Submitted by Keenan Yakola.

More than two dozen Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles on the ground in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area “currently lack the necessary emergency lights and sirens” required to be “compliant with law enforcement requirements,” according to a contract justification published in a federal register on Tuesday. The document justifies ICE paying Whelen Engineering Company, a Connecticut-based firm specializing in “emergency warning and lighting technology,” $47,330.49 for 31 “ATLAS1” kits—seemingly a typo of ATLAS, the name of the product sold by Whelen—which the company’s website describes as an “Adaptable Travel Light and Siren Kit.” The document explains that the ATLAS kits would “allow vehicles to be immediately operational and compliant with law enforcement requirements to support the current surge operation” out of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)’s St.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS Aug. 6, with its Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument. The research team has been analyzing insights from Webb’s data, and a preprint is available online. Webb is one of NASA’s space telescopes observing this comet, together providing more information about its size, physical properties, and chemical makeup. For […] The post NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Observes Interstellar Comet appeared first on NASA Science.