The United Arab Emirates has successfully launched a spacecraft towards an orbit around Mars, reports the New York Times. Built by a space physics lab at the University of Colorado, the Hope Mars probe was tested in Dubai, before being shipped to Japan's Tanegashima Island, where it was launched by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The launch is being streamed on the web and on YouTube. It will join a fleet of six other spacecrafts studying the red planet from space, three operated by NASA, two by the European Space Agency (one shared with Russia) and one by India. Each contains different instruments to help further research of the Martian atmosphere and surface.

The Hope orbiter is carrying three instruments: an infrared spectrometer, an ultraviolet spectrometer and a camera. From its high orbit — varying from 12,400 miles to 27,000 miles above the surface — the spacecraft will give planetary scientists their first global view of Martian weather at all times of day. Over its two-year mission, it will investigate how dust storms and other weather phenomena near the Martian surface have either speed or slow the loss of the planet's atmosphere into space.
"You'll be hearing a lot about Mars this summer," the Times adds. "Three missions are launching toward the red planet, taking advantage of the way Earth and its neighbor get closer every 26 months or so, allowing a relatively short trip between the two worlds." The next expected launch will be China's Tianwen-1, which could occur between later this week through early August... On July 30, NASA is scheduled to launch Perseverance, a robotic rover that will be the fifth wheeled American vehicle to explore Mars... A fourth mission, the joint Russian-European Rosalind Franklin rover, was to launch this summer, too. But technical hurdles, aggravated by the coronavirus pandemic, could not be overcome in time to meet the launch window. It is now scheduled to launch in 2022.
If the other three spacecraft all launch successfully, they should arrive at Mars early next year.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The concept seems simple: you just suck in some air from the atmosphere, compress it using electrically-driven compressors and store the energy in the form of pressurised air. When you need that energy you just let the air out and pass it through a machine that takes the energy from the air and turns an electrical generator. Compressed air energy storage (or CAES), to give it its full name, can involve storing air in steel tanks or in much less expensive containments deep underwater. In some cases, high pressure air can be stored in caverns deep underground, either excavated directly out of hard rock or formed in large salt deposits by so-called "solution mining", where water is pumped in and salty water comes out. Such salt caverns are often used to store natural gas. Compressed air could easily deliver the required scale of storage, but it remains grossly undervalued by policymakers, funding bodies and the energy industry itself. This has stunted the development of the technology and means it is likely that much more expensive and less effective solutions will instead be adopted.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt: "A new membrane developed at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics blocks gas from flowing through it when one color of light is shined on its surface, and permits gas to flow through when another color of light is used. It is the first time that scientists have developed a membrane that can be controlled in this way by light."

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Blizzard has added another victory in their campaign against World of Warcraft bots. A federal judge has ruled that not only did the Glider bot break the EULA, it can be classified as a circumvention device under the DMCA. "As we've noted before, Blizzard's legal arguments, which Judge David G. Campbell largely accepted, could have far-reaching and troubling implications for the software industry. Donnelly is not the most sympathetic defendant, and some users may cheer the demise of a software vendor that helps users break the rules of Blizzard's wildly popular role playing game. But the sweeping language of Judge Campbell's decision, combined with his equally troubling decision last summer, creates a lot of new uncertainty for software vendors seeking to enter software markets dominated by entrenched incumbents and achieve interoperability with legacy platforms."