Lifeboat Foundation

When the meteor that Avi Loeb, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University calls IM1 streaked across the sky on 8 January 2014, it was nothing special.

Yes, at half a meter in diameter, it was big enough to put on a nice show for people on the ground, ending in a rapid series of explosions high in the atmosphere.

“There were some reports of flashes in the sky, and there was probably a boom, although I’ve never heard anyone say that,” says Loeb’s colleague, Rob McCallum of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In a major milestone, Chandrayaan-3’s Pragyan rover has confirmed the presence of sulphur & other elements on the moon’s south pole. Molly Gambhir brings you a report.

#chandrayaan3 #sulphur #gravitas.

Continue reading “Gravitas: Chandrayaan-3’s big milestone: Sulphur on moon’s south pole confirmed” »

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Prominent National Science Foundation (NSF) space telescopes worldwide have been shut down due to a major cyberattack, the reason for which is unknown. For over two weeks, ten telescopes have been impacted, while some on-site operatives were able to keep some operational. These shutdowns have caused chaos in the astronomy sphere due to many essential windows of opportunity being missed for space observations.

NOIRLab (the NSF-run coordinating center for ground-based astronomy) said in a press release “Our staff are working with cybersecurity experts to get all the impacted telescopes and our website back online as soon as possible and are encouraged by the progress made thus far.”

Accounts may be hijacked and data can be uploaded without authentication if a certain version of Jupiter X Core, a premium plugin for setting up WordPress and WooCommerce websites, is used. These vulnerabilities impact various versions of the plugin.

Jupiter X Core is a visual editor that is both simple and powerful, and it is a component of the Jupiter X theme. The Jupiter X theme is used in more than 172,000 websites.

The second flaw, identified as CVE-2023–38389, makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to gain control of any WordPress user account so long as they are in possession of the user’s email address. The vulnerability has been given a critical severity level of 9.8 and affects all versions of Jupiter X Core beginning with 3.3.8 and below.

Space junk could one day be snatched in orbit with a strong bag, if a new contract to test the technology ends up flying in space.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has released a new entry in its World Factbook that catalogues the programs and milestones of space agencies around the world.

Some of the world’s leading astronomical observatories have reported cyberattacks that have resulted in temporary shutdowns.

The National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab, reported that a cybersecurity incident that occurred on Aug. 1 has prompted the lab to temporarily halt operations at its Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii and Gemini South Telescope in Chile. Other, smaller telescopes on Cerro Tololo in Chile were also affected.

The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed colorful new portraits of the iconic Ring Nebula that capture unprecedented details a dying star creates glowing structures.

A new hypothesis suggests that the universe may be twice as old as we had believed. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope provide new information on the rate of the universe’s expansion.