Astronauts aboard the Artemis II mission observed flashes of light on the lunar surface that NASA has now confirmed were small rocky fragments striking the Moon at high speed, according to the agency's preliminary lunar science report. The crew witnessed the impacts with their unaided eyes during a unique solar eclipse on the sixth day of the mission, when the Orion spacecraft's trajectory gave them an unprecedented close-up view of the darkened Moon.
The fragments were likely no more than a few inches wide, slamming into the lunar surface at incredible speeds. The observations, detailed in the Artemis II Preliminary Lunar Science Report, mark the first time humans have directly seen such impact events from lunar orbit. NASA formatted the findings for public consumption under the title «Artemis II: Sights & Sounds of Science».
The Artemis II mission has been widely described as the most significant space mission of most people's lifetimes, but as access to space becomes cheaper and more routine, not all orbital activities will be quite so momentous. Students from the University of Glasgow and Japan's Kyushu Institute of Technology are collaborating on a planned CubeSat mission to distill whisky in space for the first time, scheduled to launch in 2028.
The spacecraft will carry 10 milliliters of fluid and spend five years in orbit studying how its chemical composition changes, with particular interest in how the frequent temperature and pressure shifts experienced as the satellite travels around the Earth could influence the maturing process. While the experiment may seem trivial to teetotalers, it offers practical experience with orbital manufacturing that will likely inform future missions.
In a separate development, the controversy around this year's Nikon Small World in Motion competition has ended with the disqualification of the winning video after experts raised alarms. Ning Xu's entry, which supposedly showed cilia in airway tissue samples taken from a child with primary ciliary dyskinesia, was stripped of the top prize for using generative AI.
Xu had previously claimed that AI was only used for post-processing the original images, a practice that would have already placed the entry in a gray area as far as competition rules were concerned. But researchers familiar with PCD said the structures shown in the video did not resemble anything they had ever seen in a patient, prompting suspicion that the fascinating visuals were actually the result of an AI hallucination. The disqualification shifted all previous winners up a rank, so Nguyen Nam Nhat of Vietnam now takes the top spot with a video of a roundworm and a single-celled Dileptus.
Finally, for those who appreciate minimal web design, a new collection of ASCII animations and art has caught attention online. Some pieces, such as «aurora fjord», can be exported as a GIF or video clip, while others can be embedded in HTML with just a couple of lines of code, allowing for customization and manipulation. The project highlights the enduring appeal of text-based visual art in an era dominated by high-resolution imagery.