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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

If you're a majority Chinese-owned company looking for cheap real estate in the US, you might want to steer clear of American missile silos and military bases.

Cryptomining firm MineOne found this out the hard way after President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Monday forcing the blockchain biz to sell its facilities, located outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, within 120 days.

Why? The China-backed MineOne facility is located less than a mile from the Francis E. Warren Air Force base, where a not insignificant number of nuclear tipped Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles are housed. This, according to the White House, makes MineOne a national security risk.

"There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that MineOne Partners Limited, a British Virgin Islands company ultimate majority owned by Chinese nationals… through the acquisition of certain real estate that is located within 1 mile of Francis E. Warren Air Force base… might take action that impair the national security of the United States," the order reads.

MineOne acquired the property in 2022 with the goal of operating a crypto mining facility on the site, the order states. However, the sale wasn't registered with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) until after the government body received a tip from a member of the public about the facility.

[...] "The proximity of foreign-owned real estate to a strategic missile base and key element of America's Nuclear triad, and the presence of specialized and foreign sourced equipment, potentially capable of facilitating surveillance and espionage activities, presents a national security risk to the United States," the order reads.

[...] The executive order also placed limits on who MineOne could sell to, presumably in an attempt to prevent the datacenter from being transferred into another foreign firm. If MineOne fails to comply with the order, the White House has authorized the Attorney General to take any steps necessary to enforce it, which presumably includes seizing property and assets.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/05/arizona-woman-accused-of-helping-north-koreans-get-remote-it-jobs-at-300-companies/

An Arizona woman has been accused of helping generate millions of dollars for North Korea's ballistic missile program by helping citizens of that country land IT jobs at US-based Fortune 500 companies.

Christina Marie Chapman, 49, of Litchfield Park, Arizona, raised $6.8 million in the scheme, federal prosecutors said in an indictment unsealed Thursday.

[...] In the indictment, prosecutors wrote:

The conspiracy perpetrated a staggering fraud on a multitude of industries, at the expense of generally unknowing US companies and persons. It impacted more than 300 US companies, compromised more than 60 identities of US persons, caused false information to be conveyed to DHS on more than 100 occasions, created false tax liabilities for more than 35 US persons, and resulted in at least $6.8 million of revenue to be generated for the overseas IT workers. The overseas IT workers worked at blue-chip US companies, including a top-5 national television network and media company, a premier Silicon Valley technology company, an aerospace and defense manufacturer, an iconic American car manufacturer, a high-end retail chain, and one of the most recognizable media and entertainment companies in the world, all of which were Fortune 500 companies.

[...] The indictment came alongside a criminal complaint charging a Ukrainian man with carrying out a similar multiyear scheme. Oleksandr Didenko, 27, of Kyiv, Ukraine, allegedly helped individuals in North Korea "market" themselves as remote IT workers.

Chapman was arrested Wednesday. It wasn't immediately known when she or Didenko were scheduled to make their first appearance in court. If convicted, Chapman faces 97.5 years in prison, and Didenko faces up to 67.5 years.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Nickel monosilicide (NiSi) is widely used to connect transistors in semiconductor circuits. Earlier theoretical calculations had incorrectly predicted that NiSi was not magnetic. As a result, researchers had never fully explored magnetism in NiSi.

Recently, however, scientists used neutron scattering to identify an elusive form of magnetic order in NiSi. The research is published in the journal Advanced Materials.

[...] Because NiSi is extensively used by the semiconductor industry, it is already compatible with chip manufacturing. Physicists used neutron scattering at the Spallation Neutron Source, a Department of Energy user facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to uncover magnetic order in single crystal NiSi that had not been previously known.

[...] The robust magnetic structure and coupling of magnetic-electronic properties of NiSi offer the opportunity to use NiSi for magnetic memory applications. The research team also applied density functional theory combined with the self-(electron) interaction correction method (instead of using the local density approximation) to identify the origin of magnetism as arising from hybridization between Ni 3d orbitals and Si sp states.

Harnessing the newly discovered magnetism of NiSi in semiconductors may lead to faster computers and computer memory. The unique magnetism in NiSi is attractive because electronics that use magnetism to store and process data are reliable, fast, and small. The result is increased capabilities at lower costs. The work also highlights the need for improvements in how scientists apply conventional modeling to certain materials.

More information: Pousali Ghosh et al, NiSi: A New Venue for Antiferromagnetic Spintronics, Advanced Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202302120

Original Submission

owl writes:

COBOL Programmers are Back In Demand. Seriously.

https://cacm.acm.org/news/cobol-programmers-are-back-in-demand-seriously/

As millions of American workers have been thrown out of work by the Covid-19 pandemic and filed unemployment claims, many states' computer systems have not been able to keep pace.

In early April, during his daily press conference related to the coronavirus crisis, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy made an appeal for volunteer programmers who know COBOL, the computer language on which the state's unemployment benefits system operates.

"Literally, we have systems that are 40-plus-years-old," Murphy said. "There'll be lots of postmortems. and one of them on our list will be, how did we get here where we literally needed COBOL programmers?"

Decades-Old Programming Languages Fortran And Cobol Are Still Thriving

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The May 2024 edition of the TIOBE Index includes a couple of surprising results, placing two of the most ancient programming languages among the top spots in popularity among developers.

[...] Fortran, a compiled language originally created by IBM in 1957, is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing tasks. According to the index, this ancient language is still the 10th most popular programming technology. Fortran reentered the top 10 after more than 20 years, and TIOBE Software CEO Paul Jansen has provided some explanations for this seemingly odd situation.

The TIOBE Index simply "publishes what has been measured," and Fortran is apparently the subject of more than a thousand books available on Amazon. New, "cool" languages such as Kotlin and Rust barely hit 300 books for the same search query, Jansen said, while Fortran is still evolving, with the latest ISO definition for the language published in 2023.

[...] The main reason for Fortran's resurgence, however, is its aptitude for mathematical computing. Fortran has some competition, but each newer language has its own issues. Python is slow, MATLAB is "very easy" for math-related computations but costly, and C/C++ are fast but lack native support for complex math. In this jungle of languages, Jansen said, Fortran still has a reason to exist.

As for Cobol, its popularity is even easier to understand. The English-like language was designed for business use in 1959 and is now the 20th most popular programming technology. Cobol is still widely used in mainframe computers employed in critical industries such as banking, automotive, insurance, and more. IBM is proposing an AI-based solution designed to "translate" Cobol applications into something more modern like Java, but the ancient language will likely remain relevant for the foreseeable future.

[Editor's Comment: FYI - Perl comes at a #30 in the list with 0.58% rating.]

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Within approximately 12 seconds, two highly educated brothers allegedly stole $25 million by tampering with the ethereum blockchain in a never-before-seen cryptocurrency scheme, according to an indictment that the US Department of Justice unsealed Wednesday.

In a DOJ press release, US Attorney Damian Williams said the scheme was so sophisticated that it "calls the very integrity of the blockchain into question."

"The brothers, who studied computer science and math at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, allegedly used their specialized skills and education to tamper with and manipulate the protocols relied upon by millions of ethereum users across the globe," Williams said. "And once they put their plan into action, their heist only took 12 seconds to complete."

Anton, 24, and James Peraire-Bueno, 28, were arrested Tuesday, charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Each brother faces "a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each count," the DOJ said.

The alleged scheme was launched in December 2022 by the brothers, who studied at MIT, after months of planning, the indictment said. The pair seemingly relied on their "specialized skills" and expertise in crypto trading to fraudulently gain access to "pending private transactions" on the blockchain, then "used that access to alter certain transactions and obtain their victims’ cryptocurrency," the DOJ said.

The indictment goes into detail explaining that the scheme allegedly worked by exploiting the ethereum blockchain in the moments after a transaction was conducted but before the transaction was added to the blockchain.

These pending transactions, the DOJ explained, must be structured into a proposed block and then validated by a validator before it can be added to the blockchain, which acts as a decentralized ledger keeping track of crypto holdings. It appeared that the brothers tampered with this process by "establishing a series of ethereum validators" through shell companies and foreign exchanges that concealed their identities and masked their efforts to manipulate the blocks and seize ethereum.

upstart writes:

Assange wins High Court bid to appeal against extradition to US over spying charges:

Julian Assange wins High Court bid to appeal against extradition to US over spying charges

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has won a last-ditch bid to appeal his extradition to the United States to face espionage charges.

High Court judges on Monday granted him permission to appeal his removal to the US where he is being prosecuted over an alleged conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information over the publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

The decision has granted the 52-year-old a reprieve in order for lawyers to challenge his extradition at a full appeal hearing at a later date.

It was feared he could have been put on a plane within days if his bid was denied. However, his legal team had vowed to apply to the European Court of Human Rights for an emergency injunction to halt his removal if they were unsuccessful.

looorg writes:

Flying cars within six years.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Transportation/Boeing-aims-to-bring-flying-cars-to-Asia-by-2030
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240517_28/

Made by Boeing, that might not inspire one with confidence due the current aircraft issues they have.

U.S. aircraft manufacturer Boeing plans to enter the flying car business in Asia by 2030, looking to tap demand for the fast, short-distance travel the vehicles could provide in the region's traffic-choked cities.

[...] The company is developing electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) craft at subsidiary Wisk Aero. The aircraft will adopt autonomous technology, rare among eVTOL craft.

The plan is to first obtain certification in the U.S. before expanding into Asia. Details of the Asia business will be finalized in the future, including whether Boeing will sell the aircraft to companies aiming to provide eVTOL transportation services or operate the services itself.

Boeing is currently selecting its first Asian market, including Japan. In Japan, domestic startup SkyDrive and Germany's Volocopter are scheduled to operate air taxi services at the 2025 Osaka World Expo.

Boeing opened a research and development base in Nagoya on Thursday. It first established R&D operations in Japan in 2022 but had been renting space from other companies until now.

[...] The single-occupant aircraft was developed by a US company. It measures 4.5 meters wide and 2.6 meters high. [...] Officials said the craft can fly at a maximum speed of about 100 kph. It can stay aloft for approximately 15 minutes.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-accidentally-nukes-customer-account-causes-two-weeks-of-downtime/

Buried under the news from Google I/O this week is one of Google Cloud's biggest blunders ever: Google's Amazon Web Services competitor accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason. UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service. UniSuper thankfully had some backups with a different provider and was able to recover its data, but according to UniSuper's incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn't happen until May 15.

UniSuper's website is now full of must-read admin nightmare fuel about how this all happened. First is a wild page posted on May 8 titled "A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian." This statement reads, "Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper's Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper's Private Cloud subscription. This is an isolated, 'one-of-a-kind occurrence' that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud's clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again."

[...] A June 2023 press release touted UniSuper's big cloud migration to Google, with Sam Cooper, UniSuper's Head of Architecture, saying, "With Google Cloud VMware Engine, migrating to the cloud is streamlined and extremely easy. It's all about efficiencies that help us deliver highly competitive fees for our members."

[...] The second must-read document in this whole saga is the outage update page, which contains 12 statements as the cloud devs worked through this catastrophe. The first update is May 2 with the ominous statement, "You may be aware of a service disruption affecting UniSuper's systems." UniSuper immediately seemed to have the problem nailed down, saying, "The issue originated from one of our third-party service providers, and we're actively partnering with them to resolve this." On May 3, Google Cloud publicly entered the picture with a joint statement from UniSuper and Google Cloud saying that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack.

[...] The joint statement and the outage updates are still not a technical post-mortem of what happened, and it's unclear if we'll get one. Google PR confirmed in multiple places it signed off on the statement, but a great breakdown from software developer Daniel Compton points out that the statement is not just vague, it's also full of terminology that doesn't align with Google Cloud products. The imprecise language makes it seem like the statement was written entirely by UniSuper. It would be nice to see a real breakdown of what happened from Google Cloud's perspective, especially when other current or potential customers are going to keep a watchful eye on how Google handles the fallout from this.

Anyway, don't put all your eggs in one cloud basket.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Register is reporting on the issues raised by an anecdote about how library e-book reading habits get reflected in mobile ads, with the observation that tracking is occurring and with the underlying question being about how the tracking is occurring. The context is that many libraries use DRM'd mobile phone apps to allow limited, temporary access to e-books to the subset of patrons willing to install the app to the subset of patrons willing to agree to the app's terms of service to the subset of patrons with smart phones.

In December, 2023, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign information sciences professor Masooda Bashir led a study titled "Patron Privacy Protections in Public Libraries" that was published in The Library Quarterly. The study found that while libraries generally have basic privacy protections, there are often gaps in staff training and in privacy disclosures made available to patrons.

It also found that some libraries rely exclusively on social media for their online presence. "That is very troubling," said Bashir in a statement. "Facebook collects a lot of data – everything that someone might be reading and looking at. That is not a good practice for public libraries."

Salo said that the amount of visitor-tracking scripts on many library websites is just beyond the pale.

"I have been watching actually the situation with healthcare organizations getting absolutely nailed to the wall for Google pixels and Facebook pixels and what have you, as potential HIPAA violations," she said.

"And you know, it's the same kind of thing [with libraries]. If we think this stuff is confidential, we should act like it and we're very frequently not. So yes, I am absolutely on a one-librarian war against Google and Facebook pixels. That just has got to stop."

— The Register, An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads. That's not supposed to happen.

The assertion is that this level of tracking is not supposed to happen with library services, as per professional decisions by earlier generations of librarians. The terms of service and licensing which both the libraries and their patrons gave the nod to may even explicitly allow the surveillance and warn of it buried in scores of pages of legalese. Be that as it may, the apps creators (and the purchasers, the libraries) may even be unknowingly affected by trackers built into the Software Development Kits used to build the app. Thus the bigger question is why so many librarians and their patrons have become so unversed in mobile ICT as to buy and deploy such DRMed software-as-a-service, which contain two kinds of violations of basic rights: digital restrictions and tracking. Academic librarian, Dorothea Salo, is off to a good start in mitigating the problems but there is a lot to catch up on.

For what its worth, there are DRM-free, public domain options including LibriVox for audio books and Project Gutenberg for e-books in several formats. Some regions will have their own analog for public domain literature, such as Project Runeberg for Nordic literature in the public domain.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/intel-pci-history

Personal computing has changed a lot in the past four decades, and one of the biggest changes, perhaps the most unheralded, comes down to compatibility. These days, you generally can't fry a computer by plugging in a joystick that the computer doesn't support. Simply put, standardization slowly fixed this. One of the best examples of a bedrock standard is the peripheral component interconnect, or PCI, which came about in the early 1990s and appeared in some of the decade's earliest consumer machines three decades ago this year. To this day, PCI slots are used to connect network cards, sound cards, disc controllers, and other peripherals to computer motherboards via a bus that carries data and control signals. PCI's lessons gradually shaped other standards, like USB, and ultimately made computers less frustrating. So how did we get it? Through a moment of canny deception.

[...] So how did we end up with the standards that we have today, and the PCI expansion card standard specifically? PCI wasn't the only game in town—you could argue, for example, that if things played out differently, we'd all be using NuBus or Micro Channel architecture. But it was a standard seemingly for the long haul, far beyond other competing standards of its era.

Who's responsible for spearheading this standard? Intel. While PCI was a cross-platform technology, it proved to be an important strategy for the chipmaker to consolidate its power over the PC market at a time when IBM had taken its foot off the gas, choosing to focus on its own PowerPC architecture and narrower plays like the ThinkPad instead, and was no longer shaping the architecture of the PC.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

North Korea laundered $147.5 mln in stolen crypto in March:

North Korea laundered $147.5 million through virtual currency platform Tornado Cash in March after stealing it last year from a cryptocurrency exchange, according to confidential work by United Nations sanctions monitors seen by Reuters on Tuesday.

The monitors told a U.N. Security Council sanctions committee in a document submitted on Friday that they had been investigating 97 suspected North Korean cyberattacks on cryptocurrency companies between 2017 and 2024, valued at some $3.6 billion.

That included an attack late last year where $147.5 million was stolen from HTX cryptocurrency exchange before being laundered in March this year, the monitors told the committee, citing information from crypto analytics firm PeckShield and blockchain research firm Elliptic.

In 2024 alone, the monitors said they had been looking at "11 cryptocurrency thefts ... valued at $54.7 million," adding that many of those "may have been conducted by DPRK IT workers inadvertently hired by small crypto-related companies."

The monitors said that according to U.N. member states and private companies, North Korean IT workers operating abroad generate "substantial income for the country."

The U.N. sanctions monitors were disbanded at the end of April after Russia vetoed the annual renewal of their mandate. Some of the monitors submitted unfinished work, which was shared with the council's North Korea sanctions committee on Friday.

Traditionally, reports by the sanctions monitors are first agreed by all eight members. The unfinished work submitted to the committee did not go through that process.

The monitors said they had been investigating a Feb. 6 New York Times report that Russia released $9 million out of $30 million in frozen North Korean assets and allowed Pyongyang to open an account at a Russian bank in South Ossetia so it could better obtain access to international banking networks.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Mayflies live for only a day. Galapagos tortoises can reach up to age 170. The Greenland shark holds the world record at over 400 years of life.

Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel laureate and author of the newly released book "Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality," opened his packed Harvard Science Book Talk last week by noting the vast variabilities of lifespans across the natural world.

Death is certain, so far as we know. But there's no physical or chemical law that says it must happen at a fixed time, which raises other, more philosophical issues.

The "why" behind these enormous swings, and the quest to harness longevity for humans, have driven fevered attempts (and billions of dollars in research spending) to slow or stop aging. Ramakrishnan's book is a dispassionate journey through current scientific understanding of aging and death, which basically comes down to an accumulation of chemical damage to molecules and cells.

"The question is whether we can tackle aging processes, while still keeping us who we are as humans," said Ramakrishnan during his conversation with Antonio Regalado, a writer for the MIT Technology Review. "And whether we can do that in a safe and effective way."

Even if immortality—or just living for a very, very long time—were theoretically possible through science, should we pursue it? Ramakrishnan likened the question to other moral ponderings.

"There's no physical or chemical law that says we can't colonize other galaxies, or outer space, or even Mars," he said. "I would put it in that same category. And it would require huge breakthroughs, which we haven't made yet."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The US Department of Justice yesterday said it has determined that Boeing violated a 2021 agreement spurred by two fatal crashes and is now facing a potential criminal prosecution.

Boeing violated the agreement "by failing to design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the US fraud laws throughout its operations," the DOJ said in a filing in US District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Because of this, "Boeing is subject to prosecution by the United States for any federal criminal violation of which the United States has knowledge," the DOJ said.

The US government is still determining whether to initiate a prosecution and said it will make a decision by July 7. Under terms of the 2021 agreement, Boeing has 30 days to respond to the government's notice.

[...] "We believe that we have honored the terms of that agreement and look forward to the opportunity to respond to the Department on this issue," Boeing said. "As we do so, we will engage with the Department with the utmost transparency, as we have throughout the entire term of the agreement, including in response to their questions following the Alaska Airlines 1282 accident."

Yesterday's DOJ court filing said that Boeing could be prosecuted for the charge listed in the one-count criminal information that was filed at the same time as the deferred prosecution agreement in 2021. That document alleged that Boeing defrauded the Federal Aviation Administration in connection with the agency's evaluation of the Boeing 737 Max. The DOJ filing yesterday said Boeing could also be prosecuted for other offenses.

In January 2021, the DOJ announced that Boeing signed the deferred prosecution agreement "to resolve a criminal charge related to a conspiracy to defraud the Federal Aviation Administration's Aircraft Evaluation Group (FAA AEG) in connection with the FAA AEG's evaluation of Boeing's 737 Max airplane."

This occurred after 346 passengers died in two Boeing 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Boeing agreed to pay $2.5 billion, including $1.77 billion in compensation for airline customers and $500 million for the heirs, relatives, and legal beneficiaries of the crash victims.

[...] The nonprofit Foundation for Aviation Safety, which is led by former Boeing employee Ed Pierson, recently accused Boeing of violating the deferred prosecution agreement. Pierson alleged in a December 2023 court filing that "Boeing has deliberately provided false, incomplete, and misleading information to the FAA, the flying public, airline customers, regulators, and investors."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The regulator is warning OEMs to respect data privacy or it will get mad:

The Federal Trade Commission's Office of Technology has issued a warning to automakers that sell connected cars. Companies that offer such products "do not have the free license to monetize people's information beyond purposes needed to provide their requested product or service," it wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. Just because executives and investors want recurring revenue streams, that does not "outweigh the need for meaningful privacy safeguards," the FTC wrote.

Based on your feedback, connected cars might be one of the least-popular modern inventions among the Ars readership. And who can blame them? Last January, a security researcher revealed that a vehicle identification number was sufficient to access remote services for multiple different makes, and yet more had APIs that were easily hackable.

Later, in 2023, the Mozilla Foundation published an extensive report examining the various automakers' policies regarding the use of data from connected cars; the report concluded that "cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy."

Those were rather abstract cases, but earlier this year, we saw a very concrete misuse of connected car data. Writing for The New York Times, Kash Hill learned that owners of connected vehicles made by General Motors had been unwittingly enrolled in OnStar's Smart Driver program and that their driving data had been shared with their insurance company, resulting in soaring insurance premiums.

[...] The FTC says that automakers and other businesses must protect users' data against illegal collection, use, and disclosure. It points to recent enforcement actions against companies in other sectors that have illegally collected or used geolocation data, surreptitiously disclosed sensitive user data, and illegally used sensitive data for automated decisions.

The FTC says the easiest way to comply is to not collect the data in the first place.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

This week the European Space Agency posted a slightly ominous note regarding its BepiColombo spacecraft, which consists of two orbiters bound for Mercury.

The online news release cited a "glitch" with the spacecraft that is impairing its ability to generate thrust. The problem was first noted on April 26, when the spacecraft's primary propulsion system was scheduled to undertake an orbital maneuver. Not enough electrical power was delivered to the solar-electric propulsion system at the time.

According to the space agency, a team involving its own engineers and those of its industrial partners began working on the issue. By May 7 they had made some progress, restoring the spacecraft's thrust to about 90 percent of its original level. But this is not full thrust, and the root cause of the problem is still poorly understood.

[...] The spacecraft consists of three components. The "transfer module" is where the current problems are occurring. It was built by the European Space Agency and is intended to power the other two components of the spacecraft until October 2025. It is essential for positioning the spacecraft for entry into orbit around Mercury. The other two elements of the mission are a European orbiter, MPO, and a Japanese orbiter, Mio. After their planned arrival in orbit around Mercury in December 2025, the two orbiters will separate and make at least one year's worth of observations, including the characterization of the small planet's magnetic field.

The news release is ambiguous about the fate of BepiColombo if full power cannot be restored to its propulsion system.

[...] What is clear, she said, is that the current thrust level can support the next critical milestone, BepiColombo's fourth Mercury swing-by, which is due to occur on September 5 of this year. This is the first of three swing-bys scheduled to happen in rapid succession from September to January that will slow the spacecraft down relative to Mercury.

"This swing-by sequence provides a braking delta-V of 2.4 km/s and provides a change of velocity vector direction with respect to the Sun as required for the trajectory end game in 2025," Montagnon said.

Original Submission