Month: March 2017

Enlarge / Phobos, shown in this image, had once been thought to have been an asteroid captured by Mars. (credit: NASA APOD)

Our Solar System's two innermost rocky planets have no moons. Earth has an unusually large one, the product of a massive collision. And Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, are... well, weird, looking like asteroids but not behaving like them. Now, a new paper suggests that the moons' oddity could be explained by a cycle of ring building and destruction that started more than four billion years ago.

The idea solves a bunch of problems, it may create a brand new one, and, best of all, it has some testable consequences.

Phobos and Deimos don't look especially odd on the surface. In fact, their surfaces look a lot like a pretty mundane class of asteroids. So it has been suggested that the two moons are simply asteroids that wandered into Mars' gravitational field and got caught. Phobos appears to be transient; in about 70 million years, it's expected to drop close enough to Mars to be torn apart by the planet's gravity.

AUSTIN, Texas—As has become standard at my job, I recently strapped on a virtual reality headset to go somewhere far, far away. On this day, it was a trip to outer space, with pit stops on a moon's surface and a sci-fi-styled briefing room, to hear about future expeditions to Mars.

I should have been looking out at the virtual planets, solar-sail rigs, and plans for human colonies. But I kept focusing my attention somewhere else: Buzz Aldrin standing next to me.

"You can look at Buzz from any angle," a demo representative said while I was wearing an HTC Vive VR headset. It was true. I could get on my toes and look at the top of his head, crouch and look up at his chin, or sidestep and see his face and body from any angle.

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Enlarge / President Donald Trump speaks after signing the NASA transition authorization act in the Oval Office of the White House. (credit: Jim Lo Scalzo-Pool/Getty Images)

Prior to Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump had made only a few passing references to space during the first two months of his administration. That changed during a signing ceremony for S.422, NASA's first authorization act in seven years. "Today, we're taking the initial steps toward a bold and bright new future for American spaceflight," the president said.

For all of the pomp associated with its passage, the authorization act seems like a relatively inconsequential document. It keeps NASA more or less on the same course it has been on, providing funding for large programs like the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft, but not pairing the money with a clear mandate (and the extra funding) needed to use these vehicles for a meaningful exploration program.

What was notable about Tuesday's bill signing ceremony, however, was the glimpse it provided into Trump's view of the space program. Twice, during the short ceremony, he mentioned jobs. In reading from prepared remarks, he noted that the bill addresses NASA's human exploration, space science, and technology goals. "We support jobs," the president added. "It's about jobs also."

Enlarge (credit: Greenlight Community Broadband)

Last year, the state of North Carolina won a court case against the Federal Communications Commission, a victory that allowed it to restore a state law that restricts the growth of municipal broadband networks.

This created an immediate problem for new customers of one government-run ISP. After the FCC's 2015 vote to preempt the state law, Greenlight Community Broadband in Wilson, North Carolina, began offering service outside the Wilson County boundaries, something it previously wasn't allowed to do. Greenlight now serves about 200 customers in the nearby town of Pinetops, as well as Vick Family Farms in rural Nash County.

Greenlight came close to shutting off Internet service to those new customers after the state ban on municipal broadband expansion was upheld by a federal appeals court. But in October 2016, the Wilson City Council voted to provide free Internet service to Pinetops and Vick Family Farms for six months. Wilson's wholesale providers agreed to waive their fees for six months, making this decision possible. Wilson's Greenlight ISP was technically in compliance with the state law as long as it didn't charge its new customers for service, but Wilson community leaders hoped the state legislature would eliminate or change the state law before the six months were up.