Two astronauts stranded on space station to touch down early
Two American astronauts who have been trapped on the International Space Station since June could return to Earth earlier in March than expected, NASA said Tuesday.
Veteran astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were due to spend eight days on the International Space Station (ISS), but have been there for more than eight months after their Boeing Starliner spacecraft suffered propulsion problems.
The US space agency decided the Starliner would return home without its crew after carrying out weeks of intensive testing and announced in August that it was tasking Elon Musk's SpaceX with bringing the crew home.
Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, JeremyBloom, and doomandgloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man (RIP), wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos since 2007, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
More than 100 cars on Oregon highway crash in 'whiteout conditions'
A crash involving more than 100 vehicles in Portland, Ore., during “whiteout conditions” closed Interstate 84 on Thursday.
Cars, semitrucks and other vehicles were piled up along the snow-covered roadway, according to the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, and one SUV erupted into flames.
“Everyone was able to get out of the SUV,” the sheriff’s office said in a social media post. “Responders are going car by car. There are reports of injuries; no number at this time. Whiteout conditions.”
US aircraft carrier collides with ship in Mediterranean Sea
The aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman collided with a large merchant vessel Wednesday night in the vicinity of Port Said, Egypt, in the Mediterranean Sea.
"The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) was involved in a collision with the merchant vessel Besiktas-M at approximately 11:46 p.m. local time, Feb. 12, while operating in the vicinity of Port Said, Egypt, in the Mediterranean Sea," a statement from the U.S Navy's Sixth Fleet said.
The collision involved a rare collision of two large vessels as the 100,000-ton aircraft carrier collided with the 53,000-ton merchant vessel Besiktas-M, a Panamanian-flagged cargo ship.
Boeing 737 Max Hits Car In The Middle of Runway During Takeoff
Takeoff and landing are the most dangerous parts of any flight, and the fatal mid-air collision in Washington, DC two weeks ago highlighted this. A Gol Boeing 737 Max collided with a ground vehicle while taking off from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Thankfully, the flight crew stopped the airliner before the end of the runway at Galeão International Airport, and no one was injured.
One passenger onboard the Brazilian airline’s flight recorded the aborted takeoff. The initial acceleration seemed normal until a loud thud was heard inside the cabin. Then, the thrust reversers were deployed to slow the plane’s takeoff roll. According to Simply Flying, the flight crew told air traffic control that a car was in the middle of the runway. It was later confirmed that the vehicle belonged to the airport.
Everyone onboard safely evacuated the damaged aircraft on the runway via airstairs, so it wasn’t an urgent enough emergency to necessitate the inflatable slide. Gol operated an additional flight to the airplane’s scheduled destination of Fortaleza Pinto Martins International Airport for the stranded passengers. The carrier noted that the incident didn’t impact any of its other flights.
Scientists Just Discovered ‘Quipu,’ the New Largest Structure in Our Cosmos
Humanity’s growing understanding of the universe can be best described as a “Copernican journey”—the centuries-long discovery that we are far from the center of all things. Earth, for example, orbits around the Sun (thanks for that one, Copernicus). But it’s also just one Solar System among billions in the Milky Way, which is turn a part of the Virgo Supercluster and the even larger Laniakea supercluster—one of the largest objects in the universe, at around 520 million light-years across.
However, even Laniakea isn’t the largest structure in the known universe. In 2003, scientists discovered the Sloan Great Wall (SGW), believed to stretch beyond 1 billion light-years. But now, in a study published on the preprint server arXiv (and accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics), scientists assert their belief that there’s a structure even larger than this celestial behemoth.
NASA’s Webb Space Telescope reveals ancient surface of Pluto and other celestial bodies for the first time
Scientists at NASA for the first time have been able to observe the make up of Pluto and other small and icy celestial bodies in the outer solar system.
They had expected to find that the surfaces of the bodies, known as “trans-Neptunian” objects, were dominated by frozen molecules that are gases or liquids on the surface of Earth, like water, methane, and carbon dioxide. They believed that radiation from the sun and solar system would alter that chemistry, creating new and more complex hydrocarbon molecules like methanol and ethane.
New data from the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Spectrograph instrument (NIRSpec) has “confirmed this, but in unexpected ways, and in unprecedented detail,” NASA explained in a blog post on Wednesday.
