SpaceX launched its straight out-of-science fiction Starship several miles into the air from a remote corner of Texas on Wednesday, but the test flight ended in a fireball at touchdown.

The rocketship—50 meters tall and 9 meters wide—soared out over the Gulf of Mexico. After about five minutes, it reached an altitude of 12.5 kilometers. That's almost 100 times higher than the previous test flights. Then it turned sideways as planned and came back to Earth near the Mexican border. When it touched down, however, the rocketship exploded.

The entire flight lasted six minutes and 42 seconds. SpaceX broadcast it live on its website. Despite the crash, Musk, the owner of SpaceX, called it a “success” and tweeted, “Mars, here we come!”

SpaceX said that the rocket was precisely guided to the landing point. The fuel tank pressure was low, however, when the engines were successfully restarted for touchdown, which caused Starship to come down a little bit too fast.

Starship is actually the upper stage of Musk's moon-and Mars-ships. It will be carried on the top of a bigger rocket, known as Super Heavy, which is still in development. The entire vehicle will tower 120 meters—9.4 meters taller than NASA's Saturn V rocket that carried men to the moon almost three decades ago. SpaceX intends to use Starship to put massive satellites into orbit around Earth, besides delivering people and cargo to the moon by 2024 and Mars in 2026.

While accepting an award in Berlin last week, Musk said he's highly confident of a human flight to Mars in six years—“if we get lucky, maybe four years”. But Musk admitted for the first time after the test failure that his timelines could be too optimistic.

On the evening of April 8, Dunhuang Academy and Huawei jointly launched a brand-new technology-driven tour experience at the Mogao Grottoes (莫高窟). Using Huawei’s newly-released Hetu AI platform, coupled with the output of the Digital Dunhuang project, visitors to the Mogao Grottoes can enjoy a fantasy experience prior to entering the attraction.

Zhao Shengliang, director of the Dunhuang Academy, said that it has been cooperating with Huawei since March 2019. Using Huawei’s latest Hetu technology, visitors are able to see the detailed contents of the Dunhuang Art Murals (壁画) outside the caves, through their Huawei mobile phones. This will reduce the time tourists spend inside the cave, aiding the protection of the cultural relics, while at the same time helping to increase the amount of information visitors can obtain. It is also considered to be a new way of promoting Dunhuang Art.

The Dunhuang Academy has used digital technology to preserve the research and exploration of Dunhuang Grottoes since the early 1990s. It has collected a wealth of data and has realized the goal of sharing of digital Dunhuang globally. It has played an important role in the protection and research of cultural site, as well as promoting the development and progress of related work.

The Huawei Hetu platform unites Dunhuang’s study findings, high-resolution images of the site’s murals and virtual, three-dimensional models with the real Mogao Grottoes. It has not only re-created the real tour of the scenic spot, but also developed a new way of digitally experiencing the grottoes. When people visit the site, they not only have the experience of seeing the real grottoes, but they can appreciate the admirable artworks more clearly and in greater detail.

In the future, Dunhuang Academy will continue to cooperate with Huawei to create more colorful virtual content to enrich the experience of Mogao Art on the platform, helping people around the world get to know Dunhuang Art better.

It's our galactic(银河系的) home, but the Milky Way contains many mysteries scientists are working to uncover. Now, as The Guardian reports, astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) have built a 3D map that provides the most detailed look at our galaxy yet.

The -data has been seven years in the making. In 2013, the ESA launched its Gaia Space .Observatory from Kourou in French Guiana. Since then, two high-powered telescopes aboard the spacecraft have been sweeping the skies, recording the locations, movements, and changes in brightness of more than a billion stars in the Milky Way and beyond.

Using Gaia's findings, astronomers put together a 3D map that allows scientists to study the galaxy in greater depth than ever before. The data has made it possible to measure the acceleration (加速度) of the solar system. By comparing the solar system's movements to those of more faraway objects in space, researchers have determined that the solar system is slowly falling toward the center of the galaxy at an acceleration of 7 millimeters                           per second per year, The Guardian reports. Additionally, the map shows how matter is distributed (使分配)throughout the Milky Way. With this information, scientists should be able to measure the mass of the Milky Way.

Gaia's observations may also hold clues to the Milky Way's past and future. The data holds small remaining parts of the 10-billion-year-old round flat object that made up the edge of the star system. By comparing it to the shape of the Milky Way today, astronomers have determined that the flat object will continue to increase in size as new stars are created.

The Gaia observatory was launched with the mission of carrying out an updated star census. The previous one was conducted in 1957, and Gaia's new data reaches four times farther and accounts for 100 times more stars.