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NASA Mars Helicopter Heard Humming Through Thin Martian Air

First came the amazing pictures, then the video. Now NASA is sharing sounds of its little helicopter humming through the thin Martian air.NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California released this first-ever audio Friday, just before Ingenuity was set to soar on its fifth test flight.The low hum from the helicopter blades spinning at more than 2,500 revolutions per minute is barely audible. It almost sounds like a low-pitched, far-away mosquito or other flying insect.That’s because the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) helicopter was more than 260 feet (80 meters) from the microphone on the Perseverance rover. Martian wind gusts also obscured the chopper’s sound.Scientists isolated the sound of the whirring blades and magnified it, making it easier to hear.The sound was recorded during the helicopter’s fourth test flight on April 30.Ingenuity — the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet — arrived at Mars on February 18, clinging to Perseverance’s belly. Its first flight was April 19; NASA named the takeoff and landing area Wright Brothers Field in honor of Wilbur and Orrville, who made the world’s first airplane flights in 1903. A postage-stamp-size piece of wing fabric from the original Wright Flyer is aboard Ingenuity.The $85 million tech demo was supposed to end a few days ago, but NASA extended the mission by at least a month to get more flying time.Friday afternoon’s test flight was aiming for twice the altitude — as high as 33 feet (10 meters). The helicopter was also headed to a new touchdown spot.With the helicopter’s first phase complete, the rover can now start hunting for rocks that might contain signs of past microscopic life. Core samples will be collected for eventual return to Earth.

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China Says Rocket Debris Unlikely to Cause Damage

Debris from a large, out-of-control Chinese rocket that is expected to reenter the atmosphere this weekend is unlikely to cause damage, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Friday. The Long March 5B rocket was launched April 29 from Hainan Island. It was carrying a module for a planned Chinese space station. After the unmanned Tianhe module separated from the rocket, the nearly 21,000-kilogram rocket should have followed a planned reentry trajectory into the ocean, but now, no one knows where the debris will land. “U.S. Space Command is aware of and tracking the location of the Chinese Long March 5B in space, but its exact entry point into the Earth’s atmosphere cannot be pinpointed until within hours of its reentry,” Lt. Col. Angela Webb, U.S. Space Command Public Affairs, told CBS News. Reentry is expected May 8. While the odds are that any debris will fall into the ocean, in May 2020, debris from another Long March 5B rocket fell on parts of Ivory Coast, causing damage to some buildings. Harvard-based astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told Reuters that the debris could fall as far north as New York or as far south as Wellington, New Zealand. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks during a briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, May 6, 2021.Speaking with reporters Thursday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the United States has no plans to try to shoot down the rocket. “We have the capability to do a lot of things, but we don’t have a plan to shoot it down as we speak,” said Austin. “We’re hopeful that it will land in a place where it won’t harm anyone. Hopefully in the ocean, or someplace like that,” he added. The launch of the Tianhe module is the first of 11 planned missions to build the Chinese space station.  
 

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African Activists Welcome US Support of COVID Vaccine Waiver

African nations have welcomed news that the U.S. supports a proposal to waive intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines. But, they warn, the road ahead is long and full of obstacles.Health experts and activists say the decision, announced this week by the U.S. trade representative, could save lives in parts of the world where the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage and vaccines are in short supply.  Fatima Hassan is director of the Health Justice Initiative, a South African group that advocates for equitable health care. While Hassan said she welcomes U.S. support of the so-called “TRIPS” waiver — it stands for “Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property” — she worries that the process is moving too slowly. “Obviously … we welcome the Biden administration’s announcement — and really its giving effect, partially, to a promise he made when he was campaigning to be the president of the United States,” he said, but added that it is only a “small step to be able to go forward in terms of the TRIPS waiver, but also in terms of other initiatives to scale up manufacturing not just in Africa, but in the global South, particularly in Latin America and Asia as well.” Biden Agrees to Waive COVID-19 Vaccine Patents, but It’s Still Complicated Implementing waiver of intellectual property rights at WTO is not as simple as handing over vaccine recipes so countries can make generic versionsThe waiver idea came from two nations that have suffered greatly during the pandemic: South Africa and India. South Africa is the continent’s worst-hit country, with nearly 1.6 million confirmed cases and a vaccination program that has been plagued by fits and starts. Health officials are now bracing for a third wave of infections. Hassan stressed that the waiver alone won’t immediately produce a bounty of locally produced vaccines. The Africa Centers for Diseases Control has identified about six facilities on the continent that are capable of manufacturing vaccines — hardly enough to quickly meet the needs of more than 1.2 billion Africans.And, says Yuan Qiong Hu of global aid group Doctors Without Borders, the U.S. does not have the final word here. The World Trade Organization meets in June to hammer out the conditions, and there are a number of high-profile opponents, including the European Union, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Germany, Brazil and Australia.While more than 100 countries support the waiver proposal, countries that oppose the waiver, says Hassan, may fear that it sets an irreversible precedent. 
 
Industry groups also have weighed in.Canada’s Procurement minister Anita Anand poses for a photo in front of a shipment from South Africa of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at Toronto Pearson Airport in Ontario, Canada, April 28, 2021.Despite such opposition, Hassan remains upbeat.“Maybe this statement from the U.S. trade office is actually the first of a long journey, where over the next few decades we’ll finally be able to have a real reckoning around the impact of intellectual property on access to healthcare services, in particular medicine,” she said. “The fact that medicines are still commodified, that they are subject to a trade regime and subject to the quite excessive and quite protectionist rules of the World Trade Organization is a key concern for many organizations and many health advocates and activists. “I think that we shouldn’t underestimate the statement and the move by the U.S. government,” she added. “It’s certainly going to create a ripple effect.”Umunyana Rugege, director of South African advocacy group Section 27, certainly hopes that is the case. Her group campaigns for social justice in South Africa. Before COVID-19 appeared, their health advocacy focused on another pandemic: HIV. South Africa carries the world’s heaviest burden of that virus. Rugege said her country’s lengthy experience in that battle enabled them to act quickly when COVID-19 first appeared. “Early in the pandemic, what we did was to call for a number of things,” she said. “The first thing was a moratorium on any new patents on COVID-related technologies. So that’s before we even had vaccines, before we knew what treatments were going to work. We said, let’s make sure that we’re not giving out new patents on these technologies. The second thing we demanded was for automatic compulsory licenses where there are health technologies that are found to be effective against COVID, but that have patents.”  This is familiar ground for African health activists. From the mid-90s, activists lobbied hard for the World Trade Organization to issue a similar waiver for lifesaving antiretroviral medications. A final agreement was inked in 2001. According to the United Nations, as many as 42 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since counting began more 40 years ago. Since COVID was first recognized in early 2020, the World Health Organization says it has killed 3.2 million people.

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