This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community, plus a couple of additional ones that caught my attention. This week, of course, belongs to SpaceX, who not only launched the first Dragon transporter since the failure last year safely into space, but also brought the first stage back and landed it safely on a sea barge. The spacecraft has also arrived at the ISS now, so 2016 suddenly looks very bright again in space exploration after the somewhat worrying events in the last two years. SpaceX may have stolen the show this week, but there were a whole lot of other things happening which have been somewhat overshadowed by the big news. Let’s see what was going on…

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community, plus a couple of additional ones that caught my attention. This week, we had no Weekly Space Hangout, but there was still a lot going on – not all of it good, but most of it interesting. There was a fair share of broken things, most notably the still unknown status of JAXA’s Hitomo satellite and ULA’s sudden problems with the normally very dependable Atlas V workhorse, but on the other side a Progress  freighter made a perfect flight to the ISS and Blue Origin launched and landed its New Shepard for the third time. Plus lots of space exploration and science!

Several people have asked me why I haven’t yet said a peep about the new remastered edition of LucasArts’ classic adventure Day of the Tentacle – and there are actually only two reasons: it’s probably not going to run on any of my current computers (which is somewhat ironic!) and I simply haven’t gotten around to it yet. So, after my skeptical opinion about the new version of Grim Fandango last year, what’s my take on this one? In short, I think it’s awesome – from what I’ve seen in the Trailer, the Making Of and in some other Youtube videos, this is a whole different effort than Grim Fandango and more in the style of the two Monkey Island remasters that were made some time ago.

This means that the whole artwork has been redrawn from its 320×200 original, something which makes a lot of sense since the background and characters were originally hand drawn. There were actually some rumours that the sad remnants of LucasArts had tried to do a pseudo-3D version of the game shortly before they were bought up by Disney, although this upgraded 2D rendition is a much better approach and stays completely true to the original. The artwork is actually so precise that it looks like a pixel grid was removed and the voices and music were also remastered, but I think the original version is still one of the best adventures ever made. One of the reasons I’m not really rushing to get the new version which would probably fail to run on my old machines is that I’ve played DOTT at least three times from beginning to end in the last couple of years – once even on my Android tablet. So I’m not particularly keen on playing it again at the moment – but rest assured, I will go and play it at some time in the very near future, maybe when an Android version is going to be released!

Let’s hope that this is going to open the doors to more upgrades of classic LucasArts adventures – Tim Schafer has already mentioned that Full Throttle is in the works, but what I’d particularly love to see are remastered versions of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and maybe The Dig and Sam & Max Hit the Road. Given the legal problems that DoubleFine must have had getting the rights to DOTT, all this is highly unlikely… but with the enthusiastic reaction to both the new Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle, I think nothing is impossible right now. Disney should just release all the games into the capable hands of DoubleFine and then

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community, plus a couple of additional ones that caught my attention. I didn’t really expect the Easter edition of the news roundup to be that big and at first I wanted to skip a week because of the holidays, but in addition to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference there were actually a lot of other interesting things happening! Last week we had the Cygnus transporter arriving at the ISS with some drama afterwards about performance problems of the Atlas 5 rocket, more drama about ExoMars followed by debris of its exploded booster, comets buzzing the Earth, lots of fascinating news from the Pluto system courtesy of LPSC, an even closer look at Ceres’ spots and much more. Fasten your setabelts!

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community, plus a couple of additional ones that caught my attention. It’s a bit less than last week, but the big events everybody has been waiting for have now happened: ExoMars has successfully launched and a new crew has also gone up to the ISS without problems. There were a few other interesting news, including the now very heated political fight around ULA, new Pluto science, Ceres still puzzling everyone with its spots which now seem to blink and exciting science experiments going up to the ISS on the Cygnus freighter next week.

And next week is also the Lunar and Planetady Science Conference, which will probably produce twice the amount of space and science news than usual. I highly recommend following Pamela Gay and Emily Lakdawalla on Twitter and looking at the #LPSC2016 hashtag is also a good idea! But now to this week’s news…

Yeserday, the first Mars mission to touch down on the red planet since Curiosity in 2012 has launched. The joint ESA and Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter with its Schiaparelli lander is actually only the beginning of a two-part mission that will have a sequel in 2018 with the ExoMars Rover. So why is this so exciting? Originally, ExoMars was supposed to be a combined ESA and NASA mission before the US cancelled it for budget reasons in 2012. ESA saw this coming in late 2011 and had already talked to Roscosmos for a possible collaboration before the bad news actually came and fortunately the project was able to go ahead with Roscosmos as the new partner. ExoMars is really the Mars mission that almost did not happen! I don’t usually write articles like this one much anymore, but I’m making an exception because I’ve written about almost every Mars mission before and I just want to continue that. 

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community – plus a a couple of stories that I hadn’t actually gotten around to share because there was so much going on. Last week I was thinking of giving up this weekly posting, but the feedback was so positive again that I decided to keep it going – at least as long as I have the time to put it together. And there were a lot of interesting things happening this week, although there wasn’t one story particularly standing out – that will probably come tomorrow when ExoMars has launched, but I wanted to post this on Sunday to get back into the regular rhythm. So here are a lot of good news for space and science with only a little bit of politics mixed in!

I really like Google Chrome and I’ve switched years ago from Opera when my former favourite browser had become a sad shadow of itself, but sometimes Chrome can get on my nerves too. Yesterday, I had upgraded from Version 47 to the current 49 and suddenly tabs I had open in the background began to reload when I clicked on them again after I hadn’t used them for some time. This is extremely annoying for users who like to have a lot of tabs open and can even destroy data you’ve entered into online forms or editors. But wait, we’ve had this before, it’s not a bug, but a feature and is called Automatic Tab Discarding.

You can go to chrome://flags/#automatic-tab-discarding (copy & paste this into the browser’s address bar because Chrome doesn’t allow hotlinking this for security reasons)  and disable this feature – and believe me, even on a system with only one or two Gigabytes of RAM there will be no low memory problems. At least not if you have a reasonable amount of tabs open, like ten or fifteen, depending on the contents. Overall Chrome 49 seems to be much better in the memory management department, it runs much smoother than before.

I’ve also noticed that the downloads page now looks completely different with a material-like makeover – you can also switch that off on the Flags page at chrome://flags/#enable-md-downloads if you like to have the old version back. Unfortunately, the switch to disable the new bookmarks system I’ve described in a previous blog post seems to have been removed, but if you switched it off before upgrading to Chrome 47, the old bookmarks system should still be active.

There’s also a lot of talk about the Vivaldi Browser whose development is being led by former Opera co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner – I have actually tried it, but it didn’t run as smoothly as Chrome and the big hurdle for me is that I would need a way to sync my Chrome Bookmarks, which is still impossible at this stage. The bookmark migration from Opera to Chrome was difficult enough and I don’t want to go through that again.

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles I posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community. This was truly the week of all things happening with two events especially standing out: on late Tuesday, the One-Year-Crew of Scott Kelly and Mikhail Korniyenko arrived back on Earth after 340 days in space and while we haven’t heard much from Korniyenko in the western press, Kelly was immediately in the spotlight walking around only hours after his return and giving lots of interviews. And on Friday, SpaceX finally got the SES-9 satellite into space on the fifth attempt with a flawless launch, although the first stage landing didn’t quite work out when the booster hit the drone ship too hard after a very hot re-entry – but the mission was still an amazing success. As usual, there was a lot of interesting stuff happening too, from some drama about fast radio bursts, fascinating news about clouds and ice canyons on Pluto, ESA’s ambitions to build a village on the moon and much more. Let’s go!

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles I posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community. Edition #8 comes one day late because I wanted to wait for the SpaceX SES-9 launch… which was scrubbed yet again yesterday evening after the third attempt was first thwarted by a boat in the safety range and then by an engine shutdown miliseconds before launch. I also wanted to find out if The Martian had won any Oscars, but it didn’t even get one out of several nominations! But there were still a lot of other of very interesting news, so here is last week’s collection only slightly dominated by rocket launches and award disappointments.