4775393
submission
TorKlingberg writes:
The Swedish Pirate Party won one seat in todays election to the European Parliament. The party supports copyright and patent reform and opposes wiretapping and data retention laws. It has been growing since 2006 and spreads internationally, but this is its first parliamentary seat.
4504689
submission
TorKlingberg writes:
As the Hubble is being repaired, the European Space Agency is about to launch two new space telescopes in an Ariane 5 rocket from the Guiana Space Centre at 15:12 CEST (09:12 EDT) today. Herschel is an infrared telescope with the largest mirror ever deployed in space at 3.5 m diameter. It can see further in the far-infrared than any previous mission and requires liquid helium to cool the instruments to under 2 Kelvin. The smaller Planck will study the cosmic microwave background over the entire sky.
Unlike Hubble there can be no repair missions as the telescopes are going to the L2 Lagrangian point 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from Earth in the opposite direction of the sun. The launch will be streamed live online.
