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Feds spent millions to create ‘transgender’ lab testing animals
Thursday, February 6, 2025
Members of Congress exploded Thursday over reports that taxpayer money has paid for experiments using “transgender lab rats,” saying it was time to shut down the government’s animal-testing industry.
At a time when nearly every issue sparks partisan rancor, both Democrats and Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said something needs to change.
“Why is the federal government spending taxpayer dollars to create transgender animals?” demanded Rep. Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican who called the hearing as chair of the government innovation subcommittee.
“It’s a great question. I wonder why they’re making cats constipated, also. It’s a question that rings around in my head,” said Justin Goodman, senior vice president at the White Coat Waste Project, which exposes animal testing projects.
His group calculated that the National Institutes of Health has spent at least $240 million over the years in grants for “transgender animal experiments,” including $26 million in currently active projects.
“In a lot of these cases, they involve mice, rats, monkeys who are being surgically mutilated and subjected to hormone therapies to mimic female-to-male or male-to-female gender transitions, gender-affirming hormone therapies,” Mr. Goodman said.
Researchers then use them to try to study the effects of gender transitions.
In one $1.1 million experiment, it meant pumping the test animals full of a party drug to see if those who’d undergone the forced testosterone treatments were more easily pushed into an overdose.
As for why experimenters have gravitated toward transgender-type experiments, Mr. Goodman said it was because they chase the latest trends, such as diversity, equity and inclusion.
“In this case, DEI grants were used to fund a lot of this stuff, so people who abuse animals find some kind of excuse to bring in new money, and they’ll switch their research over to something that’s trendy to bring in tax dollars,” he said.
Mr. Goodman said universities skim as much as 40% off each grant as overhead, so they don’t have any incentive to control the experiments.
Paul A. Locke, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said there are possible alternatives to animal testing, but the system is still built around it.
He said the federal government, whose regulatory agencies are often the consumers of the test results as they ponder whether to approve new pharmaceuticals or chemical uses, can make clear that it will accept non-animal test results.
He said the new technologies to replace animal testing need more funding and their results need more validation work. And he said schools can change their training for new students.
“We have to move away from [the concept that] animal testing and animal research are always the gold standard,” he said.
He said he doubts animal testing can be eliminated within a decade, saying it could be 40 years or more before it’s done.
Mr. Goodman said he was more optimistic. He said the federal government could shut off the money it pays for animal testing, which would force the companies to change.
“They’ll figure out another way to do it,” he said.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/feb/6/feds-spent-millions-create-transgender-lab-testing/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
February 7, 2025
LEDA 1313424: The Bullseye Galaxy
The giant galaxy cataloged as LEDA 1313424 is about two and a half times the size of our own Milky Way. Its remarkable appearance in this recently released Hubble Space Telescope image strongly suggests its nickname "The Bullseye Galaxy". Known as a collisional ring galaxy it has nine rings confirmed by telescopic observations, rippling from its center like waves from a pebble dropped into a pond. Of course, the pebble dropped into the Bullseye galaxy was a galaxy itself. Telescopic observations identify the blue dwarf galaxy at center-left as the likely collider, passing through the giant galaxy's center and forming concentric rings in the wake of their gravitational interaction. The Bullseye Galaxy lies some 567 million light-years away toward the constellation Pisces. At that distance, this stunning Hubble image would span about 530,000 light-years.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
NASA will swap Dragon spacecraft on the ground to return Butch and Suni sooner
Feb 6, 2025 6:30 AM |
NASA should soon announce a new plan for the return of two of its astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, to Earth as early as March 19.
This is about two weeks earlier than the existing public timeline for their flight home from the International Space Station.
Bringing the two astronauts back to Earth next month will require some shuffling of spacecraft here on the ground and a delay of the privately operated Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station to later in the spring.
Wilmore and Williams flew to the station on Boeing's Starliner in June 2024.
The plight of "Butch and Suni," as they are often referred to, was a major story in the space community last summer after their Starliner spacecraft experienced significant propulsion issues before docking.
NASA ultimately decided the safest course would be for the pair to return home on a SpaceX Dragon vehicle, and launched the Crew-9 mission last September with two empty seats.
Thus, Butch and Suni's ride home has been docked to the station since last fall.
Shuffling spacecraft
At that point the pair joined the Crew-9 mission, alongside NASA's Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, and were scheduled to fly home in February.
However, there was a late-developing technical issue with a new Dragon vehicle SpaceX is building, C213. Its first flight was to be Crew-10, the next NASA mission to the station.
These four astronauts were to relieve Crew-9, allowing Butch and Suni to fly home. In December, NASA publicly announced a delay of the Crew-10 launch to no earlier than "late March." This would bring Crew-9 home in early April.
SpaceX and NASA are still working to resolve the C213 Dragon issue, which may be related to batteries on the spacecraft. NASA now believes the vehicle will not be ready for its debut launch until late April.
Therefore, according to sources at the agency, NASA has decided to swap vehicles for Crew-10. The space agency has asked SpaceX to bring forward the C210 vehicle, which returned to Earth last March after completing the Crew-7 mission.
Known as Endurance, the spacecraft was next due to fly the private Axiom-4 mission to the space station later this spring. Sources said SpaceX is now working toward a no-earlier-than March 12 launch date for Crew-10 on Endurance.
If this flight occurs on time—and the date is not certain, as it depends on other missions on SpaceX's Falcon 9 manifest—the Crew-9 astronauts, including Wilmore and Williams, could fly home on March 19.
They would have spent 286 days in space. Although not a record for a NASA human spaceflight, this would be far longer than their original mission, which was expected to last eight to 30 days.
The plight of Butch and Suni has become increasingly political in the last 10 days after Donald Trump began his second term in the White House.
A little more than a week ago, Trump said, "I have just asked Elon Musk and @SpaceX to 'go get' the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration.
They have been waiting for many months on Space Station. Elon will soon be on his way. Hopefully, all will be safe. Good luck."
Musk, the founder of SpaceX, referred to the two astronauts as "stranded" and blamed the Biden administration for leaving them in space so long.
Politics versus pragmatism
With NASA now potentially advancing the return of Wilmore and Williams by about two weeks, from early April to mid-March, Trump and Musk may seek to score a political win.
But the underlying facts paint a different picture, suggesting pragmatic rather than political rationale.
The plan for Butch and Suni's return was finalized by NASA last August, and Musk signed off on it as chief executive of SpaceX at the time.
Their original return date on Crew-9 was delayed due to a technical problem with a SpaceX vehicle.
In recent months, as NASA has monitored the development of the C213 vehicle, they worked on a contingency plan involving the swapping of Axiom's spacecraft.
This plan was set into motion before Trump came into office. It has now been greenlit.
At this point, if NASA waited for C213 to be ready to launch the Crew-10 mission, the space station program would start to approach 'redlines' on food, water, and other supplies for crew members on board the station.
The agency is also juggling a lot of competing priorities in terms of cargo and crew missions to the station.
The bottom line is that they really needed this crew rotation to occur sooner rather than later.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/nasa-moves-up-target-to-return-butch-and-suni-but-not-for-political-reasons/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-astronauts-suni-williams-space-interview/
NASA astronaut Sunita Williams says "we don't feel abandoned" or "stuck" as space mission stretches on
February 7, 2025 / 9:38 AM EST
Contrary to a recent social media post from President Trump, Starliner astronaut Sunita Williams says she and crewmate Barry "Butch" Wilmore have not been "virtually abandoned" in space, despite a mission that's been extended from a little more than one week to more than nine months.
"I don't think I'm abandoned. I don't think we're stuck up here," she told CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson during an in-flight interview airing Friday night.
"We've got food. We've got clothes. We have a ride home in case anything really bad does happen to the International Space Station.
"We're in a posture … where we have the International Space Station fully manned and doing what the taxpayers wanted, to do world-class science. And so I feel honored, like I said, to be here and a part of the team."
NASA is finalizing plans to bring Williams and Wilmore back to Earth, along with their two space station crewmates, Crew 9 commander Nick Hague and cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, around March 19, sources say.
That would shorten their extended stay in orbit by about two weeks compared to a previous plan for late March or April.
The slightly earlier trip home would be possible if the next set of station fliers, known as Crew 10, is switched to a different Crew Dragon spacecraft, one that can be ready for launch as early as mid March.
The switch is needed, sources say, because work to prepare the original SpaceX ferry ship for its maiden flight is taking longer than expected.
In any case, after a weeklong handover to bring their Crew 10 replacements up to speed on the ins and outs of space station operation, Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams would undock and head back to Earth.
They'll come home aboard the same Crew Dragon that carried Hague and Gorbunov to the station last September, along with two empty seats reserved for Wilmore and Williams' return.
Why the mission extended for months
Assuming the dates hold up — and there are multiple variables in play — Wilmore and Williams will have logged nearly 290 days in orbit since their launch June 5 on a mission originally expected to last a little more than one week, the time needed to carry out the first piloted test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.
But the Starliner, built as part of a NASA program to develop independent commercial crew ships to ferry astronauts to and from the space station, ran into propulsion problems and helium leaks shortly after launch that prompted weeks and then months of tests and analysis.
In the end, NASA managers decided the risks were too high to bring Wilmore and Williams down aboard the Starliner.
Instead, they opted to bring the ship down by remote control, without its crew, and to keep Wilmore and Williams aboard the station until they could hitch a ride home with Hague and Gorbunov at the end of the Crew 9 expedition.
NASA initially planned to bring all four back to Earth in February, but last December, another month was tacked onto the mission because of work needed to ready the Crew 10 Starliner for launch. Sources now say more time is needed to finish that work.
Trump speaks out on crew's delay
President Trump last month blamed the Starliner crew's overall mission extension on the Biden administration, saying in a social media post that he had asked SpaceX founder Elon Musk to "go get" the two "brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden administration."
He also named Musk, a billionaire supporter of the Trump campaign, to head the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is charged with cutting the size of the federal government.
Musk said in an earlier post on his social media platform X that Mr. Trump had asked SpaceX to get the Starliner astronauts home as soon as possible, adding "we will do so. Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long."
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NASA's administrator at the time, Bill Nelson, was appointed by the Biden administration, but the decision to extend the Starliner crew's mission was made by the agency's Commercial Crew and International Space Station programs.
The plan has been in place since last September when the Crew 9 Dragon was launched with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams.
As such, there is no need to "go get" the astronauts — their ride home has been docked at the space station for the past five months.
"We don't feel abandoned. We feel like we're part of the team." In the interview, Dickerson asked Williams about the president's comments on their mission.
"Trump said you and Butch Wilmore, who is your Starliner crewmate, had been — this is the president's words — 'virtually abandoned,'" Dickerson asked. "Do you feel abandoned up there, commander?"
"I don't think those words are quite accurate," Williams replied. "Both Butch and I have lived up here on the space station before.
We know how NASA and our commercial partners work together. So we expected that we would be up here for a little while.
"We're part of something bigger than ourselves. We're part of the International Space Station, and we have obligations to our international partners to do science and exploration while we're up here.
So yeah, we knew this was going to happen, so no, we don't feel abandoned. We feel like we're part of the team, and that's a huge honor."
Asked why the Crew 9 Dragon couldn't return to Earth sooner, given that it's already docked at the station, Williams said that would leave the station with a single U.S. crew member aboard, Don Pettit, who was launched to the station last year with two cosmonauts aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
With only a single U.S. astronaut aboard to respond to emergencies, operate power, life support and other systems in the NASA segment of the station, high-priority research would grind to a halt. Standard practice is for NASA to launch a replacement crew about a week before the outgoing crew's departure for an orderly handover.
"Sure, it could have taken us home, but that leaves only three people on the space station from the Soyuz crew, two Russians and one American," Williams said. "And the space station is big, it's a building, it's the size of a football field.
"Things can go wrong, and you need to be able to fix it, either inside (or) outside, and so having additional people to be able to do that, that capability, is really important."
NASA has tentatively decided to switch the Crew 10 fliers — commander Anne McClain, pilot Nichole Ayers, Japan's Takuya Onishi and cosmonaut Kirill Peskov — to a different Crew Dragon to avoid adding even more time to Crew 9's already extended mission.
Crew 10 is expected to be assigned to a Crew Dragon that had been earmarked for a commercial flight to the station, a mission known as AX-4 that was booked by Houston-based Axiom Space.
That non-NASA crew would instead use the original Crew 10 Dragon later this spring.
NASA would not comment on the plans. A spokeswoman said "we're not able to confirm any details reported on Crew 9 return at this time.
We are working through coordination of forward plans for the agency's Commercial Crew Program missions with its various stakeholders. We will share more information as soon as we can."
For her part, Williams said she just wanted "the right decision to be made, in the best interest of all of us, of Crew 10, of course, and us.
I'm happy either way. Eight days turned into a couple more months than that, a couple more months, whatever, it doesn't really matter. The right decision just has to be made."
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Hubble Goes Supernova Hunting
Feb 07, 2025
A supernova and its host galaxy are the subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image.
The galaxy in question is LEDA 132905 in the constellation Sculptor.
Even at more than 400 million light-years away, LEDA 132905’s spiral structure is faintly visible, as are patches of bright blue stars.
The bright pinkish-white dot in the center of the image, between the bright center of the galaxy and its faint left edge, is a supernova named SN 2022abvt.
Discovered in late 2022, Hubble observed SN 2022abvt about two months later.
This image uses data from a study of Type Ia supernovae, which occur when the exposed core of a dead star ignites in a sudden, destructive burst of nuclear fusion.
Researchers are interested in this type of supernova because they can use them to measure precise distances to other galaxies.
The universe is a big place, and supernova explosions are fleeting. How is it possible to be in the right place at the right time to catch a supernova when it happens?
Today, robotic telescopes that continuously scan the night sky discover most supernovae. The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS, spotted SN 2022abvt.
As the name suggests, ATLAS tracks down the faint, fast-moving signals from asteroids close to Earth.
In addition to searching out asteroids, ATLAS also keeps tabs on objects that brighten or fade suddenly, like supernovae, variable stars, and galactic centers powered by hungry black holes.
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-goes-supernova-hunting/
New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain Before the Super Bowl
Feb 6, 2025
This true-color reflectance image of Lake Pontchartrain and New Orleans was captured on February 2, 2025, by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) instrument aboard the Landsat 8 satellite.
On Sunday, February 9, Super Bowl LIX—the annual championship game of the U.S. National Football League—will be held in the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.
The OLI instrument aboard the joint NASA-USGS Landsat 8 spacecraft is from the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) project.
HLS provides 30-meter resolution, true-color surface reflectance imagery from the OLI and OLI-2 instruments and from the Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) aboard the ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-2 satellites.
The data from the four instruments are processed through a set of algorithms to make the imagery consistent and comparable.
This processing includes atmospheric correction, cloud and cloud-shadow masking, spatial co-registration and common gridding, illumination and view angle normalization, and spectral bandpass adjustment.
https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/news/worldview-image-archive/new-orleans-lake-pontchartrain-before-super-bowl
https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/
NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel Releases 2024 Annual Report
Feb 06, 2025
The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), an advisory committee that reports to NASA and Congress, issued its 2024 annual report Thursday examining the agency’s safety performance, accomplishments, and challenges during the past year.
The report highlights 2024 activities and observations on NASA’s work, including:
strategic vision and agency governance
Moon to Mars management
future of U.S. presence in low Earth orbit
health and medical risks in human space exploration
“Over the past year, NASA has continued to make meaningful progress toward meeting the intent of the broad-ranging recommendations the panel has made over the last several years,” said retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Susan J. Helms, chair of ASAP.
“We believe that the agency’s careful attention to vision, strategy, governance, and program management is vital to the safe execution of NASA’s complex and critical national mission.”
This year’s report reflects the panel’s continued focus on NASA’s strategies for risk management and safety culture in an environment of growing space commercialization.
Specifically, the panel cites its 2021 recommendations for NASA on preparing for future challenges in a changing landscape, including the need to evaluate NASA’s approach to safety and technical risk and to evolve its role, responsibilities, and relationships with private sector and international partners.
Overall, the panel finds NASA is continuing to make progress with respect to the agency’s strategic vision, approach to governance, and integrated program management.
The NASA 2040 new agencywide initiative is working to operationalize the agency’s vision and strategic objectives across headquarters and centers.
With the establishment of NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office in 2023, it finds NASA has implemented safety and risk management as a key focus for NASA’s Artemis campaign.
The 2024 report provides details on the concrete actions the agency should take to fulfill its previous recommendations and spotlights its recommendations for the agency moving ahead.
It addresses safety assessments for Moon to Mars and current International Space Station operations, as well as risk-related issues surrounding NASA’s planned transition to commercial low Earth orbit destinations.
It covers relevant areas of human health and medicine in space and the impact of budget constraints and uncertainty on safety.
The annual report is based on the panel’s 2024 fact-finding and quarterly public meetings; direct observations of NASA operations and decision-making; discussions with NASA management, employees, and contractors; and the panel members’ experiences.
Congress established the panel in 1968 to provide advice and make recommendations to the NASA administrator on safety matters after the 1967 Apollo 1 fire claimed the lives of three American astronauts.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-aerospace-safety-advisory-panel-releases-2024-annual-report/
https://www.nasa.gov/asap/
Robot Gets a Grip
Feb 06, 2025
Blue tentacle-like arms attached to an Astrobee free-flying robot grab onto a “capture cube” in this image from Feb. 4, 2025.
The experimental grippers demonstrated autonomous detection and capture techniques that may be used to remove space debris and service satellites in low Earth orbit.
The Astrobee system was designed and built at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley for use inside the International Space Station.
The system consists of three cube-shaped robots (named Bumble, Honey, and Queen), software, and a docking station used for recharging.
The robots use electric fans as a propulsion system that allows them to fly freely through the microgravity environment of the station. Cameras and sensors help them to “see” and navigate their surroundings.
The robots also carry a perching arm that allows them to grasp station handrails to conserve energy or to grab and hold items.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/robot-gets-a-grip/
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/nasa-cubesat-finds-new-radiation-belts-after-may-2024-solar-storm/
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2024JA033504
NASA CubeSat Finds New Radiation Belts After May 2024 Solar Storm
Feb 06, 2025
The largest solar storm in two decades hit Earth in May 2024. For several days, wave after wave of high-energy charged particles from the Sun rocked the planet.
Brilliant auroras engulfed the skies, and some GPS communications were temporarily disrupted.
With the help of a serendipitously resurrected small NASA satellite, scientists have discovered that this storm also created two new temporary belts of energetic particles encircling Earth.
The findings are important to understanding how future solar storms could impact our technology.
The new belts formed between two others that permanently surround Earth called the Van Allen Belts.
Shaped like concentric rings high above Earth’s equator, these permanent belts are composed of a mix of high-energy electrons and protons that are trapped in place by Earth’s magnetic field.
The energetic particles in these belts can damage spacecraft and imperil astronauts who pass through them, so understanding their dynamics is key to safe spaceflight.
The discovery of the new belts, made possible by NASA’s Colorado Inner Radiation Belt Experiment (CIRBE) satellite and published Feb. 6, 2025, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, is particularly important for protecting spacecraft launching into geostationary orbits, since they travel through the Van Allen Belts several times before reaching their final orbit.
New Belts Amaze Scientists
Temporary belts have been detected in the aftermath of large solar storms before. But while previous belts have been composed mostly of electrons, the innermost of the two new belts also included energetic protons.
This unique composition is likely due to the strength and composition of the solar storm.
“When we compared the data from before and after the storm, I said, ‘Wow, this is something really new,’” said the paper’s lead author Xinlin Li, a professor at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. “This is really stunning.”
The new belts also seem to have lasted much longer than previous belts. Whereas previous temporary belts lasted around four weeks, the new belt composed primary of electrons lasted more than three months.
The other belt, that also includes protons, has lasted much longer than the electron belt because it is in a more stable region and is less prone to the physical processes that can knock the particles out of orbit. It is likely still there today.
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“These are really high-energy electrons and protons that have found their way into Earth’s inner magnetic environment,” said David Sibeck, former mission scientist for NASA’s Van Allen Probes and research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who was not involved with the new study. “Some might stay in this place for a very long time.”
How long such belts stick around depends on passing solar storms. Large storms can provide the energy to knock particles in these belts out of their orbits and send them spiraling off into space or down to Earth.
One such storm at the end of June significantly decreased the size of the new electron belt and another in August nearly erased the remainder of that electron belt, though a small population of high-energy electrons endured.
CubeSat Fortuitously Comes Back to Life to Make the Discovery
The new discovery was made by NASA’s CIRBE satellite, a CubeSat about the size of a shoebox that circled the planet’s magnetic poles in a low Earth orbit from April 2023 to October 2024.
CIRBE housed an instrument called the Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope integrated little experiment-2 (REPTile-2) — a miniaturized and upgraded version of an instrument that flew aboard NASA’s Van Allen Probes, which made the first discovery of a temporary electron belt in 2013.
After a year in space, the CubeSat experienced an anomaly and unexpectedly went quiet on April 15, 2024.
The scientists were disappointed to miss the solar storm in May but were able to rely on other spacecraft to provide some preliminary data on the electron belt.
Luckily, on June 15, the spacecraft sprang back to life and resumed taking measurements.
The data provided high-resolution information that couldn’t be gleaned by any other instrument and allowed the scientists to understand the magnitude of the new belts.
“Once we resumed measurements, we were able to see the new electron belt, which wasn’t visible in the data from other spacecraft,” Li said.
Having the CubeSat in orbit to measure the effect of the solar storm has been bittersweet, Li said.
While it provided the opportunity to measure the effects of such a large event, the storm also increased atmospheric drag on the CubeSat, which caused its orbit to decrease prematurely.
As a result, the CubeSat deorbited in October 2024. However, the spacecraft’s data makes it all worth it.
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Space weather station
07/02/2025
Over the course of a whole day, Norway’s plasma sampler, the multi-Needle Langmuir Probe (m-NLP), is seen being slowly moved around by a robotic arm to be slotted into place on the outside porch of Bartolomeo – the Airbus-operated platform attached to the Columbus laboratory of the International Space Station (ISS).
Since its integration on Bartolomeo in September 2023, the task of this instrument has been to sample its immediate space weather environment by measuring the plasma surrounding the ISS.
It does so to an extraordinarily high level of detail, making a few thousand measurements per second.
Plasma, sometimes called ‘the fourth state of matter’ (the other three being solid, liquid, and gas), is essentially an electrically charged gas.
Most of the visible matter in space is made of plasma, including the Sun and the radiation particles it throws off during solar flares. On Earth, we can see plasma in the form of auroras or lightning.
The streams of particles flying from the Sun towards Earth are referred to as the solar wind, and they give rise to space weather.
“Spectacular events such as solar flares can be accompanied by bursts of energetic particles that can reach Earth’s upper atmosphere and ionosphere, where most of our satellites are operating,” explains Fabrice Cipriani of European Space Agency’s Space Environment and Effects section.
“This form of space radiation can for instance interrupt communication between satellites and the ground or cause a satellite to veer off its orbit.
m-NLP helps us understand space weather by detecting electron density around the ISS, down to a resolution of a few meters.
As the instrument is operating most of the time, its continuous measurements allow us to monitor the impact of the Sun on our nearby environment.”
“So far, the instrument has given us a wealth of data about the plasma state in mid and low latitudes, at unprecedented resolution,” explains Lasse Clausen, professor for plasma physics at the University of Oslo.
“Now we can really start to understand the underlying physical mechanisms that drive space weather effects in this part of the globe.
We were also lucky enough to capture the plasma’s response to one of the biggest solar storms in the last years.”
The instrument is gathering data in its own right, but due to its flexibility, it also acts as the blueprint for operational space weather monitoring instruments that are currently being developed within ESA’s Space Situational Awareness programme.
“m-NLP was the first instrument to be slotted onto the Bartholomeo platform,” says Atul Deep, ESA’s experiment system engineer.
“This meant that during its integration, various system requirements had to be tested and validated.
In this way, our instrument helped prepare the systems for future payloads that will be hosted on the platform.”
Kenza Benamar, ESA’s technology research and development engineer, adds: “The m-NLP technology has potential to be used well beyond low Earth orbit.
With modifications such as more radiation-resistant electronics or different coating, such instruments could be part of a future space weather constellation or even venture into deep space.
This concept is currently under study in ESA’s Space Situational Awareness Programme,” Kenza adds.
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2025/02/Space_weather_station
He’s got spunk — here’s what happens when astronauts ejaculate in space
Published Feb. 7, 2025, 10:46 a.m. ET
This information could really come in handy.
Randy astronauts may find themselves in need of a little sexual relief while touring the galaxy.
But when a rocket man can no longer keep those inner passions pinned up, the release of his bodily fluids in zero-gravity makes some out-of-this-world motion, so say a set of scientists.
“Let’s talk about spunk,” said sexpert Esme Louise James, per a trending TikTok. “In space,” added astrophysicist Matthew Agnew in the collaboration clip dedicated to space cadets and ejaculation.
Talking about getting freaky in the final frontier is a dirty job — but someone’s got to do it.
Interest in space sex has piqued in recent months, owing to Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, astronauts of the International Space Station (ISS).
Due to technical issues on the aircraft — a Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which launched for what was meant to be an eight day trip in June 2024 — the twosome is now stranded in the great beyond, indefinitely.
Since the mishap, social media savages have speculated that the astronauts have engaged in naughty behavior to pass the time.
And while solar system insiders claim that interstellar intercourse is “not impossible,” the pros say it would be difficult to enjoy “the do” due to a lack of stability in the high skies.
But, should a male moonwalker find a some time for a little self-pleasure, James and Agnew say the outcomes of an outer space orgasm are otherworldly.
“What would happen if a man’s rocket blasted off in space?,” pondered James in the NSFW NASA-inspired vid. The eye-popping post amassed over 24,000 views.
“When a man ejaculates in the vacuum of space, how fast backwards is her propelled?” asked Agnew before he and James revealed the goopy answer via the “conservation of momentum.”
It’s a fundamental concept of physics, according to NASA. (Note: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s code of ethics does not explicitly address sex or masturbation in outer space).
The concept states that the total momentum of two or more bodies in a system will remain the same, said Agnew.
“This means that the mass multiplied by the velocity of the ejaculated will equal the mass multiples by the velocity of them man,” continued the astro-know-it-all.
And to prove that he wasn’t just jerking viewers around, Agnew and James did the man-juice math.
The academic duo calculated the average volume of “space spunk,” approximately one teaspoon, as well as its density, one gram, and the average speed of ejaculation, which they found to be 45 kilometers per hour.
After multiplying the density by volume to find the mass, Agnew and James multiplied the mass by the velocity.
“And that gives us the momentum of the ejaculate,” Agnew announced with pride.
“So let’s say the average man weighs [155 pounds],” he said. “This means the velocity must equal 0.000562 [meters-per-second].”
Thankfully, James put their funky-spunky finding in layman’s terms.
“This means our astronaut who has blasted off in the vacuum of space is now traveling backwards at two meters-per-hour,” she said.
“It’s about the speed of an average garden snail,” said Agnew — which travels at around one meter-per-hour.
“So if you ever find yourself in the vacuum of space and you want to use ejaculate as propellant,” he warned, “you’re not going to be moving very quickly.”
https://nypost.com/2025/02/07/lifestyle/hes-got-spunk-heres-what-happens-when-astronauts-ejaculate-in-space-per-scientists/
https://www.tiktok.com/@dr.esme.louise/video/7333981452482170114