Yesterday, at a press conference, millionaire Dennis Tito officially announced the project of its Inspiration Mars Foundation to send two astronauts on a journey to Mars and back. According to his intentions, the mission is supposed to start in early 2018 to take advantage of the closeness between the Earth and Mars and last 501 days.
The novel “A Heritage of Stars” by Clifford D. Simak was published for the first time in 1977.
Thomas Cushing wants to discover the secrets of humanity’s technological past. Studying at the university, he found a record dating back a thousand years that reports stories that were already centuries old concerning the total destruction of technology. The chronicle also reports the story, maybe just a legend, concerning the place of going to the stars, where human beings were leaving to reach distant worlds.
LG has reached an agreement with Hewlett-Packard for the acquisition of the webOS operating system for an amount of money that hasn’t been disclosed. LG will use webOS in its new line of Smart TVs and will assume stewardship of the projects Open webOS and Enyo, the cross-platform JavaScript framework used to write applications that work on different mobile devices and browsers.
A Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket has just been launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on Sriharikota island, India. The cargo includes a series of small satellites including some nanosatellites such as the Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator (STRaND-1), based on a Google Nexus 1 smartphone running Android. Among the “real” satellites there’s the NEOSSat (the Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite). A little more than 20 minutes after the launch, the satellites have been deployed into orbit successfully.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gifted the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign the supercomputer Ember. Originally funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), it will now be used to work in genomics and transcriptomics. It will be handled by the High-Performance Biological Computing (HPCBio) group, which runs the infrastructure for bioinformatics.
