Month: December 2023

Enlarge / Electric Ford F-150 Lightnings being built at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan. (credit: Ford)

Production cuts are coming to the Ford F-150 Lightning. On Monday, Automotive News reported that Ford's suppliers have been told by the automaker that from January it is halving the production rate from 3,200 trucks a week down to 1,600 trucks a week.

Ford debuted a fully electric version of its best-selling F-150 pickup truck in 2022. You'd be hard-pressed to tell the electric F-150 Lightning from a gas- or diesel-burning F-150—bar some aerodynamic detailing here and there they all use the same body, and the EV hides its batteries neatly between the chassis rails.

That conservatism in design appeared to be a winning strategy with the pickup crowd. Ford's order books were flooded with over 200,000 reservations well before the truck hit the streets, spurring the automaker to announce last January that it would double its original production plan and aim for an annual production rate of 150,000 trucks a year.

Enlarge / The Jones 1 Nebula. (credit: Michal Mlynarczyk)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's December 12, and today's photo comes to us from Michal Mlynarczyk in the Holy Cross Mountains, Poland. The subject of Michal's image is the lovely Jones 1 nebula.

This faint nebula was found in 1941 by an American astronomer named Rebecca "Becky" Jones using photographic plates. Its name, Jones 1, is notable because relatively few astronomical objects are named after women, and this is one of the first. Jones made her career as an assistant to other more "notable" astronomers of the day, including Harlow Shapley and Wallace Eckert.

Enlarge / Artist's impression of the New Horizons spacecraft at Arrokoth. This astronomical body is the most distant object visited by human spacecraft, with the flyby of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft taking place on January 1, 2019.

New Horizons is now nearly twice as far from the Sun as Pluto, the outer planets are receding fast, and interstellar space is illuminated by the vast swath of the Milky Way ahead. But the spacecraft’s research is far from over. Its instruments are all functioning and responsive, and the New Horizons team has been working hard, pushing the spacecraft’s capabilities to carry out new tasks.

Since its launch in January 2006, the New Horizons spacecraft has traveled over 5 billion miles, passed by the moons of Jupiter, and surveyed the scaley frozen methane ice of its target planet Pluto. In January 2019, it buzzed by Arrokoth, another billion miles beyond Pluto—the most distant object to have ever been visited by a spacecraft. The data it returned from this intact remnant of our Solar System’s formation has given us important new insights into how that process happened.

But New Horizons’ mission is far from over. While it may never have another close encounter with an orbiting object, the team that operates the spacecraft is working out ways to put its instruments to new uses.