News roundup: Tiangong-1 crashes burns up, hotel chain gives away coral-frindly sunscreen

Man, it looks like space is definitely the place this week.

Of course, most of the talk has centered around Chinese Space Station, which many people feared would crash upon them from the sky above.

Those fears never came to pass.

The Tiangong-1 experimental space laboratory, which is China’s first space station, reentered Earth’s atmosphere and burned up over the southern Pacific Ocean.

Tiangong-1 has been empty for some time. The last mission to it was in 2013. Since then, it has just been descending ever closer to Earth.

It’s sibling Tiangong-2, was placed in orbit in September 2016 and is still in use. Though, its future is likely to be short as well as China plans to build a larger, permanent space station in the 2020s.

So, in the mid-2020s, don’t be surprised to hear about another Chinese space station hurtling toward earth.

• Uncomfortable, but survivable: That describes the upper atmosphere of Venus, if you’re a microbe, that is. Of course, you’d have to manage to keep afloat 30 miles above the burning hot surface which can reach 465 Celsius and has the pressure of 90 Earth atmosphers. Sounds like a tall order, but dark patches in Venus’s atmosphere that change shape, size and position over time, but never disappear completely, could be potential organisms on the Hell Planet.
• Seeing ever further: Even though it’s supposed to be in its final months, the Hubble Telescope still continues to send amazing images back to Earth. This time, it has revealed the most distant regular star that humanity has ever seen. While there have been further objects seen, like supernovas and quasars, this is the furthest regular star. Its discovery is largely thanks to a rare cosmic alignment.
• Speaking of telescopes: It looks like the James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed again. Set to go into space in October of this year, it has had that date pushed back to Spring 2019. The delay is blamed on problems with the sun shield and the project is expected to go over budget, which will cause the already very anti-science Republicans to likely blow their tops.
• Protecting coral reefs: A hotel in Hawaii has taken steps toward slowing the bleaching of coral reefs by giving away Earth-friendly sunscreen. The hotel chain, Aqua-Aston Hospitality, has made it a statewide initiative to steer tourists away from Oxybenzone, the chemical in sunscreen that has contributed to coral bleeching.

That’s it for the news roundup today. Keep checking in for roundups of the day’s most interesting news.

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