Month: May 2019

Enlarge / When Ultima met Thule. A view of the two-lobed body, showing the bright neck and the large Maryland crater. (credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University APL/Southwest Research Institute.)

For many at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, January 1 this year didn't mean a New Year's celebration. Instead, it meant the first arrival of data from New Horizons' visit to a small Kuiper Belt object. But, like its earlier flyby of Pluto, the probe was instructed to grab all the data it could and deal with getting it back to Earth later. The full set of everything New Horizons captured won't be available for more than a year yet. But with 10 percent of the total cache in hand, researchers decided they had enough to do the first analysis of 2014 MU₆₉.

2014 MU₆₉ is thought to preserve material as it condensed in the earliest days of the Solar System's formation. And everything in the New Horizons' data suggests that this is exactly what it has done. With the exception of one big crater temporarily named "Maryland" and the gentle collision that created its two-lobed structure, the object appears to have been largely untouched by more than 4 billion years of the Solar System's existence.

The dawn of time

The Kuiper belt is a sparse donut of small bodies near the outer edges of the Solar System. The bodies there are formed primarily of icy materials, most of which would otherwise remain gases in the warm, inner regions of the Solar System. Some of them, like Pluto, are large enough and/or have a complex collision history, which can ensure that they undergo geological changes that alter the materials that were present at their formation.

Enlarge / The begrimed Falcon 9 booster is back at the launch pad with its Starlink satellite payload. (credit: SpaceX)

Even though time remained in its launch window Wednesday night, SpaceX scrubbed an attempt to launch its first batch of Starlink satellites. The upper-level winds were just not cooperating, so the company stood down the launch attempt.

On Thursday, the rocket stands again at the launchpad. This time, the weather conditions have improved, and the winds in the upper level of the atmosphere appear to be more conducive to a launch. And so SpaceX will press ahead with a historic launch and unconventional deployment of 60 satellites that will provide Internet access. The deployment, about an hour after launch, will be fascinating to watch, and we are eager to know how successful the company and the Air Force will be at connecting with and tracking these satellites.

Below, you will find an embedded webcast, which should begin at about 10:15pm ET (02:15 UTC Thursday), as well as an edited copy of our story explaining the Starlink constellation, which was originally posted ahead of Wednesday's launch attempt.

Enlarge / Cryptolocker was one of the ransomware pioneers, bringing together file encryption and bitcoin payment. (credit: Christiaan Colen / Flickr)

This story was originally published by ProPublica. It appears here under a Creative Commons license.

From 2015 to 2018, a strain of ransomware known as SamSam paralyzed computer networks across North America and the UK It caused more than $30 million in damage to at least 200 entities, including the cities of Atlanta and Newark, New Jersey, the Port of San Diego and Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles. It knocked out Atlanta’s online water service requests and billing systems, prompted the Colorado Department of Transportation to call in the National Guard, and delayed medical appointments and treatments for patients nationwide whose electronic records couldn’t be retrieved. In return for restoring access to the files, the cyberattackers collected at least $6 million in ransom.

“You just have 7 days to send us the BitCoin,” read the ransom demand to Newark. “After 7 days we will remove your private keys and it’s impossible to recover your files.”