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SpaceX Starlink: As dishes go to Ukraine, what to know about the internet service

Starlink promises high speed and low latency internet access.

On Saturday, CEO Elon Musk posted on his Twitter page that Starlink service is active in Ukraine, with more terminals en route. Previously, Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister of Ukraine, had tweeted to Musk on Saturday, February 26, calling for the tech billionaire to provide some assistance to Ukraine amidst the Russian attack on the country.

Starlink is designed to help people in areas without access to reliable, ground-based internet get online — so long as they have a view of the sky. Starlink promises high-speed and low latency service without relying on expensive ground-based fiber optic cables or local infrastructure. Just point a dish at the sky, and the supplied hardware will connect to the internet using the satellites orbiting above.

Quantum Gravity Sensor Breakthrough Paves Way for Groundbreaking Map of World Under Earth’s Surface

An object hidden below ground has been located using quantum technology — a long-awaited milestone with profound implications for industry, human knowledge, and national security.

University of Birmingham researchers from the UK National Quantum Technology Hub in Sensors and Timing have reported their achievement in Nature. It is the first in the world for a quantum gravity gradiometer outside of laboratory conditions.

The quantum gravity gradiometer, which was developed under a contract for the Ministry of Defence and in the UKRI-funded Gravity Pioneer project, was used to find a tunnel buried outdoors in real-world conditions one meter below the ground surface. It wins an international race to take the technology outside.

Advanced new GOES-T weather satellite is ‘go’ for launch on March 1, NASA says

Once it’s in space, it’ll be known as GOES-18.

“A big part of the GOES-R [series] mission is actually doing solar observations,” said Pam Sullivan, NOAA’s GOES-R program director.

Before GOES-T can begin its weather-watching mission, it does have to reach space. To do that, it will need good weather.

Current forecasts predict a 60% chance of good weather at launch time on Tuesday, with conditions improving to 70% on Wednesday if NASA and NOAA have to delay for a day, said launch weather officer Jessica Williams of the 45th Weather Squadron at Space Launch Delta in the briefing.

SpaceX and Axiom in final preparations for all-commercial Axiom-1 mission

With the launch just weeks away, SpaceX and Axiom are making their final preparations for the first all-private, all-commercial Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Axiom-1 will be the first all-commercial mission flown to the ISS by SpaceX in partnership with Axiom Space.

Axiom-1 will launch using a flight-proven Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 from historic Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at the Kennedy Space Center. The mission will launch on March 30, 2022, at 2:46 PM EDT (18:46 UTC). Axiom-1 will be the second commercial Crew Dragon flight and the first mission to use a Crew Dragon that has flown three times.

Entirely New, Inexpensive Catalyst Speeds the Production of Oxygen From Water

The material could replace rare metals and lead to more economical production of carbon-neutral fuels.

An electrochemical reaction that splits apart water molecules to produce oxygen is at the heart of multiple approaches aiming to produce alternative fuels for transportation. But this reaction has to be facilitated by a catalyst material, and today’s versions require the use of rare and expensive elements such as iridium, limiting the potential of such fuel production.

Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed an entirely new type of catalyst material, called a metal hydroxide-organic framework (MHOF), which is made of inexpensive and abundant components. The family of materials allows engineers to precisely tune the catalyst’s structure and composition to the needs of a particular chemical process, and it can then match or exceed the performance of conventional, more expensive catalysts.

A new gravity sensor used atoms’ weird quantum behavior to peer underground

Poli imagines using quantum gravity sensors to monitor groundwater or magma beneath volcanoes, or to help archaeologists uncover hidden tombs or other artifacts without having to dig them up (SN: 11/2/17). These devices could also help farmers check soil quality or help engineers inspect potential construction sites for unstable ground.

“There are many tools to measure gravity,” says Xuejian Wu, an atomic physicist at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., who wasn’t involved in the study. Some devices measure how far gravity pulls down a mass hanging from a spring. Other tools use lasers to clock how fast an object tumbles down a vacuum chamber. But free-falling atoms, like those in quantum gravity sensors, are the most pristine, reliable test masses out there, Wu says. As a result, quantum sensors promise to be more accurate and stable in the long run than other gravity probes.

Hackers attack train network to stop Putin’s troops moving to Ukraine

The hackers claimed that the attack was to “slow down the transfer” of troops moving from Belarus to northern Ukraine, saying that they had put the trains in “manual control” mode which would “significantly slow down the movement of trains, but will not create emergency situations.”

An ideological aversion to high-stakes situations has been expressed by other hacking groups. Anonymous, which has claimed a number of attacks on Russia’s banks and services, the websites of the President of the Russian Federation and Russia’s Ministry of Defence, has said that critical infrastructure is a “no-go” due to the risk of exacerbating the already tumultuous situation in eastern Europe.

Sergei Voitehowich, a former employee of Belarus’s state-owned Belarus Railway company, said that the Cyber Partisans had damaged the train traffic control system and that while it has been restored, other systems were experiencing issues and making it “impossible to buy tickets”, according to Bloomberg.