Oct. 13 (UPI) — Blue Origin successfully launched a NASA moon landing experiment aboard the company’s reusable New Shepard rocket Tuesday morning in Texas.
Liftoff took place from the company’s launch facilities about 150 miles east of El Paso.
The capsule separated from the rocket minutes into the flight and spent about 3 minutes at the height of an arc just over the Kármán line, the altitude at which space begins.
The rocket booster, with NASA sensors mounted on the exterior, landed smoothly about 7 minutes, 30 seconds after launch. The capsule landed with the aid of parachutes a few minutes later, kicking up a cloud of dust and sand.
The NASA experiment is part of the agency’s Tipping Point program, which seeks to demonstrate technology that can be adopted by private industry.
The project includes a collection of sensors designed to help locate a safe site on the moon
… Read More
(Bloomberg) — In a quiet experiment of just two weeks, China provided millions of people access to long-forbidden foreign websites like YouTube and Instagram. The trial appears to signal the Communist government is moving toward giving the country’s citizens greater access to the global internet — while still attempting to control who sees what.
© Bloomberg
An attendee uses her smartphone ahead of the keynote speech at Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat Open Class Pro conference in Guangzhou, China, on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018.
The Tuber browser-app, backed by government-linked 360 Security Technology Inc., appeared without fanfare late September and offered for the first time in years a way to view long-banned websites from Facebook Inc. to Google and the New York Times, albeit sanitized versions. Chinese users rejoiced in a newfound ability to directly peruse long-blocked content from a mobile browser without an illegal virtual private network or VPN.
Load
… Read More
Standing in my office 25 years ago was an unknown, newly minted astronomer with a half-smile on her face. She had come with an outrageous request—really a demand—that my team modify our exhaustively tested software to make one of our most important and in-demand scientific instruments do something it had never been designed for, and risk breaking it. All to carry out an experiment that was basically a waste of time and couldn’t be done—to prove that a massive black hole lurked at the center of our Milky Way.
My initial “no way” (perhaps I used a stronger expression) gradually gave way in the face of her cheerful but unwavering determination. It was my first encounter with a force of nature, Andrea Ghez, one of three winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, for her work on providing the conclusive experimental evidence of a supermassive black hole with the
… Read More
YUMA PROVING GROUND, Arizona—In the 105-degree heat of the southern Arizona desert, the Army has linked together experimental drones, super guns, ground robots and satellites in a massive test of its future warfare plans.
On Wednesday, the service mounted the first demonstration of Project Convergence, bringing in some 34 fresh-out-of-the-lab technologies. The goal: to show that these weapons and tools—linked and led by artificial intelligence—can allow humans to find a target, designate it as such, and strike it — from the air, from kilometers away, using any available weapon and in a fraction of the time it takes to execute that kill today. It was an ambitious test that revealed how far Army leaders have come in their goal of networked warfare across the domains of air, land, space and cyberspace. It also provided a vivid picture of how much further the Army has to go.
The scenarios involved different
… Read More
BOULDER, Colo. (KDVR) — Rachel Tilton is your typical 7th grader at the moment, forced to do most of her learning on a laptop because of COVID-19.
The 12-year old attends Casey Middle School in Boulder, Colorado, where the classrooms are empty and the classroom supplies inaccessible.
“I think it’s going to be hard. In person, it’s just way easier to learn,” said Tilton, referring to an entire school year that could be taught online.
No one agrees more than Tilton’s science teacher Erin Mayer.
“We are a hundred percent virtual, so they don’t have access to the tools that they would normally have,” Mayer said.
Taking the classroom to the students
The 20-year teaching veteran is getting some help, though, thanks to a $5,000 national grant that allows her to purchase science kits for her students that the middle-schoolers can use at home.
“Kits available where they could do
… Read More
![a person wearing a hat: An attendee uses her smartphone ahead of the keynote speech at Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s WeChat Open Class Pro conference in Guangzhou, China, on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018.](https://www.msn.com/{"default":{"load":"default","w":"80","h":"53","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB19XiVK.img?h=533&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=1358&y=559"},"size3column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"42","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB19XiVK.img?h=417&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=1358&y=559"},"size2column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"42","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB19XiVK.img?h=417&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=1358&y=559"}})
