[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.] As the Ottoman…

A Long Island dad said his 14-year-old daughter was plied with drugs and sex trafficked by “unsavory characters” during a horrific month-long ordeal that ended on a boat docked at an Islip marina.…

Months after deciding that its previous plan for bringing samples back from Mars wasn’t going to work, NASA says it’s working out the details for two new sample return scenarios, with the aim of bringing 30 titanium tubes filled with rocks and soil back to Earth in the 2030s. One scenario calls for using a beefed-up version of NASA’s sky crane to drop the required hardware onto the Martian surface, while the other would use heavy-lift commercial capabilities provided by the likes of SpaceX or Blue Origin. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the space agency plans to flesh out the engineering details for each option over the course of the next year and make its choice in 2026. But that all depends on what Congress and President-elect Donald Trump’s administration want to do. An artist’s conception shows NASA’s sky crane system lowering a rover onto the Martian surface. One option calls for a similar system to be used to put a sample retrieval platform on Mars. (NASA Illustration / Ashwin R. Vasavada) Nelson noted that China is planning to launch a Mars sample return mission in 2028. “I don’t think we want the only sample return coming back on the Chinese spacecraft, and that’s just simply a grab-and-go kind of mission, whereas ours has been a very methodical process. … I think that the administration will certainly conclude that they want to proceed, so what we wanted to do was to give them the best possible options so that they can go from here,” he told reporters. For years, NASA has been working on a plan that started out with the collection and caching of samples by the Perseverance rover in Mars’ Jezero Crater, which is considered prime territory for harboring potential evidence of ancient life. Those samples would have been gathered up and brought to a sample retrieval platform, where they would have been sent into Martian orbit on a rocket known as the Mars Ascent Vehicle. The samples would be transferred to a Mars orbiter built by the European Space Agency. That orbiter would then deliver the samples back to Earth for laboratory study. It was a complex plan, and last year, NASA determined that the operation would have taken until 2040 to get the samples back, with a price tag of $11 billion. “That was just simply unacceptable,” Nelson said. NASA asked its experts as well as commercial space ventures to come up with ideas for lowering the cost and speeding up the schedule, which resulted in the two options presented today. The sky crane option would build upon the technology that used a rocket-powered, free-flying platform to lower NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers to the Martian surface. “You’re looking at cost in the range of $6.6 billion to $7.7 billion,” Nelson said. The estimated price tag for the commercial heavy-lift option is in the range of $5.8 billion to $7.1 billion. “You all know that SpaceX and Blue Origin have already been ones that have expressed an interest, but it could be others as well, and a team is evaluating and researching all industry capability to include the schedule and the budget to determine the best strategy going forward,” Nelson said. Both options would use many of the same elements proposed under the previous plan, but would trim costs by using a smaller Mars Ascent Vehicle as well as simpler design for the sample retrieval platform, powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator rather than solar panels. The samples would be brought back from Mars and sent down to Earth by ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter. NASA said ESA is currently evaluating the options proposed by NASA. The newly proposed schedule could lead to launches in the 2030-31 time frame, and delivery of the samples by as early as 2035. “But it could go out to 2039,” Nelson said. “Now, a good reason for why it could get extended out is if the Congress and the new administration do not respond.” Nelson said Congress would have to commit at least $300 million during the current fiscal year to keep the Mars sample return campaign on track. “If they want to get this thing back on a direct return earlier, they’re going to have to put more money into it, even more than $300 million in fiscal year ’25, and that would be the case every year going forward,” he said. Trump has been bullish on Mars exploration, in part due to the influence of SpaceX founder Elon Musk. So bullish, in fact, that he wants to have astronauts on the Red Planet by 2028, potentially forcing another overhaul of the Mars sample return campaign. “We will reach Mars before the end of my term,” Trump said during a campaign rally last October. “Elon promised me he was going to do that. … He told me that we’re going to win, and he’s going to reach Mars by the end of our term, which is a big thing. Before China, before anybody.” The post NASA Lays Out Two New Options for Mars Sample Return appeared first on Universe Today.

How old is the Moon? Astronaut-gathered samples from the lunar surface put its age at about 4.35 billion years. However, other evidence suggests it’s much older, around 4.53 billion years old. A team of scientists published a recent paper that suggests the Moon’s surface age was “reset” in a melting event. The generally accepted theory about the Moon’s formation goes like this: about 4.5 billion years ago and about 200 million years after the solar system began to form, something happened. A single Mars-sized object named Theia (or possibly a series of objects) collided with or was somehow captured by infant Earth. That tumultuous crash sent a lot of molten rock and debris into space. Eventually, most of it coalesced to form the infant Moon, which settled into orbit around Earth. Debris from the inner solar system bombarded the pair for millions of years thereafter. Fast-forward to the present day, where we can study rocks collected from the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. Scientists analyzed those samples and found them to be about 4.35 billion years old. That suggests the Moon is NOT 4.53 billion years old. Which is true? It turns out there’s strong evidence for an older Moon. It exists in some zircon minerals on the lunar surface. They’re at least 4.51 billion years old. thermal models and simulations also suggest a lunar age somewhere between 4.43 and 4.53 billion years. So, why are lunar surface rocks almost 200 million years younger? Dating the Moon As it turns out, both numbers could be true. The Moon could have formed very early, but it experienced something that changed its geological clock. According to UC Santa Cruz professor Francis Nimmo and a team of researchers, the Moon likely did form 4.51 million years ago in that catastrophic collision with baby Earth. But, 180 million years later, it may have experienced a “remelting”. That reset the ages of lunar rocks to around 4.35 billion years. That’s why the surface samples collected by the Apollo astronauts show a younger age. Sample collection on the lunar surface. Apollo 16 astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr. is shown collecting samples with the Lunar Roving Vehicle in the left background. Image: NASA “We predict that there shouldn’t be any lunar rocks that are older than 4.35 billion years because they should have experienced the same resetting,” said Nimmo. “Because this heating event was global, you shouldn’t find rocks anywhere on the Moon that are significantly older than that.” Nimmo and his colleagues suggest that a global remelt of lunar rocks could account for the existence of younger surface rocks. The Apollo rocks suggest something happened, and the return of rocks from China’s Chang’e 6 mission could offer more evidence for that theory. For their paper, the authors used modeling to show that the Moon may have experienced sufficient tidal heating to cause this remelting approximately 4.35 billion years ago, which could “reset” the apparent formation age of these lunar samples. Chang’e-6 lander on the lunar surface, as seen by a mini-rover nearby. (Credit: CLEP / CNSA) Modeling a Lunar Surface Reset What could cause a global melting strong enough to reset the age of the Moon’s rocks? Nimmo suggest that the Moon experienced tidal heating due to the evolution of its orbit around Earth. This happened because the Moon was closer to Earth, and the orbit was pretty unstable during certain epochs. Thanks to the immense tidal pull from Earth, the Moon could have been heated, which led to the alteration of its geology and the “age reset” of its rocks. It turns out that the Moon isn’t the only place in the solar system where this could happen. The volcanic moon Io in orbit around Jupiter experiences the same type of tidal attraction as it orbits. That helps explain Io’s extensive volcanic activity and surface “paving” by the frequent eruptions from its volcanic features. It also explains why we don’t see widespread craters on Io. If the same thing happened to the infant Moon after its original formation, cooldown, and subsequent bombardment, we wouldn’t see any of its original craters. They’d have been covered by subsequent eruption and melting when the Moon’s orbit was stabilizing. Why is the Lunar Surface Age Important? The formation and evolution of the solar system and its many different bodies is still a hot area of study. Among other things, scientists want to understand the timing of events that shaped solar system objects. For that, they need a better understanding of the geology of each object. More data leads to better models of every aspect of solar system formation—from the first “push” in the protosolar nebula to such events as collisions, tidal heating, orbital dynamics, and surface evolution of different worlds. That’s where planetary science missions come in handy. They provide “in situ” data about each world (or object, in the case of asteroids, moons, comets, and rings), and they fill in gaps in the history of each place. “As more data becomes available—particularly from ongoing and future lunar missions—the understanding of the Moon’s past will continue to evolve,” Nimmo said. “We hope that our findings will spark further discussion and exploration, ultimately leading to a clearer picture of the Moon’s place in the broader history of our solar system.” For More Information A “Remelting” of Lunar Surface Adds a Wrinkle to Mystery of Moon’s True AgeTidally Driven Remelting Around 4.35 billion Years Ago Indicates the Moon is OldMoon Formation The post The Lunar Surface Remelted, Obscuring an Easy Answer to its True Age appeared first on Universe Today.

Terrifying stuff.

CNN is Having a Hard Time at the Thought of Free Speech Being Allowed On Zuckerberg’s Platforms [WATCH]

KJP Gets Completely Cooked When She Claims White House Press Team ‘Best in the Business’

The following article, Dems in Disarray: From Lies to Lawsuits, the Left’s Last Stand Against Trump’s Return, was first published on Conservative Firing Line. With the Dems in disarray after getting trounced by Trump’s big comeback, they’re just about out of real ideas. So they’re going back to the old ones. It’s one thing to superficially accept the will of the people in an election. It’s quite another to let those same people actually GET the kind of government … Continue reading Dems in Disarray: From Lies to Lawsuits, the Left’s Last Stand Against Trump’s Return ...

Around 1 a.m. on April 24 2018, semi-truck drivers in the Oak Park area of Michigan received a distress call from area police: An unidentified man was standing on the edge of a local bridge, apparently ready to jump onto the freeway below.Those drivers then did something amazing. They raced to the scene to help—and lined up their trucks under the bridge, providing a relatively safe landing space should the man jump.Fortunately, he didn't.The impressive line-up wasn't a coincidence—the drivers were prepared for exactly this sort of situation. Sgt. Jason Brockdorff of the Huntington Woods Police Department told The Detroit News that the response was something local police and truck drivers had actually trained for. But what was unusual was the sheer number of drivers who responded to the call."That's a practice we use if we have a jumper," Brockdorff said. "We try to do it every time, to lessen the distance someone would travel if they were to jump. Fortunately, that didn't happen."The incident lasted nearly four hours, into the early morning. However, once the trucks were in place, the police were able to more comfortably negotiate with the unidentified man.Eventually, the man walked off the bridge on his own and received medical attention.In a pair of tweets, the local police department called attention to the incident to remind people in similar situations of the importance of seeking mental health services (emphasis mine):This photo does show the work troopers and local officers do to serve the public. But also in that photo is a man struggling with the decision to take his own life. Please remember help is available through the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.You can also call a loved one, member of the clergy or 911. There are so many people that can help you make the choice to get help and live! It is our hope to never see another photo like this again.Working together, the police and everyday strangers saved a life.Ordinary people heeded the call of service to help a fellow person who was struggling. It's a powerful image that's impossible to ignore, and a reminder of humanity at its best.This article originally appeared seven years ago.