Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: The first crewed test flight of Boeing's long-delayed Starliner spacecraft won't take off as planned Saturday and could face a longer postponement as engineers evaluate a stubborn leak of helium from the capsule's propulsion system. NASA announced the latest delay of the Starliner test flight late Tuesday. Officials will take more time to consider their options for how to proceed with the mission after discovering the small helium leak on the spacecraft's service module. The space agency did not describe what options are on the table, but sources said they range from flying the spacecraft "as is" with a thorough understanding of the leak and confidence it won't become more significant in flight, to removing the capsule from its Atlas V rocket and taking it back to a hangar for repairs. Theoretically, the former option could permit a launch attempt as soon as next week. The latter alternative could delay the launch until at least late summer. "The team has been in meetings for two consecutive days, assessing flight rationale, system performance, and redundancy," NASA said in a statement Tuesday night. "There is still forward work in these areas, and the next possible launch opportunity is still being discussed. NASA will share more details once we have a clearer path forward."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA last week formally approved a $3.35 billion mission to explore Saturn's largest moon with a quadcopter drone. "Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate. "Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft outside of Earth." The mission has a launch date of July 2028. Ars Technica reports: After reaching Titan, the eight-bladed rotorcraft lander will soar from place to place on Saturn's hazy moon, exploring environments rich in organic molecules, the building blocks of life. Dragonfly will be the first mobile robot explorer to land on any other planetary body besides the Moon and Mars, and only the second flying drone to explore another planet. NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on Mars was the first. Dragonfly will be more than 200 times as massive as Ingenuity and will operate six times farther from Earth. Despite its distant position in the cold outer Solar System, Titan appears to be reminiscent of the ancient Earth. A shroud of orange haze envelops Saturn's largest moon, and Titan's surface is covered with sand dunes and methane lakes. Titan's frigid temperatures -- hovering near minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 179 degrees Celsius) -- mean water ice behaves like bedrock. NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which flew past Titan numerous times before its mission ended in 2017, discovered weather systems on the hazy moon. Observations from Cassini found evidence for hydrocarbon rains and winds that appear to generate waves in Titan's methane lakes. Clearly, Titan is an exotic world. Most of what scientists know about Titan comes from measurements collected by Cassini and the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which Cassini released to land on Titan in 2005. Huygens returned the first pictures from Titan's surface, but it only transmitted data for 72 minutes. Dragonfly will explore Titan for around three years, flying tens of kilometers about once per month to measure the prebiotic chemistry of Titan's surface, study its soupy atmosphere, and search for biosignatures that could be indications of life. The mission will visit more than 30 locations within Titan's equatorial region, according to a presentation by Elizabeth Turtle, Dragonfly's principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "The Dragonfly mission is an incredible opportunity to explore an ocean world in a way that we have never done before," Turtle said in a statement. "The team is dedicated and enthusiastic about accomplishing this unprecedented investigation of the complex carbon chemistry that exists on the surface of Titan and the innovative technology bringing this first-of-its-kind space mission to life."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

quonset writes: Just over two weeks ago, NASA figured out why its Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped sending useful data. They suspected corrupted memory in its flight data system (FDS) was the culprit. Today, for the first time since November, Voyager 1 is sending useful data about its health and the status of its onboard systems back to NASA. How did NASA accomplish this feat of long distance repair? They broke up the code into smaller pieces and redistributed them throughout the memory. From NASA: "... So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well. The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft's engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 1/2 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 1/2 hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft. During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sweden is the newest nation to sign onto NASA's Artemis Accords -- a series of non-binding bilateral arrangements for peaceful and responsible exploration. Space.com reports: During a signing event in Stockholm on Tuesday (April 16), Swedish Minister for Education Mats Persson penned the agreement alongside U.S. Ambassador Erik D. Ramanathan. "By joining the Artemis Accords, Sweden strengthens its strategic space partnership with the U.S. on space covering areas such as Swedish space research and the space industry, which in turn also strengthens Sweden's total defense capability," Persson said in a NASA statement. The event in Stockholm comes just on the heels of Switzerland's signing of the Artemis Accords the day before. Greece and Uruguay were also included in February. Sweden is now the 38th nation to join the accords, which were established in 2020, as the first Artemis moon launch inched closer to reality. The Accords mirror principles set out in 1967, as part of the Outer Space Treaty to help govern international cooperation space. NASA is using the refreshed agreement as a guideline for the Artemis program, which aims to send astronauts back to the moon for the first time since Apollo 17, in 1972. In the agency's statement, NASA administrator Bill Nelson welcomed Sweden to the expanding space club. "Our nations have worked together to discover new secrets in our solar system, and now, we welcome you to a global coalition that is committed to exploring the heavens openly, transparently, responsibly, and in peace," Nelson said, adding, "the United States and Sweden share the same bedrock principles, and we're excited to expand these principles to the cosmos."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA has confirmed that a piece of metal that tore through a Florida home last month was space junk from the International Space Station. NBC News reports: The agency confirmed Monday that the 1.6-pound object was debris from a cargo pallet that had been intentionally released from the space station three years ago. The pallet, packed with aging batteries, was supposed to burn up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere, but a piece survived -- the piece that smashed into a house in Naples, Florida, on March 8. WINK News, a CBS News affiliate in southwestern Florida, first reported the incident. Naples resident Alejandro Otero told the outlet that the object crashed through the roof and two floors of his home. Otero was not home at the time, he told WINK News, but the metal object nearly hit his son, who was two rooms away. In a blog post about the incident, NASA said it had analyzed the object at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and confirmed that it was part of the equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet. The piece of space junk is roughly cylindrical in shape and is about 4-inches tall and 1.6-inches wide. NASA said agency staff studied the object's features and metal composition and matched it to the hardware that had been jettisoned from the space station in 2021. At that time, new lithium-ion batteries had recently been installed at the space station, so the old nickel hydrogen batteries were packed up for disposal. The space station's robotic arm released the 5,800-pound cargo pallet containing the batteries over the Pacific Ocean, as the outpost orbited 260 miles above the Earth's surface, according to NASA. NASA said it will perform a detailed investigation of the latest debris incident to determine how the object withstood the extreme trip through the atmosphere.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After nearly 11 years as CNN's space correspondent, Miles O'Brien found himself in 2003 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida covering the launch of the space shuttle Columbia: As part of the post-launch routine, NASA began sharing several replays of the launch from various cameras trained on the vehicle. And that was when we saw it. Producer Dave Santucci called me into our live truck, and said, "You got to look at this." It was kind of a grainy image of what looked like a puff of smoke, as if someone dropped a bag of flour on the ground and it broke open. We played it over and over again, and it did not look good at all. The giant orange fuel tank was filled with super cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen, so it was enveloped in insulating foam. A big piece of the foam had broken away near a strut called the "bipod," striking the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing. It was made of reinforced carbon to protect the aluminum structure of the spacecraft from the searing heat of re-entry from space. I reached out to some of my sources inside the shuttle program. Everyone had seen it, of course, but the people I spoke with cautioned me not to worry. The foam was very light, and it had fallen off on earlier missions and nothing of concern had happened as a result... I wish I hadn't taken my eye off the ball. Space was my beat, and I was uniquely positioned to put this concerning event into the public domain. Like NASA's leadership, I went through a process of convincing myself that it was going to be okay. But I had this sinking feeling. It didn't feel right. A spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere at 17,500 miles an hour — much faster than a rifle bullet — is enveloped in a glowing inferno of plasma... [As it returned to earth 16 days later] the communication between the ground and the orbiter became non-routine. Producers in the control room realized the gravity of the situation, and we cut to a commercial break to get me off the couch. As I was making my way across the newsroom, I started heaving. I knew in an instant that they were all gone. There was no survivable scenario. I was sickened. It was like a body blow. Somehow I got my act together and started talking. I felt like it was my responsibility to mention the foam strike, to get the information out there to the public. About an hour after Columbia had disintegrated, I shared with a huge global audience what I knew... "That bipod is the place where they think a little piece of foam fell off and hit the leading edge of that wing." During the mission, I could have easily done a story about the foam strike, spreading the word that some NASA engineers believed there may be some reason for concern. What if I had done that? It might have made a difference. "A rescue mission would not have been impossible," the article concludes, "and I feel certain that if NASA managers saw that gaping hole in Columbia's wing, they would've tried. "We will never know for sure, but I do know how so many of us on the ground failed to do our jobs during that mission. It still haunts me." CNN broadcasts the last two episodes of its four-part series Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight tonight at 9 p.m. EST (time-delayed on the west coast until 9 p.m.PST). CNN's web site offers a "preview" of its live TV offerings here. The news episodes (along with past episodes) will also be available on-demand starting Monday — "for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps." It's also available for purchase on Amazon Prime.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN revisits 2003's disastrous landing of the Space Shuttle Columbia tonight with two "immersive" specials co-produced by BBC and Mindhouse Productions "featuring exclusive interviews and revealing never-before-broadcast footage," according to an announcement — with two more specials airing next week. You can watch a trailer here. Across four episodes, the story of the ticking-clock of Columbia's final mission is told in dramatic detail, beginning months before the troubled launch, unfolding across the sixteen days in orbit, and concluding with the investigation into the tragic loss of the seven astronauts' lives. Weaving together intimate footage shot by the astronauts themselves inside the orbiter, exclusive first-hand testimony from family members of the Shuttle's crew, key players at NASA — some of whom have never spoken before — and journalists who covered the story on the ground, the series paints an intimate portrait of the women and men onboard and uncovers in forensic detail the trail of events and missed opportunities that ultimately led to disaster. CNN says the first two episodes will livestream tonight at 9 p.m. EST (time-delayed on the west coast until 9 p.m.PST) — and then be available on-demand starting Monday — "for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps." CNN's web site offers a "preview" of its live TV offerings here. They're promising "the inside story of one America's most iconic institutions, uncovering how financial pressures and a culture of complacency may have contributed to the events of February 1, 2003. The series also reflects on the legacy of the Space Shuttle era, serving as a timely exploration of the challenges and inherent dangers that remain relevant to space travel today." On its web site CNN has also published two companion articles — one by Rice history professor Douglas Brinkley arguing that NASA "was America's crown jewel. After the Columbia disaster it was never quite the same." Because other shuttle missions had returned safely with "shredded" surface tiles — and because the stalwart Columbia had brought astronauts home from 27 previous flights — many NASA officials were lulled into complacency. They went so far as to assure the pilot and commander via email that "there is no concern ... We have seen the same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry." NASA officials also decided against enlisting spy satellite photography to examine the shuttle damage more thoroughly. If they had, it's possible that the astronauts could have repaired the spaceplane or at least abandoned it for refuge on the International Space Station... As the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) noted in its final report, "the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with this accident as the foam." All of NASA's launches were suspended for two years. While the shuttles eventually flew again, post-Columbia, the program was stunted and curtailed. The article notes that since then SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the United Launch Alliance (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) "are thriving today in the space industry," along with Virgin Galactic and Axiom Space. "NASA, far from feeling threatened, has encouraged many of the private companies with massive contracts. The agency already had a long history of dealing with sub-contractors, using its pocketbook to steer aerospace development; that tradition has adjusted seamlessly to the current space economy." In the other article CNN Space & Science writer Jackie Wattles notes that when America later retired its Space Shuttle program in 2011, "no U.S. astronaut would travel to space on an American-made rocket for nearly a decade."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.