The SpaceX Dragon capsule seen after its arrival at the International Space Station on April 10, 2016, two days after its launch from Cape Canaveral. MELBOURNE, Fla. -- An unmanned SpaceX Dragon capsule is on its way back to Earth, headed for a Pacific Ocean splashdown at 2:55 p.m. Eastern Time. The capsule carrying 3,700 pounds of equipment and experiments floated away from the International Space Station in darkness at 9:19 a.m., after being released by a 58-foot robotic arm controlled by British astronaut Tim Peake, while the spacecraft flew about 260 miles southwest of Adelaide, Australia. "The Dragon spacecraft has served us well," Peaked radioed to NASA mission controllers in Houston. "It's good to see it departing full of science, and we wish it a safe recovery back to planet Earth."

The refugee crisis is perhaps the single most challenging problem for Europe today. Hundreds of thousands of people have already traveled across dangerous sea passages from Turkish shores to Greek islands, resulting in thousands of dead and missing, despite the best rescue efforts from both sides. One of the main reasons is the total lack of any early warning-alerting system, which could provide some preparation time for the prompt and effective deployment of resources at the hot zones. This work is such an attempt for a systemic analysis of the refugee influx in Greece, aiming at (a) the statistical and signal-level characterization of the smuggling networks and (b) the formulation and preliminary assessment of such models for predictive purposes, i.e., as the basis of such an early warning-alerting protocol. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever attempt to design such a system, since this refugee crisis itself and its geographical properties are unique (intense event handling, little or no warning). The analysis employs a wide range of statistical, signal-based and matrix factorization (decomposition) techniques, including linear & linear-cosine regression, spectral analysis, ARMA, SVD, Probabilistic PCA, ICA, K-SVD for Dictionary Learning, as well as fractal dimension analysis. It is established that the behavioral patterns of the smuggling networks closely match (as expected) the regular burst and pause periods of store-and-forward networks in digital communications. There are also major periodic trends in the range of 6.2-6.5 days and strong correlations in lags of four or more days, with distinct preference in the Sunday-Monday 48-hour time frame. These results show that such models can be used successfully for short-term forecasting of the influx intensity, producing an invaluable operational asset for planners, decision-makers and first-responders.

SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket on Friday and, despite the odds, landed the first stage on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean. A SpaceX Dragon cargo spaceship was grappled by the International Space Station's Canadarm2 on April 10, following an April 8 launch from Cape Canaveral. CAPE CANAVERAL -- The coming week is another big one for SpaceX, whose unmanned Dragon capsule is scheduled to depart the International Space Station and return to Earth on Wednesday morning. The station's 58-foot robotic arm is expected to release the Dragon and its 3,700 pounds of cargo at 9:18 a.m. Because of a failed launch last summer, this Dragon will be the first to return science experiments and hardware from the ISS in a year.

Merging beliefs requires the plausibility of the sources of the information to be merged. They are typically assumed equally reliable in lack of hints indicating otherwise; yet, a recent line of research spun from the idea of deriving this information from the revision process itself. In particular, the history of previous revisions and previous merging examples provide information for performing subsequent mergings. Yet, no examples or previous revisions may be available. In spite of the apparent lack of information, something can still be inferred by a try-and-check approach: a relative reliability ordering is assumed, the merging process is performed based on it, and the result is compared with the original information. The outcome of this check may be incoherent with the initial assumption, like when a completely reliable source is rejected some of the information it provided. In such cases, the reliability ordering assumed in the first place can be excluded from consideration. The first theorem of this article proves that such a scenario is indeed possible. Other results are obtained under various definition of reliability and merging.

SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, for the second month in a row, following a Japanese satellite mission. The unmanned SpaceX rocket blasted off from Florida early this morning to put the communications satellite into orbit, with the launch vehicle's main-stage booster completing a quick return landing on the floating platform. Due to the high altitude of the mission, SpaceX did not expect a successful landing, but the Falcon 9 rocket touched down on the drone platform - nicknamed Of Course I Still Love You - just over eight minutes after launching. SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean after a delivering a Japanese satellite into orbit early this morning, and is the second rocket to successfully land in the space of a month. A company webcast showed the 23-story-tall rocketsoaring off a seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air ForceStation at 1:21 am EDT (06:21 BST).

Robot Wars will soon back on TV in the UK, and a very similar battle is heading for the country's seas. The British Royal Navy will be holding a demonstration of unmanned technology off the coast of Scotland this autumn. And during the event, one company will be trialling the world's first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of landing autonomously on a moving ship. The British Royal Navy will be holding a demonstration of unmanned technology off the coast of Scotland this autumn. One company, Roke, will be trialling the world's first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of landing autonomously on a moving ship (test phases pictured) The machines will compete in their very own version of'robot wars' to demonstrate they could be part of the Navy's future.

Second stage continuing to carry JCSAT-14 to a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit. This is the second successful touchdown in a row on a floating platform, after the last one in April. There were previously four failed attempts. SpaceX also made a successful landing on a ground-based pad in December. About two and a half minutes after the launch, the rocket's first stage was scheduled to shut down and separate, leaving the second stage to deliver the satellite into its intended orbit more than 25,000 miles (40,000 km) above the Earth.

One month after landing its first-stage rocket booster on a drone ship, SpaceX repeated the feat and launched a commercial communications satellite late Thursday night. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket was launched at 10:21 p.m. PST from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, and video of the event was streamed live. Weather conditions pushed the launch from Wednesday to Thursday. The Falcon 9 rocket carried the JCSAT-14 satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit. The satellite, operated by the Japanese communications company SKY Perfect JSAT Corp., will replace another of the firm's satellites and provide coverage to Asia, Oceania, Russia and the Pacific Islands.

On Friday, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. founder Elon Musk will try to repeat a successful attempt to pitch a SpaceX rocket from the Florida coastline to a robotic platform floating 200 miles away in the Atlantic Ocean. This time, however, the company's Falcon 9 rocket will be moving much faster than the one that deftly kissed the floating landing platform last month when SpaceX made aerospace history. The April 8 landing, part of the CRS-8 Dragon mission that delivered a payload to the International Space Station, proved Musk's idea that first-stage rockets can be recovered and reused instead of dropped into the ocean like very expensive garbage. But this idea is still in its experimental stage and would require repeated successes to become part of normal operating procedures. If the process is repeatable using the same first-stage rocket, it promises to significantly lower the cost of sending satellites, astronauts and other payloads into orbit.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk plans to send a capsule to Mars in 2018. The company is going to send one of its Dragon capsules - in this case known as the Red Dragon - to the planet. It won't carry any astronauts with it, but represents Mr Musk's first step towards his ultimate plan of colonising Mars. For now, the Dragon is too small to carry astronauts further than the Moon, he said, since it is about the size of a large family car. "Wouldn't be fun for longer journeys," Mr Musk explained in a tweet.