Technology Far and Near

This week technology allowed man to travel to the outskirts of our world while closer to home it was fighting for it's freedom.

Far

The ESA made history when the Rosetta spacecraft managed to successfully land it's robot craft, Philae, on the surface of Comet 67P. There was a slight hiccup when the anchoring harpoons didn't fire causing the probe to bounce and re-land technically making it both the first and second successful landing. A little further out in space scientists believe they may have figured out how Jupiter's infamous red spot got it's colour.

On the human front of space exploration, investigations into the crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo has revealed that the surviving pilot didn't realize his copilot unlocked the space plane's re-entry system early. 3 space station crew, one from Russia one from the United States and one from Germany, returned home after 5 and a half months on board the International Space Station landing their Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan.

And finally when it comes to orbiting our place in the universe Elon Musk confirmed plans for his company SpaceX to launch satellites in 2-3 months to provide internet access but this was over shadowed when the Chinese revealed plans to create a satellite facility in Antarctica raising concerns of the militarisation of continent.

Near

Closer to home the worlds two largest polluters, the US and China, made progress by agreeing on cutting green house gas emissions and also agreeing to drop tariffs on a wide range of technology products.

But soon it was back to the usual debates with President Obama stepping in to give his support to Net Neutrality but while your access might be free for the time being it's also been revealed that US authorities have been snagging large amounts of data via mobile phones using fake cell towers on planes. But it's not only the American Government as we discovered when Germany's foreign intelligence agency reported that it wants to spend $375 million to spy in real time on social networks outside of Germany.

And lastly the FBI was busy after it managed to uncover and arrest the creator of under world website Silk Road 2.0 causing the TOR project member to figure out where they went wrong but while the FBI may have had success on one front they lost out when a judge said the public had the right to know about the FBI's facial recognition database.