Technology

A demonstration mission of Northrop Grumman first-ever Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-1) has proven successful, extending the life of an Intelsat satellite by five years. The mission involved NorthropMEV docking with Intelsat IS-901 satellite in orbit on February 25, after which it altered the orbit of the Intelsat spacecraft to bury it more operating time.

While the original docking occurred in late February, the MEV has spent the intervening time altering the orbit of IS-901, and Intelsat has since also transitioned some of its customers to the previously inactive satellite for use of its communication services. Itnow providing &full service,& the companies announced, and will continue to do so for another five years, before the MEV returns it to its decommissioned orbit for final retirement. At that time, MEV-1 will become available again for other space tug missions, able to perform the same service for another satellite.

This is a big step in terms of orbital sustainability and in-space servicing and life extension, particular for Northrop Grumman, which can now offer this as a service. For Intelsat, the company sees it as a &cost-effective and efficient way& to continue to offer uninterrupted service and address customer needs without requiring building and launching an entirely new satellite, the release notes.

Therebeen a shift in the industry away from large, geosynchronous satellites to fleets of small, agile low-Earth orbit smallsats, owing to cost considerations. Orbital servicing could help provide another option, but for now itlikely to appeal more to legacy space industry satellite operators than to the newer constellation startups.

Northrop is planning a second MEV spacecraft to launch to service another Intelsat satellite later this year, however, so it does look like it could be a market in the near-term, and it could change the economics of larger spacecraft in future, too.

After canceling its F8 developer conference due to the coronavirus outbreak back in February, Facebook has now announced that it will no longer host local events as an alternative.

Instead, the social networking giant is planning to do a series of updates throughout the year with the first one taking place soon, though the company has yet to

As a lot of us continue to stay indoors, Facebook has become a go-to platform for many people to check in with their friends, family and neighbors during the current coronavirus pandemic. Today, to give us another way of showing support and presence in its apps, the company said it would add a new reaction for &care& — in the forms of an emoji face hugging a heart, and a pulsing heart — that will appear alongside the &thumbs up& for like, the basic heart, and the laughing, shock, sadness, and anger emojis.

This makes &care& the first addition to the list of reactions since it was expanded from a simple &like& button back in 2015to give people more empathetic, quick responses to posts.

Starting next week, the care emojis will start appearing on Facebook main app (the emoji face embracing the heart), while the new reaction will appear on Messenger (in the form of a pulsing heart) from today. You can see the new heart by pressing on an existing reaction to change it, or by creating a new reaction to a chat.

&We hope these reactions give people additional ways to show their support during the #COVID19 crisis,& a spokesperson noted about the new emojis earlier today. &We know this is an uncertain time, and we wanted people to be able to show their support in ways that let their friends and family know they are thinking of them.&

Ahead of today, it looks likePedja Ristic, a product designer at Facebook, was testing the reaction on his own posts, another hint it was coming.

This is relatively speaking a pretty small gesture: offering up an emoji in response to a post is not putting food on the table (nor shopping for it, which has become a challenge in itself), giving someone a guarantee of income, making sure that a person is not being misinformed about the scope of the novel coronavirus and how best to deal with that, nor indeed curing anyone who happens to get sick from this awful thing.

But in the scope of Facebook being a crucial part of many peoplesupport networks, ever more important as people live in isolation, itanother way to make it more useful and more tuned to the kind of empathy we all need right now.

Facebook has been working on a number of levels to do something useful in the current health crisis. Its work has ranged from making stronger efforts to ferret out and remove misinformation, provide grants to those in media that are working to report the news well, separate grants to small businesses, supporting public health initiatives to get more important messages out, and like many others also donating masks to those in need.

The new iPhone SE is now available for pre-order, ahead of an on-sale date of April 24, and if you grab it on any of Three’s plans the network will chuck in a pair of Beats X earphones for free.

Three is stocking both 64GB and 128GB versions of the new iPhone SE in all colours (red, black and white) and with plans starting at £29 per month (for

Editors note: John Lewis has got in touch with us saying that this wasn't a leak, but just an internal error for the Surface Laptop 3. We've amended the original article below. 

The Surface Book 3 and Surface Go 2 have been seeing a lot of rumors pointing to a possible release in the near future, and a clerical error by John Lewis was mistaken for