NASA chief Bill Nelson, during a House Appropriations Committee hearing, said that the first unmanned flight of the Orion spacecraft to the moon as part of the Artemis program will take place in August this year.

“At the moment I would say that in August. As part of a mission lasting about thirty days, all systems for unmanned flights will be tested., – Nelson answered the question of a member of the commission about the launch of the Artemis-1 mission. It involves the launch of an unmanned Orion spacecraft to the Moon, in whose orbit it will be for several weeks. Then the ship will return to Earth, and its descent capsule will splash down in the Atlantic.

Before launch, the launch vehicle must successfully pass a bench test. During the test, experts will simulate the procedures necessary for a successful launch, as well as check the operation of systems, interfaces and software.

On March 18, NASA reported that the 98-meter SLS rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft was transported from the vertical assembly shop to Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad 39B. However, due to a number of technical problems, the test was repeatedly postponed.

The test flight should demonstrate the readiness of the SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft for a manned mission. The Artemis 2 mission will send a crew of four astronauts to the Moon. The manned spacecraft, which is currently scheduled to fly in 2024, will have to fly around the Earth’s natural satellite. After a long space flight, the Orion descent ship with astronauts will splash down in the Atlantic. As part of the Artemis 3 mission, American astronauts will have to land on the lunar surface.

The Artemis program was made public in September 2020. Its main goal is the return, after 53 years, of American astronauts to the lunar surface in 2025, the construction of a near-lunar station and the preparation of conditions for the possible colonization of the Moon in the future.

Pentagon officials, speaking to congressmen, assured that they would not hide the discovery of extraterrestrial life if it ever happened.

“There are structures in our government that are looking for life in other places, and they have been doing this for many decades, they are looking for extraterrestrial life”– said at an open hearing in the subcommittee of the select committee on intelligence of the House of Representatives of the Congress, Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Ronald Maltry. “We are part of the same government. And our task is not to hide something if we potentially find something, but to understand what might be beyond [нашей планеты]and explore what that could mean for us if there are any implications and implications for national security from a defense standpoint.”he assured.

One of the legislators asked Maltry why, then, some of the information at the UFO hearings, representatives of the Pentagon are ready to disclose only during the closed part, where secret information will be discussed. “What are we hiding?” he asked. In response, the US Deputy Secretary of Defense explained that the military department does not want to publicly disclose the methods by which information on UFOs is collected and analyzed, since similar technologies and procedures can be used in other areas related to national security.

In turn, US Navy Deputy Director of Intelligence Scott Bray told congressmen that a special task force created by the US Department of Defense to investigate cases of UFO sightings has not yet found any evidence of extraterrestrial origin of unidentified objects. “We do not have any material, and we in the target group did not record any phenomena that would indicate that this is something extraterrestrial in origin. But we will follow where the evidence leads us. We did not draw any conclusions as to what they [необъяснимые в настоящий момент случаи] are or are not. We are committed to understanding this.”he said.

US lawmakers on Tuesday held public hearings on UFO sightings for the first time in decades. A special task force formed in the US Department of Defense is studying these phenomena.

It seems that Nvidia has decided to respond to the very affordable AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 graphics cards. According to the source, Nvidia will release a GeForce GTX 1630 model that will compete with low-end AMD adapters.

The new product should replace the old one, but still actively sold due to the shortage of the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. It is expected that the novelty will cost $190, that is, it will compete with the RX 6400, which costs $170.

The parameters of the card are unknown, but it is logical to assume the presence of the same TU117 GPU that underlies the GTX 1650. The latter has 865 CUDA cores, so the GTX 1630 may have fewer of them. Also Nvidia can cut the bus to 64-bit. In general, the company has a lot of options for creating new items. The problem is that the RX 6400 already competes quite successfully with the GTX 1650, that is, the less productive GTX 1630 will no longer be able to do this. But Nvidia can take the price, setting it at $150, for example.

At the same time, the new product, of course, will not support DLSS and ray tracing, that is, technologically it will lose both to its older brothers and the same RX 6400. On the other hand, in this segment it is more important to make the card as accessible as possible and at the same time capable of cope with modern games in one form or another.