TV News LIES

Scientists in Bolivia are hoping to track glacial changes at lightning speed.

A launch of Boeing's Starliner space capsule was scrubbed on Saturday just minutes ahead of its scheduled liftoff time.

With 3:50 left in the countdown, the rocket’s computer initiated a hold. The next launch attempt won’t happen until at least Wednesday, NASA said.

An issue with one of the three redundant computer systems at the base of the launch pad that are responsible for initiating the launch sequence prompted the automatic halt, said Tory Bruno, the head of United Launch Alliance, the government contractor trying to launch the Starliner.

“We do require all three systems to be running — triple redundancy,” ULA President and CEO Bruno said at a Saturday afternoon press briefing. “Those three big computers do a health check. … Two came up normally. The third one came up, but it was slow to come up, and that tripped a red line that created an automatic hold."

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A ferocious solar storm powerful enough to knock out or disrupt satellite and communications systems, the power grid and radio signals was raging on Friday, space weather researchers warned.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) issued a rare warning for extreme G5 geomagnetic storm conditions when a solar outburst reached Earth on Friday afternoon, hours sooner than anticipated. The effects were due to last through the weekend and possibly into next week. The last extreme G5 event was in 2003.

Noaa alerted operators of power plants and spacecraft in orbit to take precautions, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“For most people here on planet Earth, they won’t have to do anything,” said Rob Steenburgh, a scientist with the Space Weather Prediction Center.

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You may think that 1 trillion noisy periodical cicadas emerging in the Midwest and southern states this spring is gross – but we’ve got something even more disgusting to tell you.

As the Brood XIII and Brood XIX cicadas emerge, the two broods will also produce huge amounts of pee. Yes, pee, more commonly called honeydew or cicada rain, according to John Cooly, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut.

Periodical cicadas, which appear in large numbers once every 13 to 17 years, have the unique ability to urinate in high-velocity jets, according to a recent article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Cicadas can consume 300 times their weight in xylem, or plant sap, each day. They can release their pee as high as 10 feet in the air in a second, according to the New York Times.

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Contact restored.

That was the message relieved NASA officials shared after the agency regained full contact with the Voyager 1 space probe, the most distant human-made object in the universe, scientists announced Monday.

For the first time since November, the spacecraft is now returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems, NASA said in a news release.

The 46-year-old pioneering probe, now some 15.1 billion miles from Earth, has continually defied expectations for its lifespan as it ventures further into the uncharted territory of the cosmos.

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A dead spacecraft the size of a truck ignites with plasma and pulverizes into dust and litter as it rips through the ionosphere and atmosphere. This is what happens to internet service satellites during re-entry. When the full mega-constellation of satellites is deployed in the 2030s, companies will do this every hour because satellite internet requires thousands of satellites to constantly be replaced. And it could compromise our atmosphere or even our magnetosphere.

Space entrepreneurs are betting on disposable satellites as key to a new means of wealth. There are currently nearly 10,000 active satellites and companies are working as fast as possible to get tens of thousands more into orbit – for a projected 1m in the next three to four decades.

“We could get to 100,000 satellites in 10 to 15 years,” Dr Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told me. Those satellites power hyper-connected internet services and may turn some billionaires into trillionaires – at the cost of shrouding the planet with toxic trash.

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