The science behind the perfect pole vault - worldathletics.org

Thousands of crew photos, hours of astronaut commentary, and hand-annotated images from April’s lunar flyby are now available to anyoneSix months after four astronauts swung around the Moon, everyone can access the photographs and observations they brought home. NASA has uploaded more than 800 gigabytes of Artemis II lunar science data, including material never released before, to NASA’s Planetary Data System, the public archive for the agency’s planetary missions. NASA announced the release on October 7. The material captures lunar observations made during the Artemis II mission in April 2026. The SLS rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft launched on April 1, 2026, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the mission concluded successfully on April 10. What’s in the archiveThe scale is impressive. The release includes more than 11,000 full-resolution images and videos of the Moon from the crew’s handheld cameras and Orion’s own cameras, 8.5 hours of audio recordings of the crew describing what they saw on the lunar surface, and images the crew annotated by hand.

The spacecraft delivered materials and equipment for new research studies to the station.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

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