SpaceX－Rocket Landing

SpaceX Sticks a Rocket Landing at Sea in Historic First

April 8, 2016
By Calla Cofield, Space.com Staff Writer

In a dramatic feat of engineering prowess, the private spaceflight company SpaceX successfully landed a reusable Falcon 9 rocket booster today — the second such landing for the company, and the first successful touchdown on a ship.

The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 4:43 p.m. EDT (2043 GMT) today (April 8) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It carried SpaceX's robotic Dragon cargo spacecraft, which is now on its way to the International Space Station, carrying crew supplies, station hardware and science experiments. SpaceX streamed live video of the historic rocket landing during the launch, a feat that capped a smooth cargo launch for NASA

After separating from Dragon a few minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9's first stage performed several flyback engine burns, then eventually lowered itself vertically onto a SpaceX drone ship that was stationed off the Florida coast.

This was the fifth attempt in 15 months by SpaceX to land one of its rocket boosters on a drone ship; in each of the previous four tries, the rocket reached the ship successfully, but failed to stick the landing. During today's landing, SpaceX staff members crowded around the company's control room, and let out a roar of applause when the rocket booster touched down.

SpaceX has made one successful landing of a Falcon 9 booster in December 2015 — but that was on a landing pad on solid ground, at Cape Canaveral.

Today's launch kicked off SpaceX's eighth attempted cargo run for NASA, as part of the agency's Commercial Resupply (CRS) program. This is the first time SpaceX has launched a Dragon cargo vehicle for NASA since June 2015, when one of the company's Falcon 9 rockets exploded shortly after liftoff, destroying the cargo capsule in the process.

The rocket booster touched down on a robotic drone ship called "Of Course I Still Love You." It is one of two robotic drone ships used by SpaceX for its rocket landing attempts, the second of which is named "Just Read the Instructions." The ship titles honor legendary sci-fi author Iain M. Banks; both are names of sentient, planet-sized Culture starships that first appear in Banks' "The Player of Games," according to Tor.com.

SpaceX recently upgraded its Falcon 9 rocket, and today's flight was also the first time a Dragon cargo craft has been atop one of the updated booster. (The company has already flown the new rocket several times, without the Dragon vehicle.) In a media briefing yesterday (April 7), Hans Koenigsmann, VP for flight reliability at SpaceX, said the previous version of the Falcon "was the 1.1 version," while this upgraded rocket is version 1.2. Koenigsmann said the biggest changes were made to the rocket's strut system. (The June 2015 failure was later attributed to a faulty strut in the Falcon 9's upper stage.)

"There's minor changes on the nuts-and-bolts level, but that is basically all the changes that we did," Koenigsmann said.

The Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at the space station on Sunday (April 10). Astronauts on board the station are set to grab the spacecraft with the station's robotic arm at about 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT). Coverage of the event will begin at 5:30 a.m. EDT (0930 GMT). An Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft is already docked to the station, and this will be the first time two American commercial cargo vehicles will be at the station at the same time.

At the news briefing yesterday, Kirk Shireman, the ISS program manager for NASA, mentioned that two features of the Dragon spacecraft are particularly useful to the station: Its ability to return to Earth, and its unpressurized exterior storage compartment (that is, its trunk).

Stored in the trunk of the Dragon craft is the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), which is packed up like a parachute but can be made to expand to more than five times its compressed volume. Assuming everything goes to plan, BEAM will be attached to the Tranquility Node of the station, and will become the first expandable habitat occupied by humans in space. Bigelow Aerospace has already tested two other expandable habitats in orbit, without human occupants.

The second beneficial feature for NASA is that Dragon can return to Earth without burning up in the atmosphere. This Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to return to Earth on May 11 carrying, among other things, science samples from the One-Year Mission, in which NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko stayed aboard the station from March 2015 until March of this year.

Koenigsmann also confirmed that SpaceX is aiming to increase its total number of yearly launches.

"It is true we have to pick up the pace, and we will pick up the pace," he said, adding that the next scheduled launch for the company will come near the end of April, with another set for the beginning of May.

"So the time between the missions will get shorter and shorter. It is something we've seen with the 1.1 version, too — when you phase an upgrade in, you need a little bit of time between the launches, and then after a while you pick up the pace," Koenigsmann said. "And we hope we're going to be able to launch basically every other week by the end of the year."

http://www.space.com/32517-spacex-sticks-rocket-landing-sea-dragon-launch.html

Structure of the Lead:
WHO-company SpaceX
WHERE-not given
WHEN-April 8, 2016
WHAT-landed a reusable Falcon 9 rocket booster
WHY-not given
HOW-not given

Keywords:
1.prowess: 非凡的能力
2.blast off: （指宇宙飛船）被火箭發射出
3.vertically: 垂直地
4.cargo: （船、飛機、車輛裝載的）貨物
5.nuts-and-bolts: 基本要素
6.exterior: 外部的
7.unpressurized: not kept under pressure
8.orbit: （天體等的）運行軌道

Refugee

The photographer who broke the internet's heart

March 31, 2015

Thousands online have shared an image of a Syrian child with her hands raised in surrender - but what is the story behind it?

Those sharing it were moved by the fear in the child's eyes, as she seems to staring into the barrel of a gun. It wasn't a gun, of course, but a camera, and the moment was captured for all to see. But who took the picture and what is the story behind it? BBC Trending have tracked down the original photographer - Osman Sağırlı - and asked him how the image came to be.

It began to go viral Tuesday last week, when it was tweeted by Nadia Abu Shaban, a photojournalist based in Gaza. The image quickly spread across the social network. "I'm actually weeping", "unbelievably sad", and "humanity failed", the comments read. The original post has been retweeted more than 11,000 times. On Friday the image was shared on Reddit, prompting another outpouring of emotion. It's received more than 5,000 upvotes, and 1,600 comments.

Accusations that the photo was fake, or staged, soon followed on both networks. Many on Twitter asked who had taken the photo, and why it had been posted without credit. Abu Shaban confirmed she had not taken the photo herself, but could not explain who had. On Imgur, an image sharing website, one user traced the photograph back to a newspaper clipping, claiming it was real, but taken "around 2012", and that the child was actually a boy. The post also named a Turkish photojournalist, Osman Sağırlı, as the man who took the picture.

BBC Trending spoke to Sağırlı - now working in Tanzania - to confirm the origins of the picture. The child is in fact not a boy, but a four-year-old girl, Hudea. The image was taken at the Atmeh refugee camp in Syria, in December last year. She travelled to the camp - near the Turkish border - with her mother and two siblings. It is some 150 km from their home in Hama.

"I was using a telephoto lens, and she thought it was a weapon," says Sağırlı. "İ realised she was terrified after I took it, and looked at the picture, because she bit her lips and raised her hands. Normally kids run away, hide their faces or smile when they see a camera." He says he finds pictures of children in the camps particularly revealing. "You know there are displaced people in the camps. It makes more sense to see what they have suffered not through adults, but through children. It is the children who reflect the feelings with their innocence."

The image was first published in the Türkiye newspaper in January, where Sağırlı has worked for 25 years, covering war and natural disasters outside the country. It was widely shared by Turkish speaking social media users at the time. But it took a few months before it went viral in the English-speaking world, finding an audience in the West over the last week.

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-32121732

Structure of the Lead:
WHO- a Syrian child with her hands raised in surrender
WHERE-not given
WHEN-not given
WHAT-thousands online have shared an image of a Syrian child with her hands raised in surrender
WHY-not given
HOW-share online

Keywords:
1. barrel : 槍管

2. accusations : 指控

3. innocence : 天真無邪

Paris Attacks

Abaaoud: Profile Of Man Behind Paris Attacks

Monday, November 16, 2015

Abaaoud - described as "ready to climb the ranks" of IS - was filmed grinning and loading a pile of bloodied bodies onto a truck.

The 27-year-old was thought to be from the Molenbeek area of Brussels, also home to other members of the terror cell that carried out the massacre.

He is reported to have had links to thwarted attacks on a Paris-bound train - when two US soldiers and a civilian overpowered a gunman - and a separate plot to attack a church.

He is also believed to have organised and financed a terror cell in the Belgian city of Verviers.

Two of his suspected accomplices were killed in a counter-terrorism raid in the city in January, after which he boasted of being able to easily escape and travel to Syria.

Abaaoud, who also used the name Abu Omar al Baljiki, was of Moroccan origin.

In February, Islamic State's online magazine, Dabiq, carried an interview with an Islamist with that name who said he had traveled through Europe to organise attacks and procure weapons.

He said he wanted to "terrorise the crusaders waging war against the Muslims".

Abaaoud claimed a police officer had stopped him and let him go in the wake of the Verviers raid - even after his image had been released in the media.

He said in the interview: "I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance! ...

"All this proves that a Muslim should not fear the bloated image of the crusader intelligence.

"My name and picture were all over the news yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them, and leave safely [to Syria] when doing so became necessary."

Abaaoud was also named in various media last year as the elder brother of 13-year-old Younes Abaaoud, who left Belgium to become a child fighter in Syria.

It is thought Abaaoud, who was once a student at one of Brussels' most prestigious high schools, Saint Pierre d'Uccle, encouraged his sibling to join him in the war-ravaged country.

"All my life, I have seen the blood of Muslims flow," he said in a video made public last year.

"I pray that Allah will break the backs of those who oppose him, his soldiers and his admirers, and that he will exterminate them."

Independent journalists Etienne Huver and Guillaume Lhotellier, working on the Turkish-Syrian border, last year obtained photos and a video of him with his friends loading a truck with blooded corpses.

A smiling Abaaoud tells the camera: "Before we towed jet skis, motorcycles, quad bikes, big trailers filled with gifts for vacation in Morocco.

"Now, thank God, following God's path, we're towing apostates, infidels who are fighting us."

Huver told Associated Press that Abaaoud was giving orders and seemed to be a "charismatic guy who's going up in the world".

"You can see a combatant who's ready to climb the ranks," said the journalist.

http://news.sky.com/story/abaaoud-profile-of-man-behind-paris-attacks-10339387

Structure of the Lead:
WHO-Abaaoud
WHERE-not given
WHEN-not given
WHAT-described as "ready to climb the ranks" of IS- was filmed grinning and loading a pile of bloodied bodies onto a truck.
WHY-not given
HOW-not given

Keywords:

1. thwart : 反對

2. contemplate : 深思熟慮

3. bloated : 燻製的

4. crusader : 改革運動的鬥士

5. waging : 進行 (戰爭、運動)

Malala

Why Malala deserves the Nobel Peace Prize

Sun, Oct 12, 2014

By Shamil Shams

Malala Yousafzai, a teenage Pakistani activist who was shot by the Taliban for advocating girls' right to education, has won this year's Nobel Peace Prize. But does she really deserve it? DW looks at the reasons.

Malala was shot by militants in October 2012 in the Swat Valley of Pakistan's restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Taliban militants claimed responsibility for the attack and said in a statement that Malala had been attacked for promoting "secularism" in the country. After receiving initial medical treatment in Pakistan, Malala was flown to the United Kingdom where she is presently residing with her family.

Before being shot, the teenager had been campaigning for girls' right to education in Swat and was a vocal critic of Islamic extremists. She was praised internationally for writing about the Taliban atrocities in a BBC Urdu service blog.

Malala has come a long way since then. She has now become an international icon of resistance, women's empowerment and right to education, and has received numerous awards, including the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize and the European Union's prestigious Sakharov Prize. Furthermore, the teenager co-founded the Malala Fund - a New York-based nonprofit that aims to improve girls' access to education - in 2013.

Rahman said that international recognition for Malala was important because it would strengthen the progressive forces in Pakistan. She said that Malala deserved the Nobel Peace Prize more than many other people who had won it in the past.

Ghazala Naqvi, a Karachi-based writer, said that although national and international lobbies played a big role in nominations for international awards, Malala's nomination projected the soft and liberal image of Pakistan to the rest of the world.

http://www.dw.com/en/why-malala-deserves-the-nobel-peace-prize/a-17986245

Structure of the Lead:
WHO-Malala Yousafzai
WHERE-not given
WHEN-not given
WHAT-won this year's Nobel Peace Prize
WHY-advocating girls' right to education
HOW-not given

Keywords:
1. restive : 倔強的
2. campaign : 從事運動,參加競選
3. secularism : 宗教與教育分離論
4. atrocity : 暴行
5. empowerment : 授權
6. progressive : 先進的 
7. prestigious : 享有聲望的
8. nomination : 提名