GoKawiil
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NASA launched Artemis 2, sending astronauts on a lunar flyby mission using the Orion spacecraft for its first crewed flight. The mission was designed to test Orion's life-support, navigation, and other systems with humans aboard after previous uncrewed testing.
Startup Orion has released a smart mattress pad priced at $2,195 that regulates bed temperature throughout the night via a phone app, cooling users as they fall asleep and warming back to room temperature before wake-up. The device uses sleep data to adjust its settings automatically, aiming to reduce nighttime waking and improve sleep quality. It was created by 26-year-old founder Harry Gestetner, who previously sold his company Fanfix for roughly $65 million and built Orion after suffering health issues from poor sleep habits.
NASA has created an emeritus status for Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, the commander and pilot of Artemis II, five months after their lunar mission splashdown. The designation lets them leave active astronaut duty and pursue outside careers—Glover is taking a leadership role at Cal Poly—while remaining available unpaid to train and advise NASA staff on Orion spacecraft systems.
A longtime astronomy enthusiast recounts initially dismissing smart telescopes like the Unistellar eVscope and Vaonis Stellina/Equinox because their several-thousand-euro price tags couldn't compete with conventional astrophotography gear or genuine eyepiece viewing. That view shifted with newer, far cheaper models from ZWO's Seestar line and Dwarflab, which now cost a fraction of the earlier devices.
NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel reported that after reviewing data from the Artemis II mission, the Orion capsule's heat shield showed only about nine sites of char loss, a dramatic improvement from the more than 100 sites, some over an inch deep, seen after Artemis I. NASA had altered Orion's reentry trajectory rather than redesign the heat shield following the 2022 issues, and the approach appears to have worked as the crew safely splashed down in the Pacific.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, working with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, built the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O), which used infrared laser light instead of radio waves to send data from the spacecraft. During the mission the system downlinked nearly half a terabyte of data at speeds up to 260 megabits per second, delivering sharp footage of the moon's far side, a solar eclipse, and meteoroid impacts.