Month: February 2024

Enlarge

Brussels is to impose its first ever fine on tech giant Apple for allegedly breaking EU law over access to its music streaming services, according to five people with direct knowledge of the long-running investigation.

The fine, which is in the region of €500 million and is expected to be announced early next month, is the culmination of a European Commission antitrust probe into whether Apple has used its own platform to favor its services over those of competitors.

The probe is investigating whether Apple blocked apps from informing iPhone users of cheaper alternatives to access music subscriptions outside the App Store. It was launched after music-streaming app Spotify made a formal complaint to regulators in 2019.

Enlarge / Japan's second H3 rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center at 9:22 am local time Saturday. (credit: Yang Guang/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Japan's new H3 rocket took off Friday on its second test flight; its success is an important milestone for the launch vehicle poised to power nearly all of the Japanese space program's missions into orbit over the next decade.

The 187-foot-tall (57-meter) H3 rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan at 7:22 pm EST Friday (00:22 UTC Saturday) with a dummy payload and two smaller satellites.

Two hydrogen-fueled main engines and a pair of strap-on solid rocket boosters ignited with 1.6 million pounds of thrust, vaulting the H3 rocket off its launch pad on a trajectory east from Tanegashima, then south over the Pacific Ocean. The strap-on boosters burned out and jettisoned about two minutes into the flight, and the core stage's LE-9 engines fired for nearly five minutes.

Enlarge / An illustration of the ERS-2 satellite in space. (credit: European Space Agency)

Nearly three decades ago, the European Space Agency launched its largest and most sophisticated Earth observation satellite to date, the European Remote Sensing 2 satellite, on an Ariane 4 rocket. The spacecraft functioned well for more than 15 years before the space agency decided it was reaching the end of its operational lifetime.

Over the course of a number of maneuvers, operators lowered the satellite's altitude from 785 km (488 miles) to 573 km (356 miles) during the year 2011, allowing it to eventually be dragged into Earth's atmosphere for disposal. As part of this process, the satellite's propellant tanks were drained. This was to minimize the risk of a catastrophic explosion that could have generated a large amount of space debris, the agency said.

Now, more than a dozen years later, the European Remote Sensing 2 satellite is due to re-enter Earth's atmosphere this week. The problem is that the satellite will make an uncontrolled reentry, so European operators don't know where it will land. The trade-off for draining propellant more than a decade ago is that there is no fuel to ensure the satellite falls into a remote patch of ocean.