of ice at the lunar south pole. The various component spacecraft will carry a range of science instruments including cameras, a radar instrument, an infrared spectrum mineral imager, a thermometer, a seismograph and a water-molecule analyzer; the mission will tackle goals including remote sensing, identifying resources and conducting a comprehensive study of the lunar environment...

Chang'e 8 will launch later this decade and will be a step toward establishing a joint International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) with Russia and potentially other partners. The mission is expected to test technology for using local resources and manufacturing with 3D printing, according to earlier Chinese press statements.... The ILRS plan includes development of a robotic base which can be later expanded to allow astronauts to make long-term stays on the lunar surface in the 2030s.
China had previously scheduled their lunar research station for the year 2035, reports the South China Morning Post. The newspaper cites concerns from Zhang Chongfeng, deputy chief designer of China's manned space programme, that America's space program might ultimately seize common land on the moon. The US government and Nasa have proposed the Artemis Accords to set rules for future lunar activities. Already signed by more than a dozen US allies, the accords allow governments or private companies to protect their facilities or "heritage sites" by setting up safety zones that forbid the entry of others. China and Russia are opposed to the accords because this challenges the existing international protocols including the UN's Moon Agreement, which states that the moon belongs to the entire human race, not a certain party, according to Zhang.

But to effectively counter the US on the moon, China would have to "take some forward-looking measures and deploy them ahead of schedule", he said in a paper published in domestic peer-reviewed journal Aerospace Shanghai in June... Instead of building an orbiting "gateway", China would directly put a nuclear-powered research station on the moon. The unmanned facility would allow visiting Chinese astronauts to stay on the moon for as long as their American peers but only at a fraction of the cost. To counter the US territorial claims, China would also deploy a mobile station. This moon base on wheels would be able to roam freely on the lunar surface for over 1,000km, and the use of artificial intelligence technology would mean astronauts need not be present for its operation.

And, unlike the American programme, which focuses on surface activities, China would pay a great deal of attention to the exploration of caves, which could provide a natural shelter for the construction of permanent settlements.

fahrbot-bot writes: The world is full of beautiful equations, numbers and calculations. From counting beads as toddlers to managing finances as adults, we use math every day. But scientists often go beyond these quotidian forms of counting, to measure, weigh and tally far stranger things in the universe. From the number of bubbles in a typical glass of beer to the weight of all the coronavirus particles circulating in the world, LiveScience notes the 10 weird things scientists calculated in 2021.

1. Number of bubbles in a half-pint glass of beer: up to 2 million bubbles, about twice as many as Champagne.
2. Weight of all SARS-CoV-2 particles: between 0.22 and 22 pounds (0.1 and 10 kilograms).
3. Counted African elephants from space for the first time -- Earth elephants (using satellites and AI) not Space Elephants.
4. Acceleration of a finger snap: maximal rotational velocities of 7,800 deg/s and a maximal rotational acceleration of 1.6 million deg/s squared -- in seven milliseconds, more than 20 times faster than the blink of an eye, which takes more than 150 milliseconds.
5. Calculated pi to 62.8 trillion decimal places.
6. Updated the "friendship paradox" equations.
7. Theoretical number and mass of all Black Holes: about 1% of all ordinary matter (not dark matter) in the universe.
8. How long would it take to walk around the moon? At 4 hours a day, it would take about 547 Earth days, or about 1.5 years.
9. How many active satellites currently orbit the planet? As of September 2021, there were around 7,500 active satellites in low Earth orbit.
10. The "absolute limit" on the human life span: probably 120 to 150 years.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from MIT News: Aerospace engineers at MIT are testing a new concept for a hovering rover that levitates by harnessing the moon's natural charge. Because they lack an atmosphere, the moon and other airless bodies such as asteroids can build up an electric field through direct exposure to the sun and surrounding plasma. On the moon, this surface charge is strong enough to levitate dust more than 1 meter above the ground, much the way static electricity can cause a person's hair to stand on end. Engineers at NASA and elsewhere have recently proposed harnessing this natural surface charge to levitate a glider with wings made of Mylar, a material that naturally holds the same charge as surfaces on airless bodies. They reasoned that the similarly charged surfaces should repel each other, with a force that lofts the glider off the ground. But such a design would likely be limited to small asteroids, as larger planetary bodies would have a stronger, counteracting gravitational pull.

The MIT team's levitating rover could potentially get around this size limitation. The concept, which resembles a retro-style, disc-shaped flying saucer, uses tiny ion beams to both charge up the vehicle and boost the surface's natural charge. The overall effect is designed to generate a relatively large repulsive force between the vehicle and the ground, in a way that requires very little power. In an initial feasibility study, the researchers show that such an ion boost should be strong enough to levitate a small, 2-pound vehicle on the moon and large asteroids like Psyche. The team predicted that a small rover, weighing about two pounds, could achieve levitation of about one centimeter off the ground, on a large asteroid such as Psyche, using a 10-kilovolt ion source. To get a similar liftoff on the moon, the same rover would need a 50-kilovolt source. "This kind of ionic design uses very little power to generate a lot of voltage," [explains co-author Paulo Lozano]. "The power needed is so small, you could do this almost for free."

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Quanta Magazine, written by Thomas Lewton: During a summer storm in 2018, a momentous lightning bolt flashed above a network of radio telescopes in the Netherlands. The telescopes' detailed recordings, which were processed only recently, reveal something no one has seen before: lightning actually starting up inside a thundercloud. In a new paper that will soon be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers used the observations to settle a long-standing debate about what triggers lightning -- the first step in the mysterious process by which bolts arise, grow and propagate to the ground. "It's kind of embarrassing. It's the most energetic process on the planet, we have religions centered around this thing, and we have no idea how it works," said Brian Hare, a lightning researcher at the University of Groningen and a co-author of the new paper. [...]

[Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire and a co-author on the new paper] and his team turned to the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a network of thousands of small radio telescopes mostly in the Netherlands. LOFAR usually gazes at distant galaxies and exploding stars. But according to Dwyer, "it just so happens to work really well for measuring lightning, too." When thunderstorms roll overhead, there's little useful astronomy that LOFAR can do. So instead, the telescope tunes its antennas to detect a barrage of a million or so radio pulses that emanate from each lightning flash. Unlike visible light, radio pulses can pass through thick clouds. Using radio detectors to map lightning isn't new; purpose-built radio antennas have long observed storms in New Mexico. But those images are low-resolution or only in two dimensions. LOFAR, a state-of-the-art astronomical telescope, can map lighting on a meter-by-meter scale in three dimensions, and with a frame rate 200 times faster than previous instruments could achieve. "The LOFAR measurements are giving us the first really clear picture of what's happening inside the thunderstorm," said Dwyer.

A materializing lightning bolt produces millions of radio pulses. To reconstruct a 3D lightning image from the jumble of data, the researchers employed an algorithm similar to one used in the Apollo moon landings. The algorithm continuously updates what's known about an object's position. Whereas a single radio antenna can only indicate the rough direction of the flash, adding data from a second antenna updates the position. By steadily looping in thousands of LOFAR's antennas, the algorithm constructs a clear map. When the researchers analyzed the data from the August 2018 lightning flash, they saw that the radio pulses all emanated from a 70-meter-wide region deep inside the storm cloud. They quickly inferred that the pattern of pulses supports one of the two leading theories about how the most common type of lightning gets started.

One idea holds that cosmic rays -- particles from outer space -- collide with electrons inside thunderstorms, triggering electron avalanches that strengthen the electric fields. The new observations point to the rival theory. It starts with clusters of ice crystals inside the cloud. Turbulent collisions between the needle-shaped crystals brush off some of their electrons, leaving one end of each ice crystal positively charged and the other negatively charged. The positive end draws electrons from nearby air molecules. More electrons flow in from air molecules that are farther away, forming ribbons of ionized air that extend from each ice crystal tip. These are called streamers. Each crystal tip gives rise to hordes of streamers, with individual streamers branching off again and again. The streamers heat the surrounding air, ripping electrons from air molecules en masse so that a larger current flows onto the ice crystals. Eventually a streamer becomes hot and conductive enough to turn into a leader -- a channel along which a fully fledged streak of lightning can suddenly travel. Ute Ebert, a physicist at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands who studies lightning initiation but was not involved in the new work, notes, however, that despite its resolution, the initiation movie described in the new paper does not directly image ice particles ionizing the air -- it only shows what happens immediately afterward. "Where is the first electron coming from? How does the discharge start near to an ice particle?" she asked.

Few researchers still favor the rival theory that cosmic rays directly initiate lightning, but cosmic rays could still play a secondary role in creating electrons that trigger the first streamers that connect to ice crystals, said Ebert. Exactly how streamers turn into leaders is also a "matter of great debate," said Hare.

Japan revised the schedule of its space exploration plans on Tuesday, aiming to put a Japanese person on the moon by the latter half of the 2020s. From a report: "Not only is space a frontier that gives people hopes and dreams but it also provides a crucial foundation to our economic society with respect to our economic security," Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told a meeting to finalise the plan. According to the draft schedule of the plan, Japan aims to put the first non-American on the moon as part of the Artemis programme, a U.S.-led initiative that aims to return astronauts to the moon. The plan also spells out Japan's aspirations to launch a probe to explore Mars in 2024, as well as to find ways to generate solar electricity in space.

$100 billion was spent building the International Space Station — including 42 different assembly flights, reports Recode. Yet "after two decades in orbit, the International Space Station will shut down," as NASA re-focuses on sending humans back to the moon. (UPDATE: NASA has extended ISS operation through 2030.)

While they plan to keep it functioning as long as possible, NASA "has only technically certified the station's hardware until 2028 and has awarded more than $400 million to fund private replacements." (Which they estimate will save them $1 billion a year.)

So then what happens? When these stations are ready, NASA will guide the ISS into the atmosphere, where it will burn up and disintegrate. At that point, anyone hoping to work in space will have to choose among several different outposts. That means countries won't just be using these new stations to strengthen their own national space programs, but as lucrative business ventures, too. "Commercial companies have the capability now to do this, and so we don't want to compete with that," Robyn Gatens, the director of the ISS, told Recode. "We want to transition lower-Earth orbit over to commercial companies so that the government and NASA can go use resources to do harder things in deep space."

Private companies currently backed by NASA, including Lockheed Martin and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, could launch as many as four space stations into Earth's orbit over the next decade. NASA is also building a space station called Gateway near the moon; a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the living quarters for the station is scheduled to launch in 2024.

Russia and India are planning to launch their own space stations to low-Earth orbit, too, and China's Tiangong station, which is currently under construction, already has astronauts living aboard... Russia may leave the ISS as soon as 2025, the same year its space agency, Roscosmos, plans to launch its new $5 billion space station. The European Space Agency, which represents 22 different European countries, is now training its astronauts for eventual missions to Tiangong...

[C]ompetition for customers could get even more intense as space stations launched by China, Russia, and India open for business.
Recode ultimately sees a future where private-sector customers choose from competing space stations — and even have to consider the political consequences of "favoring one nation's space station over another..."

"In the best of scenarios, these new stations will learn from each other and massively expand scientific knowledge. But they will also make global politics a much bigger part of space, which could impact what happens here on Earth and how humanity explores the moon and Mars."

"We have LIFTOFF of the @NASAWebb Space Telescope!" NASA tweeted seven hours ago, sharing a 32-second video of the launch. "At 7:20am ET (12:20 UTC), the beginning of a new, exciting decade of science climbed to the sky," they wrote, adding that the telescope "will change our understanding of space as we know it."

The CBC reports: The world's largest and most powerful space telescope rocketed away Saturday on a high-stakes quest to behold light from the first stars and galaxies, and scour the universe for hints of life.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope soared from French Guiana on South America's northeastern coast, riding a European Ariane rocket into the Christmas morning sky. "What an amazing Christmas present," said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's science mission chief.

The $10-billion US observatory hurtled toward its destination 1.6 million kilometres away, or more than four times beyond the moon. It will take a month to get there and another five months before its infrared eyes are ready to start scanning the cosmos. First, the telescope's enormous mirror and sunshield need to unfurl; they were folded origami-style to fit into the rocket's nose cone. Otherwise, the observatory won't be able to peer back in time 13.7 billion years as anticipated, within a mere 100 million years of the universe-forming Big Bang. NASA administrator Bill Nelson called the telescope a time machine that will provide "a better understanding of our universe and our place in it: who we are, what we are, the search that's eternal."

"We are going to discover incredible things that we never imagined," Nelson said following liftoff, speaking from Florida's Kennedy Space Center. But he cautioned: "There are still innumerable things that have to work and they have to work perfectly.... We know that in great reward there is great risk...."

"We have delivered a Christmas gift today for humanity," said Josef Aschbacher, the European Space Agency's director general....

Cheers and applause erupted in and outside Launch Control following the telescope's flawless launch...
Official online dashboards are now tracking its position. (And you can watch complete footage of the entire launch here.) "If all goes well, the sunshield will be opened three days after liftoff, taking at least five days to unfold and lock into place," the CBC points out. "Next, the mirror segments should open up like the leaves of a drop-leaf table, 12 days or so into the flight." In all, hundreds of release mechanisms need to work — perfectly — in order for the telescope to succeed. Such a complex series of actions is unprecedented — "like nothing we've done before," noted NASA program director Greg Robinson.
Thanks to Slashdot readers Dave Knott and hackertourist for sharing the news...

"Apollo mission planners were really smart. Recognizing that future scientists will have better tools and richer scientific insights, they refrained from opening a portion of the lunar samples returned from the historic Apollo missions," writes Gizmodo.

"One of these sample containers, after sitting untouched for 50 years, is now set to be opened." The sample in question was collected by Gene Cernan in 1972. The Apollo 17 astronaut was working in the Taurus-Littrow Valley when he hammered a 28-inch-long (70 cm) tube into the surface, which he did to collect samples of lunar soil and gas. The lower half of this canister was sealed while Cernan was still on the Moon. Back on Earth, the canister was placed in yet another vacuum chamber for good measure. Known as the 73001 Apollo sample container, it remains untouched to this very day.

But the time has come to open this vessel and investigate its precious cargo, according to a European Space Agency press release. The hope is that lunar gases might be present inside, specifically hydrogen, helium, and other light gases. Analysis of these gases could further our understanding of lunar geology and shed new light on how to best store future samples, whether they be gathered on asteroids, the Moon, or Mars.

Like I said, Apollo mission planners were really clever — but they didn't exactly explain how future scientists were supposed to extract the presumed gases from the vacuum-sealed container. That task is now the responsibility of the Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis Program (ANGSA), which manages these untouched treasures. In this case, ANGSA tasked the European Space Agency, among several other institutions, to figure out a way to safely release this trapped gas, marking the first time that ESA has been involved in the opening of samples returned from the Apollo program...

The ANGSA consortium spent the past 16 months working on the problem, and the solution, dubbed the "Apollo can opener," is now ready to rock.
Sometime in the next few weeks the gas will finally be decanted into multiple containers, and then sent to specialized labs around the world.

"As it seeks answers about the cosmos and what they mean for Earth's origins, NASA on Friday announced a slew of discoveries about Jupiter," reports the Washington Post

"And scientists brought home an interstellar tune from the road."

The Juno spacecraft is gathering data about the origin of the solar system's biggest planet — in which more than 1,300 Earths could fit. Among its recent findings are photos from inside the planet's ring, a map of its magnetic field, details of its atmosphere and a trippy soundtrack from a spacecraft's travels around one of its moons.

But it's not exactly a song, or even perceptible to the human ear.

The radio emissions Juno recorded are not what a person would hear if they went to Jupiter — space is a vacuum and does not carry soundwaves like air does on Earth. But the probe zooming through space captured the electric and magnetic emissions that scientists later converted into perceptible sound. Turns out, orbiting Ganymede, which is one of Jupiter's moons and the largest satellite in the solar system, kind of sounds like R2-D2.
Launched in 2011, became the eighth spacecraft to ever reach Jupiter in 2016, "and the first to probe below the giant planet's thick gas cover.

"It fought Jupiter's extreme temperatures and hazardous radiation to survey its north and south poles, chugging along despite a lack of sunshine on its solar panels."

"What do astronomers eat for breakfast on the day that their $10 billion telescope launches into space?" asks the New York Times. "Their fingernails."

The worst-case scenario is "You work for years and it all goes up in a puff of smoke," they're told by Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona: Dr. Rieke admits her fingers will be crossed on the morning of December 24 when she tunes in for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. For 20 years, she has been working to design and build an ultrasensitive infrared camera that will live aboard the spacecraft. The Webb is the vaunted bigger and more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers expect that it will pierce a dark curtain of ignorance and supposition about the early days of the universe, and allow them to snoop on nearby exoplanets.

After $10 billion and years of delays, the telescope is finally scheduled to lift off from a European launch site in French Guiana on its way to a point a million miles on the other side of the moon... [T]here is plenty to be anxious about. The Ariane 5 rocket that is carrying the spacecraft has seldom failed to deliver its payloads to orbit. But even if it survives the launch, the telescope will have a long way to go. Over the following month it will have to execute a series of maneuvers with 344 "single points of failure" in order to unfurl its big golden mirror and deploy five thin layers of a giant plastic sunscreen that will keep the telescope and its instruments in the cold and dark. Engineers and astronomers call this interval six months of high anxiety because there is no prospect of any human or robotic intervention or rescue should something go wrong.

But if all those steps succeed, what astronomers see through that telescope could change everything. They hope to spot the first stars and galaxies emerging from the primordial fog when the universe was only 100 million years or so old, in short the first steps out of the big bang toward the cozy light show we inhabit today.
Tod Lauer, an astronomer at NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona, remembers the launch of the original Hubble Space Telescope — and told the Times that astronomers had to trust their colleagues in rocket and spacecraft engineering to get it right.

"Someone who knows how to fly a $10 billion spacecraft on a precision trajectory is not going to be impressed by an astronomer, who never took an engineering course in his life, cowering behind his laptop watching the launch," Dr. Lauer said. "You feel admiration and empathy for those people, and try to act worthy of the incredible gift that they are bringing to world."

On Friday the manufacturer of the rocket carrying the teescope tweeted an update. "Target launch date is December 24 at 12:20 am UTC," and confirmed it again on Saturday...

A long and strikingly critical article that reviews the state of the Russian space program was published in the state-aligned newspaper MK this week. This article was written by Dmitry Popov, who has worked at the publication since 1992. Ars Technica reports: The article, translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell, is titled "The Space Program Is Rotting from Within." It begins with the declaration that Russia's space program has a shortage of competent and highly qualified staff, obsolete facilities and technology, and "systemic leadership weakness." And that's just the opening paragraph. Popov goes on to state that Russian space companies are delinquent on promised deliveries for hundreds of contracts. For example, the Khrunichev Center agreed to deliver 10 booster cores for the Angara A5 rocket five years ago. The first five cores were delivered only in March of this year, and the other five are not yet completed. [...] Popov said Roscosmos is struggling even to build its mainstay vehicles, the Soyuz rockets and Progress spacecraft. Consider a recent docking issue with the Progress vehicle, which carries supplies to the Russian segment of the International Space Station.

Popov further expressed concern about reliance on Germany to help fuel the Soyuz rocket and the Soyuz spacecraft that launches humans. The issue is that vernier thrusters on the Soyuz boosters and in the de-orbit engines of the Soyuz-MS spacecraft use a special grade of highly refined hydrogen peroxide. Production of this hydrogen peroxide in Russia, however, depends on deliveries of chemicals produced by a German company called Evonik Resource Efficiency GmbH. These deliveries are subject to limitation by international sanctions against the Russian Federation. "That is, the West can stop Russian space launches with a single keystroke," Popov wrote.

The article also discusses the Vostochny Cosmodrome, a spaceport in eastern Russia that has been a priority for President Vladimir Putin. However this project, under Rogozin's stewardship, has been beset by construction delays and corruption, such as embezzlement. Of the nearly 1,200 structures planned for construction at the spaceport, only about 200 have been completed, Popov wrote. Construction has yet to begin on more than 40 percent of them. Already, the planned launch of Angara A5 rockets from Vostochny has been delayed from 2021 to 2023, as criminal investigations continue. Popov then turns to Russia's so-called Moon program, which requires development of the Oryol, or "Eagle," spacecraft to fly cosmonauts into deep space. This vehicle was intended to both replace the Soyuz for transporting cosmonauts to the International Space Station and to form part of the lunar program. But aside from that, everything is going swell with Russia's Moon program.

Popov also criticizes Rogozin for over-promising on Russian launch efficiency and under-delivering. For example, Roscosmos said there would be 44 space launches in 2019, and 25 were conducted. In 2020, 40 launches were planned and just 17 conducted. This year, Russia has conducted fewer than half of its planned 47 launches. Roscosmos, therefore, has decided to no longer publish its planned number of launches. The overall portrait Popov paints of Roscosmos is that of a wasteful, increasingly decrepit enterprise where almost no money is being invested into the present or future. Instead, the focus seems to be providing high-paying jobs for a handful of technocrats, whose salaries are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Meanwhile, the average monthly wages for technical specialists who build the country's rockets and spacecraft range from $500 to $1,000 a month.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: Scientists have spotted an unusually large exoplanet in orbit around b Centauri, a massive two-star system that is visible to the unaided eye. With a combined weight of roughly 10 Suns, it's now the heaviest star system known to host a planet. The details of this discovery were published today in Nature. The newly discovered planet, called "b Cen (AB)b," is likely a gas giant and is heavier than 10 Jupiters combined, making it one of the most massive planets ever discovered. It orbits the b Centauri binary system, which is located 325 light-years from Earth and has a combined mass of nearly 10 Suns. At 52 billion miles from its host stars, this planet has one of the widest orbits ever detected. By comparison, Pluto orbits the Sun at around 3.3 billion miles, so yeah, that's an unbelievable separation. Until now, planets had not been found in orbit around star systems weighing more than three solar masses. Astronomers didn't think planets could form around systems like this, so it's forcing a major rethink of what's possible in terms of planetary architectures and the conditions under which planets can form.

That a planet exists in this star system is indeed surprising. Young stars have protoplanetary disks around them, from which planets eventually emerge. A hot star system like b Centauri, however, is not supposed to be conducive to planetary formation, owing to tremendous amounts of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation. This high-energy radiation "tends to destroy the disks in a very short time," and it was "thought that this wouldn't give planets enough time to form in the disk before it disappeared," [said Markus Janson, an astronomer at Stockholm University and the first author of the study]. Yet there it is -- a full fledged planet around the b Centauri system. [...] A neat observation is how the ratio between the masses of the star system and its planet closely matches that of our Sun and Jupiter. But that's where the comparison ends, as the scale of b Centauri is far vaster, as the planet is 10 times the mass of Jupiter and with an orbit that's 100 times wider. [...]

From an astrobiological perspective, Janson added that b Centauri is "possibly one of the worst places in the galaxy to host life." Together, the binary pair spew enormous amounts of UV and X-ray radiation, "which would sterilize any surface that is exposed to it," so "life on any surface in the system is certainly not very likely." Still, Janson did not rule out the possibility that life could exist in subterranean oceans, matching ongoing speculation about basic life existing on Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus.

The Yutu-2 rover is on a roll. It's been exploring the far side of the moon since early 2019 as part of China's Chang'e-4 lunar lander mission. It now has its eyes set on a strange-looking cube-shaped object it spotted in the distance. From a report: Andrew Jones, a journalist who covers the Chinese space program for SpaceNews and Space.com, highlighted a new rover update in a series of tweets Friday. The nickname for the cube-shaped object translates to "mystery house." The rover team is planning to drive over and get a closer look at the object. As with Yutu-2's intriguing discovery of a "gel-like" substance inside a crater in 2019, don't get too excited for aliens. That substance turned out to be glassy-looking rock. And as far as I know, Stanley Kubrick never planted a monolith on the real moon, and those metal sculptures that were once all the rage on Earth haven't made the trek across space. Yutu-2's view of the cube is fuzzy and far-off, so the object's true nature should become clearer as the rover gets closer. The most likely explanation is a boulder. This part of the moon is pockmarked with impact craters, which can feature quite a bit of chunky debris.

Just two days after officially (and quietly) confirming that it intends to replace the International Space Station with a commercial station by 2030, NASA has awarded over $400 million in agreements to three companies to further develop private station plans. TechCrunch reports: The three companies, which received the awards under the agency's Commercial low Earth orbit (LEO) Destinations program, are: Nanoracks for $160 million; Blue Origin for $130 million; and Northrop Grumman for $125.6 million. NASA received eleven proposals in total, director of commercial spaceflight Phil McAlister said Thursday. He added that of the three chosen proposals, there was a diversity of technical concepts and a variety of logistical and launch vehicle options offered. "This diversity not only enhances the likelihood of success of NASA strategy, but it also leads to a high degree of innovation, which is critical in most commercial space endeavors," he said.

The three companies have already released a handful of details about their proposals. Blue Origin is calling its station concept "Orbital Reef," and it is designing it with Boeing, Sierra Space and others. The team said it wants to launch the station in 2027. Meanwhile, Nanoracks is calling its station, which is being developed with its parent company Voyager Space and aerospace prime Lockheed Martin, "Starlab." While Northrop didn't give its station proposal a flashy name, it's working with Dynetics to deliver a modular design based around its Cygnus spacecraft.

These substantial awards mark the first phase of a two-phase process as NASA seeks to ensure that there will be no gap between the retirement of the ISS and the introduction of a new station. NASA has repeatedly stressed, both to Congress and more recently in a report by the Office of Inspector General, that the overall success of the development of a thriving economy in LEO is dependent upon avoiding this gap. "If there is no habitable commercial destination in low Earth orbit after the ISS is decommissioned, NASA will be unable to conduct microgravity health research and technology demonstrations needed for long-duration human exploration missions to the Moon and Mars, significantly increasing the risk of -- or delaying -- those missions," the agency said in the report.

Today, Vice President Kamala Harris' office released a new framework for US space policy, detailing how the Biden administration plans to approach commercial, civil, and military space activity moving forward. From a report: Called the United States Space Priorities Framework, the document keeps many of the same space priorities from the previous administration but adds a new emphasis on using space to help combat climate change and investing in STEM education. The new framework comes ahead of today's National Space Council meeting, the first one to be held under the Biden administration. Harris, who chairs the National Space Council, will convene the policy advisory group at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, at 1:30PM ET today.

[...] When it comes to space, the Biden administration is carrying forward many of the priorities set by the Trump administration. Notably, NASA's ambitious Artemis program, which was solidified under Trump, is still a major focus under Biden. And plenty of the topics discussed under Pence's Space Council are included in the new framework released by Harris. A few of the key points include maintaining US leadership in space by sending humans back to the Moon and exploring the Solar System with robotic spacecraft, fostering a competitive, regulatory environment for space companies, and defending against security threats in space while strengthening our space assets. In the biggest break from the previous administration, there looks to be a renewed focus on using space in the fight against climate change. In the new framework, the administration pledges to invest in satellites that can observe Earth from space, helping scientists better understand our changing climate. "Open dissemination of Earth observation data will support both domestic and international efforts to address the climate crisis," the document states. To further drive home this new emphasis on climate research from space, President Biden plans to sign a new Executive Order today that will add five new members to the National Space Council, including the Secretaries of Education, Labor, Agriculture, and the Interior, but also notably the National Climate Advisor.

"The thought of combining a printer (the bane of office workers) with the bacterium E. coli (the scourge of romaine lettuce) may seem an odd, if not unpleasant, collaboration," writes the New York Times.

"But scientists have recently melded the virtues of the infuriating tool and of the toxic microbe to produce an ink that is alive, made entirely from microbes." The microbial ink flows like toothpaste under pressure and can be 3D-printed into various tiny shapes — a circle, a square and a cone — all of which hold their form and glisten like Jell-O. The researchers describe their recipe for their programmable, microbial ink in a study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

The material is still being developed, but the authors suggest that the ink could be a crucial renewable building material, able to grow and heal itself and ideal for constructing sustainable homes on Earth and in space... [T]he new substance contains no additional polymers; it is produced entirely from genetically engineered E. coli bacteria. The researchers induce bacterial cultures to grow the ink, which is also made of living bacteria cells. When the ink is harvested from the liquid culture, it becomes firm like gelatin and can be plugged into 3D-printers and printed into living structures, which do not grow further and remain in their printed forms...

Bacteria may seem an unconventional building block. But microbes are a crucial component of products such as perfumes and vitamins, and scientists have already engineered microbes to produce biodegradable plastics. A material like a microbial ink has more grandiose ambitions, according to Neel Joshi, a synthetic biologist at Northeastern University and an author on the new paper. Such inks are an expanding focus of the field of engineered living materials. Unlike structures cast from concrete or plastic, living systems would be autonomous, adaptive to environmental cues and able to regenerate — at least, that is the aspirational goal, Dr. Joshi said. "Imagine creating buildings that heal themselves," said Sujit Datta, a chemical and biological engineer at Princeton University who was not involved with the research....

Dr. Manjula-Basavanna is shooting for the moon, Earth's satellite, where there are no forests to harvest for wood and no easy way to send bulk building materials. There, he said, the ink might be used as a self-regenerating substance to help build habitats on other planets, as well as places on Earth. "There is a lot of work to be done to make it scalable and economic," Dr. Datta conceded. But, he noted, just five years ago creating robust structures out of microbes was unimaginable; conceivably, self-healing buildings could be a reality in our lifetime.

Hmmmmmm writes: China is developing a powerful nuclear reactor for its moon and Mars missions, according to researchers involved in the project. The reactor can generate one megawatt of electric power, 100 times more powerful than a similar device Nasa plans to put on the surface of the moon by 2030. The project was launched with funding from the central government in 2019. Although technical details and the launch date were not revealed, the engineering design of a prototype machine was completed recently and some critical components have been built, two scientists who took part in the project confirmed to the South China Morning Post this week.

To China, this is an ambitious project with unprecedented challenges. The only publicly known nuclear device it has sent into space is a tiny radioactive battery on Yutu 2, the first rover to land on the far side of the moon in 2019. That device could only generate a few watts of heat to help the rover during long lunar nights. Chemical fuel and solar panels will no longer be enough to meet the demands of human space exploration, which is expected to expand significantly with human settlements on the moon or Mars on the agenda, according to the Chinese researchers. "Nuclear power is the most hopeful solution. Other nations have launched some ambitious plans. China cannot afford the cost of losing this race," said one researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences who asked not to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media.

If all goes as planned, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will launch early Wednesday morning "to test whether slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid can nudge it into a different trajectory," reports The New York Times. "Results from the test, if successful, will come in handy if NASA and other space agencies ever need to deflect an asteroid to save Earth and avert a catastrophic impact." From the report: The DART spacecraft is scheduled to lift off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday at 1:20 a.m. Eastern time (or 10:20 p.m. local time) from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. NASA plans to host a livestream of the launch on its YouTube channel starting at 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday. If bad weather around the Vandenberg launch site prompts a delay, the next opportunity for liftoff would be about 24 hours later.

After launching to space, the spacecraft will make nearly one full orbit around the sun before it crosses paths with Dimorphos, a football-field-size asteroid that closely orbits a bigger asteroid, called Didymos, every 11 hours and 55 minutes. Astronomers call those two asteroids a binary system, where one is a mini-moon to the other. Together, the two asteroids make one full orbit around the sun every two years. Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, and the mission is essentially target practice. DART's impact will happen in late September or early October next year, when the binary asteroids are at their closest point to Earth, roughly 6.8 million miles away.

Four hours before impact, the DART spacecraft, formally called a kinetic impactor, will autonomously steer itself straight toward Dimorphos for a head-on collision at 15,000 miles per hour. An onboard camera will capture and send back photos to Earth in real time until 20 seconds before impact. A tiny satellite from the Italian Space Agency, deployed 10 days before the impact, will come as close as 34 miles from the asteroid to snap images every six seconds in the moments before and after DART's impact.