UNITED STATES
Spacecraft contact lost
NASA on Tuesday said that it has lost contact with a US$32.7 million spacecraft headed to the moon to test a lopsided lunar orbit, but engineers are hopeful they can fix the problem. After one successful communication and a second partial one on Monday, NASA said that it could no longer communicate with the spacecraft, called Capstone. Engineers are trying to find the cause of the communications drop-off and are optimistic they can fix it, NASA spokeswoman Sarah Frazier said on Tuesday. The spacecraft, which launched from New Zealand on Tuesday last week, had spent nearly a week in Earth orbit and had successfully started on its way to the moon when contact was lost, Frazier said. The 25kg satellite is the size of a microwave oven and would be the first spacecraft to try out this oval orbit, which is where NASA wants to stage its Gateway outpost. Gateway would serve as a staging point for astronauts before they descend to the lunar surface. The orbit balances the gravities of Earth and the moon, and so requires little maneuvering and therefore fuel, allowing the satellite — or a space station — to stay in constant contact with Earth.
MEXICO
Time may be standardized
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Tuesday submitted a bill to end daylight saving time, putting an end to the practice of changing clocks twice a year. Secretary of Health Jorge Alcocer said the nation should return to “God’s clock,” or standard time, arguing that setting clocks back or forward damages people’s health. That would mean darkness falling an hour earlier on summer afternoons. “The recommendable thing is to return to standard time, which is when the solar clock coincides with the people’s clock, the clock of God,” Alcocer said. Mexicans set their clocks ahead this year on April 3 and are scheduled to set them back on Oct. 30. The changes, if approved, would presumably apply to next year. The change would mean that Central Mexican Time, which covers most of the country, potentially could be permanently two hours behind the east coast of the US. It is now one hour behind for most of the year. The US Senate in March passed a bill to make daylight savings permanent, although the measure has not passed the US House of Representatives.
SWITZERLAND
CERN makes observations
The physics lab that is home to the world’s largest atom smasher on Tuesday announced the observation of three new “exotic particles” that could provide clues about the force that binds subatomic particles together. The observation of a new type of pentaquark and the first duo of tetraquarks at CERN, the Geneva-area home to the Large Hadron Collider, offers a new angle to assess the “strong force” that holds together the nuclei of atoms. Most exotic hadrons, which are subatomic particles, are made up of two or three elemental particles known as quarks. The strong force is one of four forces known in the universe, along with the “weak force” — which applies to the decay of particles — as well as the electromagnetic force and gravity. The collider’s underground ring of superconducting magnets that propel infinitesimal particles along a 27km circuit at near light speed began operating again on Tuesday. Data from the collisions are recorded by high-tech detectors along the circular path.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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