Seven astronauts are officially set to ride NASA’s Discovery orbiter towards the International Space Station (ISS) next week even as engineers tackle glitches with the orbital laboratory. “I think we’re ready to go fly,” Wayne Hale, NASA’s shuttle program manager, told reporters during a press briefing at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. “We’re on track to getting a third flight done by the end of the year.”
Discovery is scheduled to rocket spaceward on Dec. 7 at about 9:36 p.m. EST (0236 Dec. 8 GMT) to continue assembly of the ISS. The planned space shot, which follows successful July and September missions, will mark NASA’s first night shuttle launch since the 2003 Columbia accident.
AMD was expected to launch the new product, formerly known as “4×4,” on Thursday via a motherboard built by Asustek Computer. The Quad FX Platform consists of two of the new dual-core Athlon FX-70 series processors connected to two Nvidia chipsets that offer a total of four PCI Express slots for high-end graphics cards, said Ian McNaughton, product manager for AMD’s Athlon FX product.
Google stated today that it would shut down Google Answers, a service, which allows users to pose a question to a panel of researchers and pay for a helpful answer. The service, which started about four years ago, failed to gain much traction with users, especially when compared to a rival service offered by Yahoo, that are free “It was not one of our most popular products,” said Sunny Gettinger, a Google spokeswoman.