Month: September 2018

Enlarge / A Long March-2C rocket carrying two satellites is launched at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on July 9, 2018 in Jiuquan, Gansu Province of China. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/China News Service/VCG) (credit: Wang Jiangbo/China News Service/VCG)

As part of its long-term planning, Chinese rocket officials have talked for some time about a super-heavy lift rocket that will enable a human lunar program. For this rocket, called the Long March 9, officials have generally cited the 2030 time frame for its maiden launch.

However, at the at the World Conference on Science Literacy 2018 this week, an engineer with the China National Space Administration, Li Guoping, said the country planned to launch the Long March 9 booster in 2028. This comes as China has successfully ramped up its launch cadence in 2018—it should launch about three dozen orbital rockets this year, more than any other country. The report in the Chinese news service Xinhua did not specify why this larger rocket was now expected to launch two years earlier than previously announced.

A huge rocket

The Long March 9 is an extremely ambitious booster, with a diameter of 10 meters, length of 90 meters, and a proposed lift capacity of 140 tons to low-Earth orbit. Those numbers are on par with the Saturn V rocket that NASA designed and built during the 1960s to carry out the Apollo lunar landing program. It would be roughly equivalent, in terms of capability, to SpaceX's proposed Big Falcon Rocket, although there has been no word from China on whether any part of the Long March 9 might be reusable.

Enlarge / Zapping a vapor cell of excited cesium atoms with lasers makes an excellent detector of radio waves. (credit: Rydberg Technologies)

In the 1950s, atomic clocks revolutionized precision time-keeping. Now we may be on the verge of so-called "atomic radio," thanks to the development of a new type of antenna capable of receiving signals across a much wider range of frequencies (more than four octaves) that is highly resistant to electromagnetic interference.

An antenna is typically a collection of metal rods that pick up passing radio waves and convert their energy into an electrical current, which is then amplified. One might argue that the good old-fashioned radio antenna has served us well since the dawn of the 20th century, so why do we need anything to replace it?

According to David Anderson of Rydberg Technologies, those antennae are wavelength-dependent, so their size depends on whatever wavelength of signal they are trying to measure (they need to be about half the size of whatever wavelength they are designed to receive). That means you need antennae of several different sizes to measure different radio frequencies.

Sam Machkovech

Specs at a glance: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition
CUDA CORES	4352
TEXTURE UNITS	272
ROPS	88
CORE CLOCK	1,350MHz
BOOST CLOCK	1,635MHz
MEMORY BUS WIDTH	352 bits
MEMORY BANDWIDTH	616GB/s
MEMORY SIZE	11GB GDDR6
Outputs	3x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0b, 1x USB Type-C (VirtualLink VR)
Release date	September 20, 2018
PRICE	Founders Edition (as reviewed): $1,199. Partner cards priced at: $1,169.

Like any piece of expensive technology, a top-of-the-line graphics card comes with all manner of lingo and abbreviation. You'll need a glossary to wade through the stuff inside (processors, CUDA cores, ROPs), the speeds measured (memory bandwidth, boost clocks, TeraFLOPS), and the results you want from a good card (anti-aliasing, frame rates, higher resolutions).

Thanks to Nvidia's newest products, the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, that required glossary is only getting bigger.

Enlarge (credit: Nintendo)

On Tuesday night, at roughly 11 p.m. ET, Nintendo finally did it: they put a bunch of classic NES games on the Switch.

(No, the December 2017 launch of Vs. Super Mario Bros. doesn't count, because that's a Switch port of an arcade game. We win on a technicality.)

After signing up for the new paid Nintendo Switch Online service, we were able to load 20 first- and third-party NES games on a Switch, all via one 54MB app full of pre-loaded ROMs. Only paying subscribers get access to this app, which makes this—a subscription-based classic-gaming service—as close as Nintendo has ever gotten to resembling Netflix. (NES-flix?)