Apparently, just as easily as on Earth. You just use a lens to focus sunlight to melt the lunar dust, turn it into tiles, and put them together. The only thing you need to take is the lens. And some people or robots to do the actual construction work...
(Science fiction writers writing about lunar colonies take note. This technique could be used for more than just roads!)
...and so are pretty pictures. Like this image of the stellar nursery NGC 364.
Lots of dust. And now we can get a good count of the stars and protostars. We'll learn about star formation.
But I sort of want to hang that on my wall.
One of the things birders like is when a poor bird gets lost. It was trying to fly to Newfoundland and winds up in Scotland.
(In the U.K. "twitcher" was a derogatory term for people who chased those birds and trampled all over people's property on the way).
We now know why migratory birds (and sometimes local birds) get lost: Space weather. Solar flares can interfere with their ability to navigate using the magnetic field and cause them to wander way, way off course.
There have been instances of these lost birds getting help from the handy humans to get back on track...by hitching rides on ships going the right direction. Apparently cruise ships going across the North Sea routinely have passengers too, but those birds are just being lazy and smart ;).
In 2029, a NASA mission will reach the asteroid Psyche. Psyche is metal. Very metal. The estimate is about 60 percent. We don't know how it got so metal.
Metal asteroids like this could contain valuable resources for building in space, where you don't need to pull them out of a gravity well.
Or, perhaps, it's aliens.
Nah.
Definitely not.
...not if you're a bee.
Bee sex is determined by the Csd gene, which has more than 100 variations. Except...that it's still the same. Two different alleles, girl. Two of the same, boy.
But you don't want to be a sexually produced boy bee. Drones are produced via asexual reproduction and reproduce only outside the hive.
So, what happens to male workers?
Infanticide. The eggs are "not raised." Which is probably a euphemism, nothing's wasted in a hive.
No, we don't currently know how the workers can tell. Scent is the lead theory.
Why do we care? It could be useful for breeding better bees.
...including a 1.2 mile tall dust devil. 200 feet diameter. Moving at about 12 mph. They couldn't see the top of it, but they were guessing the height. Perserverence snapped it.
Dust devils on Mars get huge because of the lower atmospheric pressure. And dust storms can encompass the entire planet.
If writing stuff on Mars...here's some bad weather for you to use.
Oh, and they can come with lightning too!
NASA has a problem. You know that asteroid sample.
They got more than they bargained for. Specifically the dark fine-grained material on the inside of the lid and base was unexpected. And could give us SCIENCE sooner than we thought. What an excellent problem to have!
One of the things the JWST discovered was a swarm of mysterious early galaxies that were just...too...bright. They didn't have time to form enough stars.
Now we've worked it out. They aren't massive, but it turns out that in the early universe, stars may have formed more explosively, in rapid, bright bursts. As galaxies got bigger, the process (gas ejection from supernovas) became impossible.
It's kind of like a forest. Large numbers of saplings grow in a young forest but are crowded out in a mature one, resulting in steadier replacement.
NASA found enough funding to continue to monitor the New Horizons spacecraft until the end of the decade.
The mission will now be to explore another Kuiper Belt Object, but they are yet to announce which one. In 2028 or 2029 the craft will leave the Kuiper Belt.
There's a significant source of carbon dioxide on Europa. And it seems to be leaking from the subsurface oceans.
Could this mean there is life? It seems pretty likely. Complex life? Unlikely...
It's...complicated.
We thought it had an atmosphere, but observations by the JWST showed it didn't.
But we also now know that stellar contamination makes observations of close in exoplanets hard. Is it an atmosphere? Or is it a starspot?
What this means is that when looking for life signs from a distance, you also have to model the star. Which means you can't do it in five minutes...you might have to take a couple of years to do it. Bear that in mind when sending out your fictional exploration ships?
Earth could become uninhabitable to mammals, specifically, in about...250 million years. That's about the same amount of time they've been around.
Why?
The cycle of continent formation will bring the continents back together into an equatorial supercontinent, nicknamed Pangea Ultima.
This will result in extremely hot temperatures in the center of the supercontinent. Mammals might survive along the coast.
Then there will be 2.5% more energy from the sun. We're talking average monthly temperatures of 140 degrees Fahrenheit here.
Reptiles or dinosaurs/birds might become more dominant again, but small mammals might survive until the continents split again...and then re-evolve. Maybe.
But there's one group of mammals that might not have problems.
Cetaceans might survive, even thrive. Their return to the water is generally believed to be permanent, but who knows?
As for humanity? If we're still around then, then we might have to move into the water ourselves.
Turns out the sample container contains black dust. And probably some more stuff, but we won't know until next month. Right now we're just checking that there's something in there. And there is!
Unfortunately, it appears that Chandrayaan-3 did not survive the lunar night. It went into dormancy and attempts to regain contact have failed.
This was not surprising; the lander was meant to have a 14-day mission duration and anything they got after the night was a bonus. It's still a bit disappointing, though. We could have got even more good science done.
Even without this, though, the mission has already been declared a success.
...asteroid bits. The Osiris-Rex capsule touched down successfully in Utah (the main spacecraft will now do a gravity assist maneuver and zoom off on another mission).
Now we have 250 grams of asteroid bits to study and the knowledge that we can do this again with other samples.
While Osiris doesn't have another sample capsule, its next destination is Apophis, which it will study close up. Yeah, that's the one that's going to kill us all according to the tabloids (spoiler, it's not).
The mission will drop its cargo of asteroid samples in Utah on Sunday morning. The sample will be carefully stored to prevent it from being contaminated by Earth's environment; it's carbon rich and may contain water.
This is some of the oldest material in the solar system. What will it tell us about our origins?
Yes, diamonds can be pink...but the coloration is extremely rare in natural diamonds.
We now know what caused them. The vast majority of these diamonds come from one place, Argyle in Western Australia. Pink diamonds are created deep in the earth's crust because they require heavy tectonic pressure.
In other words, there are probably a lot where we can't get to them. But in Argyle, the crust got stretched, magma was pushed up to the surface, and it deposited the colorful stones. Which tells us where to look for more.
(Or, honestly, we could just make them, but some people, that isn't good enough).
Or at least a wooden shelter. It was found above the Kalambo Falls in wet soil, on the border between Zambia and Tanzania.
Given the location it's also possible it was actually a fishing dock. Either way, it was made by putting logs together in a fairly sophisticated way. Wood seldom survives, and this shows that people were building wooden shelters or platforms...long before we thought.
...it's the sun's fault. We've been hit by a G2 geomagnetic storm, which can interfere briefly with radio communications.
Not a big deal, but it could make your GPS less accurate. Or if you still have a landline...I called my dad and we had static on the cordless phone!
Again, not a big deal (this is only the second highest rating of geomagnetic storm) but now you know what might be messing with your phone...
No, NASA has not confirmed that asteroid Bennu will hit us on September 24, 2182.
Bennu has a 1 in 1,750 chance of hitting the Earth by the year 2300 and a one in 2,700 chance of specifically hitting on that date (although it is the most likely).
Bennu is 500 meters across. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was 6 miles across. So, while Bennu hitting would be bad, it wouldn't kill us all.
What it would do is create a four mile wide crater, knock down buildings tens of miles away and shatter windows 100 miles away. So if it were to hit, say, Los Angeles, we'd have a real life disaster movie.
We're also developing planetary defense systems and if Bennu does start to get too close we should be able to, shall we say, convince it to go somewhere else. If not, we'd likely get enough warning to evacuate the impact site, or coastal areas that might be tsunami'd by a water impact.
(And in any case, 2182 is a while in the future).
