Would you like Science with that?

For your viewing pleasure. There are hundreds of people watching it and just waiting for stuff to get going again. (Currently: work apparently paused due to a thunderstorm. [shrug])

ETA: Apparently Trump's packed board has threatened that if his name comes off they'll strip the center of all funding. Details:

(eyeroll)

A Moonlit Earth as Seen From Artemis II

One of the first images transmitted back to Earth from the Artemis II mission was a stunner. In a single image, Earth’s full disk appears amid celestial phenomena that illustrate its place in the solar system. And although the visible hemisphere appears to be awash in sunlight, it is actually lit by moonlight. The astronauts’ vantage point provided a rare opportunity to capture nighttime features—most notably lights from human habitation—from a new perspective.

An Artemis crew member captured the photo from the Orion spacecraft after it completed the translunar injection burn, which sent the spacecraft out of Earth orbit and on a trajectory toward the Moon. In the photo, Earth eclipses the Sun from Orion’s perspective, leaving only a small sliver of its bright light visible around the bottom right edge. Green auroras, caused by charged particles from the Sun interacting with Earth’s upper atmosphere, glow around the north and south poles (lower left and upper right, respectively).

The Sun’s light also produces the fuzzy glow, known as zodiacal light, that appears to the lower right of Earth. This phenomenon comes from sunlight reflecting off interplanetary dust. Skywatchers on Earth may see it at certain times of year around dawn or dusk as a faint column of light extending up from the horizon. Data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on its journey to Jupiter suggest that Mars may be a significant source of the dust particles that produce zodiacal light. Earth’s other planetary neighbor, Venus, appears as the bright object in the bottom right of the image.

On Earth itself, city lights are evidence of human activity. Bright areas appear in Spain, Portugal, and northern Africa (lower left), sub-Saharan Africa (center left), and Brazil (center right). Digital camera technology—with help from the illumination of a full Moon—made it possible to see these and other details of Earth’s surface and atmosphere in low light. The crew set the camera’s ISO to 51,200 to make it highly sensitive to light. For comparison, an ISO setting of 100 or 200 is common for daytime photography.

Previous nighttime views of Earth taken from spacecraft may look very different from this photo but have also inspired and enlightened. For instance, the Apollo 12 crew photographed Earth eclipsing the Sun in 1969; astronaut Alan Bean would go on to depict his impressions of the event in paintings.

More recently, astronauts aboard the International Space Station have photographed the planet at night from low Earth orbit, while NASA’s Black Marble nighttime lights product suite uses satellite observations to produce science-quality records of nighttime lights at daily, monthly, and yearly time scales. Those programs provide sustained data records, while the Artemis II photo is distinctive as a single human-captured full-disk view showing many low-light features at once.

Cindy Evans, senior exploration scientist in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, was working in the Science Evaluation Room during the Artemis II mission and was one of the first people on Earth to see the image. Evans was struck both by its beauty and the perspective revealed by all the visible solar system features. “I love the image so much because it was taken with Earth in moonshine, and shows Earth as a solar system body, a dynamic planet interacting with the solar wind, and a place harboring life,” she said.

The image is scientifically valuable, as well, said Miguel Román, Deputy Director for Atmospheres and Data Systems at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It speaks powerfully to the breadth of what NASA does across science and human exploration,” he said. Román studies artificial light at night, as viewed from space, as a measurable signal of human activity.

“[This photo] reminds us that Earth at night is visually compelling, physically complex, and scientifically underexplored,” Román said. “I see this image as a glimpse of what Earth science can become in the future.”

How Artemis II livestreamed hi-def videos and images from the moon to Earth

This April, humanity had front-row seats to space as the Artemis II Orion spacecraft transmitted crystal-clear footage of its historic journey around the moon from more than 250,000 miles (about 402,000 kilometers) back to Earth at speeds on par with home internet connections.

The livestreaming of high-definition video and high-resolution photos of the moon and Earth was made possible through the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O). Developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory in collaboration with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the onboard O2O payload was the space end of a high-speed laser communications (lasercom) link.

This link reached Earth when Orion had a line of sight with primary optical ground stations at NASA's White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico and Caltech/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Table Mountain Facility in California, or an experimental ground station at Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory.

Together with terrestrial networks, O2O formed an internet backbone between the Artemis II Orion spacecraft and the Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas.

Toward a high-speed internet in space

"Our goal was to demonstrate O2O's operational utility for human spaceflight, extending the high-bandwidth connections that internet users enjoy on Earth to astronauts in deep space," says lead systems engineer Farzana Khatri, a senior staff member in Lincoln Laboratory's Optical and Quantum Communications Group.

"We not only demonstrated the first use of lasercom on a crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit, but also attracted massive public engagement as the astronauts shared multimedia from their journey in near-real time."

During the last missions to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, astronauts relied on radio-frequency systems to communicate. But radio waves can carry only so much data per second because of their low carrier frequency. The grainy, poor-quality video and images of the moon from that time speak to this limited bandwidth.

With its much higher carrier frequency, infrared laser light can transmit 10 to 100 times more data per second than radio waves can. The switch from Apollo-era radios to Artemis-era lasers is analogous to the move from dial-up to high-speed internet. And high-speed internet is rapidly becoming a key requirement for NASA missions as they collect more high-resolution data and push humans farther into deep space.

Lasering in on unprecedented views

During the Artemis II mission, from April 1–11, O2O downlinked nearly half a terabyte of data at speeds up to 260 megabits per second. This trove contained never-before-seen views of the basins and craters on the far side of the moon, a crescent Earth setting behind the moon, a nearly hourlong total solar eclipse with other planets scattered across a star-filled sky, and flashes of light from tiny meteoroids striking the lunar surface.

"O2O was able to downlink all the data stored on multiple onboard cameras, allowing mission control to erase the memory cards and refill them with new photos and videos," explains Khatri.

"For any space mission, scientists and spacecraft engineers are concerned that data not sent down during the mission can become corrupted or destroyed. And when the spacecraft capsule returns, downloading the data can sometimes take months. The lasercom capability provided by O2O ensured the data were preserved and immediately available for analysis."

O2O is based on the laboratory's R&D 100 Award-winning Modular, Agile, and Scalable Optical Terminal (MAScOT), which contains subassembly modules for pointing the laser beams, establishing a communications link with ground stations, and maintaining this link despite atmospheric conditions. MAScOT made its debut in space on the International Space Station in 2023, demonstrating NASA's first LEO user for its lasercom relay system.

Over the moon for O2O

Leading up to the launch of Artemis II, operations teams from the laboratory traveled to NASA's White Sands Test Facility and Mission Control Center (MCC) to conduct monthly maintenance on ground hardware and simulate different mission stages. During the 10-day mission, laboratory teams provided around-the-clock coverage.

At mission control, one laboratory team, along with NASA Goddard colleagues, interfaced with a mission flight controller to command the O2O payload, coordinated with U.S. and Australian ground terminals to bring up the O2O physical link, assessed whether overall O2O mission requirements were being met, and analyzed data to ensure payload health and optimize performance.

Another laboratory team oversaw subsystems of the optical ground terminal at White Sands, while staff at the laboratory's main campus in Massachusetts offered subject-matter expertise.

Initially, O2O had a scheduled operational window of one hour a day, with the onboard radio system set to downlink most data. However, mission operators found O2O so useful that they maximized its operational time as the mission progressed. On the fly, mission operators adjusted Orion's attitude—how the spacecraft is oriented in space—so O2O could have line-of-sight access to the ground.

"One special aspect of this mission that enabled our technology to be so impactful was the flexibility built into the planning process to account for the fact that humans hadn't been to the moon in more than 50 years, and it would be the first time sending astronauts on Orion," says Bryan Robinson, leader of the Optical and Quantum Communications Group.

"An established process for making real-time changes to the plan and the willingness of operators to try out this new technology had a huge impact, even for this short mission. This impact was tangible to everyone in mission operations and to the public watching from home."

With Artemis II completed, engineers, scientists and mission specialists are analyzing mission data. Their analyses will provide insights into spacecraft and subsystem performance and moon geology that will inform lunar landings and deep-space exploration. While the laboratory team is still processing O2O performance data, members believe the system could downlink at least 10 times more data by improving the efficiency of the downlink process and addressing data-flow bottlenecks in space and ground networks.

The laboratory team is now evaluating how lasercom could support future moon plans for Artemis and Ignition. Aligning with the National Space Policy to secure U.S. leadership in space, Ignition is a recently announced initiative to establish a permanent lunar base with a sustainable human presence.

"Participating in this historic mission from the MCC and having O2O be useful, I couldn't have asked for anything more amazing in my career," Khatri says.

"When I came home, I was floored by the response of people who were engaged with the mission while it was happening. Much of that engagement was enabled by the technology we developed. That's a rare moment in a career doing what we do," Robinson adds.

Universe expansion still accelerating say astronomers

New supernovae study debunks 2025 findings that cosmos expansion is slowing

Our understanding of the universe remains solid, say astronomers whose new study has found the expansion of the universe is still accelerating as previously found.

In late 2025, a team of astronomers shocked the space community with claims that the evidence of dark energy – a mysterious force that pushes the cosmos apart – was weakening such that the expansion is no longer accelerating.

They suggested the methods used to measure the universe’s expansion using supernovae, or exploding stars, were fundamentally flawed.

But a new study led by the University of Southampton, which re-evaluated the data, has found that the universe is behaving exactly as expected.

Experts behind the paper, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, include renowned Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicists Professor Adam Riess and Professor Brian Schmidt.

Lead author Dr Phil Wiseman, from the University of Southampton, said the debate that followed last year’s revelations was the result of a scientific misunderstanding rather than a flaw in the universe itself.

He added: “The previous and well accepted measurements were, in fact, fine and our current understanding of the fate of the universe remains robust.

"Thankfully we have averted this crisis, but the mystery about why the universe is still accelerating in size remains.

"By proving our measurements are correct, we can get back to trying to understand what dark energy actually is, rather than wondering if it exists at all."

The original discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe, made by Profs Riess and Schmidt with American astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011.

If the 2025 claims had been true, it would have dismantled their findings as well as nearly three decades of astronomical progress.

Professor Adam Riess said: “Extraordinary claims require especially careful testing.

“What we find is that when we calibrate these supernovae, accounting for different host environments and populations, the evidence for cosmic acceleration remains remarkably consistent.”

To measure the universe, the Southampton-led team looked closely at Type Ia supernovae – violent, luminous white dwarf star explosions – to calculate vast cosmic distances.

The 2025 study had claimed that, as the universe aged, these supernovae had different maximum brightnesses, tricking astronomers into thinking the cosmos was accelerating when it was slowing.

However, the new Southampton study found the error lay in how the age of these stars was estimated.

They proved that the previous findings incorrectly assumed the age of a galaxy was the same as the age of the star that exploded.

The experts also said the 2025 paper failed to account for the mass of host galaxies, a standard correction used in modern cosmology to prove accuracy.

Professor Mark Sullivan, also from the University of Southampton, said that challenging accepted theories and observations is fundamental to science.

He added: “This is how progress is made. Although this idea did not turn out correct, it has opened up new ways of thinking about how supernovae explode and how we can measure dark energy more accurately.”

Paper co-author Dr Brodie Popovic added: “We've recently been really focused on astrophysics of the explosions and how they impact cosmology.

Yang Xiao Long and Blake Belladonna

…and the vet was like, “You know the thing with geriatric cats is—” and I was like, “What do you mean, geriatric?! It’s a little baby, look at her!" Kumail Nanjiani: Night Thoughts (2025)

The maps show no signs of tampering. But some spots aren't synching properly. So, the maps suck. That's Corporation Rim for you.

ratthi & murderbot

bonus: ratthi & secunit 3