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Meanwhile, supply-chain problems are likely to cause limited supplies of filtering facepiece respirators, such as N95 masks. Yet strategies to decontaminate personal protective equipment, or PPE, remain unresolved in many hospitals with limited resources, both in the United States and abroad. University of Delaware researchers, led by biomedical engineer Jason Gleghorn, have devised a system for decontaminating N95 masks using off-the-shelf materials available at any hardware store combined with ultraviolet type C (UV-C) lights found in shuttered research laboratories....

Once every 30 years or so, or roughly one Saturnian year, a monster storm rips across the northern hemisphere of the ringed planet. In 2010, the most recent and only the sixth giant storm on Saturn observed by humans began stirring. It quickly grew to superstorm proportions, reaching 15,000 kilometers (more than 9,300 miles) in width and visible to amateur astronomers on Earth as a great white spot dancing across the surface of the planet....

Matthew Dominick was selected by NASA to join the 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class. He reported for duty in August 2017 and completed two years of training as an Astronaut Candidate. The Colorado native earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of San Diego and a Master of Science degree in Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School. He graduated from U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. He has more than 1,600 hours of flight time in 28 aircraft, 400 carrier-arrested landings, and 61 combat missions....

Despite the pandemic’s disruptions, MIT’s research community still managed to generate a number of impressive research breakthroughs in 2021. In the spirit of reflection that comes with every new orbit around the sun, below we count down 10 of the most-viewed research stories on MIT News from the past year. 10. Giving cancer treatment a recharge. In October, researchers discovered a way to jump-start the immune system to attack tumors....

In the 1990s, the German orbital X-ray telescope ROSAT began detecting large variations in signals in the soft X-ray part of the spectrum that lasted a day or so. These were similar to the copious flux of soft X-rays from the comet Hyakutake discovered around the same time. It was proposed that these were due to solar wind, fluxes of charged particles arriving from the sun, and how they interact with neutral ions in the upper extremities of our atmosphere, or the geocorona....

Long-sustained westerly winds shaped the dunes surrounding the Saudi Arabian oasis of Jubbah in this photograph shot by an astronaut from the International Space Station (ISS). Jubbah sits in the protective wind shadow of Jabel Umm Sinman, which roughly translates from Arabic as “two camel-hump mountain.” The hard, black rock of the mountain disrupts wind flow and blocks dunes from forming on its lee side. The area around Jabel Umm Sinman has been at the center of significant climatic and anthropological shifts during the Holocene, a geologic term for the past 10,000 years....

Polar sea ice typically forms in the winter months due to the cold temperatures. However, the sinking of colder, denser water should bring warmer water back to the surface and prevent the formation of sea ice. The researchers have recently published a study in the journal Science Advances explaining why this does not occur. According to their research, the lower salinity of surface water in the polar regions prevents the warmer water from rising to the surface, leading to the formation of sea ice....

As early as the 1930s, researchers noticed that odd, milky-white patches of water sporadically discolor the generally bluer and shallow waters of the Bahama Banks. Sampling the discolored water patches made clear that these whiting events were caused by an abundance of fine-grained calcium carbonate particles suspended in the water. However, why surges of calcium carbonate end up suspended in the water at particular times has never been clear. Some experts have argued that it is mainly a mechanical process, with currents dredging up calcium carbonate sediments....

On day 22 of the 25.5-day Artemis I mission, the Orion spacecraft continues its journey back to Earth. Flight controllers and engineers continue to test the spacecraft and its systems in preparation for future flights with a human crew aboard. The second part of the propellant tank slosh development flight test was conducted by engineers. This propellant slosh test is specifically scheduled during quiescent, or less active, parts of the mission....

The ground team for NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has switched the rover to a redundant onboard computer in response to a memory issue on the computer that had been active. The intentional swap at about 2:30 a.m. PST today (Thursday, February 28) put the rover, as anticipated, into a minimal-activity precautionary status called “safe mode.” The team is shifting the rover from safe mode to operational status over the next few days and is troubleshooting the condition that affected operations yesterday....

Yesterday, NASA’s Glenn Research Center held a dedication ceremony for its Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility. Formerly known as Plum Brook Station, the facility is located on 6,400 acres in Sandusky, Ohio, and is home to powerful space simulation chambers that support NASA’s Artemis program and commercial spaceflight testing. The event was attended by NASA Administrator Senator Bill Nelson, NASA Glenn Director Marla Pérez-Davis, Mark Armstrong (son of Neil Armstrong), NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana, Armstrong Test Facility Director David Stringer, and members of the Ohio Congressional Delegation....

NASA’s Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), aboard the Aqua satellite, captured carbon monoxide plumes coming from California wildfires last week. There were 28 major wildfires burning across the state as of September 14, 2020. This includes the August Complex Fire, which started on August 17 and has since burned over 471,000 acres, making it the largest fire on record in California. The animation shows three-day averages of carbon monoxide concentrations around 3 miles (5 kilometers) up in the atmosphere between September 6 and September 14....

This animation shows the gamma-ray sky’s frenzied activity during a year of observations from February 2022 to February 2023. The pulsing circles represent just a subset of more than 1,500 light curves – records of how sources change in brightness over time – collected by the LAT over nearly 15 years in space. Thanks to the work of an international team of astronomers, this data is now publicly available in a continually updated interactive library....

A paper published today in the journal Icarus identifies distinct deposits of minerals called carbonates along the inner rim of Jezero, the site of a lake more than 3.5 billion years ago. On Earth, carbonates help form structures that are hardy enough to survive in fossil form for billions of years, including seashells, coral, and some stromatolites ­– rocks formed on this planet by ancient microbial life along ancient shorelines, where sunlight and water were plentiful....

Sarli leads a team designing shields to protect NASA’s Mars Earth Entry System from micrometeorites and space debris. To test the team’s shields and computer models, he recently traveled to a NASA lab, designed to safely recreate dangerous impacts. Set far away from residents and surrounded by dunes, the Remote Hypervelocity Test Laboratory at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, has supported every human spaceflight program from the Space Shuttle to Artemis....

One of Pluto’s most identifiable features, Cthulhu (pronounced kuh-THU-lu) stretches nearly halfway around Pluto’s equator, starting from the west of the great nitrogen ice plains known as Sputnik Planum. Measuring approximately 1,850 miles (3,000 kilometers) long and 450 miles (750 kilometers) wide, Cthulhu is a bit larger than the state of Alaska. Cthulhu’s appearance is characterized by a dark surface, which scientists think is due to being covered by a layer of dark tholins – complex molecules that form when methane is exposed to sunlight....

NASA’s Perseverance rover today completed the collection of the first sample of Martian rock, a core from Jezero Crater slightly thicker than a pencil. Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California received data that confirmed the historic milestone. The core is now enclosed in an airtight titanium sample tube, making it available for retrieval in the future. Through the Mars Sample Return campaign, NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are planning a series of future missions to return the rover’s sample tubes to Earth for closer study....

Astronomers from the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) and Lowell Observatory have used NASA’s Swift satellite to check out comet C/2012 S1 (ISON), which may become one of the most dazzling in decades when it rounds the sun later this year. Using images acquired over the last two months from Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT), the team has made initial estimates of the comet’s water and dust production and used them to infer the size of its icy nucleus....

NASA and the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) of Pensacola, Florida, as well as engineers from Oceaneering Space Systems of Houston, have jointly developed the X1. It’s a 57–pound device that humans can wear over their body to assist or inhibit movement in leg joints. The inhibition mode allows astronauts to use the device as a space-based exercise machine, supplying resistance against leg movement. However, the same technology can be used in reverse on the ground, potentially helping individuals walk for the first time....

After the start of an eruption near Fagradalsfjall—a shield volcano on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula—news reports noted that a river of lava was visible from as far away as the nation’s capital (30 kilometers/20 miles). It could also be seen from a satellite orbiting hundreds of kilometers above the ground. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired this false-color image at 10:25 p.m. local time (22:25 Universal Time) on March 22, 2021, three days after the start of the eruption....