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Submission + - NASA to regain radio link to Voyager 2 (nytimes.com)

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Back in March 2020, NASA shut down the Australia dish in its Deep Space Network for repairs and upgrades. For the duration of the outage, NASA had no means for communicating with Voyager 2. From the NYTimes:

On Friday, Earth’s haunting silence will come to an end as NASA switches that communications channel back on, restoring humanity’s ability to say hello to its distant explorer.

Because of the direction in which it is flying out of the solar system, Voyager 2 can only receive commands from Earth via one antenna in the entire world. It’s called DSS 43 and it is in Canberra, Australia. It is part of the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which along with stations in California and Spain, is how NASA and allied space agencies stay in touch with the armada of robotic spacecraft exploring everything from the sun’s corona to the regions of the Kuiper belt beyond the orbit of Pluto. (Voyager 2’s twin, Voyager 1, is able to communicate with the other two stations.)

A round-trip communication with Voyager 2 takes about 35 hours — 17 hours and 35 minutes each way....

While Voyager 2 was able to call home on the Canberra site’s smaller dishes during the shutdown, none of them could send commands to the probe....

NASA ... did send one test message to the spacecraft at the end of October when the antenna was mostly reassembled.

Submission + - Anti-Amazon Graffiti Increasing in Seattle (with Photos) (geekwire.com)

Submitted by reifman
reifman writes: If you're eagerly awaiting your city's selection for HQ2, you may want to check out GeekWire's photo gallery of anti-Amazon graffiti images from around Seattle. Animosity towards Amazon has grown in the wake of its threats over a per head tax on employees, which the city council passed and then repealed shortly after. The tax would have increased the budget for services for our 12,000+ homeless. Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos also fought the state income tax on the wealthy in 2010.
Idle

Boss Waterboards Employee in Team Building Exercise 13

Posted by samzenpus
As part of a team building exercise, Chad Hudgens agreed to be waterboarded. "He lay on his back with his head downhill, co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth." His boss told the employees present, "You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales." Chad thought about it for a few days and is now suing. General counsel for the company, George Brunt says, "We're not the mean waterboarding company that people think we are. I don't know if this would even be an issue if it weren't for Guantanamo Bay." He added that the company has seen great success with other torture themed training such as "The Iron Boot of Productivity" and "Drawn and Quarterly Reports."

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