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TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — A pre-dawn fire on Wednesday forced Japan’s space agency to cancel the launch of an unnamed rocket meant to deliver supplies to the International Space Station, the operator said. The fire broke out near the launch pad on southern Tanegashima island at around 03:05 am (1805 GMT on Tuesday), as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) was preparing to launch the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s cargo vessel Kounotori8 on an H-2B rocket, […]
by Manjunath KIRAN with Bhuvan BAGGA in New Delhi Agence France Presse BANGALORE, India (AFP) — India’s space program suffered a huge setback Saturday after it lost contact with an unmanned spacecraft moments before it was due to make a historic soft landing on the Moon. Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought to comfort glum scientists and a stunned nation from the lunar program’s command centre in Banglalore, saying India was “proud” and clasping the […]
by Bhuvan Bagga and Glenda Kwek BANGALORE, India (AFP) — India lost communication with its unmanned spacecraft Saturday just before it was due to land on the Moon, in a blow to the country’s lunar ambitions as the world takes renewed interest in Earth’s satellite. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi looked on in the mission control room at the southern city of Bangalore, India had hoped to become just the fourth country — after […]
by Ivan Couronne Agence France Presse Washington, United States (AFP)– By the time an international group of scientists stunned the world with the first ever image of a black hole, they were already planning a sequel: a movie showing how massive clouds of gas are forever sucked into the void. The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration has already recorded the necessary observations and is processing the mountains of data to produce the first video, which will […]
SEOUL, South Korea (AFP) — Tech giant Samsung has said it will launch its hotly anticipated first foldable smartphone on Friday, months after faulty screens forced an embarrassing delay of its release. The world’s largest smartphone maker spent nearly eight years developing the Galaxy Fold, but had to hold its launch in April after reviewers reported screen problems within days of use. It was a major setback for the firm, which was hoping to spark […]
by Andrea Palasciano MOSCOW, Russia (AFP) — Working in secrecy for a year, the Telegram messaging service has a plan: to beat Facebook in the race to launch a cryptocurrency with its new project “Gram”. Little is known about Gram, but media reports say Russian-founded Telegram aims to create an accessible service that is easier to use than various cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin — still confined to a relatively small market. In a document leaked […]
SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) — Huawei’s upcoming flagship Mate 30 smartphone will launch next month without key Google apps, creating a disadvantage for the Chinese tech giant hit by US sanctions. A Google spokesperson confirmed Thursday that the California firm won’t be able to deliver licensed applications such as Gmail, Maps and YouTube for the new device because of sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump. As a result, Huawei will be able to pre-load […]
by Maria ANTONOVA MOSCOW, Russia (AFP) — Russia on Thursday launched an unmanned rocket carrying a life-size humanoid robot that will spend 10 days learning to assist astronauts on the International Space Station. Named Fedor, short for Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research, the robot is the first-ever sent up by Russia. Fedor blasted off in a Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft at 6:38 am Moscow time (0338 GMT) from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz is […]
SINGAPORE (AFP) — Singapore will next week begin a public trial of driverless buses that can be booked with an app, part of ambitions to roll out autonomous vehicles across the city-state. Well-organised and high-tech, Singapore has become a testbed for self-driving vehicles, developing home-grown technology and inviting foreign companies to trial their own. Four driverless mini-buses will follow a 5.7 kilometre (3.5-mile) route on the resort island of Sentosa from August 26 to November […]
PARIS, FRANCE (AFP) — Facebook, under pressure to ramp up privacy rules across its platform, said on Tuesday it was rolling out a tool allowing users to control data that it receives from other apps and websites about their online activity. The new tool is to give clients access to their so-called “off-Facebook activity” — fed back to Facebook with the aim of targeting advertisements — and give them the option of deleting it. “Off-Facebook […]
PARIS, France (AFP) — A second planet has been discovered circling Beta Pictoris, a fledgling star in our own galaxy offering astronomers a rare glimpse of a planetary system in the making, according to a study published Monday. “We talking about a giant planet about 3,000 times more massive than Earth, situated 2.7 times further from its star than the Earth is from the Sun,” said Anne-Marie Lagrange, an astronomer at France’s National Centre for […]
BORGARNES, Iceland (AFP) — To prepare for the next mission to Mars in 2020, NASA has taken to the lava fields of Iceland to get its new robotic space explorer ready for the job. With its black basalt sand, wind-swept dunes and craggy peaks, the Lambahraun lava field at the foot of Iceland’s second biggest glacier, Langjokull, was chosen as a stand-in for the Red Planet’s surface. https://youtu.be/x1UJgbXvNQ8
