Month: August 2023

Enlarge / NASA's Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio, formerly known as Plum Brook Station, is the world's largest space test chamber. (credit: NASA/Michelle Murphy)

It's big news when a hurricane damages buildings at NASA's Kennedy Space Center or hits a rocket factory in New Orleans. There's damage that needs repairing immediately so missions can move forward to launch.

But there's a deeper problem with NASA's infrastructure. Erik Weiser, director of NASA's facilities and real estate division, told a blue-ribbon National Academies panel Thursday that the agency's budget for maintenance and construction is "wholly underfunded."

In his presentation to the National Academies committee, Weiser described NASA's infrastructure as in an "increasing state of decline." There's a mismatch between what NASA needs to maintain or upgrade its facilities and the dollars the agency devotes to those efforts. The maintenance gap is $259 million per year using NASA's most conservative estimate, or more than $600 million if NASA followed the maintenance practices of the commercial industry, Weiser said.

The Xbox 360. (credit: Thomas Hawk)

The digital storefront for purchasing games and other media on the Xbox 360 game console will be shut down next summer, just a bit shy of 20 years after the console's debut.

A blog post announcement credited to Dave McCarthy, CVP of Xbox Player Services at Microsoft, stated that purchases will no longer be possible starting on July 29, 2024. The change affects both the on-console store and the Xbox 360 Marketplace website. Users will lose the ability to purchase games, movies and TV content, and avatars and other profile customizations.

Users will still be able to download and play games they have already purchased for the foreseeable future after that date, and many other network features will continue to work, like communication with friends, cloud saves, and online play in multiplayer games whose developers still support it. Developers will still be able to issue patches and updates to Xbox 360 games, too. Backward-compatible Xbox 360 games will still be available for purchase on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S stores, Microsoft says.

Enlarge / SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD V2's are water-resistant, but are they erase-your-data-and-become-unmountable-resistant?

Amid ongoing pressure to address claims that its SanDisk Extreme SSDs are still erasing data and becoming unmountable despite a firmware fix, Western Digital is facing a lawsuit over its storage drives. A lawsuit filed on Wednesday accuses the company of knowingly selling defective SSDs.

Western Digital brand SanDisk's series of Extreme V2 and Extreme Pro V2 portable SSDs are often recommended by tech review sites. If you've considered a portable drive, it's likely you've come across the popular series in your search.

However, numerous owners of the drives, including Ars Technica's own Lee Hutchinson, encountered a problem where the drives seemingly erased data and became unreadable. Lee saw two drives fill approximately halfway before showing read and write errors. Disconnecting and reconnecting showed the drive was unformatted and empty. Wiping and formatting didn't resolve things.

Enlarge / Helium-rich Wolf-Rayet stars generally form by the ejection of hydrogen and other materials. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team)

Magnetars are some of the most extreme objects we know about, with magnetic fields so strong that chemistry becomes impossible in their vicinity. They're neutron stars with a superfluid interior that includes charged particles, so it's easy to understand how a magnetic dynamo is maintained to support that magnetic field. But it's a little harder to fully understand what starts the dynamo off in the first place.

The leading idea, which benefits from its simplicity, is that the magnetar inherits its magnetic field from the star that exploded in a supernova to create it. The original magnetic field, when crushed down to match the tiny size of the resulting neutron star, would provide a massive kick to start the magnetar off. There's just one problem with this idea: we haven't spotted any of the highly magnetized precursor stars that this hypothesis requires.

It turns out that we have been observing one for years. It just looked like something completely different, and it took a more careful analysis, published today in Science, to understand what we've been observing.

Enlarge / A photo of the Ottawa Food Bank warehouse. (credit: Ottawa Food Bank)

Late last week, MSN.com's Microsoft Travel section posted an AI-generated article about the "cannot miss" attractions of Ottawa that includes the Ottawa Food Bank, a real charitable organization that feeds struggling families. In its recommendation text, Microsoft's AI model wrote, "Consider going into it on an empty stomach."

Titled, "Headed to Ottawa? Here's what you shouldn't miss!," (archive here) the article extols the virtues of the Canadian city and recommends attending the Winterlude festival (which only takes place in February), visiting an Ottawa Senators game, and skating in "The World's Largest Naturallyfrozen Ice Rink" (sic).

As the #3 destination on the list, Microsoft Travel suggests visiting the Ottawa Food Bank almost as if it were a world-famous restaurant, drawn from otherwise realistic summaries found online but capped with a travel-writer-style filler phrase.

Enlarge / A self portrait of InSight's hardware on the red planet. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

To say Mars is a bizarre planet might be something of an understatement. It has nearly no atmosphere, has an unstable liquid metal core that causes it to wobble on its axis constantly, and as a frozen desert, is an oxymoron in itself. As if Mars wasn’t strange enough, data from NASA’s InSight Lander (RIP) has now revealed that the red planet is spinning faster and faster every year.

The increasing spin went unknown until a research team found evidence of acceleration through InSight’s RISE (Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment) instrument. That same team, led by radio scientist Sebastien Le Maistre of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, who is also the principal investigator of RISE, had previously found that the core of Mars is most likely a glob of molten metal. Looking further into RISE data from InSight’s first 900 days on Mars, they saw that the planet’s spin was accelerating by a fraction of a millisecond per (Earth) year, or about 0.76 milliseconds. Martian days are gradually growing shorter. But why?

What lies beneath—or above

RISE’s main objective was to see how much Mars wobbled as its orbit was pushed and pulled by the gravity of the Sun. This would determine whether the core was more likely to be solid or liquid. However, RISE also had another task, which was measuring the length of a Martian day. Days on Mars, known as sols, are about a half-hour longer than Earth days at 24 hours and 37 minutes. RISE measured both the rotation rate and wobbling of Mars with reflected radio waves. When it received a radio signal from NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), it would reflect those waves right back at Earth. The difference between the frequency of the signal sent out by the DSN and the signal that bounced back to Earth told the InSight team how the lander was moving along with Mars.

Enlarge / Bored Ape NFTs can now be purchased for just $50,000 each. (credit: Sotheby's)

The Sotheby's auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by investors who regret buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that sold for highly inflated prices during the NFT craze in 2021. A Sotheby's auction duped investors by giving the Bored Ape NFTs "an air of legitimacy... to generate investors' interest and hype around the Bored Ape brand," the class-action lawsuit claims.

The boost to Bored Ape NFT prices provided by the auction "was rooted in deception," said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Central District of California. It wasn't revealed at the time of the auction that the buyer was the now-disgraced FTX, the lawsuit said.

"Sotheby's representations that the undisclosed buyer was a 'traditional' collector had misleadingly created the impression that the market for BAYC NFTs had crossed over to a mainstream audience," the lawsuit claimed. Lawsuit plaintiffs say that harmed investors bought the NFTs "with a reasonable expectation of profit from owning them."