NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

July 26, 2024

Facing NGC 6946

From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy, we see NGC 6946 face-on. The big, beautiful spiral galaxy is located just 20 million light-years away, behind a veil of foreground dust and stars in the high and far-off constellation Cepheus. In this sharp telescopic portrait, from the core outward the galaxy's colors change from the yellowish light of old stars in the center to young blue star clusters and reddish star forming regions along the loose, fragmented spiral arms. NGC 6946 is also bright in infrared light and rich in gas and dust, exhibiting a high star birth and death rate. In fact, since the early 20th century ten confirmed supernovae, the death explosions of massive stars, were discovered in NGC 6946. Nearly 40,000 light-years across, NGC 6946 is also known as the Fireworks Galaxy.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?

Former astronaut Mark Kelly on shortlist for Harris' VP pick

July 26, 2024

Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut, is on Vice President Kamala Harris' shortlist to be her running mate as she pursues becoming the next president of the United States. It is the first time that someone who has flown into space has been on the ticket for the White House.

Harris is considering Mark Kelly to be her vice president alongside other candidates, including the governors of Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Kelly has represented Arizona in the U.S. Senate since 2020, when he won a special election to complete the six-year term of John McCain, who died two years earlier.

Kelly was reelected to a full term in 2022.

A former captain in the U.S. Navy, naval aviator and test pilot, Kelly became an astronaut with NASA's 1996 class of candidates, the same group that included his twin brother, Scott.

Kelly logged more than 54 days on four space shuttle missions.

He served as pilot on the STS-108 crew, launching on the shuttle Endeavour to deliver supplies to the International Space Station in 2001 and then five years later on Discovery on STS-121, NASA's second return to flight after the loss of the orbiter Columbia and its seven-member crew in 2003.

In 2008, Kelly commanded Discovery's STS-124 crew, who installed Japan's Kibo laboratory on the ISS.

His final mission, STS-134, marked the last flight of Endeavour and delivered the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a cosmic ray detector, that was mounted to the space station's backbone truss.

After leaving NASA, Kelly moved to Tucson to care for his wife, former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011.

Together, they co-founded the organization "Giffords" to advocate for reduced gun violence.

Kelly also volunteered for one more NASA "mission," allowing scientists to collect his physiological and medical data while his brother provided the same during a year aboard the ISS.

The "twins study" helped further reveal the effects that long-duration space travel has on the human body.

Kelly was the fourth NASA astronaut to be elected to Congress, following John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth; Apollo 13 command module pilot John "Jack" Swigert (who died of cancer before being able to take office); and Apollo 17 lunar module pilot Harrison "Jack" Schmitt.

(Following the opposite path, Senator Jake Garn and Representative [later Senator and today, NASA Administrator] Bill Nelson were chosen to fly on the space shuttle as congressional observers.)

Glenn was under consideration by Jimmy Carter to be vice president and then ran for president in 1984 but lost the nomination to Walter Mondale in the primary.

If Kelly is chosen and elected vice president, he will become the chair of the National Space Council, which provides advice and assists the president on the development and implementation of space policy.

Under NASA's current plans, Kelly (again, if chosen and elected) could be in office when the next astronauts launch to the moon, if not the next American and first woman to walk on the lunar surface.

Harris, who became the presumptive Democratic nominee after President Joe Biden withdrew from the election, will become the first woman and first Asian-American to be president if she wins against Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump.

https://www.space.com/astronaut-mark-kelly-harris-vice-president-candidate

U.S. indicts, offers $10 million reward for North Korean hacker

July 26, 2024 / 4:10 AM

The United States indicted a North Korean hacker for cyberattacks that helped steal military and nuclear secrets and offered a $10 million reward for information about him, multiple agencies announced Thursday.

Rim Jong Hyok was charged for his involvement in a conspiracy to "hack and extort U.S. hospitals and other healthcare providers, launder the ransom proceeds and then use these proceeds to fund additional computer intrusions into defense, technology and government entities worldwide," the Justice Department said in a statement.

Rim and his co-conspirators allegedly worked for North Korean intelligence agency Reconnaissance General Bureau in a hacker collective known by various names including Andariel, Onyx Sleet and APT45.

According to the indictment, Andariel victimized five healthcare providers, four U.S.-based defense contractors, two U.S. Air Force bases and NASA's Office of Inspector General.

"The Andariel actors stole terabytes of information, including unclassified U.S. government employee information, old technical information related to military aircraft, intellectual property and limited technical information pertaining to maritime and uranium processing projects," the Justice Department said.

The operation also infiltrated networks and stole data from Taiwanese and South Korean defense contractors and a Chinese energy company.

Andariel hacked into multiple U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers' computer networks and encrypted the servers responsible for health records, diagnostics and imaging services, the indictment said.

After the attacks, the hackers demanded the victims pay a fee to restore access. In one case, the group sent a ransom note to a Kansas hospital demanding roughly $100,000 in Bitcoin.

"Otherwise all of your files will be posted in the Internet, which may lead you to loss of reputation and cause the troubles for your business," the note read.

"Please do not waste your time! You have 48 hours only! After that the Main server will double your price."

"Today's indictment underscores our commitment to protecting critical infrastructure from malicious actors and the countries that sponsor them," U.S. Attorney for the District of Kansas Kate Brubacher said.

"Rim Jong Hyok and those in his trade put people's lives in jeopardy. They imperil timely, effective treatment for patients and cost hospitals billions of dollars a year."

The Justice Department and the FBI also announced the recovery of $114,000 in virtual currency from the ransomware attacks and related money laundering transactions, as well as the seizure of online accounts used by the co-conspirators.

Rim's last known location was in North Korea, where he worked at the Reconnaissance General Bureau's offices in Pyongyang and Sinuiju, the indictment said.

On Thursday, the U.S. State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to his location or identification.

In addition, U.S., South Korean and British government security agencies released a cybersecurity advisory outlining Andariel's ransomware tactics and warning that North Korea is conducting a global espionage campaign "to advance the regime's military and nuclear programs and ambitions."

It was co-authored by the FBI, the U.S. National Security Agency and cyber agencies, Britain's National Cyber Security Center and South Korea's National Intelligence Service.

"The authoring agencies believe the group and the cyber techniques remain an ongoing threat," the advisory said.

While North Korea remains under heavy international sanctions, it has increasingly turned to hacking and cybertheft in recent years to bankroll its illicit missile and nuclear programs.

Pyongyang funds 40% of its weapons programs through "illicit cybermeans," the U.N. Security Council's Panel of Experts estimated in an annual report released in March.

The panel said that 58 suspected cyberattacks on cryptocurrency-related companies generated some $3 billion for the regime between 2017 and 2023.

The Treasury Department sanctioned the Reconnaissance General Bureau in 2015 and U.S. officials previously publicized the threat from North Korean hackers targeting hospitals and other healthcare organizations with ransomware.

In 2022, U.S. law enforcement recovered roughly $500,000 in payments made to North Korean hackers by victims including a medical center in Kansas and a healthcare provider in Colorado.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2024/07/26/North-Korea-hacker-Rim-Jong-Hyok-indictment-reward-Justice-FBI/1161721976132/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-perseverance-rover-scientists-find-intriguing-mars-rock

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Scientists Find Intriguing Mars Rock

July 25, 2024

The six-wheeled geologist found a fascinating rock that has some indications it may have hosted microbial life billions of years ago, but further research is needed.

A vein-filled rock is catching the eye of the science team of NASA’s Perseverance rover.

Nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” by the team, the arrowhead-shaped rock contains fascinating traits that may bear on the question of whether Mars was home to microscopic life in the distant past.

Analysis by instruments aboard the rover indicates the rock possesses qualities that fit the definition of a possible indicator of ancient life.

The rock exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area being explored by the rover contained running water.

Other explanations for the observed features are being considered by the science team, and future research steps will be required to determine whether ancient life is a valid explanation.

The rock — the rover’s 22nd rock core sample — was collected on July 21, as the rover explored the northern edge of Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley measuring a quarter-mile (400 meters) wide that was carved by water rushing into Jezero Crater long ago.

“We have designed the route for Perseverance to ensure that it goes to areas with the potential for interesting scientific samples,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

“This trip through the Neretva Vallis riverbed paid off as we found something we’ve never seen before, which will give our scientists so much to study.”

Multiple scans of Cheyava Falls by the rover’s SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument indicate it contains organic compounds.

While such carbon-based molecules are considered the building blocks of life, they also can be formed by non-biological processes.

“Cheyava Falls is the most puzzling, complex, and potentially important rock yet investigated by Perseverance,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist of Caltech in Pasadena.

“On the one hand, we have our first compelling detection of organic material, distinctive colorful spots indicative of chemical reactions that microbial life could use as an energy source, and clear evidence that water — necessary for life — once passed through the rock. On the other hand, we have been unable to determine exactly how the rock formed and to what extent nearby rocks may have heated Cheyava Falls and contributed to these features.”

Other details about the rock, which measures 3.2 feet by 2 feet (1 meter by 0.6 meters) and was named after a Grand Canyon waterfall, have intrigued the team, as well.

How Rocks Get Their Spots

In its search for signs of ancient microbial life, the Perseverance mission has focused on rocks that may have been created or modified long ago by the presence of water.

That’s why the team homed in on Cheyava Falls.

“This is the kind of key observation that SHERLOC was built for — to seek organic matter as it is an essential component of a search for past life,” said SHERLOC’s principal investigator Kevin Hand of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission.

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Running the length of the rock are large white calcium sulfate veins. Between those veins are bands of material whose reddish color suggests the presence of hematite, one of the minerals that gives Mars its distinctive rusty hue.

When Perseverance took a closer look at these red regions, it found dozens of irregularly shaped, millimeter-size off-white splotches, each ringed with black material, akin to leopard spots.

Perseverance’s PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) instrument has determined these black halos contain both iron and phosphate.

“These spots are a big surprise,” said David Flannery, an astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

“On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface.”

Spotting of this type on sedimentary terrestrial rocks can occur when chemical reactions involving hematite turn the rock from red to white.

Those reactions can also release iron and phosphate, possibly causing the black halos to form. Reactions of this type can be an energy source for microbes, explaining the association between such features and microbes in a terrestrial setting.

In one scenario the Perseverance science team is considering, Cheyava Falls was initially deposited as mud with organic compounds mixed in that eventually cemented into rock. Later, a second episode of fluid flow penetrated fissures in the rock, enabling mineral deposits that created the large white calcium sulfate veins seen today and resulting in the spots.

Another Puzzle Piece

While both the organic matter and the leopard spots are of great interest, they aren’t the only aspects of the Cheyava Falls rock confounding the science team.

They were surprised to find that these veins are filled with millimeter-size crystals of olivine, a mineral that forms from magma.

The olivine might be related to rocks that were formed farther up the rim of the river valley and that may have been produced by crystallization of magma.

If so, the team has another question to answer: Could the olivine and sulfate have been introduced to the rock at uninhabitably high temperatures, creating an abiotic chemical reaction that resulted in the leopard spots?

“We have zapped that rock with lasers and X-rays and imaged it literally day and night from just about every angle imaginable,” said Farley.

“Scientifically, Perseverance has nothing more to give.

To fully understand what really happened in that Martian river valley at Jezero Crater billions of years ago, we’d want to bring the Cheyava Falls sample back to Earth, so it can be studied with the powerful instruments available in laboratories.”

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NASA's Fermi Finds New Feature in Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst Yet Seen

Jul 25, 2024

In October 2022, astronomers were stunned by what was quickly dubbed the BOAT — the brightest-of-all-time gamma-ray burst (GRB).

Now an international science team reports that data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals a feature never seen before.

The brightest gamma-ray burst yet recorded gave scientists a new high-energy feature to study.

“A few minutes after the BOAT erupted, Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor recorded an unusual energy peak that caught our attention,” said lead researcher Maria Edvige Ravasio at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and affiliated with Brera Observatory, part of INAF

(the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics) in Merate, Italy.

“When I first saw that signal, it gave me goosebumps. Our analysis since then shows it to be the first high-confidence emission line ever seen in 50 years of studying GRBs.”

A paper about the discovery appears in the July 26 edition of the journal Science.

When matter interacts with light, the energy can be absorbed and reemitted in characteristic ways. These interactions can brighten or dim particular colors (or energies), producing key features visible when the light is spread out, rainbow-like, in a spectrum.

These features can reveal a wealth of information, such as the chemical elements involved in the interaction. At higher energies, spectral features can uncover specific particle processes, such as matter and antimatter annihilating to produce gamma rays.

“While some previous studies have reported possible evidence for absorption and emission features in other GRBs, subsequent scrutiny revealed that all of these could just be statistical fluctuations.

What we see in the BOAT is different,” said coauthor Om Sharan Salafia at INAF-Brera Observatory in Milan, Italy. “We’ve determined that the odds this feature is just a noise fluctuation are less than one chance in half a billion.”

GRBs are the most powerful explosions in the cosmos and emit copious amounts of gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light. The most common type occurs when the core of a massive star exhausts its fuel, collapses, and forms a rapidly spinning black hole.

Matter falling into the black hole powers oppositely directed particle jets that blast through the star’s outer layers at nearly the speed of light. We detect GRBs when one of these jets points almost directly toward Earth.

The BOAT, formally known as GRB 221009A, erupted Oct. 9, 2022, and promptly saturated most of the gamma-ray detectors in orbit, including those on Fermi. This prevented them from measuring the most intense part of the blast.

Reconstructed observations, coupled with statistical arguments, suggest the BOAT, if part of the same population as previously detected GRBs, was likely the brightest burst to appear in Earth’s skies in 10,000 years.

The putative emission line appears almost 5 minutes after the burst was detected and well after it had dimmed enough to end saturation effects for Fermi.

The line persisted for at least 40 seconds, and the emission reached a peak energy of about 12 MeV (million electron volts). For comparison, the energy of visible light ranges from 2 to 3 electron volts.

So what produced this spectral feature? The team thinks the most likely source is the annihilation of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons.

“When an electron and a positron collide, they annihilate, producing a pair of gamma rays with an energy of 0.511 MeV,” said coauthor Gor Oganesyan at Gran Sasso Science Institute and Gran Sasso National Laboratory

in L’Aquila, Italy. “Because we’re looking into the jet, where matter is moving at near light speed, this emission becomes greatly blueshifted and pushed toward much higher energies.”

If this interpretation is correct, to produce an emission line peaking at 12 MeV, the annihilating particles had to have been moving toward us at about 99.9% the speed of light.

“After decades of studying these incredible cosmic explosions, we still don’t understand the details of how these jets work,” noted Elizabeth Hays, the Fermi project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“Finding clues like this remarkable emission line will help scientists investigate this extreme environment more deeply.”

https://www.asdnews.com/news/aerospace/2024/07/25/nasas-fermi-finds-new-feature-brightest-gammaray-burst-yet-seen

These 2 US cities are the most vulnerable to solar storms, scientists say

July 26, 2024

As we approach solar maximum — the most active period in the solar cycle — it's no surprise that scientists are looking into the effects of geomagnetic storms on Earth.

While increased solar activity often leads to brilliant showings of auroras, it also can wreak havoc on our technological systems here on Earth.

We most commonly see interference in radio transmissions during strong geomagnetic storms, but geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) have been known to take out power lines and transformers, too.

A team from the British Geological Survey (BGS) has evaluated the vulnerability of cities' power grids and determined that two American cities are especially at risk during a geomagnetic storm: Milwaukee and Washington, D.C.

Lauren Orr of the BGS suggests various reasons as to why these two cities are particularly vulnerable, including "electrical conductivity of the ground, the physical construction of the power grid in those areas, or the location of the auroral currents in the sky."

Now, this isn't a red-alert emergency yet — most solar storms we've experienced in the last 100 years haven't been strong enough to wipe out a power grid. But if something like the 1859 Carrington Event, the strongest recorded solar storm in history, were to happen again, the problems would be severe.

Orr therefore posits that we should monitor cities like Milwaukee and Washington, D.C., to further learn what can be done to protect their power grids.

"Network science is now a common tool to quantify the resilience and robustness of power grids to both deliberate attacks and those caused by random failures or natural disasters," she said in a statement.

"Having previously had great success using network science to uncover patterns within the auroral electrojet, we would again combine the fields of network science and space weather to capture the network response to GICs."

https://www.space.com/us-cities-at-risk-for-solar-storm-damage

Falcon 9 Returns to Flight

July 25, 2024

SpaceX submitted its mishap report to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regarding Falcon 9’s launch anomaly on July 11, 2024.

SpaceX’s investigation team, with oversight from the FAA, was able to identify the most probable cause of the mishap and associated corrective actions to ensure the success of future missions.

Post-flight data reviews confirmed Falcon 9’s first stage booster performed nominally through ascent, stage separation, and a successful droneship landing.

During the first burn of Falcon 9’s second stage engine, a liquid oxygen leak developed within the insulation around the upper stage engine.

The cause of the leak was identified as a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor attached to the vehicle’s oxygen system.

This line cracked due to fatigue caused by high loading from engine vibration and looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line.

Despite the leak, the second stage engine continued to operate through the duration of its first burn, and completed its engine shutdown, where it entered the coast phase of the mission in the intended elliptical parking orbit.

A second burn of the upper stage engine was planned to circularize the orbit ahead of satellite deployment.

However, the liquid oxygen leak on the upper stage led to the excessive cooling of engine components, most importantly those associated with delivery of ignition fluid to the engine.

As a result, the engine experienced a hard start rather than a controlled burn, which damaged the engine hardware and caused the upper stage to subsequently lose attitude control.

Even so, the second stage continued to operate as designed, deploying the Starlink satellites and successfully completing stage passivation, a process of venting down stored energy on the stage, which occurs at the conclusion of every Falcon mission.

Following deployment, the Starlink team made contact with 10 of the satellites to send early burn commands in an attempt to raise their altitude.

Unfortunately, the satellites were in an enormously high-drag environment with a very low perigee of only 135 km above the Earth. As a result, all 20 Starlink satellites from this launch re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere.

By design, Starlink satellites fully demise upon reentry, posing no threat to public safety. To-date, no debris has been reported after the successful deorbit of Starlink satellites.

SpaceX engineering teams have performed a comprehensive and thorough review of all SpaceX vehicles and ground systems to ensure we are putting our best foot forward as we return to flight.

For near term Falcon launches, the failed sense line and sensor on the second stage engine will be removed. The sensor is not used by the flight safety system and can be covered by alternate sensors already present on the engine.

The design change has been tested at SpaceX’s rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas, with enhanced qualification analysis and oversight by the FAA and involvement from the SpaceX investigation team.

An additional qualification review, inspection, and scrub of all sense lines and clamps on the active booster fleet led to a proactive replacement in select locations.

Safety and reliability are at the core of SpaceX’s operations.

It would not have been possible to achieve our current cadence without this focus, and thanks to the pace we’ve been able to launch, we’re able to gather unprecedented levels of flight data and are poised to rapidly return to flight, safely and with increased reliability.

Our missions are of critical importance – safely carrying astronauts, customer payloads, and thousands of Starlink satellites to orbit – and they rely on the Falcon family of rockets being one of the most reliable in the world.

We thank the FAA and our customers for their ongoing work and support.

https://www.spacex.com/updates/#falcon-9-returns-to-flight

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Powerful wildfires devastating Canada captured in satellite imagery

July 25, 2024

Quick-moving wildfires continue to burn across Western Canada, keeping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s GOES-R series satellites busy as they monitor hotspots and smoke plumes around the clock.

On Wednesday evening (July 24) in Jasper National Park, the largest national park in the Canadian Rockies, thousands of residents and tourists had to be evacuated as powerful fires scorched through the southern part of the community.

According to the Associated Press, there were "significant losses" across the area as structures were burned to the ground and other nearby towns were also forced to flee.

These fires began on Monday (July 22) following a significant fire that also occurred in Western Canada on May 10; that fire, in British Columbia, expanded and burned more than 13,000 acres of land in just three days.

Firefighters, weather forecasters and community leaders rely on satellites to provide a wider scope of fire and smoke movement; they use images taken by the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) instrument aboard each of the GOES-R satellites to aid with such monitoring needs.

Using different spectral bands, the wavelengths from each of these instruments' channels can pick up smoke signals and identify hotspots during a wildfire, pinpoint the locations of those signals, and produce powerful images to paint a picture in near real-time of the growth and/or demise of each event.

By combining these snapshots with ground observations from officials and firefighters, even wildfire and smoke forecasts can be significantly improved.

This benefits firefighting efforts because it helps teams better understand each particular fire and also can help communities have more lead time to evacuate if a fast-moving blaze takes a quick turn when the winds shift or if new fires ignite from another's embers.

Wildfire smoke forecasts are also important for other parts of North America downwind of the plumes.

By detecting the intensity and movement of the smoke, air quality alerts can be issued to help communities, especially in major cities, prepare for the incoming impacts that at times can last for days and cause health issues — particularly for those with respiratory issues.

https://www.space.com/jasper-wildfire-national-park-satellite-images

Discovery of 'dark oxygen' from deep-sea metal lumps could trigger rethink of origins of life

July 25, 2024

Potato-size metallic nodules strewn across the Pacific Ocean seafloor produce oxygen in complete darkness and without any help from living organisms, new research reveals.

The discovery of this deep-sea oxygen, dubbed "dark oxygen," is the first time scientists have ever observed oxygen being generated without the involvement of organisms and challenges what we know about the emergence of life on Earth, researchers say.

"When we first got this data, we thought the sensors were faulty, because every study ever done in the deep sea has only seen oxygen being consumed rather than produced," study lead author Andrew Sweetman, a professor and leader of the seafloor ecology and biogeochemistry research group at the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), said in a statement.

But when the instruments kept showing the same results, Sweetman and his colleagues knew they "were onto something ground-breaking and unthought-of," he said.

The results, published Monday (July 22) in the journal Nature Geoscience, suggest that small metallic nodules found in the north Pacific's Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) produce oxygen through seawater electrolysis, where seawater splits into oxygen and hydrogen in the presence of an electric charge.

This charge may come from the difference in electric potential that exists between metal ions within the nodules, which leads to a redistribution of electrons, according to the study.

So-called polymetallic nodules are common on the ocean's abyssal plains, which are flat regions of the seafloor between 10,000 and 20,000 feet (3,000 to 6,000 m) below the ocean surface.

These nodules mostly contain oxides of iron and manganese, but they also hold metals like cobalt, nickel and lithium, as well as rare earth elements such as cerium that are essential components of electronics and low-carbon technologies.

Sweetman and his colleagues originally set out to study the potential impacts of mining polymetallic nodules on the seafloor ecosystem in the CCZ, an abyssal plain spanning 1.7 million square miles (4.5 million square kilometers) between Hawaii and Mexico.

As part of this assessment, the team measured changes in oxygen concentrations using special experimental chambers at multiple locations.

Typically, oxygen levels decline the deeper in the ocean scientists look, as less light is available, meaning there are fewer photosynthetic organisms and therefore lower oxygen production.

But instead of the expected decline in oxygen, the data showed steady emissions from the seabed.

The discovery of dark oxygen 13,000 feet (4,000 m) below the waves, where no light can penetrate, challenges scientists' belief that Earth's oxygen is only naturally produced through photosynthesis (and through oxidizing ammonia, but this results in tiny amounts that are immediately consumed).

That, in turn, raises new questions about the origins of life on Earth roughly 3.7 billion years ago, Sweetman said.

"For aerobic life to begin on the planet, there has to be oxygen and our understanding has been that Earth's oxygen supply began with photosynthetic organisms," he said.

"But we now know that there is oxygen produced in the deep sea, where there is no light. I think we therefore need to revisit questions like: where could aerobic life have begun?"

The results also raise new concerns about potentially mining polymetallic nodules, which could represent a vital source of oxygen for deep-sea ecosystems, Sweetman said.

"Through this discovery, we have generated many unanswered questions and I think we have a lot to think about in terms of how we mine these modules, which are effectively batteries in a rock."

https://www.space.com/deep-sea-dark-oxygen-from-metal-lumps-evidence-for-origins-of-life

U.S. military urged to embrace smallsat revolution

July 26, 2024

The U.S. military has begun to recognize the utility of small satellites, with programs like the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture leveraging smallsats for missile tracking and communications. However, a new report argues that the U.S. Space Force has yet to fully commit the resources to capitalize on this technology at scale.

“The Space Force, Congress, and the industrial base must adjust old paradigms built around large, legacy space systems with long and costly development timelines and move toward a hybrid approach that includes both smallsats and large, exquisite satellite systems,” says a report released July 25 by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

The report calls on the U.S. military to fully leverage the innovations in small satellite technology to enhance its space capabilities and maintain superiority in a contested domain.

Smallsats have become increasingly popular in both commercial and military applications due to their lower cost, faster production times, and ability to be deployed in large numbers.

This proliferation allows for greater resilience and redundancy in space operations, the report says, arguing that proliferation is crucial to maintaining what the military terms “space superiority” — the ability to operate freely in space while denying adversaries the same capability.

Smallsats, typically weighing less than 1,200 kg, have gained significant traction in recent years.

Commercial players like SpaceX and Planet have demonstrated the power of large constellations of small satellites for various applications, from global internet coverage to Earth observation.

Charles Galbreath, lead author of the report, says the Space Force must embrace the smallsat revolution or risk losing the high ground in space.

“Our adversaries, particularly China and Russia, are developing sophisticated counterspace weapons aimed at our legacy satellite systems.

SmallSats offer a way to enhance our resilience and operational capabilities in this new environment.”

The report recommends the Department of Defense boost production rates, strengthen supply chains, and increase funding to support large-scale smallsat deployment.

https://spacenews.com/u-s-military-urged-to-embrace-smallsat-revolution/