The Martian InSight lander will no longer be able to function within months as dust continues to pile up on its solar panels, starving it of energy, NASA reported on Tuesday.

Launched from Earth in 2018, the six-metre-wide machine's mission was sent to study the Red Planet below its surface. InSight is armed with a range of instruments, including a robotic arm, seismometer, and a soil temperature sensor. Astronomers figured the data would help them understand how the rocky cores of planets in the Solar System formed and evolved over time.

"InSight has transformed our understanding of the interiors of rocky planets and set the stage for future missions," Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said in a statement. "We can apply what we've learned about Mars' inner structure to Earth, the Moon, Venus, and even rocky planets in other solar systems."

The mission didn't go quite as planned. The spacecraft was designed to stick its fancy heat probe five metres into the Martian regolith to take the planet's temperature. But the long rod, nicknamed the mole never made it that far down since the soil was too loose to compress around the apparatus and provide enough resistance to burrow through. The heat probe was also often prone to popping out.

Still, Glaze said InSight has gathered valuable data for science. "The InSight mission has really just been an incredible mission for us," Glaze said during a briefing.

"It's given us a glimpse of Mars that we couldn't get from any other spacecraft in our NASA Mars fleet. An interpretation of the Insight data has really furthered our understanding of how rocky planets form throughout the universe. It's not just telling us information about Mars, but broadening our planetary science understanding and helping us think differently about other rocky planets across the Solar System, and beyond."

The lander's days are numbered, however, as it struggles to obtain enough energy to continue operating its instruments. When it just landed on Mars, its solar panels were able to produce 5,000 watt-hours every Martian sol, apparently equivalent to powering an electric oven for an hour and 40 minutes. But now it's only generating about a tenth of that. 

Its energy levels have dropped, and are dropping, because Martian dirt is gathering on and blocking its solar panels, and the hours of sunlight are dwindling as winter approaches the lander. Bruce Banerdt, InSight's principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the only way InSight could be revived is if a so-called dust devil, a powerful whirlwind, miraculously blows away the dirt on the panels.

If just 25 percent of the dust is removed, InSight could produce 1,000 watt-hours per sol and have enough power to continue collecting data. But its declining rate energy levels coupled with the low chance of an automatic spring clean from an incoming dust devil has led NASA to start preparing for its final demise. 

"We've been hoping for a dust cleaning like we saw happen several times to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. That's still possible, but energy is low enough that our focus is making the most of the science we can still collect," Banerdt said. InSight's robotic arm will eventually be placed in a retirement pose, its seismometer is expected to wind down, and all science operations will cease.

NASA engineers came up with a way to extend InSight's mission, Kathya Garcia, InSight deputy project manager at JPL, explained during the briefing for the media.

"We had a really clever idea of trying to figure out how we can actually clean the solar panels," Garcia said. "We use the arm to scoop the dirt transported over the lander, and we slowly let the dirt fall onto the deck of the lander so that the dirt is carried over by the solar winds across the solar panels, cleaning it."

Garcia said the InSight team performed this motion successfully six times, extending the seismometer's run time by about six weeks. This in turn allowed NASA to detect this month its largest Mars quake yet, estimated to be a magnitude-five shake. But this technique is not enough to keep the lander from petering out.

After its instruments are powered down over our summer, InSight will live out the end of its days in a weakened state until its energy levels are completely drained. ®

Science fiction is littered with fantastic visions of computing. One of the more pervasive is the idea that one day computers will run on light. After all, what’s faster than the speed of light?

But it turns out Star Trek’s glowing circuit boards might be closer to reality than you think, Ayar Labs CTO Mark Wade tells The Register. While fiber optic communications have been around for half a century, we’ve only recently started applying the technology at the board level. Despite this, Wade expects, within the next decade, optical waveguides will begin supplanting the copper traces on PCBs as shipments of optical I/O products take off.

Driving this transition are a number of factors and emerging technologies that demand ever-higher bandwidths across longer distances without sacrificing on latency or power.

QNAP is warning users about another wave of DeadBolt ransomware attacks against its network-attached storage (NAS) devices – and urged customers to update their devices' QTS or QuTS hero operating systems to the latest versions.

The latest outbreak – detailed in a Friday advisory – is at least the fourth campaign by the DeadBolt gang against the vendor's users this year. According to QNAP officials, this particular run is encrypting files on NAS devices running outdated versions of Linux-based QTS 4.x, which presumably have some sort of exploitable weakness.

The previous attacks occurred in January, March, and May.

A US task force aims to prevent online harassment and abuse, with a specific focus on protecting women, girls and LGBTQI+ individuals.

In the next 180 days, the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse will, among other things, draft a blueprint on a "whole-of-government approach" to stopping "technology-facilitated, gender-based violence." 

A year after submitting the blueprint, the group will provide additional recommendations that federal and state agencies, service providers, technology companies, schools and other organisations should take to prevent online harassment, which VP Kamala Harris noted often spills over into physical violence, including self-harm and suicide for victims of cyberstalking as well mass shootings.

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Inverse Finance has been robbed of cryptocurrency somehow exchangeable for $1.2 million, just two months after being taken for $15.6 million.

"Inverse Finance’s Frontier money market was subject to an oracle price manipulation incident that resulted in a net loss of $5.83 million in DOLA with the attacker earning a total of $1.2 million," the organization said on Thursday in a post attributed to its Head of Growth "Patb."

And Inverse Finance would like its funds back. Enumerating the steps the DAO intends to take in response to the incident, Patb said, "First, we encourage the person(s) behind this incident to return the funds to the Inverse Finance DAO in return for a generous bounty."

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel today signed an order approving the extradition of Julian Assange to America, where he faces espionage charges for sharing secret government documents.

Assange led WikiLeaks, a website that released classified files including footage of US airstrikes and military documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan war that detailed civilian casualties.

It also distributed secret files revealing the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and sensitive communications from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, during the 2016 US presidential election. 

A group of senators wants to make it illegal for data brokers to sell sensitive location and health information of individuals' medical treatment.

A bill filed this week by five senators, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), comes in anticipation the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling that could overturn the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing access to abortion for women in the US.

The worry is that if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade – as is anticipated following the leak in May of a majority draft ruling authored by Justice Samuel Alito – such sensitive data can be used against women.

A Russian operated botnet known as RSOCKS has been shut down by the US Department of Justice acting with law enforcement partners in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. It is believed to have compromised millions of computers and other devices around the globe.

The RSOCKS botnet functioned as an IP proxy service, but instead of offering legitimate IP addresses leased from internet service providers, it was providing criminals with access to the IP addresses of devices that had been compromised by malware, according to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of California.

It seems that RSOCKS initially targeted a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as industrial control systems, routers, audio/video streaming devices and various internet connected appliances, before expanding into other endpoints such as Android devices and computer systems.

Interview 2023 is shaping up to become a big year for Arm-based server chips, and a significant part of this drive will come from Nvidia, which appears steadfast in its belief in the future of Arm, even if it can't own the company.

Several system vendors are expected to push out servers next year that will use Nvidia's new Arm-based chips. These consist of the Grace Superchip, which combines two of Nvidia's Grace CPUs, and the Grace-Hopper Superchip, which brings together one Grace CPU with one Hopper GPU.

The vendors lining up servers include American companies like Dell Technologies, HPE and Supermicro, as well Lenovo in Hong Kong, Inspur in China, plus ASUS, Foxconn, Gigabyte, and Wiwynn in Taiwan are also on board. The servers will target application areas where high performance is key: AI training and inference, high-performance computing, digital twins, and cloud gaming and graphics.

The US could implement a law similar to the EU's universal charger mandate if a trio of Senate Democrats get their way.

In a letter [PDF] to Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, two of Massachusetts' senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, along with Bernie Sanders (I-VT), say a proliferation of charging standards has created a messy situation for consumers, as well as being an environmental risk. 

"As specialized chargers become obsolete … or as consumers change the brand of phone or device that they use, their outdated chargers are usually just thrown away," the senators wrote. The three cite statistics from the European Commission, which reported in 2021 that discarded and unused chargers create more than 11,000 tons of e-waste annually.

Microsoft is extending the Defender brand with a version aimed at families and individuals.

"Defender" has been the company's name of choice for its anti-malware platform for years. Microsoft Defender for individuals, available for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, is a cross-platform application, encompassing macOS, iOS, and Android devices and extending "the protection already built into Windows Security beyond your PC."

The system comprises a dashboard showing the status of linked devices as well as alerts and suggestions.

Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC has revealed details of its much anticipated 2nm production process node – set to arrive in 2025 – which will use a nanosheet transistor architecture, as well as enhancements to its 3nm technology.

The newer generations of silicon semiconductor chips are expected to bring about increases in speed and will be more energy efficient as process nodes shrink and the tech industry continues to fight to hang onto Moore's Law.

The company is due to go into production with the 3nm node in the second half of this year.

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