3 entries tagged engineering. All writing.
TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 23, 2026 The Cheapest Fuel in the Solar System Is a Planet On September 28, the European Space Agency's JUICE spacecraft swings within 8,640 kilometres of Earth over the Indian Ocean, borrowing 3.5 kilometres a second of speed from our planet for free. It's the third of four such thefts on a roundabout route to Jupiter's icy moons that won't actually arrive until 2031 — because JUICE can't carry enough fuel to get there any faster. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Eight Years to Mercury, and One Chance to Stop On 3 September the BepiColombo spacecraft, two hundred million kilometres from Earth, let go of the engine that carried it for eight years and 9.9 billion kilometres. On 21 November it has to stop at Mercury, the hardest planet in the solar system to arrive at, using a sequence it will run on its own because the radio round-trip is too long to help. A 2024 power fault already cost it eleven months. This is what it is for, why the arrival is so hard, and what the last flyby found on the way in. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Two Nanometres of Nothing: What Apple's New Chip Actually Changed The A20 Pro in the iPhone 18 Pro is the first phone chip made on a "2-nanometre" process. Nothing on it is two nanometres wide; the number stopped measuring anything about a decade ago. What did change is real and fourteen years overdue: the transistor's gate now wraps all the way around the channel instead of three sides of a fin. This is what that means, why the fin had to go, and why the label survives anyway.