Google’s Pixel phones are always talked about on the Internet especially when it comes to the cameras and its always up-to-date software. Almost like LG and HTC flagships, however, the hype pretty much stops there and sales don’t reflect the positive reception it gets. In fact, the Pixel 3 apparently sold less than its predecessors. Google seems to be taking … Continue reading
People are dressing up as Princess Leia, Spider-Man and … Tyrannosaurus Deadpool?
Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg will be among the candidates facing off on the first night.
The final hours for China’s Tiangong-2 space station are at hand, as the 8-ton piece of hardware will fall to earth, or rather sea, some time in the next 20 hours or so in a controlled deorbit manuever. But unlike with its predecessor, it isn’t a mystery where this particular piece of space debris is going to fall.
Tiangong-2 is a small space station that was put into orbit in 2016 to test a number of China’s orbital technologies; it was originally planned to stay up there for two years, but as many a well-engineered piece of space kit has done, it greatly exceeded its expected lifespan and has been operational for more than a thousand days now.
Chinese Taikonauts have visited the station to perform experiments, test tools, orbital refueling, and all that sort of thing. But it’s not nearly as well equipped as the International Space Station, nor as spacious — and that’s saying something — so they only stayed a month, and even that must have been pretty grueling.
The time has come, however, for Tiangong-2 to be deorbited and, naturally, destroyed in the process. The China National Space Administration indicated that the 18-meter-wide station and solar panels will mostly burn up during reentry, but that a small amount of debris may fall “in a safe area in the South Pacific,” specifying a rather large area that does technically include quite a bit of New Zealand. (160-190°W long by 30-45°S lat)
They did not specify when exactly it would be coming down, except that it would be during July 19 Beijing time (it’s already morning there at the time of publishing). It should produce a visible streak but not anything you’ll see if you aren’t looking for it. This visualization from The Aerospace Company shows how the previous, very similar station would break up:
It’ll be different this time around but you get a general idea.
That’s much better than Tiangong-1, which stopped responding to its operators after several years and as such could not be deliberately guided into a safe reentry path. Instead it just slowly drifted down until people were pretty sure it would be reentering sometime in the following few days — and it did.
There was never any real danger that the bus-sized station would land on anyone, but it’s just fundamentally a little unnerving not knowing where the thing would be coming down.
This isn’t the last Tiangong; Tiangong-3 is planned for a 2020 launch, and will further inform the Chinese engineers and astronauts in their development of a more full-featured space station planned for a couple years down the line.
Controlled deorbit is the responsible thing to do, not to mention just plain polite, and the CNSA is doing the right thing here. All the same, Kiwis should probably carry umbrellas tomorrow.
There are hordes of mechanical keyboards out there, now that old-school clicky switches have made a glorious comeback. But as any keyboard fan will tell you, the deeper you dig into the mech world, the more you find yourself on a never-ending upgrade train. The iKBC MF87 was the final stop on train for me.
Microsoft has announced that Skype will lose support for SMS Connect, the feature that enables users to view and send text messages from their computer instead of their phone. The feature is very convenient for those who use SMS messaging, but who are on their computer during work and don’t want to separately handle their handset. Though the loss is … Continue reading
Mark Morgan told NPR the new rule virtually ending protections is not being applied to the whole border.
If confirmed, the son of late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would replace outgoing Secretary Alexander Acosta.
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