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Violently bludgeoned to death and left in a Danish bog, the Stone Age individual known as ‘Vittrup man’ was discovered in 1915 by peat cutters in the midst of harvest.

His murder – thought to have been part of a ritualized sacrifice – occurred sometime between 3300 and 3100 BCE, during the height of the local Funnelbeaker culture.

Archeologists now have the strongest evidence yet that this is not where his life began.

The first hint that Vittrup man was a foreigner in Denmark came from a study investigating Mesolithic and Neolithic gene pools of Eurasia.

This revealed that Vittrup man’s DNA was distinct from the other skeletons from this time found in the area, which prompted archeologist Anders Fischer from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and his colleagues to investigate further.

Now, the team has unlocked the life history of this ill-fated man, combining modern and traditional archeological methods to read the story written in his bones.

It’s often astonishing just how much a person’s remains can tell us about their life. Vittrup man’s bones tell of a journey from his birthplace on the Scandinavian coast, to his gruesome death in Denmark 30-40 years later.

The remains include Vittrup man’s right ankle bone, the shaft of a lower left shin bone, a fragmented skull, and a jawbone. It’s assumed the bones come from one person because of similarities in their general appearance, along with radiocarbon and stable isotope analysis. These details also encode the story of Vittrup man’s travels.

Isotopes detected in his tooth enamel and proteins in his bones betray his coastal hunter-gatherer upbringing, a childhood of eating marine mammals and fish in a cold, northern climate that deposited strontium, carbon, and oxygen isotopes from the Scandinavian Peninsula into his teeth forever.

The team found significant similarities between his DNA and that of Mesolithic people from Norway and Sweden, further confirming his place of origin.

We may never know why he left these shores to join a society hundreds or even a thousand kilometers from home – only that his journey didn’t end well.

In his late teens, Vittrup man’s diet switched to farm food, like sheep and goats, which we now know from the molecular markers the researchers found embedded in his teeth and bones.

The Funnel Beaker culture was the northernmost group practicing farming and husbandry along this geographic passage. While they eventually introduced these techniques to the hunter-gatherers further north, Vittrup man appears to have joined this agricultural society as a farmer before these methods had spread to his homeland.

The researchers aren’t sure whether his one-way commute was forced or voluntary, since his way of death nor his lifestyle reveal much about his social standing.

“Many explanations for such a drastic change in life-style and geography are possible,” they write.

“He may have been an immigrant or trader who became integrated into equal social standing as other members of the local Funnel Beaker society. He could also have been a captive/slave providing labor and possibly maritime skills.”

Ritualized bog bludgeonings were common in Denmark at the time, regardless of a person’s social status.

“Evidently, such dubious honor was also given to persons of non-local provenience,” the authors conclude.

The research was published in PLOS ONE.

Four days after Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander made an off-kilter touchdown on the Moon, the mission team is releasing snapshots that were taken during its descent.

The ultra-wide-angle images confirm that the lander is continuing to communicate with flight controllers, even though it’s lying in an awkward angle that limits how much data its antennas can transmit.

Meanwhile, images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have identified Odysseus’ landing spot, within a mile (1.5 kilometers) of its intended target near a crater called Malapert A in the Moon’s south polar region. The bad news is that the solar-powered lander may have to go dark sooner than anticipated.

The lander is the first-ever commercial spacecraft to survive a descent to the Moon, and the first U.S-built spacecraft to do so since NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972. NASA is paying Intuitive Machines $118 million to deliver six science payloads to the surface, and there are another six private-sector payloads on board.

Odysseus’ descent wasn’t easy: Just hours before the landing, the Nova Control team had to reprogram the lander to work around a disabled laser range-finding system. The spacecraft instead made use of one of the NASA payloads, an experimental laser range-finding system. Fortunately, the work-around worked.

The lander also hit the dirt faster than originally planned, with a lateral motion that’s thought to have tripped up one of Odysseus’ landing legs. As a result, the spacecraft is lying on its side. Mission managers say that doesn’t seem likely to affect data collection, but it is affecting data transmission.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s images from this past weekend indicate that Odysseus hit a bull’s-eye, just like the hero from Greek mythology after whom it was named.

“After traveling more than 600,000 miles, Odysseus landed within 1.5 kilometers of its intended Malapert A landing site, using a contingent laser range-finding system patched hours before landing,” Intuitive Machines said in today’s update.

But Intuitive Machines also suggested that Odysseus won’t be able to remain in operation for the week to 10 days that mission managers had hoped for.

“Flight controllers intend to collect data until the lander’s solar panels are no longer exposed to light,” according to the update. “Based on Earth and Moon positioning, we believe flight controllers will continue to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning.”

Maybe Odysseus and its controllers will have to hope for an unexpected revival similar to what the team behind another off-kilter Moon lander, Japan’s SLIM spacecraft, experienced this weekend.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

Japan’s Moon lander has produced another surprise by waking up after the two-week lunar night, the country’s space agency said Monday.

The unmanned Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) touched down last month at a wonky angle that left its solar panels facing the wrong way.

As the Sun’s angle shifted, it came back to life for two days and carried out scientific observations of a crater with a high-spec camera, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said.

It went to sleep again as darkness returned and, since it was “not designed for the harsh lunar nights”, JAXA had been uncertain whether it would reawaken.

“Yesterday we sent a command, to which SLIM responded,” JAXA said on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday.

“SLIM succeeded in surviving a night on the Moon’s surface while maintaining its communication function!”

SLIM越夜後運用にて、航法カメラでの撮像を実施しました！ pic.twitter.com/MhXQXdBAaG

— 小型月着陸実証機SLIM (@SLIM_JAXA) February 26, 2024

It said communications were “terminated after a short time, as it was still lunar midday and the temperature of the communication equipment was very high”.

But it added: “Preparations are being made to resume operations when instrument temperatures have sufficiently cooled.”

SLIM, dubbed the “Moon Sniper” for its precision landing technology, touched down within its target landing zone on January 20.

The feat was a win for Japan’s space programme after a string of recent failures, making the nation only the fifth to achieve a “soft landing” on the Moon, after the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India.

But during its descent, the craft suffered engine problems and ended up on its side, meaning the solar panels were facing west instead of up.

The aim of the mission is to examine a part of the Moon’s mantle – the usually deep inner layer beneath its crust – that is believed to be accessible.

Rocks exposed in this area are “crucial in the search for the origins of the Moon and the Earth”, Tomokatsu Morota, associate professor at the University of Tokyo specialising in lunar and planetary exploration, previously told AFP.

This includes shedding light on the mystery of the Moon’s possible water resources, which will also be key to building bases there one day as possible stopovers on the way to Mars.

The latest news from SLIM comes after JAXA toasted a successful blast-off for its new flagship H3 rocket on February 17, making it third time lucky after years of delays and two previous failed attempts.

Countries including Russia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates are also trying to reach the Moon.

The first American spaceship to the Moon since the Apollo era – the uncrewed Odysseus lander built by a private company and funded by NASA – landed near the lunar south pole on Thursday.

But its maker said the spacecraft was probably lying sideways following a dramatic landing, even as ground controllers worked to download data and surface photos from it.

Previous Japanese lunar missions have failed twice – one public and one private.

In 2022, the country unsuccessfully sent a lunar probe named Omotenashi as part of the United States’ Artemis 1 mission.

And in April last year, Japanese startup ispace tried in vain to become the first private company to land on the Moon, losing communication with its craft after what it described as a “hard landing”.

© Agence France-Presse

Smacking a spacecraft into an asteroid may have had some interesting side effects.

According to an analysis of a collision between NASA’s DART probe and the asteroid Dimorphos back in September 2022, the tiny asteroid’s shape could have changed significantly as a direct result of the impact.

This offers some clues about how the asteroid formed in the first place, while also suggesting the upcoming mission to investigate Dimorphos will find not an impact crater, but a neatly reformed pile of space rock.

The DART mission – Double Asteroid Redirection Test – was one of planetary safety. Scientists wanted to see if they could divert the course of an asteroid by ramming it with a spacecraft. Dimorphos was the chosen target – a small asteroid in a mutual orbit with a larger binary companion called Didymos. Because the orbital period of the binary object was well known, any changes in the timing of this period would mean that the mission was successful.

And a success it was: the impact had a much greater effect on the timing of the period than scientists expected. But the DART mission was the first time humanity had ever tried such a thing; we didn’t know if there would be ongoing effects to observe, what those effects might be, what they could mean for asteroid redirection, and what, if anything, they would tell us about Dimorphos.

Obviously, scientists have been monitoring the space rock for changes. But a team led by planetary scientist Sabina Raducan of the University of Bern in Switzerland took a different approach. They took a simulated Dimorphos and a simulated DART spacecraft, and tried to replicate the observed effects of the impact.

That includes the transferral of momentum from the spacecraft to the asteroid, the amount of material that erupted from Dimorphos, and the shape that material formed as it spewed into space, known as the ejecta cone.

To do this, they needed to tweak unknown variables: the composition and density of Dimorphos.

Not all asteroids are built alike. Some are more dense, such as chunks of planets arrested in their development by large impacts and broken up into smaller fragments. And some are what are known as “rubble piles“, which is pretty much what it sounds like: looser agglomerations of dust and pebbles that have come together, but would be more susceptible to coming apart under gravitational stress, for example.

We already knew that both Didymos and Dimorphos fall into the rubble pile category. But the DART impact can tell us exactly what Dimorphos is made of.

Raducan and her colleagues were able to produce simulations consistent with the observed result of the DART project. And, in these simulations, the asteroid is held together so loosely that DART didn’t leave a scar on the surface; instead, the spacecraft caused global deformation and resurfacing.

For this to occur, the asteroid needs to be a very weak rubble pile; its cohesive strength, the team’s calculations suggest, is less than a few pascals. This is very similar to asteroids Ryugu and Bennu, both of which have been visited by human spacecraft for data and sample collection.

The simulations also suggest that the density of Dimorphos is very low, around 2.4 grams per cubic centimeter. That’s slightly denser than Ryugu and Bennu, which sit around 1.28 and 1.26 grams per cubic centimeter, respectively. The density of Earth, for context, is 5.51 grams per cubic centimeter.

The boulder density of the simulated Dimorphos was consistent with the density obtained from DART observations.

These findings suggest that Dimorphos may be Didymos’ asteroid baby. Didymos is also a rubble pile, and we know that rubble piles often shed debris as they spin, thanks to centrifugal force. Some of this shed debris remains in orbit with Didymos, according to this model of Dimorphos’ formation; over time, it clumped together to become the loose rubble pile we walloped with a spaceship.

We don’t know if they’re right, not yet. But we will. Later this year, the European Space Agency is launching the Hera mission to study Didymos and Dimorphos. If what Hera finds is consistent with the team’s simulations, we’ll know a lot more about Dimorphos than we did.

And this has implications, not just for our understanding of the ongoing evolution of the binary, but asteroids, asteroid binaries, and how we plan and execute any upcoming asteroid redirection missions.

“Since the DART spacecraft probably caused global deformation of Dimorphos, we can infer that similarly formed asteroid moons are easily reshaped and their surfaces are relatively young,” the researchers write in their paper.

“Overall, the findings of this study provide valuable information for understanding the formation and characteristics of binary asteroids and will inform future exploration and asteroid deflection efforts.”

The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.