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Harrisburg’s finance director has been suspended after a neighbor snapped a photo of him gardening in the nude and called police to complain. Bruce Weber is suspended pending the outcome of a police investigation. The neighbor, ShaVonne Moon, posted a photo Friday on Facebook of her naked neighbor, bent over, pulling weeds in his backyard garden on Boas Street . She complained on her social media post that she’s “sick of it,” and had to keep her young sons away from her home’s windows and backyard to avoid seeing the naked man outside. Weber confirmed Sunday that it was him...

Lunar gravity is approximately one sixth of Earth’s gravity, so bodily fluids and the like will “fall down,” but more slowly, which brings its own icky challenges. There’s $35,000 in prize money up for grabs, plus the unending personal glory of being able to say you helped designed a moon toilet. There’s also a junior category for under-18s. There’s a fairly extensive list of technical requirements for the sought-after toilet, and creators will have to take into account a host of factors including female needs and sickness. For example, while the preferred method for capturing vomit will be emesis bags...

Blow up the moon. It sounds like the grandiose plan of a James Bond villain. Only the idea came, not from a fictional villain, but the government of the United States of America. The secret mission, code-named “Project A119,” was conceived at the dawn of the space race by an Air Force division located at New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base. A June 1959 report entitled “A Study of Lunar Research Flights” outlined plans to explode the bomb on the moon’s “terminator” — the area between the part of the surface that’s illuminated by the sun and the part that’s...

NASA has finalized the contract for the initial crew module of the agency’s Gateway lunar orbiting outpost. Orbital Science Corporation of Dulles, Virginia, a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Space, has been awarded $187 million to design the habitation and logistics outpost (HALO) for the Gateway, which is part of NASA’s Artemis program and will help the agency build a sustainable presence at the Moon. This award funds HALO’s design through its preliminary design review, expected by the end of 2020. “This contract award is another significant milestone in our plan to build robust and sustainable lunar operations,” said...

With NASA planning its next human mission to the moon in 2024, researchers are looking for options to power settlements on the lunar surface. According to a new article in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, nuclear fission reactors have emerged as top candidates to generate electricity in space. When it comes to powering an astronauts’ settlement, there are many factors to consider, writes correspondent Tien Nguyen in collaboration with ACS Central Science. The power source must be capable of being transported safely from Earth and of withstanding the harsh conditions of other worlds....

Explanation: What are those dots between Saturn's rings? Our Earth and Moon. Just over three years ago, because the Sun was temporarily blocked by the body of Saturn, the robotic Cassini spacecraft was able to look toward the inner Solar System. There, it spotted our Earth and Moon -- just pin-pricks of light lying about 1.4 billion kilometers distant. Toward the right of the featured image is Saturn's A ring, with the broad Encke Gap on the far right and the narrower Keeler Gap toward the center. On the far left is Saturn's continually changing F Ring. From this perspective,...

NASA’s top executive concentrating on human spaceflight, Doug Loverro, has resigned just a week before the scheduled start of a milestone space mission. Loverro became NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations last December, and was playing a leading role in NASA’s Artemis moon program as well as preparations for next week’s launch of a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station. That mission, set for liftoff on May 27 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is due to send NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the station for a stay that could last...

BERLIN (AP) — The European Space Agency said Friday that human urine could one day become a useful ingredient in making concrete to build on the moon. The agency said researchers in a recent study it sponsored found that urea, the main organic compound in urine, would make the mixture for a “lunar concrete” more malleable before it hardens into its sturdy final form.

The Trump administration is drafting the legal language that will go into a new international agreement called the Artemis Accords that will create standards of behavior for moon mining practices. U.S. officials will formally negotiate the accords with several space-partner countries considered to have similar interests in lunar-mining endeavors. Some of the countries include Canada, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and those across Europe.

Huntsville AL (SPX) Apr 18, 2008 Behold the full Moon. Ancient craters and frozen lava seas lie motionless under an airless sky of profound quiet. It's a slow-motion world where even a human footprint may last millions of years. Nothing ever seems to happen there. Right? Wrong. NASA-supported scientists have realized that something does happen every month when the Moon gets a lashing from Earth's magnetic tail. "Earth's magnetotail extends well beyond the orbit of the Moon and, once a month, the Moon orbits through it," says Tim Stubbs, a University of Maryland scientist working at the Goddard Space Flight...

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Japan has found evidence of embedded carbon emissions on the moon. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their study of carbon data from the KAGUYA lunar orbiter and what they learned from it. The work involved studying a year and a half of data from the KAGUYA lunar orbiter, focusing specifically on carbon emissions. They found that the moon was emitting more carbon than has been thought, and more than could be accounted for by new carbon additions, such as the solar wind or collisions...

Now, a California man has put a painstakingly amount of effort into creating the world’s clearest image of the moon’s craters. Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy is the genius behind this masterpiece, which took two weeks to create. So, how did he do it? Here’s McCarthy describing the process: “This moon might look a little funny to you, and that’s because it is an impossible scene. From two weeks of images of the waxing moon, I took the section of the picture that has the most contrast (right before the lunar terminator where shadows are the longest), aligned and blended them to...

Synopsis: Due to outdated international law (1967 Outer Space Treaty) Trump administration to work with other like minded nations to settle on a new agreement called the "Artemis Accord" going forward to place bases and industry on the moon and other celestial bodies. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine pokes Obama in the eye.

Posted on May 4, 2020May 4, 2020 by Matt Williams Want to Mine the Moon? Here’s a Detailed Map of all its Minerals The prospect of mining asteroids and the Moon is on a lot of peoples’ minds lately. Maybe it’s all the growth that’s happened in the commercial aerospace industry in the past few decades. Or perhaps it’s because of Trump’s recent executive order to allow for asteroid and lunar mining. Either way, there is no shortage of entrepreneurs and futurists who can’t wait to start prospecting and harvest the natural bounty of space!Coincidentally enough, future lunar miners...

As astronauts explore the Moon during the Artemis program, they may need to make use of the resources that already exist on the lunar surface. Take water, for instance: Because it's a heavy and therefore expensive resource to launch from Earth, our future explorers might have to seek out ice to mine. Once excavated, it can be melted and purified for drinking and used for rocket fuel. But how much water is there on the Moon, and where might we find it? This is where NASA's Lunar Flashlight comes in. About the size of a briefcase, the small satellite —...

LCRT would be an ultra-long-wavelength radio telescope capable of capturing some of the weakest signals traveling through space. “It is not possible to observe the universe at wavelengths greater than 10 meters [33 feet], or frequencies below 30 MHz, from Earth-based stations, because these signals are reflected by the Earth’s ionosphere,” said Bandyopadhyay. “Moreover, Earth-orbiting satellites would pick up significant noise from Earth’s ionosphere,” which is why “such observations are very difficult.” It’s for this reason that wavelengths greater than 10 meters have yet to be explored by scientists. Consequently, this telescope would be a tremendous boon to astronomers and...

If you need a reason to get out of the house and see a show in our own backyard, tonight’s the night. A pink supermoon will rise tonight, according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac. The moon will also be the closest to the Earth at about 221,772 miles away, Space.com said. Not only does it have a colorful name, but it also is a supermoon and the first full moon of spring. You will be able to see it just after sunset with it making its peak illumination at 10:35 p.m. EDT, according to the almanac. But the show you...

Tonight's pink moon must have not gotten the memo about social distancing; the moon will be the closest to Earth today than any other day of the year, making it the largest full moon of 2020...You can see the moon rise in the sky this evening (in New York, that happens at 7:05 p.m. local time). But the moon won't appear full until 10:35 p.m. EDT (0235 GMT), according to NASA. If you miss it, fret not — the moon will appear full on Wednesday night, as well...Today's moon has one other claim to fame — it's known as the...

President Donald Trump signed an executive order today (April 6) establishing U.S. policy on the exploitation of off-Earth resources. That policy stresses that the current regulatory regime — notably, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty — allows the use of such resources. This view has long held sway in U.S. government circles. For example, the United States, like the other major spacefaring nations, has not signed the 1979 Moon Treaty, which stipulates that non-scientific use of space resources be governed by an international regulatory framework. And in 2015, Congress passed a law explicitly allowing American companies and citizens to use moon...

Signals from existing global navigation satellites near the Earth could be used to guide astronauts in lunar orbit, 385,000 km away. Cheung and Lee plotted the orbits of navigation satellites from the United States’s Global Positioning System and two of its counterparts, Europe’s Galileo and Russia’s GLONASS system—81 satellites in all. Most of them have directional antennas transmitting toward Earth’s surface, but their signals also radiate into space. Those signals, say the researchers, are strong enough to be read by spacecraft with fairly compact receivers near the moon. Cheung, Lee and their team calculated that a spacecraft in lunar orbit...