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China Launched its Second "Heavenly Palace" Thursday Morning [Updated]

posted by cmn32480 on Thursday September 15 2016, @01:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-no-moon! dept.

martyb writes:

China is scheduled to launch a space station into orbit in less than an hour. According to Ars Technica:

China will take its next step toward a large space station on Thursday, when it intends to launch the Tiangong-2 laboratory into orbit. The 8.5-ton, 10.4-meter-long facility will launch from the Jiuquan launch center in the Gobi Desert, aboard a Long March 2-F rocket. The launch is set for 10:04am ET (14:04pm UTC) Thursday, and live video is available.

This space station, "Heavenly Palace 2," will be China's second after it launched the similarly sized Tiangong-1 laboratory in 2011. Following this week's launch, China plans to send two taikonauts to Tiangong-2 in four to six weeks aboard a Shenzhou-11 spacecraft. They will live there for about a month, testing out the lab's life support systems and performing scientific research. According to China's official news service, Xinhua, those experiments will involve areas of medicine, physics, and biology, as well as quantum key transmission, space atomic clock, and solar storm research.

China has plans within the next decade to send up an even larger space station. This, on top of plans to establish a moon colony, as well.

Also at Spaceflight Now.

[Update] The launch was a success — coverage at: phys.org and Nature.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday September 15 2016, @08:49PM

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 15 2016, @08:49PM (#402467) Journal

    Apparently this story was posted at 01:35AM. It wasn't posted at 01:35AM UTC and it wasn't posted at 01:35AM my local time zone (I'd checked the site since then and it wasn't here). The green site shows the date in my local time zone, but this site seems to show them in some arbitrary time zone (where the server is hosted?) and not tell me when, so I have no idea when it was actually posted. The story says that 14:04 UTC is 'within the next hour', so I can guess the time zone for this story, but it's not very helpful in the general case.

    tl;dr Logged-in users have control over what time zone is used to display story dates/times.

    Steps to change your setting:

    1. Login to SoylentNews
    2. Click on Preferences [soylentnews.org] in the "Navigation" slashbox on the left-hand side.
    3. Click on the "Homepage" tab.
    4. Scroll down a bit.
    5. Choose your: "Date/Time Format".
    6. Choose your: "Time Zone"
    7. Choose your: "Daylight Savings Time" [sic]
    8. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the "[Save]" button.

    It looks to me that you currently have selected:
    Date/Time Format: "Sunday March 21, @10:00AM"
    Time Zone: "-1200 International Date Line West"

    At some point, I'd like to see the site support a free-format date/time selection (ala strftime(); e.g. "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"), but there's more to implementing it on this site than first meets the eye. Maybe some other 'time'. =)

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday September 16 2016, @01:45PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday September 16 2016, @01:45PM (#402766) Journal

    Okay, I've now done that, but it only lets me specify a base UTC offset (not a time zone) and then whether I want DST on, off, or automatic. Automatic doesn't work, which isn't surprising because a UTC offset isn't a time zone and so is not enough information to know whether I'm currently in DST.

    To be honest, I'd be happy with it just displaying UTC (and labelling it UTC), but this is the web. My web browser knows my time zone. Other websites manage to localise the time automatically - it's not that hard - so why is it so difficult for this one?

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    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday September 28 2016, @01:48PM

      by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 28 2016, @01:48PM (#407376) Journal

      Okay, I've now done that, but it only lets me specify a base UTC offset (not a time zone) and then whether I want DST on, off, or automatic. Automatic doesn't work, which isn't surprising because a UTC offset isn't a time zone and so is not enough information to know whether I'm currently in DST.

      To be honest, I'd be happy with it just displaying UTC (and labelling it UTC), but this is the web. My web browser knows my time zone. Other websites manage to localise the time automatically - it's not that hard - so why is it so difficult for this one?

      This is well beyond my area of expertise. I had previously reached out to other devs but it seems there's been no response to your query. Am reaching out to them again.

      The labeling of a timestamp as being UTC may have some UI layout issues on the site, but is probably the easiest change to make.

      As for auto-detecting the user's timezone, I am curious as to how that could be done. In my particular case, lookups based on my IP address incorrectly determine that I am coming from the midwest USA. So, there is a question of accuracy. Secondly, it would seem to me that implementing auto-detection would require Javascript (please correct me if there is some other way!) The community has strongly spoken out against requiring Javscript to implement features of the site.

      It would be very helpful if you could provide links to site(s) that implement auto-timezone detection.

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    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 29 2016, @01:01AM

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday September 29 2016, @01:01AM (#407684) Homepage Journal

      We do adjust for DST, we just don't adjust what we call your zone when we do. So, during DST in Central you're given the correct (-5) offset even though the label says -6. We should probably be more clear about that.

      If you want actual UTC, set your zone to +0000 Universal Coordinated, the "U" and "C" from UTC ("Time" being redundant in this context).

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      • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday September 29 2016, @08:29AM

        by TheRaven (270) on Thursday September 29 2016, @08:29AM (#407784) Journal
        This doesn't make sense. UTC is a time zone, it is not a locale. To do DST, you need a locale. In Britain, for example, we use UTC for half of the year and BST for the other half. The vertical stripe of countries that use UTC as their base time zone includes ones that don't do DST at all, and ones that do DST in the other direction (it turns out that there are countries south of the equator, a fact that appears lost on a number of North American developers).
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