TUCSON, AZ — Tucson astronomers have discovered a possible “mini-moon” orbiting Earth!

On February 15, Astronomers Kacper Wierzchos and Theodore Pruyne noticed and started to track an asteroid that is caught in Earth’s orbit, and has been orbiting our planet for an estimated two to three years.

“These events are really rare,” said Wierzchos, and astronomer at Cataline Sky Survey in Tucson. “This is maybe the second, maybe the third asteroid out of one million known that has entered the orbit of Earth.”

Wierzchos said there is still a possibility that the “mini-moon” is a man-made object, but all signs point to the fact that this is a natural object. The “mini-moon” is considered small and is often compared to the size of a car.

“We probably capture and lose these tiny little things all the time,” said Patrick Young, Associate professor of Astrophysics at Arizona State University. “The fact that we manage to see such a tiny thing is pretty impressive.”

The “mini-moon” will only be around for a little while longer. Wierzchos said its trajectory will shoot it back out into space next month.

The U.S. Senate today voted unanimously to pass the Secure and Trusted Telecommunications Networks Act. Written as a response to recent concerns around Chinese hardware manufacturers, the bill would ban purchase of telecom equipment from embattled Chinese manufactures like Huawei and ZTE.

H.R. 4998, which passed the House last December, would also include $1 billion in funding to help smaller rural telecoms “rip and replace” existing equipment from specific manufacturers. The bill still needs to be signed off by Trump in order to become a law, though Politico notes that the administration has already acknowledged support for the funding, which would be managed by the FCC.

“Telecommunications equipment from certain foreign adversaries poses a significant threat to our national security, economic prosperity, and the future of U.S. leadership in advanced wireless technology,” Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said of the bipartisan bill in a statement. “By establishing a ‘rip and replace’ program, this legislation will provide meaningful safeguards for our communications networks and more secure connections for Americans. I thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for coming together to help move this bill to the President’s desk.”

Huawei in particular has been the focus of U.S. concern over alleged ties to the Chinese government for a number of years. The Trump administration has targeted the company over spying concerns — charges Huawei has long staunchly denied. Last May, the company was added to an entity list, effectively barring U.S. companies from conducting business with the hardware giant.

When Amazon launched a funky membership program called Amazon Prime in 2005, Walmart boasted larger profits than Amazon had revenue. Fifteen years later, though, Prime is the key reason for Amazon’s dominance over Walmart in online sales.

That pressure has pushed the traditional retailer to burn tens of billions of dollars to fight back while its executives have cycled through various stages of reaction to Prime’s ascent: denial, followed by meek competition, followed by a reversal that seemed to signal Walmart wanted to stick to a free, no-membership strategy.

But Recode has learned that over the past 18 months, the world’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer has explored creating its own paid membership program that would include perks that Amazon can’t replicate, in part to avoid a direct comparison to Prime. Amazon now accounts for nearly 40 percent of all online retail sales in the US, according to eMarketer, and Prime is a huge reason why. Walmart is a distant No. 2 with only a little more than 5 percent of the US e-commerce market.

As soon as next month, Walmart plans to start publicly testing a membership program called Walmart+, according to sources. The program is expected to essentially launch as a rebrand of Walmart’s existing Delivery Unlimited service, which charges customers $98 a year for unlimited, same-day delivery of fresh groceries from one of the 1,600-plus Walmart stores in the US where the program is available. The company is also considering launching Walmart+ with a feature that would allow customers to use text messaging to place orders. Sources said that the amount of the Walmart+ fee could still change or the company might test multiple price points.

But the long-term vision for Walmart+ is for the program to add more perks, which could include discounts on prescription drugs at Walmart pharmacies and fuel at Walmart gas stations, as well as a Scan & Go service that would allow shoppers to check out in Walmart stores without waiting in line — a tool Walmart briefly tested but discontinued nearly two years ago.

Still, no additional perks beyond grocery delivery are set in stone, which has led some insiders to worry that the pressure to simply act might be supplanting a strong rollout plan and business case, according to sources. It’s unlikely that a $98 annual program built exclusively around grocery delivery would be enough to successfully compete with Amazon Prime. Those overseeing the program, however, believe that testing different perks and learning from those tests will benefit both customers and the business in the long term.

A Walmart spokesperson confirmed that a membership program called Walmart+ was in development but declined to provide other details.

The reality Walmart is facing is that Prime, which boasts more than 150 million members worldwide, has become a retail wrecking ball that’s impossible for competitors to ignore, even if they’re hard-pressed to truly compete with all it offers. Prime costs $119 a year in the US, and it comes with unlimited one-day shipping on more than 10 million products, same-day grocery deliveries from Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh, access to a large catalog of TV shows and movies available for online streaming, and more. Prime customers spend more and shop more frequently than Amazon’s non-Prime shoppers.

Even with its huge lead over all US competitors, Amazon isn’t satisfied, pushing into prescription drugs in 2018 with the acquisition of the online pharmacy PillPack, and developing multiple grocery store concepts beyond Whole Foods. Earlier this week, Amazon opened a new, high-tech supermarket that allows shoppers to pluck fresh foods like fruits, vegetables, and meat off of shelves, walk right out, and get automatically charged for the merchandise afterward.

In recent years, Amazon has also made moves for Prime to appeal to households with less disposable income that historically have favored shopping at Walmart. Amazon added a monthly payment option for Prime fees in 2016, a 45 percent Prime fee discount for those on government assistance in 2017, and ways for Prime customers to pay for orders with cash. Today, more than half of Walmart’s top-spending families are Amazon Prime members, according to sources. While Walmart’s overall grocery business is larger than Amazon’s, one fear is that top Walmart customers could eventually turn to Amazon for groceries as they get sucked further into the Prime suite of perks.

This state of affairs, in which even an industry titan like Walmart has struggled to combat Amazon’s e-commerce offensive, highlights the power Amazon has amassed that has made it a target of a broader congressional investigation of Big Tech and a separate probe by the Federal Trade Commission. Recode reported last year that the FTC was exploring the question of whether Prime’s bundling of various features allows Amazon to unfairly undercut competitive services.

At Walmart, the Walmart+ initiative is a top priority for Janey Whiteside, the company’s chief customer officer who joined from American Express in 2018, according to sources. Other top Walmart leaders, including CEO Doug McMillon, have played an active role in planning. The goal for the program is to eventually save Walmart customers both time and money, and presumably to encourage them to keep spending heavily with the brick-and-mortar giant. Executives believe the program needs to strike a balance of being valuable enough that customers will pay for it, while different enough from Amazon Prime that it doesn’t promote a direct comparison that would likely be impossible for Walmart to win.

Perks like prescription drug and fuel discounts could provide an edge, since they are frequent purchases and Amazon doesn’t own gas stations or its own brick-and-mortar pharmacies. (Amazon does own the online pharmacy PillPack, though its current target customer is someone who regularly takes multiple medications versus one-off patients.) The Walmart+ rollout also comes with a belief that top-spending Walmart families that subscribe to Amazon Prime will still be attracted to Walmart+ because its fresh grocery prices are often lower than those Amazon offers.

In the past, some Walmart executives have opposed a paid membership program, seeing Walmart’s competitive advantage as giving shoppers everyday low prices without the need to splurge on a membership fee. Some feared a program would look tame in comparison to Prime, which had a decade head start.

One of the first big moves Marc Lore made as US e-commerce chief following Walmart’s acquisition of his startup Jet.com in late 2016, was to ax a new Walmart membership that offered unlimited two-day shipping on a much smaller selection of goods than Amazon Prime’s catalog, but at half the price. Lore said at the time that two-day shipping had become “table stakes” — a consumer expectation single-handedly created by Amazon Prime.

Last year, Walmart followed up Amazon’s announcement that Prime would soon offer 10 million products for one-day delivery with a free, one-day delivery promise of its own for orders of $35 or more — no membership fee required. But Walmart’s one-day selection is about 1/50th of the size of Amazon’s.

Over the past few years, Walmart has also worked to build on its huge grocery business, which accounts for more than half of its store sales. The company is the US grocery leader when it comes to an order-online, pickup-at-store service, which is still the main driver of Walmart’s e-commerce growth. But last year Walmart also unveiled the $98-a-year Grocery Unlimited service that’s being rebranded as Walmart+, as Amazon ramped up its own grocery delivery services, and other competitors like Instacart and Shipt helped make the behavior more popular.

Same-day grocery delivery, however, is expensive. Grocery store profit margins are traditionally small to begin with, before even paying for the labor to pick orders and then deliver them. Walmart executives have said that having workers pick both grocery delivery and pickup orders from stores close to customers helps keep costs down. Walmart has also started testing robots that can pick out groceries, which it hopes will someday improve the economics even more.

In a best-case scenario, Walmart executives hope Walmart+ will lead customers to pay for more products and services with better profit margins, potentially helping to bring down losses in Walmart’s e-commerce business — a stress point that previously caused friction between leaders in Walmart’s store business and e-commerce business. Walmart executives said at a recent investor event that US e-commerce losses will be flat or slightly down from last year’s numbers.

From the time Walmart spent $3 billion to acquire Jet.com in 2016, executives have stressed both internally and externally that the traditional retailer has built-in advantages over Amazon. Walmart+ is the time to prove it.

A celestial phenomenon is set to occur between Venus and the moon Thursday night, according to NASA’s calendar.

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and you’ve got a clear sky Thursday, look to the southwest and you’ll see a very bright Venus alongside a crescent moon, together two of the brightest objects in the night sky.

Why Venus is so bright

Venus, also known as the “evening star,” is the third brightest object in the sky after the sun and the moon.The planet is as bright as it is because of a characteristic called “albedo,” which astronomers use to describe how bright a planet is by specific measurements, according to EarthSky, a website by scientists providing updates on events of the cosmos. When sunlight hits a planet, some of the light is absorbed by the planet’s surface or atmosphere, and some is reflected.

Albedo is a comparison between the sunlight that strikes an object and how much of it is reflected. The albedo of Venus is close to .7, meaning its thick cloud covering reflects about 70% of the light striking it back into space. Venus is also the Earth’s closest neighbor in the solar system as it’s the planet next-inward from Earth in the orbit around the sun.

Why we’ll see a crescent moon

The moon takes 29.5 days to orbit the Earth. The waxing crescent moon we’ll see Thursday night comes after the new moon we just saw on Sunday, February 23 — meaning the visible side of the moon was between the Earth and the Sun, so we couldn’t see it.

But as the moon moves away from that position on its journey around the Earth, we’re gradually able to see the side of the moon illuminated by the sun — a waxing crescent moon visible in the western sky for a few days while on its way to becoming full again.

Why they’re meeting and how you can see it

We’re currently in the middle of an “evening apparition” of Venus, which is the period of time during which the planet climbs higher in the sky until it reaches its greatest separation from the sun.When a planet is at its greatest elongation is when it appears farthest from the sun as seen from Earth, so its appearance is also best at that point. Venus is expected to reach its maximum elongation for the year in the east of the evening sky by March 24, 2020, according to EarthSky. On this night, Venus will stay out for a maximum amount of time after sunset.

The planets and the moon follow roughly the same path through the sky, which is called the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the plane of the solar system on which all the planets orbit the sun, and the moon travels nearby. The moon and planets occasionally appear to pass closely by each other in the night sky.

In reality, Venus will actually be about 84 million miles from Earth on February 27, while the moon is nearly 250,000 miles away. But our Earthly perspective will still make for a seemingly close sighting.

As long as the weather is clear, those who live in the Northern hemisphere can see the meeting between the crescent moon and Venus by heading outdoors after sunset and looking to the southwest horizon. Below the constellation Aries, you should see the crescent moon below and to the side of Venus.

If you miss it tonight, you won’t have to wait long before a similar phenomenon occurs in the last days of March.

Amazon wants to kill the supermarket checkout line.

The online retailing giant is opening its first cashier-less supermarket, where shoppers can grab milk or eggs and walk out without waiting in line or ever opening their wallets. It’s the latest sign that Amazon AMZN, -0.70% is serious about shaking up the $800 billion grocery industry.

At the new store, which opened Tuesday in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, shoppers scan a smartphone app to enter the store. Cameras and sensors track what’s taken off shelves. Items are charged to an Amazon account after leaving.

“I love the convenience of literally grabbing and going” said Art Kuniyuki, a payroll and benefits manager from Seattle, who spent $15 on Barilla pasta, Dove chocolate and other groceries shortly after the store opened.

Called Amazon Go Grocery, the new store is an expansion of its two-year-old chain of 25 Amazon Go convenience stores. It’s 10,400 square feet — more than five times the size of the convenience stores — and stocks much more beyond the sodas and sandwiches found at Amazon Go.

Cameron Janes, who helps oversee Amazon’s physical stores, said the technology had to be tweaked to account for how people squeeze tomatoes to test for ripeness or rummage through avocados to find just the right one. Nothing at the store is weighed. One blood orange goes for 53 cents; a banana is 19 cents.

Amazon is not new to groceries. It made a splash in 2017 when it bought Whole Foods and its 500 stores. It’s also been expanding its online grocery delivery service. But it’s still far behind rival Walmart WMT, -0.34% , the nation’s largest grocer, which has more than 4,700 stores. Walmart’s online grocery service has also been popular with customers, who buy online and then drive to a store to pick up their order.

Amazon also plans to open another type of grocery store in Los Angeles sometime this year, but the company said it won’t use the cashier-less technology at that location and has kept other details under wraps. The company declined to say if it plans to open more Amazon Go Grocery stores, and said there are no plans to bring the technology to Whole Foods stores.

Much of the fruits and vegetables come from the same suppliers at Whole Foods, Janes said. And it has products from the Whole Foods store brand 365, such as organic oatmeal and bagged baby carrots. But it also sells Oreos, Cheez-Its and other stuff banned from the natural grocer.

Families can shop together with just one phone scanning everyone in. Anything they grab and leave the store with will be added to the tab of the person who signed them in. But shoppers shouldn’t help out a stranger reaching for the top shelf: Amazon warns that grabbing an item for someone else means you’ll be charged for it if they walk out with it.

Hoping to catch up to Amazon, other retailers and startups are racing to bring similar cashier-less technology to stores. Earlier this month, 7-Eleven said it is testing a cashier-less store for employees inside its offices in Irving, Texas.

But cashier-less stores have come under scrutiny from lawmakers and advocates who say they discriminate against low-income people who may not have a credit card or bank account. Amazon has since let customers pay with cash at its convenience stores, and the company said shoppers can do the same at the grocery store by alerting a worker to let them in through the turnstile.

The stores also eliminates the job of cashiers. Janes declined to say exactly how many people the store employs, only saying it is “several dozen.” Workers greet customers and walk around aisles restocking shelves. One employee stands by the alcohol section to check IDs of shoppers who want wine or beer.

While cashier-less stores remove the annoyance of waiting in line to pay, it also kills some joys of the supermarket. There’s no one to bag groceries. Instead, Amazon gives out reusable bags so shoppers can fill them as they shop. And there’s no deli counter, butcher or fishmonger. Instead, sliced ham, steaks and salmon fillets are already packaged and found in refrigerated shelves.

“Just walk out technology is kind of cool, in theory,” said David Bishop, a partner at retail consultancy Brick Meets Click, but he said shoppers decide where to shop based on other factors besides how quickly they can get in and out of the store.

Bishop said those who want thinly sliced ham may skip Amazon Go Grocery and walk two blocks away to the Kroger KR, -1.98% -owned QFC supermarket, which is about five times the size.

Still, Bishop said, it’s hard for the grocery industry to ignore Amazon, which has the cash and technology to experiment with groceries. “They’re not giving up,” he said of Amazon.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been given the green light to move into the Port of Los Angeles.

The L.A. City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to approve a lease agreement for the companty to occupy a currently vacant terminal. The site will allow SpaceX to research, design and manufacture spacecrafts with the goal of sending people to Mars.

“This is an exciting item, colleagues,” councilmember Joe Buscaino, in whose district the company will be located, said at Tuesday’s meeting. “It’s crazy that here we are in 2020, preparing ourselves to send people to Mars and it’s going to happen in our own backyard.”

SpaceX will pay $1.7 million annually for 10 years to rent the space, and the lease includes two 10-year options to renew.

Buscaino noted that SpaceX will compliment a recently approved investment in the San Pedro Public Market.

One of the greatest luxuries of flying in business or first class is the ability for passengers to lay back and stretch their legs out on long journeys. Those with economy tickets could also soon enjoy this benefit with Air New Zealand’s Economy Skynest.

Potential game-changer

According to a press release, the flag carrier of New Zealand has been working on a prototype that provides six full-length lie-flat sleep pods

The airline has been working on this initiative for three years, with the help of over 200 customers in Auckland. Now, it is one step closer to becoming a reality. This is because a patent has been filed and a trademark application been made.

Air New Zealand Chief Marketing and Customer Officer Mike Tod shared how his company wants to offer greater comfort for economy passengers. He recognizes that long-distance flights are primarily a struggle for these customers.

Good timing

One of the key routes that the pods will be appreciated on is the upcoming Auckland-New York service, which launches in October 2020. Passengers traveling between New Zealand and the United States on this flight will have to endure 17 hours 40 minutes one way. Therefore, this is the perfect route to test the Economy Skynest on.

Nikki Goodman, the carriers’ general manager of customer experience also shared her excitement about the project. She said that feedback from customers and cabin crew during the final phase of development had been fantastic. Goodman also sees other airlines following Air New Zealand’s approach and predicts that others will license the product from the firm.

What’s included?

Each pod will hold a length of 200cm, with the width at the shoulder area measuring at 58cm. Ultimately, the carrier plans to have a full-sized pillow, sheets, and a blanket included in each pod.

Furthermore, there will be earplugs, ambient lighting and a curtain for privacy. Additionally, the company is looking at other features such as reading lights, ventilation outlets, and USB outlets.

Simple Flying reached out to Air New Zealand for comment on the introduction of the Economy Skynest into operations. A spokesperson shared that since this is a prototype, the company will make a final decision on whether to operate it next year after it has evaluated the performance of its first year of Auckland-New York services.

Altogether, this project will definitely be welcomed by several passengers that struggle to catch some sleep in the air.

Several reports coming from Japan are announcing that Tesla and Panasonic are ending their solar cell production deal at Gigafactory New York ahead of Elon Musk holding an event at the factory.

Back in 2017, Tesla made another manufacturing agreement with Panasonic to accelerate the production of solar products at the factory it inherited from SolarCity in Buffalo following the acquisition of the company.

They called the factory Gigafactory 2 because they aim to produce over 1 gigawatt of solar products at the factory, which also happens to work under a similar deal as Gigafactory 1, where Tesla and Panasonic manufacture batteries.

Panasonic invested in the production of solar cells at te factory, which has recently been renamed Gigafactory New York, and Tesla agreed to buy those cells to put inside the solar roof tiles, now called Solarglass, that it itself manufactures at the location. Panasonic is also separately producing solar modules at Gigafactory New York, for Tesla’s solar retrofit business.

The deal hasn’t panned out exactly as planned.

Tesla hasn’t been buying a lot of solar modules from the plant and its solarglass production ramp has been extremely slow.

Furthermore, Tesla has reportedly been using solar cells from other manufacturers in its solar roof tiles.

Now reports from Reuters and Nikkei both states that Tesla and Panasonic are ending their solar cell production deal at the factory in New York.

Nikkei reported today

“Tesla and Panasonic are scrapping their partnership in producing solar cells after years of struggling to ramp up output at the Gigafactory 2 in upstate New York.”

The deal at Gigafactory Nevada to produce battery cells for Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y is reportedly intact. The report also states that Tesla is considering bringing new production to Gigafactory New York and they are not expecting to have issue fulfilling their employment requirements with the state, which paid for the factory.

We contacted Tesla about the reports and we will update if we get more information.

The news comes soon after Elon Musk announced a ‘Tesla April company talk’ to be held at Gigafactory New York and it is expected to be related to Tesla’s previously announced ‘Battery Investor Day’, which should involve a new battery announcement.

When announcing the event, Musk also said that Tesla will be expanding solar roof installs internationally and that it will become an important product for the company.

A major effort to expand development of Canada’s oil sands has collapsed shortly before a deadline for government approval, undone by investor concerns over oil’s future and the political fault lines between economic and environmental priorities.

Nine years in the planning, the project would have increased Canada’s oil production by roughly 5 percent. But it would have also slashed through 24,000 acres of boreal forest and released millions of tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide every year.

Some Canadian oil executives had predicted that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet would approve the project by a regulatory deadline this week, though with burdensome conditions. But in a letter released Sunday night, the Vancouver-based developer, Teck Resources, declared that “there is no constructive path forward.”

The unexpected withdrawal relieves Mr. Trudeau of a choice that was sure to anger environmentalists or energy interests, if not both.

Conservatives were quick to blame Mr. Trudeau for the loss of a project that they said would have created thousands of jobs and given an economic lift to the western province of Alberta, the hub of Canada’s energy industry, which has suffered from low oil prices over the last five years. They suggested that the government felt pressure from weeks of protests by Indigenous groups opposing a natural gas pipeline, even though some Indigenous groups supported the Alberta project, known as the Frontier mine.

“It is what happens when governments lack the courage to defend the interests of Canadians in the face of a militant minority,” Alberta’s premier, Jason Kenney, said in a statement.

The chief executive of Teck Resources, Don Lindsay, said in a letter to federal officials that global capital markets, investors and consumers were looking to governments to put “a framework in place that reconciles resource development and climate change, in order to produce the cleanest products” — something that he said “does not yet exist here.”

While environmental concerns were part of government and company calculations, there was no guarantee that the Frontier project would have gone forward even if it gained final regulatory approval. Mr. Lindsay had said the company needed a deep-pocketed partner to help pay for the project, and higher oil prices.

Canada supplies nearly six million barrels of oil a day, making it the world’s No. 4 producer and the biggest source of American imports. The oil sands contribute over 60 percent of that output and are vital to the west’s economy. Canadian output continues to grow because of investments made when global supplies were tighter.

The oil sands are a watery mixture of sand and clay soaked with a dense, viscous form of petroleum known as bitumen. But in addition to being a fossil fuel, bitumen is difficult to extract and energy-intensive to process.

And when Teck Resources proposed the Frontier project, the energy world was very different. The American shale-drilling frenzy was in its infancy, and the Keystone XL pipeline was seemingly going to deliver the oil-sands output to the American market.

Now the United States has an abundance of relatively cheap oil, prodigious deposits are being tapped in Brazil, Norway and Guyana, and the Keystone project is still awaiting completion. Delays in pipeline approvals have prompted the Alberta government to mandate production cutbacks over the last two years to drain a glut of oil in storage.

Kevin Birn, a vice president and oil-sands expert at the consultancy IHS Markit, estimated that for a project like Frontier to break even, the price of West Texas intermediate oil, the North American benchmark, would need to average $65 a barrel over a decade or more of operations. That is roughly $15 above the current price, and other analysts put the break-even figure at $80 to $85.

But until Sunday night, despite a regulatory review that cost it hundreds of millions of dollars, Teck Resources refused to give up. The company argued that its project, at a cost of 20.6 billion Canadian dollars ($15.5 billion), would create 7,000 construction and 2,500 operational jobs and eventually generate more than 70 billion Canadian dollars in local and national government revenue.

Andrew Leach, a professor of energy economics at the University of Alberta, said some might read the project’s demise as a fatal blow to oil-sands development, but he interpreted Teck Resources’ decision as a pragmatic one.

“Teck was clear that it does not want a situation where one project has to answer for all of Canada’s climate policies and climate commitments,” he said. Moreover, he added, “global investors are not prepared to help a company the size of Teck to build a multibillion-dollar project. The global market was not prepared to be part of the political football.”

No new oil-sands mine has opened since 2018, but more than a dozen proposals are awaiting regulatory approval or investment decisions. Mr. Leach said some of those were economically and environmentally more viable than the Frontier project.

But resistance to new pipelines and high production costs have steadily reduced investments in oil-sands fields. There has been an exodus of international oil companies, including ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and Equinor of Norway.

At the same time, there are questions about the market outlook. While world demand is roughly 100 million barrels a day, a figure that increases by 1 percent every year, the International Energy Agency projects that growth will begin to slow considerably in 2025. The agency says demand could fall to 67 million barrels a day in 2040, especially if governments increase regulation and electric cars become commonplace.

Reduced demand would focus production on places where it is cheapest, like Saudi Arabia.

“Companies like Teck are realizing that global capital markets are changing rapidly,” said Simon Dyer, executive director of the Pembina Institute, a leading Canadian environmental research organization. “There was never an economic pathway for this project under global demand scenarios consistent with the Paris climate agreement.”

A federal-provincial panel that reviewed the project, he said, “didn’t properly assess the climate impacts.” The national parks agency also raised concerns about the possible effect on a national park downstream that is a UNESCO world heritage site.

The Alberta Energy Regulator wrote in July that “there will be significant adverse project and cumulative effects on certain environmental components and Indigenous communities.” Nevertheless, it approved the project after finding it in the public interest.

Two federal officials — Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson and Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan — issued a joint statement welcoming Teck’s decision. “A strong economy and clean environment must go hand in hand,” they said.

NASA’s InSight lander has detected hundreds of “marsquakes” on Mars, including about 20 tremors that were relatively significant. Compared to quakes here on Earth, the marsquakes were pretty puny, but the new data could provide planetary scientists with more information about the interior of Mars.

The initial results of the mission were published on Monday in the journals Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications. The lander, which touched down on Mars via supersonic parachute in 2018, detected its first possible marsquake in April 2019.

Many of the quakes that InSight detected were small enough that they probably wouldn’t be felt if they happened on Earth, Philippe Lognonné, principal investigator for one of the lander’s instruments, said in a press conference. “Mars is a place where we can probably say the seismic hazard is extremely low,” Lognonné added. “At least at this time.”

The 24 largest quakes discussed in the paper only reached a magnitude 3 or 4, which on Earth, might be powerful enough to be felt as a rumble on the ground but usually aren’t strong enough to cause serious damage. But unlike on Earth, where quakes can happen closer to the surface, it appears that the marsquakes InSight detected tended to originate far deeper in the planet (30 to 50 kilometers). The deeper the quake, the less shaking is felt on the surface.

The researchers had hoped to register larger quakes, which would have given them a more detailed look at the interior of the planet — and even potentially the core — but that hasn’t happened yet.

“The general cause of marsquakes is the long-term cooling of the planet,” Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator, said in a press call on Friday. The interior of Mars, like Earth, has been cooling down since it was formed. As the planet cools down, Banerdt says, it contracts and the brittle crust of the planet cracks, causing the surface to shudder.

That’s the general outlook, but the specific cause of each quake is still unknown. “The details of the particular mechanisms for these quakes is still for us a mystery,” Banerdt says. “We don’t have any conclusions of the mechanisms on any individual quakes yet.”

They may not know what drives each quake, but they’ve measured a lot of them. In the papers, the authors discuss data from 174 marsquakes collected before September 30th, 2019. Since then, the instrument on board InSight that measures quakes has detected about 450 rumblings. NASA says the “vast majority” of these are probably quakes.

Other sensors were also working while InSight’s seismometer was registering quakes. One detected thousands of whirlwinds near the lander, while another recorded strong magnetic signals coming from underground rocks. Another instrument, a self-hammering probe that was supposed to measure the interior temperature of Mars, hasn’t been as lucky. It was supposed to burrow into the surface, but it encountered trouble last fall when it popped back out of the planet. As a last-ditch attempt to salvage this part of the mission, NASA plans to try to push the probe into the surface in late February and early March.

InSight’s mission lasts for nearly another year, and the team here on Earth will continue to gather more data about the inner workings of the Red Planet until then.