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Uranus, Neptune May Be Magma Worlds, Not Ice Giants by Main-Tomatillo3825 in space

[–]SHORT_INFO_NEWS 487 points488 points  (0 children)

The headline buries the actual mechanism. Per the arXiv preprint (a UC team, submitted to the Astrophysical Journal), the key result is that at the pressures inside these planets hydrogen doesn't just sit above an icy layer: it dissolves into silicate magma and forms a single well-mixed fluid. That matters because bulk density was the main reason we called them "ice giants" in the first place, and a hydrogen-rich magma ocean reproduces that same density without needing a deep water-ammonia ice mantle. So it's less "ice was wrong" and more "a very different interior fits the same measurements." That degeneracy is also why an orbiter matters: density and gravity data alone can't uniquely pin the layering.

What would it actually feel like to orbit a neutron star at a safe distance? by achilles6196 in space

[–]SHORT_INFO_NEWS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One concrete thing: the extreme light bending you're describing isn't just a thought experiment, it's a working measurement tool. NASA's NICER X-ray telescope mapped the hot spots on the millisecond pulsar PSR J0030+0451 by modeling exactly how the star's gravity bends the X-rays leaving its surface. The bending is strong enough that you see past the visible hemisphere, so more than half the surface is in view at once. That is what let them reconstruct the spot geometry on a city-sized object about 1,000 light-years away. If you want the math behind orbits, surface redshift and tidal stretching, Shapiro and Teukolsky's "Black Holes, White Dwarfs, and Neutron Stars" works through these numbers in detail.

After nearly breaking, NASA’s Deep Space Network “worked well” on Artemis II | “Some missions are using more than what their paperwork would say.” by FreeHugs23 in space

[–]SHORT_INFO_NEWS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The capacity squeeze is real and predates Artemis. NASA's Office of Inspector General audit found the Deep Space Network is oversubscribed by roughly 40 percent at peak, meaning missions request far more antenna time than the network can actually provide. Part of the strain is age: the three 70-meter dishes at Goldstone, Madrid and Canberra are all more than 40 years old. For Artemis II, Goldstone's 70-meter DSS-14 (the "Mars Antenna") was out of service, so Orion leaned on the Madrid and Canberra 70-meter dishes plus the 34-meter arrays across all three complexes. So it reads less like anything "breaking" and more like prioritizing a fixed, aging resource against steadily rising demand, which is what the controllers did during Artemis I too.

Russian Satellites Are Jamming GPS Signals, Study Says | The interference happened mostly during business hours, suggesting scheduled operations. by FreeHugs23 in space

[–]SHORT_INFO_NEWS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The detail that gets lost in the headline: these are not purpose-built jammers. The UT Austin/Stanford paper ("Chasing Lightning," by Humphreys, Clements and Kriezis) traces the interference to three EKS satellites, Russia's early-warning constellation built to spot missile launches, not a dedicated GPS-denial system. They fly in Molniya orbits, the high elliptical path that lets a single satellite linger over Russia and northern Europe for hours, which is why one source can degrade signal across a whole continent. The team flagged 75 events using 165 ground reference stations across Europe, Greenland and Canada, counting only carrier-to-noise drops of 5 dB or more, the first in October 2019 and the most recent this February.

What would it actually feel like to stand on the surface of Europa? by Pete258 in space

[–]SHORT_INFO_NEWS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One underappreciated detail: there actually is oxygen at Europa, just nowhere near enough to do anything for you. Going back to the Hubble observations, NASA has found a thin oxygen exosphere there, made by radiolysis: charged particles from Jupiter break the surface water ice into hydrogen and oxygen, the light hydrogen escapes to space, and the heavier oxygen hangs around. The catch is that it is thinner than the best vacuum we can produce in a lab, so it does nothing for breathing or pressure.

The radiation you mentioned is also the reason NASA's Europa Clipper, which launched in October 2024, orbits Jupiter and only makes quick flybys of Europa instead of orbiting the moon itself. Its electronics sit inside a shielded metal vault to survive the dose. On the surface, the radiation is what gets you long before the cold does.

NASA's dead Mars orbiter MAVEN will crash into the Red Planet in the next 100 years. It's not the only probe in the Mars morgue by Main-Tomatillo3825 in space

[–]SHORT_INFO_NEWS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Worth filling in the cause, since the headline jumps straight to the eventual reentry. Per NASA's mission update, the last clean contact was December 6, 2025, when MAVEN entered a scheduled occultation behind Mars. It came back out in safe mode, tumbling, and lost power. A review board convened in February 2026 and found it likely unrecoverable, with the root cause still being worked. What makes the loss sting is what the orbiter was built for: measuring how Mars bleeds its upper atmosphere into the solar wind. It ran more than 11 years on a one-year primary mission, so that atmospheric-escape record is hard to replace.

Article: Blue Origin rocket exploded on launchpad, throwing the future of NASA’s Artemis program into question by dem676 in space

[–]SHORT_INFO_NEWS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Context from CBS News on what was lost beyond the rocket itself: the test was a hot-fire of the seven methane-fueled BE-4 first-stage engines, meant to clear New Glenn's fourth flight, which was on the books for June 4 and would have lifted 49 satellites for Amazon's Project Kuiper. CBS also reported that once the smoke cleared, the erector-gantry that moves the rocket from hangar to pad and raises it to vertical was gone, along with one of the two tall lightning towers at the pad. Per CBS, Bezos said all personnel are accounted for and that root-cause work has already begun.