Hasta La Gadget!

After more than eight years, NASA’s comet-hunting Deep Impact mission has come to an abrupt close. The agency has stopped trying to communicate with the mission probe after losing contact on August 8th. It’s not clear what went wrong, but NASA suspects that it may have lost orientation control, guaranteeing that the Deep Impact vehicle would lose power and freeze. It’s going out on a good note, however. Like NASA’s Mars rovers, Deep Impact easily outlasted its intended lifespan — after successfully intercepting the comet Tempel 1 in 2005, it went on to study three more comets as well as numerous exoplanets. We’ll miss the probe’s continued research, but its legacy should live on through other projects.

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Source: NASA

It would be an understatement to say there’s been a long build-up to the moment when Voyager 1 ventures into interstellar space: scientists thought the probe was on the edge back in 2010, and we’ve been waiting for the official milestone ever since. Researchers contributing to an American Geophysical Union journal now believe that the spacecraft may have crossed that symbolic border months ago. Measurements from August 25th onwards show a steep drop in the detected volume of cosmic rays from the heliosphere, just as the extrasolar rays are picking up. Spectrum measurements from the period also mirror those of interstellar regions. On the surface, the clues strongly imply that Voyager 1 has passed the limit of our solar system’s influence. NASA, however, disputes the claims — the agency notes that its vehicle is still traveling the magnetic highway, and it won’t have officially escaped the surly bonds of the Sun until the magnetic fields shift. We won’t break out the champagne and party streamers, then, but the dispute underscores just how close we are to having another human-made object roaming the galaxy.

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Via: BBC

Source: AGU, NASA

HP has announced that the Department of Justice has opened a fraud investigation relating to Autonomy—the company that HP bought for $11 billion then ended up costing a further $9 billion. More »

Europe’s second-highest court has finally denied Microsoft’s 2008 appeal of its 899 million euro ($1.35 billion) EU antitrust fine, while reducing the award to 860 million euros ($1.07 billion). If you can’t remember that far back, Redmond was hit with the penalty for delaying information about its operating system to rival companies, impeding their progress in competing with the software giant. It’s not known if a further appeal is possible, but we suspect that the company won’t give up if it’s got any options — it’s not exactly pocket change we’re talking about.

Court upholds EU antitrust decision against Microsoft, reduces fine slightly to $1.07 billion originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jun 2012 05:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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