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Former President Donald J. Trump leaned heavily on major Republican donors in March as his campaign and the Republican Party sought to close the financial gap separating him from President Biden, new federal filings showed on Monday.

For much of the race, Mr. Trump has relied on small donors — in particular, those giving less than $200 online — to sustain his campaign. Most big donors steered clear.

But in recent weeks, as Mr. Trump finished trouncing his primary opponents and Mr. Biden and the Democrats gathered fund-raising steam, these donors have opened their checkbooks to the former president.

In the last two weeks of March alone, one committee backing Mr. Trump raised nearly $18 million, nearly all from six-figure contributions. Mr. Trump and the Republican Party finished the month with $93 million on hand between all their committees, his campaign has said, having raised more than $65 million in March.

Still, Republicans are lagging behind. In the first three months of the year, Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party together raised more than $187 million, his campaign has said, including $90 million in March, ending the month with $192 million on hand.

Mr. Trump’s campaign has not provided a full account of its first-quarter fund-raising. The two committees that filed on Monday reported raising nearly $90 million combined since January, but that does not include money raised directly by the campaign or the Republican National Committee.

The filings on Monday with the Federal Election Commission were the first detailed look this year at the joint fund-raising committees through which Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden have raised the majority of their money. These committees, some of which can raise more than $800,000 from individual donors in concert with the candidates’ parties, transfer funds to the campaigns themselves and also build out national campaign operations.

(The campaigns and parties themselves have been filing monthly reports, which do not include details on the individual donors.)

Biden Victory Fund, the president’s main joint fund-raising committee with the party reported raising $121.3 million in the first three months of the year.

Top donors included Seth MacFarlane, the creator of “Family Guy”; the billionaire entrepreneur Reid Hoffman; and the lawyer George Conway, a vocal Trump critic who until last year was married to Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump adviser.

The reporting period included Mr. Biden’s March 28 fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall, which campaign aides said brought in $25 million.

Trump 47 Committee Inc. — Mr. Trump’s new joint fund-raising committee with the Republican National Committee — was formally set up with the F.E.C. on Jan. 31. It reported raising $23.6 million in the quarter, including $17.8 million in the second half of March alone, largely from six-figure contributions.

Those gifts included $814,399 dated March 25 from Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire who was a vital supporter of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign but was less engaged with his 2020 run. Mr. Trump had been courting Mr. Mercer and other donors in recent weeks.

Mr. Trump’s joint fund-raising agreement with the R.N.C. directs a portion of the contributions to Trump 47 Committee Inc. to a political action committee that has been paying his costly legal bills. The first $6,600 given goes to Mr. Trump’s campaign, and the next $5,000 goes to his Save America PAC, which last year spent more than $50 million on his legal expenses. The R.N.C. and state parties receive the remaining amount.

Other top-dollar donors to Trump 47 included Roger William Norman, a Nevada real-estate developer who gave nearly half a million dollars last year to a super PAC backing Mr. Trump, and Robert T. Bigelow, the Las Vegas aerospace mogul, who gave $5 million to the Trump super PAC in February.

Jeffrey C. Sprecher, the chief executive of Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, also gave more than $800,000, as did his wife, Kelly Loeffler, who briefly served as a Republican senator from Georgia.

Joe Ricketts, the chairman of TD Ameritrade, also gave the maximum amount. Other major donors included Linda McMahon, the former pro-wrestling entrepreneur; Phil Ruffin, the casino magnate; and Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets. All three also gave at least $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC last year.

Mr. Trump’s Save America joint fund-raising committee — which had served as his main fund-raising vehicle during the primary campaign — raised $65.8 million in the first quarter of 2024, and ended March with $13.7 million on hand.

Iran’s much-anticipated retaliation for Israel’s killing of senior military leaders produced a fiery aerial display in the skies over Israel and the West Bank.

But in important ways, military analysts say, it was just that: a highly choreographed spectacle.

The more than 300 drones and missiles that hurtled through Iraqi and Jordanian airspace Saturday night before they were brought down seemed designed to create maximum drama while inflicting minimal damage, defense officials and military experts say. Just as they did back in 2020 when retaliating for the U.S. killing of Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iranian leaders this weekend gave plenty of warning that they were launching strikes.

Iran also sequenced the attack, a retaliation for airstrikes on an Iranian Embassy building in Syria on April 1, in such a way that both Israelis and Americans were able to adjust their aerial defenses once the Iranian missiles and drones were in the air.

The result: a lot of bang, but relatively little destruction on the ground.

Few of Iran’s drones and missiles found their intended targets, an inaccuracy level that military experts and defense officials say was probably by design.

Iran planned the attacks in a way that would send a warning to Israel and create deterrence but avoid sparking a war, according to two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, said Iran gave countries in the region about 72 hours advance warning.

“I think Iran is very concerned about what comes next if they were too effective,” said Gen. Joseph L. Votel, a former leader of the U.S. military’s Central Command. “The early notification of what they were doing seems a little interesting to me.”

The repercussions of such an immense aerial attack could still push Israel, Iran and even the United States closer to the wider war that President Biden has been trying to avoid. It was Iran’s first direct attack on Israel after decades of a shadow war, and Israeli leaders were considering a possible response.

Mr. Biden has made clear to Israeli leaders that while the United States is committed to defending Israel, he has no interest in attacking Iran. In fact, the president and his team, hoping to avoid further escalation, are advising Israel that its successful defense against the Iranian airstrikes constituted a major strategic victory that might not require another round of retaliation, U.S. officials said.

In the space of five hours on Saturday night, Israel demonstrated that with the help of its allies, it could provide residents with solid protection from deadly airstrikes.

Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, which became operational in 2011, intercepts rockets. But this weekend, Israel primarily used fighter jets and its Arrow 3 system, which is designed to intercept ballistic missiles outside the earth’s atmosphere, including those armed with nuclear and other nonconventional warheads, a defense official said.

Iron Dome’s interceptors are six inches wide and 10 feet long. They rely on sensors and computerized guidance to target short-range rockets. The Arrow system can fly longer distances to go after bigger threats.

Jacob Nagel, a former acting Israeli national security adviser, said Israel also used a system called David’s Sling, which shoots down drones, missiles and rockets, and interceptions from Israeli warplanes.

The strikes were proof of concept for the Arrow 3 system, which had mostly been used to take down the occasional incoming missile fired by Houthi militia forces in Yemen. During the Iranian assault, the long-range system saw “more use than during the rest of its time since its invention put together,” Mr. Nagel said. “And we saw that it works.”

“The achievement as a whole is surprising,” he added. “The Iranians never dreamed that we would intercept so many. They must have anticipated that a large chunk would be shot down, but they did not realize that 99 percent would be intercepted.”

Mr. Nagel strongly rebuffed the idea, however, that Iran had not sought to inflict damage on their targets in Israel. “Symbolism is when you fire three or four rockets, not 320” drones and missiles, he said. “They fired all the varieties in their arsenal.”

Israel got help from the United States, Britain and France. American officials said U.S. fighter jets shot down more than 70 exploding drones in the attack, while two Navy warships in the eastern Mediterranean destroyed four to six missiles, and an Army Patriot battery in Iraq knocked down at least one missile that passed overhead. The more than 300 drones and missiles Iran launched was on the high end of what U.S. analysts had expected, one official said.

Jordan, a critic of Israel’s war effort in Gaza, said that its military had shot down aircraft and missiles that entered its airspace during the attack.

Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a retired leader of Central Command, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that Israel showed that it could defend its airspace, cities and people.

“So I think that Israel this morning is now much stronger than they were yesterday,” he said.

On the surface, that would suggest that Iran came out weaker and showed that it still had a long way to go before it could make good on its leaders’ frequent calls for the destruction of Israel.

But military analysts and defense officials cautioned about drawing firm conclusions about Iranian military capability from Saturday night’s display.

Iran demonstrated that weapons fired from its territory could reach Israel, and for a foe with demonstrated nuclear ambitions, that capability should worry Israeli military strategists, General Votel, who led Central Command from 2016 to 2019, said in an interview.

“They can launch missiles that can reach Israel, even though they were shot down outside Israeli airspace,” General Votel said. “It’s concerning, particularly for a country that is pursuing nuclear weapons capability.”

Afshon Ostovar, an expert on Iran’s military at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., said that Iran showcased a large part of its military capability, but not all of it.

Many of Iran’s drones were Shahed-136 “kamikazes,” the same type that Russia is using in Ukraine. These are slow-moving and fly low, he said.

Fabian Hinz, an expert on Iran’s military at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Berlin, examined footage of the drones and missile launches published by media outlets affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, as well as photos of debris published by Israel, to determine the types of weapons that Iran used in the attack. Mr. Ostovar analyzed the attack from a strategic point of view, taking into account the weapons that were used.

Iran launched two types of long-range cruise and ballistic missiles, both developed by the Guards aerospace unit, both analysts said.

The cruise missile, called the Paveh, has a range of about 1,650 kilometers, or about 1,000 miles. It is the same type of missile that Iran has provided to the Houthi militia group in Yemen and to Shiite militant groups in Iraq. The ballistic missiles, they said, are called Emad and have a similar range.

Iran also used the Kheibar Shekan ballistic missile, one of its newest and most advanced. The precision-guided missile has a range of 1,450 kilometers, or about 900 miles. Iranian military officials have said its warhead can evade missile defense systems.

“The mix of weapons is what you would have expected in a substantial attack against Israel,” Mr. Hinz said. “They have basically used their sophisticated system to conduct these strikes. Launching over 100 ballistic missiles over a short period of time is quite something, and doing a combined attack with that many different weapons is really the upper tier of potential actions they could do.”

Facing mounting pressure to strike down a near-total abortion ban revived last week by Arizona’s Supreme Court, Republican state legislators are considering efforts to undermine a planned ballot measure this fall that would enshrine abortion rights in the Arizona Constitution, according to a presentation obtained by The New York Times.

The 1864 law that is set to take effect in the coming weeks bans nearly all abortions and mandates prison sentences of two to five years for providing abortion care. The proposed ballot measure on abortion rights, known as the Arizona Abortion Access Act, would enshrine the right to an abortion before viability, or about 24 weeks. Supporters of the measure say they have already gathered enough signatures to put the question on the ballot ahead of a July 3 filing deadline.

Republicans in the Legislature are under tremendous pressure to overturn, or at least amend, the 1864 ban. Former President Donald J. Trump, the national standard-bearer of the Republican Party, directly intervened on Friday, calling on Republican legislators, in a frantically worded post online, to “act immediately” to change the law. A top Trump ally in Arizona who is running for the Senate, Kari Lake, has also called for the overturning of the 1864 law, which she had once praised.

Abortion rights have been a winning message for Democrats since the Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by Mr. Trump, overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. And even though it is an objectively unpopular aspect of his White House legacy, Mr. Trump has repeatedly bragged that he is personally responsible for overturning Roe.

Republicans in Arizona, however, have already resisted efforts to repeal the 160-year-old law and are bracing for the potential for another floor battle on the ban that is looming for the Legislature, which is set to convene on Wednesday. The plans that circulated among Republican legislators suggest the caucus is considering other measures that would turn attention away from the 1864 law.

The presentation to Republican state legislators, written by Linley Wilson, the general counsel for the Republican majority in the Arizona State Legislature, proposed several ways in which the Republican-controlled Legislature could undermine the ballot measure, known as A.A.A., by placing competing constitutional amendments on the ballot that would limit the right to abortion even if the proposed ballot measure succeeded.

The plan, the document said, “Changes narrative — Republicans have a plan!” adding that the plan “puts Democrats in a defensive position to argue against partial birth abortions, discriminatory abortions, and other basic protections.”

One proposal would have the Legislature send to voters two other ballot initiatives that would “conflict with” and “pull votes from” the A.A.A. ballot measure. Ballot measures for a constitutional amendment can be proposed through a petition, as with the A.A.A. ballot measure, or through the State Legislature, and the document suggests that voters could read the Republican ballot measures first on the ballot if they are filed before the A.A.A. ballot measure.

One of the Republican ballot initiatives outlined in the presentation would enact an abortion ban after the fifth week of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest and medical necessity. The other ballot option would propose a ban after the 14th week of pregnancy. The language of the measures would be intentionally written to mislead voters on when exactly an abortion would become illegal, according to the presentation.

The second option, for example, would be known as the “Fifteen Week Reproductive Care and Abortion Act.” But “in reality,” according to the presentation, “It’s a 14-week law disguised as a 15-week law because it would only allow abortion until the beginning of the 15th week.” Similarly, the wording of the five-week abortion ban would make abortion illegal “after the sixth week of pregnancy begins.”

An alternative to those two options would be to put forward a ballot measure that would take effect only if the A.A.A. ballot measure also passes. That plan, known as “conditional enactment,” would insert language in the state Constitution declaring that the right to an abortion in the A.A.A. ballot measure “is not absolute and shall not be interpreted to prevent the Legislature from” regulating abortion in the future. It would also include language used by anti-abortion activists, referring to “the preservation of prenatal life” and “mitigation of fetal pain.”

Ben Toma, the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, confirmed the authenticity of the document and said in a statement that it “presents ideas drafted for internal discussion and consideration within the caucus. I’ve publicly stated that we are looking at options to address this subject, and this is simply part of that.”

Dawn Penich, a spokeswoman for Arizona for Abortion Access, the liberal coalition organizing the A.A.A. ballot measure, said in a statement that the Republican presentation “shows yet again why Arizonans can’t leave our most basic and personal rights in the hands of politicians.”

Kate Zernike contributed reporting from New York.

President Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, reported earning roughly $620,000 in 2023, releasing their joint tax return for the third straight year of Mr. Biden’s presidency and the 26th time throughout his political career.

The couple’s tax return, released on Monday evening by the White House, showed that Mr. Biden and Dr. Biden paid just over $181,000 in state and federal taxes, with an effective federal income tax rate of nearly 24 percent.

Their federal gross income in 2023 was nearly 7 percent higher than the $580,000 they reported in 2022, largely a result of increased taxable interest income this year stemming from higher interest rates.

The bulk of their income came from the $400,000 salary that Mr. Biden earned as president, and Dr. Biden’s salary of $85,985 from Northern Virginia Community College, where she is an English professor. The president’s salary is set by Congress and has been constant since 2001.

The jump in income last year was largely attributable to the $129,876 in taxable interest, pensions, annuities, IRA distributions and Social Security benefits that the couple claimed, up significantly from the $92,087 reported last year.

Dr. Biden also earned $4,115 in royalties from books she has written, while the president reported no royalties.

In releasing his tax return this year, Mr. Biden once again sought to contrast himself with former President Donald J. Trump, who resisted releasing his returns throughout his tenure as president.

Mr. Trump’s returns were made public at the end of 2022 by the House Ways and Means Committee after a protracted legal battle. They showed that he paid a total of $1.1 million in federal income taxes during the first three years of his presidency, but paid no tax in 2020.

The New York Times obtained tax documents of Mr. Trump’s in 2020, which revealed that he paid just $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency and again during his first year as president. They also showed that Mr. Trump had paid no income tax in 10 separate years because of tax write-offs and large business losses he declared.

“President Biden believes that all occupants of the Oval Office should be open and honest with the American people, and that the longstanding tradition of annually releasing presidential tax returns should continue unbroken,” the White House said in a statement.

For 2023, the Bidens reported giving $20,477 to 17 charities, including the church Mr. Biden regularly attends in Wilmington, Del., and the National Fraternal Order of Police Foundation.

They also reported an annual $5,000 donation to the Beau Biden Foundation, which is named in honor of Mr. Biden’s son who died of brain cancer in 2015.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, also released their 2023 return. It showed that they paid $88,570 in federal income tax on total income of $450,299, an effective federal income tax rate of 19.7 percent, and more or less the same as what they reported last year.

They paid an additional $26,766 in income taxes to California and the District of Columbia and contributed $23,026 to charity.

The cost of a proposed NASA mission to gather rocks on Mars and return them to Earth is spiraling upward and slipping further into the future. So on Monday, space agency officials asked for ideas on simplifying the mission and trimming its price tag.

“The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference on Monday. “And not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long.”

The mission, known as Mars Sample Return, is central to the search for signs that life may have existed on the red planet. The idea is to bring samples of rock and soil back to Earth so that scientists can prod and poke at them using their most sophisticated tools.

NASA had hoped that Mars Sample Return would cost $5 billion to $7 billion, and that the rocks would arrive on Earth in 2033.

But last fall, a panel that reviewed the mission concluded that the cost was likely to be much higher, from $8 to $11 billion. NASA officials said on Monday that after they looked over the review, they agreed with that cost estimate, and that, given budget constraints, the current Mars Sample Return mission would not be able to deliver the rocks before 2040.

On Tuesday, NASA plans to issue a “request for information” seeking alternative plans from aerospace companies as well as experts within NASA, with proposals to be due on May 17. Of those, NASA would finance several of the proposals, with studies finishing later this year. Then NASA would have to decide its next step.

“We’re going to need to go off to some very innovative new possibilities for design and certainly leave no stone unturned,” said Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate.

At the same time, she said she hoped for “traditional, tried-and-true architectures” that would reduce the risk of delay and failure.

“This is the Hail Mary,” Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that supports space exploration, said in an interview. Mr. Dreier said he had thought that NASA would simply announce a delay, which would reduce the amount it was spending on the mission in a given year, while adding to the final price tag.

“That would have been an easier way, from our perspective, to preserve the plan as it existed, to add certainty where there’s uncertainty,” Mr. Dreier said.

The first phase of Mars Sample Return is already underway. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2021, has been drilling and collecting cylindrical samples of rock and soil in the Jezero Crater, which contains an ancient river delta.

The current Mars Sample Return plan, devised by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, involves a complex choreography. First, a new robotic spacecraft would land near the Perseverance rover, which would then hand over about 30 of its rock samples. Those would then be launched into orbit around Mars. Yet another spacecraft, from the European Space Agency, would retrieve those samples, take them back to Earth and drop them off within a small disk-shaped vehicle that would land in a Utah desert.

To undertake a mission that would move more quickly and at a lower cost, one idea might be to leave some of the samples behind on Mars. That would reduce the size and complexity of the spacecraft needed.

If scientists were forced to choose which rocks they want most, “I think that will be some very, very lively and very exciting scientific chatter,” Dr. Fox said.

In February, Mr. Dreier wrote an essay about whether NASA could turn to Elon Musk’s SpaceX for a cheaper robotic Mars Sample Return mission. SpaceX’s mammoth Starship rocket is being designed with the goal of sending people to Mars.

“The answer is almost certainly ‘no,’” Mr. Dreier wrote then. “At least, not anytime soon.”

But if Mr. Musk and SpaceX are interested, NASA is now willing to listen. Mr. Dreier said that SpaceX would need to solve numerous technical challenges, including how it could produce propellants for the return trip.

“Is this getting to be less, or more expensive and time-consuming and risky than the original J.P.L. concept?” Mr. Dreier said, referring to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s plan.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Dreier said that, as an optimist, perhaps Mr. Nelson was right and that someone would offer a better solution.

But he added that NASA’s announcement on Monday could be a pretext for canceling the mission, or trying to convince Congress that it indeed needed $11 billion.

“It may just be that people don’t want to accept that that’s what it costs,” he said. “I guess that’s one of the things we’ll find out.”

The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily allowed a ban to take effect in Idaho on gender-affirming treatment for minors, a signal that at least some justices appear comfortable with wading into another front in the culture wars.

In siding with state officials who had asked the court to lift a block on the law, the justices were split, with a majority of the conservative justices voting to enforce the ban over the objections of the three liberal justices. The justices also specified that their decision would remain in place until the appeals process had ended.

The court specified that it would allow the ban to apply to everyone except the plaintiffs who brought the challenge.

Although orders on the emergency docket often include no reasoning, the decision included concurrences by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who was joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas, and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented and was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Elena Kagan noted a dissent.

The law, passed by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature, makes it a felony for doctors to provide transgender medical care for minors, including hormone treatment.

States around the country have pushed to restrict transgender rights. At least 20 states with Republican-controlled legislatures, including Idaho, have enacted legislation that limits access for gender transition care for minors.

Idaho officials had appealed to the Supreme Court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, upheld a temporary block on the law as litigation continues in lower courts.

The law, the Vulnerable Child Protection Act, makes it a crime for medical providers to offer medical care to transgender teenagers.

Attorney General Raúl R. Labrador of Idaho, in his emergency application, said that the case raised a recurring question that a majority of the justices had expressed interest in: whether a court can enact what is known as a universal injunction, which freezes a state law from going into effect — not just for the parties directly involved in the case, but for everyone.

Mr. Labrador contended that a federal court erred in applying the freeze so expansively. “The plaintiffs are two minors and their parents, and the injunction covers two million,” he wrote.

Temporarily barring the law meant “leaving vulnerable children subject to procedures that even plaintiffs’ experts agree are inappropriate for some of them,” he added.

Mr. Labrador continued, “These procedures have lifelong, irreversible consequences, with more and more minors voicing their regret for taking this path.”

The plaintiffs, two minors and their parents who are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that this case was not the right vehicle for addressing concerns about universal injunctions.

That is because the four plaintiffs are anonymous, referred to only by pseudonyms. If the court narrowed the temporary pause on the Idaho law to apply only to those directly involved in the lawsuit, the plaintiffs, including minors, would be forced to “disclose their identities as the transgender plaintiffs in this litigation to staff at doctors’ offices and pharmacies every time they visited a doctor or sought to fill their prescriptions.”

James Dean, a landscape painter who ran a NASA program that invited artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Rockwell and Jamie Wyeth to document aspects of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects, died on March 22 in Washington. He was 92.

His son Steven confirmed the death, at an assisted living facility.

From the final Mercury mission in 1963 until 1974, Mr. Dean gave dozens of artists access to astronauts, to areas near the launchpads at Cape Canaveral (and the Kennedy Space Center) and to ships that recovered astronauts after their ocean splashdowns.

Mr. Dean believed that artists offered a perspective that could not be found in photographs.

“Their imaginations enable them to venture beyond a scientific explanation of the stars, the moon and the outer planets,” Mr. Dean and Bert Ulrich wrote in their book, “NASA/ART: 50 Years of Exploration” (2008).

One night before L. Gordon Cooper blasted off on the last Mercury mission in May 1963, Mr. Dean allowed the painters Peter Hurd and Lamar Dodd to work from a field near the rocket’s launchpad, and provided them with huge lamps for illumination.

A security guard who saw the two artists amid the bushes with their paints and brushes quickly determined that they did not pose a threat — and escorted them to the top of the launchpad, where they looked inside the Mercury capsule, which gave Mr. Dodd the inspiration for his abstract gouache painting, “Max Q.”

In 1965 Jamie Wyeth, then 19, painted “Support,” a watercolor of the launch of Gemini 4 from a nearby gantry, the massive structure that encloses and services rockets before they lift off.

“Jamie went off to the edge and let his legs hang over, and he’s painting like he’s sitting on a dock up in Maine someplace,” Mr. Dean said in an interview in 2019 with Carolyn Russo, the art curator at the National Air and Space Museum.

Mr. Rauschenberg roamed the space center’s grounds in the weeks before the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first men on the moon.

“He didn’t bring a sketch pad or anything like that with him but what he wanted to do was look at our photo files to experience the action real-time,” Mr. Dean told Ms. Russo.

The experience led Mr. Rauschenberg to create “Stoned Moon,” a series of 34 lithographs, including “Sky Garden,” in which he superimposed a negative image of the Saturn 5 rocket, with many of its parts labeled, over images of it blasting off.

In the hours before Apollo 11 launched on July 16, 1969, Mr. Dean got permission for the illustrator Paul Calle to sketch Neil Armstrong, Col. Buzz Aldrin and Lt. Col. Michael Collins having breakfast and then suiting up — the only artist allowed in those spaces.

James Daniel Dean was born on Oct. 14, 1931, in Fall River, Mass. His father, John, was a pastry chef. His mother, Sadie (Griffin) Dean, managed the home.

James recognized that he had artistic talent in high school when a history teacher told students to draw their homework, and he began sketching airplanes and ships. In 1950, he entered the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, Mass., and graduated in 1956, with time in between for his Army service in Panama.

He was hired as a graphic designer in the Secretary of Defense’s office; five years later, he joined NASA’s office of Educational Programs and Services. In 1963, a year after James Webb, the NASA administrator, created the fine art program, Mr. Dean was named its founding director, one of his many responsibilities in the office.

While Mr. Dean handled the art program’s logistics, Hereward Lester Cooke, a curator of painting at the National Gallery of Art, reached out to the artists, who were paid $800 each. They collaborated on the 1971 book, “Eyewitness to Space,” a collection of Apollo-related paintings and drawings.

“Jim had the foresight to know that artists would make an important contribution to the space age,” Mr. Ulrich said by phone. “The history of the agency unfolds through art and through the eyes of the artists.”

The concept of commissioning art at an agency devoted to science was not universally accepted early on, Mr. Dean recalled. He told The Orlando Sentinel in 1983 that some space technicians “regarded the artists with amused tolerance.”

He added, “Later as they saw their space hardware converted by the artists’ imagination and skill into images of fantasy and beauty, they increasingly became respectful.”

The artwork led to exhibitions in 1965 and 1969 and to several traveling tours.

Mr. Dean — who referred to himself as the “other” James Dean to differentiate himself from the actor — left NASA in 1974 to join the Air and Space Museum (which opened two years later), as the curator of art under Colonel Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut who was its director.

Mr. Dean was in charge of transferring some 2,000 paintings and drawings from NASA to the museum as well as preparing exhibits and acquiring other artworks. He also contributed paintings of the space shuttle program to NASA.

He retired in 1980 to focus on his own painting from a studio in Alexandria, Va. He also designed stamps for the U.S. Postal Service, including one in 1985 that celebrated Frederic Bartholdi, who sculpted the Statue of Liberty.

His friendship with Colonel Collins resulted in Mr. Dean creating sketches that depict NASA’s history in “Liftoff: The Story of America’s Adventure in Space” (1988).

In addition to his son Steve, Mr. Dean is survived by another son, Richard; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His wife, Rita (Williams) Dean, whom he married in 1952, died in 2019. His son James died in 2018.

Mr. Dean arranged for Mr. Rockwell, whose paintings were renowned for their nostalgic evocations of small-town America, to meet the astronauts John Young and Virgil (Gus) Grissom during a countdown demonstration test before their Gemini 3 flight in 1965.

Mr. Rockwell, who was working for Look magazine at the time, left with photographs of the two astronauts. But after returning to his studio in Stockbridge, Mass., he realized that he needed more details about their spacesuits. He asked Mr. Dean for one.

Mr. Dean’s request was initially denied because material inside the suit was classified and could not be mailed. So he contacted Joseph W. Schmitt, a suit technician, who brought one to Stockbridge. Mr. Schmitt stayed for a week as Mr. Rockwell painted Mr. Young and Mr. Grissom suiting up.

When the painting was being hung at the National Gallery for an exhibition in 1965, Mr. Dean asked John Walker, the museum’s director, what he thought of it.

“And he looked at me seriously and he said, ‘I never knew Norman Rockwell had such quality,’” Mr. Dean told Ms. Russo. The next morning, Mr. Dean called Mr. Rockwell to tell him what Mr. Walker had said.

“He said, ‘Oh, now I can die happy.’”

Fishing guides in the Florida Keys began reporting unusual sightings to Ross Boucek last fall. Small bait fish, especially at night, would start spinning in tight circles in the water, seemingly in distress.

As the months went by, more reports trickled in to Dr. Boucek, a biologist with the Bonefish & Tarpon Trust, a nonprofit conservation group. Bigger fish — jacks, snook — were swimming in spirals or upside down in the shallow waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. So were stingrays and the occasional shark.

Dr. Boucek called scientists at state agencies and universities. They held meetings, took samples of the water and fish and tried to figure out what might be causing the fish to behave so strangely. A parasite? A sewage spill? Some other contaminant?

Then, in January, the mysterious ailment began afflicting smalltooth sawfish, a type of large, prehistoric-looking ray named for the look of its snout-like rostrum lined with sharp teeth. The sawfish, which are endangered and reliably found only in southernmost Florida, started dying.

The search for answers became urgent, Dr. Boucek said, “the second an endangered species started dying off at unprecedented rates.”

He now spends much of his time in a wet suit, flippers and a snorkeling mask, collecting samples and recording data from sensors that he deploys along the sea bottom, looking for changes or patterns that might help solve the mystery.

At least 38 sawfish have died so far this year, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, which is investigating the deaths. Perhaps only hundreds of breeding sawfish females remain in the wild, said R. Dean Grubbs, a fish ecologist at Florida State University. The fish can grow as long as 18 feet, according to the commission.

A research team led by state scientists has raced to conduct experiments, tag sawfish and sample their blood. Florida lawmakers designated $2 million in emergency funds to help carry out the work.

Some wonder if last summer’s record-breaking sea temperatures, which bleached coral throughout the Keys, may have altered the ecosystem and triggered unusual microalgal growth.

In their best lead to date, they have learned that microalgae naturally present near the sea bottom have produced an elevated level of toxins that acutely affect the neurological systems of fish when they swim into those areas.

That might explain why spinning fish seem to recover when pulled up from the sea bottom (where toxin concentrations are higher) toward the water surface (where concentrations are lower), said Michael Parsons, a marine science professor at Florida Gulf Coast University. Sawfish are sea-bottom dwellers.

Since early April, the National Marine Fisheries Service has been trying to rescue and rehabilitate sawfish spotted in distress, a logistically daunting effort that the agency calls the first of its kind in the United States. The team rescued its first sawfish, an 11-foot male, on April 5, after a member of the public saw it swimming in circles in Cudjoe Bay. It is now recovering at Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium in Sarasota, in hopes that it can eventually return to the wild.

More than 150 sick sawfish have been observed since the crisis started. Whirling sawfish have been spotted as far north as Palm Beach County, but scientists have not linked their behavior to that of the fish in the Lower Keys.

Gregg Furstenwerth, who lives in Little Torch Key and has been spotting spinning fish for months, sharing videos on social media, said he glimpsed one struggling sawfish, about 14 feet long, late last month on a beach near Key West.

“My wife started crying,” he said. “I wish it was better. I’m sitting here watching the ecosystem tear itself apart, and I’m powerless to stop it.”

Whatever is happening threatens not only the endangered sawfish and other marine life — some 426 dead fish from more than 50 species have been reported to the state — but also the livelihoods of many in the Lower Keys whose jobs are connected to sport fishing.

Some fishing guides have had clients cancel their trips because they are worried that because people are worried that the fish they catch will not be safe to eat, Dr. Boucek said. The state says that people should not consume any fish that has exhibited abnormal behavior.

One of the microalgae species detected, Gambierdiscus, produces several toxins, including a compound responsible for a common form of fish poisoning in humans called ciguatera. But it typically does not sicken fish.

“It’s been a stressful few months, just trying to piece together a very complicated puzzle,” said Allison Delashmit, executive director of the Lower Keys Guides Association.

More than one thing may be to blame for the sick and dying fish, cautioned Alison Robertson, an associate marine science professor at the University of South Alabama. Fish in the Keys, where a number of toxins have been present for years, could be predisposed to behaving abnormally because of prior exposure.

“We actually think the combined effect of multiple toxins are causing the behavioral effects that we’ve been seeing,” Dr. Robertson said.

To collect fresh data, Dr. Boucek, 39, who lives on a sailboat in Marathon, in the Middle Keys, goes out on a boat every few days to check on sensors.

One recent morning, Capt. Nick LaBadie, a 33-year-old fishing guide, took Dr. Boucek to six sites around Sugarloaf Key, about 15 miles north of Key West, reading GPS coordinates to track sensors identified by floating buoys. The first site, nicknamed Tarpon Belly, was where some of the first spinning fish had been reported, Dr. Boucek said.

“You talk to these guys who are 70 years old, and they’re like, ‘I’ve never seen this,’” he recalled.

He donned his swim gear and dove in, squealing “Woo!” as he hit the chilly water. He cleaned the tip of one sensor and deployed another one. He could see clear to the shallow bottom but still looked out for bull sharks, which, he and Mr. LaBadie agreed, can be “very aggro.”

Back on board, Dr. Boucek recorded his work by hand, in pencil. He added fixative to preserve a water sample and placed it in a cooler.

“Every day, you think you have some kind of pattern, and the next week that pattern’s totally gone,” he said.

He failed to find a sensor at another site where the water was more turbid. But Dr. Boucek noted promising signs, including a nurse shark and a red snapper in the Sugarloaf Marina, where few fish had been seen for a while. Near Tarpon Belly, he spotted “mullet mud,” a dark patch created when feeding fish stir the sea bottom, for the first time this season.

He came upon no sawfish.

Not long after docking the boat and leaving the marina, however, word spread among fishing guides and scientists: A thrashing sawfish had washed up on a beach in Key West. Tourists watched it die.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Maybe it’s the superior experience of sipping a crisp, carbonated beverage through a straw. Maybe it’s the rise of Stanley Cups, or the supremacy of cold brew even in the winter months. Whatever it is, straws have evolved beyond the single-use plastic straw-man argument for environmental personal responsibility into so much more.

There are straws made of paper, glass straws, metal straws and durable, reusable plastic straws. Many come with their own silicone accessories, cleaning systems, and personalized carrying cases.

Our endless enthusiasm for sipping things through narrow tubes has birthed much innovation in the straw market. It has also created a new anxiety: lip wrinkles.

Traditional straws force sippers to purse their lips around the opening in an expression that many believe, over time, creates wrinkles around your lips, called perioral lines.

Enter the anti-wrinkle straw, shaped like the number 7, with a small hole at the top horizontal portion that allows users to drink without pursing their lips.

The straws work, “in theory,” said Jenny Liu, a Board-Certified dermatologist and Assistant Professor of Dermatology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. But she noted that there are “no studies to back it up.”

“The way the opening is designed, it allows for one to drink out of straw but not have to use the muscles around the lips as readily compared to traditional straws,” Dr. Liu said. Because there is less repetitive contraction of these muscles when using an “anti-wrinkle” straw, it’s less likely that perioral lines will form.

“But, again, all of this is theoretical,” Dr. Liu said. “Lip wrinkles are not just from repetitive movement. Genetics, sun damage, and other factors like occupation — like, for example musicians, that play with their mouth — can all affect the likelihood of developing lip wrinkles.”

Frequency of use also factors into the equation

“For someone who doesn’t usually use a straw to drink but does have lip wrinkles, using an anti-wrinkle straw is not going to be very helpful,” she continued, “so it’s really a misnomer.”

The lack of peer-reviewed studies has not prevented the aesthetically minded TikToking straw-enthusiasts out there from making anti-wrinkle straws the new thing.

In a video that has received more than 1.6 million views on TikTok — and even more on X — the aesthetician and online influencer Michaela Scott raved about the product.

“This straw is an anti-wrinkle straw, so you’re not pursing your lips as much when you drink out of it sideways like this,” she said in the video, posted last week.

The wellness and beauty influencer Lauren Erro claimed that it “might be the best invention for anti-aging ever.”

“They always say that straws give you mouth wrinkles, but this straw literally is trying to prevent that,” she said in a recent TikTok.

Some commenters were less than impressed with the invention.

“This is such a tiring way of living,” one commenter declared.

“Just use a straw bro,” replied another.

Whether or not it’s a fleeting trend the straws are part of a budding market on e-commerce sites. The most popular anti-wrinkle straw — the Lipzi — has been purchased by tens of thousands of people, according to its inventor, Tim McManaman.

Mr. McManaman, 58, lives in Normal, Ill., and works in procurement for a large financial services company. In his spare time, he enjoys inventing and patenting original ideas. An avid Diet Coke drinker, he got the idea for the Lipzi when he caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview as he was drinking from a straw and noticed just how many wrinkles formed around his lips when he sipped.

When he presented the prototype to his wife and four young adult children, they were uncharacteristically enthusiastic about the invention. “I brought this straw to the kitchen table and my wife’s first reaction was: ‘OK, this idea might actually work,’” he said in an interview.

As it goes from side gig to profitable family business Lipzi has started doing wholesale supply to spas in the Midwest; and Mr. McManaman said he has recently received patent approval, which could help minimize knockoff sellers on Amazon.

His daughter Grace has been helping him build the brand on social media, and his son TJ, a senior in college, is hoping to join the business after graduation.

Mr. McManaman added that personally doesn’t care much about lip wrinkles.

“But there’s a lot of people that do,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that take it pretty serious.”