NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is a long-running spacecraft mission dedicated to studying the Red Planet from orbit. Launched in 2005 and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, MRO is part of NASA’s broader Mars Exploration Program. It plays a key role in analyzing Mars’ surface, atmosphere, and subsurface using a suite of advanced instruments.
One of MRO’s standout tools is SHARAD (Shallow Radar), which probes beneath the Martian surface to detect features like ice and rock layers. Provided by the Italian Space Agency and operated by Sapienza University of Rome, SHARAD is a collaborative effort analyzed by a joint U.S.-Italian science team, with U.S. participation led by the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.
Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, built the orbiter and continues to support its operations, ensuring the spacecraft’s longevity and scientific productivity well into its second decade.
When a drummer hits a drum, the surface vibrates and creates sound—a signal we recognize as music. But once those vibrations stop, the signal disappears. Now imagine a drumhead that’s incredibly thin, only about 10 millimeters wide, and covered in tiny triangular holes. Scientists have created exactly that, and it does something extraordinary.
Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, working with teams from the University of Konstanz and ETH Zurich, discovered that vibrations can travel through this miniature membrane with barely any energy loss. In fact, the vibrations move more cleanly than signals in even the most advanced electronic circuits. This breakthrough, recently published in Nature, opens up new possibilities for how we transmit sound and information, especially in the race toward powerful new quantum technologies.
Phonons – Sound Signals or Vibrations That Spread Through a Solid Material.
Some of the other tools downloaded onto the systems include an ELF binary named atm from an external server (“195.123.240[.]233:443”) and a Golang port scanner called TXPortMap to map out the internal network and identify potential exploitation targets.
“TGR-CRI-0045 uses a simplistic approach to ViewState exploitation, loading a single, stateless assembly directly,” the researchers noted. “Each command execution requires re-exploitation and re-uploading the assembly (e.g., running the file upload assembly multiple times).”
“Exploiting ASP.NET View State deserialization vulnerabilities via exposed Machine Keys allows minimal on-disk presence and enables long-term access. The group’s opportunistic targeting and ongoing tool development highlight the need for organizations to prioritize identifying and remediating compromised Machine Keys.”
Microsoft is rolling out a new backup system in September for its Authenticator app on iOS, removing the requirement to use a Microsoft personal account to back up TOTP secrets and account names.
Previously, the Microsoft Authenticator app required iOS users to sign in with a personal Microsoft Account to enable backups, regardless of whether they were using the app for personal or enterprise credentials.
This created problems in enterprise environments where organizations often like to keep personal and corporate data separated.