Month: October 2023

Enlarge / The Voyager 2 spacecraft before its launch in 1977. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Forty-six years in deep space have taken their toll on NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft. Their antiquated computers sometimes do puzzling things, their thrusters are wearing out, and their fuel lines are becoming clogged. Around half of their science instruments no longer return data, and their power levels are declining.

Still, the lean team of engineers and scientists working on the Voyager program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are taking steps to eke out every bit of life from the only two spacecraft flying in interstellar space, the vast volume of dilute gas outside the influence of the Sun's solar wind.

"These are measures that we're trying to take to extend the life of the mission," said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL, in an interview with Ars.

Enlarge / The social media image used to promote Fallout's premiere date. (credit: Amazon)

The Amazon-produced TV adaption of the popular, long-running video game series Fallout will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on April 12, 2024, the company announced on Monday.

Amazon also announced that the series will be part of the same canon as the video games. The announcement was made through social media posts that showed an interface resembling the iconic Vault Boy accessory from the games.

The series was announced in July 2020, alongside news that Westworld writers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy would be executive producers. In January 2022, it was revealed that Nolan would direct the first episode but that two other writers—Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel, Tomb Raider) and Graham Wagner (Portlandia, The Office, Silicon Valley) would be the showrunners.

Enlarge / A forward-facing camera on the top of an Indian booster captured this view of a Gaganyaan test spacecraft firing its abort motor to propel itself off the rocket. (credit: ISRO)

In 2018, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi committed his nation to develop its own capability to send astronauts into orbit, an achievement that would make India the fourth country with an independent human spaceflight program. On Saturday, that ambition moved a step closer to reality with a successful test of the human-rated spacecraft's launch abort system.

This is the set of rocket motors and parachutes that would be used to propel the spacecraft away from a failing launch vehicle, a dramatic maneuver that would save the lives of everyone on board. By all accounts, Indian officials were thrilled with the outcome of the test flight.

"We have started the journey of Gaganyaan with this maiden launch of the test vehicle abort sequence, and this will be repeated multiple times under different conditions," said Sreedhara Somanath, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization. "Also, we’ll have an unmanned Gaganyaan vehicle (orbital) mission soon, at the beginning of the next year.”

Enlarge (credit: 1Password)

1Password, a password manager used by millions of people and more than 100,000 businesses, said it detected suspicious activity on a company account provided by Okta, the identity and authentication service that disclosed a breach on Friday.

“On September 29, we detected suspicious activity on our Okta instance that we use to manage our employee-facing apps,” 1Password CTO Pedro Canahuati wrote in an email. “We immediately terminated the activity, investigated, and found no compromise of user data or other sensitive systems, either employee-facing or user-facing.”

Since then, Canahuati said, his company had been working with Okta to determine the means that the unknown attacker used to access the account. On Friday, investigators confirmed it resulted from a breach Okta reported hitting its customer support management system.