Tag Archive for: stabilizes

International Space Station stabilizes after just-docked Russian module suddenly fires thrusters • The Register


The International Space Station tilted 45 degrees today after Nauka, a just-docked Russian module, suddenly and unexpectedly fired its thrusters.

The launch of Nauka, also known as the Multipurpose Laboratory Module, did not go smoothly. Engine troubles and dodgy docking sensors meant that the vehicle did not rendezvous with the orbiting lab until today. It blasted off atop a Proton-M rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan eight days earlier.

Even after the vehicle finally managed to dock, problems did not stop there. Within hours of it attaching itself to the space station, its engines began aimlessly firing. The generated thrust caused the whole space station to lose attitude control, according to NASA:

“The crew is not in any danger, never was in any danger, and attitude control has been regained,” NASA spokesperson Rob Navias said about an hour after the thrusters briefly fired at around 1645 GMT. Communications between ground and the station were lost for 11 minutes during the burn, which was at one point declared a “spacecraft emergency” by NASA officials.

Indeed, we’re told none of the seven astronauts on board the station were harmed during the scare. The crew right now is made up of cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, who were in the Zvezda module connected to Nauka at the time; Akihiko Hoshide from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency; Thomas Pesquet from the European Space Agency; and NASA’s Shane Kimbrough, Megan McArthur, and Mark Vande Hei.

According to the American space agency, the low-Earth-orbit station automatically detected that the Nauka module was in error, and used its own thrusters, including those on the Zvezda unit, to correct its orientation. It’s not clear what caused Nauka to malfunction, and Russian officials sent commands to the…

Source…

Mozilla-backed Rust language stabilizes at version 1.0

New programming languages come and go. Most of them remain nothing more than academic toys or niche novelties. Rust, development of which is sponsored by Mozilla, might be one of the exceptions. The new language reached the 1.0 milestone today, marking the point at which its feature set is stabilized and developers can start to use it without having to worry too much about their code getting broken by a major change.

Rust is an attempt to offer the performance and control of a language like C or C++, while making it much harder to write the kind of security-compromising bugs that are abundant in those languages. Key to this is the language’s handling of memory and memory management.

Some of the biggest problems with C come from mishandling memory; predominantly reading or writing more data to a block of memory than the block of memory contains, reading or writing from blocks of memory that have been deallocated. Environments such as Java, .NET, and JavaScript handle these through a combination of bounds checking—ensuring that every attempt to read and write memory is constrained to the memory that has been allocated—and garbage collection—ensuring that memory is deallocated only once all the references to the memory (through which reads and writes are performed) are destroyed.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments


Ars Technica » Technology Lab