Space

Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. SpaceX employees say they’re paying the price for the billionaire’s push to colonize space at breakneck speed.

Through interviews and government records, Reuters documented at least 600 injuries of SpaceX workers since 2014. Many were serious or disabling. The records included reports of more than 100 workers suffering cuts or lacerations, 29 with broken bones or dislocations, 17 whose hands or fingers were “crushed,” and nine with head injuries, including one skull fracture, four concussions and one traumatic brain injury. The cases also included five burns, five electrocutions, eight accidents that led to amputations, 12 injuries involving multiple unspecified body parts, and seven workers with eye injuries.

SpaceX, founded by Musk more than two decades ago, takes the stance that workers are responsible for protecting themselves, according to more than a dozen current and former employees, including a former senior executive.

Musk himself at times appeared cavalier about safety on visits to SpaceX sites: Four employees said he sometimes played with a novelty flamethrower and discouraged workers from wearing safety yellow because he dislikes bright colors.

Scientists have discovered a reservoir of liquid water on Mars - deep in the rocky outer crust of the planet.

The findings come from a new analysis of data from Nasa’s Mars Insight Lander, which touched down on the planet back in 2018.

The lander carried a seismometer, which recorded four years' of vibrations - Mars quakes - from deep inside the Red Planet.

Analysing those quakes - and exactly how the planet moves - revealed "seismic signals" of liquid water.

You can watch the meteors best around the 13th of August. There will be around 50 to 100 per hour.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/aVT4z

New preliminary evidence for phosphine and ammonia in Venus's atmosphere deepens the mystery of their origins, suggesting the possibility of a biological source. The detections, made using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and the Green Bank Telescope, point to potential microbial life in Venus's clouds despite the planet's extreme surface conditions. Space.com reports:

The new detections of phosphine and ammonia were obtained by a team led by Jane Greaves of the University of Cardiff using submillimeter radio wavelength data collected by the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. "We don't know how you make phosphine or ammonia in an oxygenating atmosphere like that of Venus," said team member and astrophysicist Dave Clements of Imperial College, London, in an interview with Space.com. Then again, it's not clear why biology on Earth produces phosphine, either." Whether it's in penguin poop or badger guts, we don't know why bacteria make phosphine, but they do."

The JCMT's initial detection of phosphine on Venus in 2020 by Greaves and her team was met by fierce disagreement from some quarters. This disagreement focused on how the data was processed and whether that was creating spurious signals since observations by other telescopes struggled to detect the phosphine. Clements said those technical disagreements have now been resolved and that the latest measurements, using a new detector on the JCMT called Namakanui (meaning 'Big Eyes' in Hawaiian), have come from three observing campaigns, each providing 140 times as much data as the initial detection. [...]

Clements is open to the possibility that both phosphine and ammonia are being produced by some rare photochemistry in Venus' upper atmosphere involving solar ultraviolet breaking up molecules and allowing phosphine and ammonia to form from the molecular debris. If that is the case, nobody has observed this process yet, not even in the laboratory. Another possibility that has been mooted is that the phosphine could be produced by Venusian volcanoes. Clements also pointed out that the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is making a fly-by of Venus in August 2025 to help slingshot it towards the Jovian system. JUICE carries instruments capable of detecting phosphine and ammonia, but there's no guarantee that its instruments will be switched on and deployed at Venus.

An idea worth pursuing I guess. My first question: in case this gets forgotten about in the distant future, how could it be marked so there's a good chance of being found?

(Link to the AIBS journal article which inspired the question: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biae058/7715645?login=false )

Paywall removed: https://archive.is/ewwMg

tl;dr

Heat building up inside the thrusters may be causing Teflon seals to bulge, restricting the flow of propellant.