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/ 11 March 2008

Space shuttle Endeavour launches with Japanese lab

The United States space shuttle Endeavour blasted off from a seaside Florida launch pad on Tuesday to deliver part of a long-awaited Japanese space laboratory to the International Space Station. Piercing the still of night with a thunderous boom and a flash of white-hot flame, the spaceship lifted off from the Kennedy Space Centre at 2.28am local time.

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/ 11 March 2008

Mere high-definition TV could soon be lo-tech

If you have just blown the budget on a new high-definition TV, look away now. Japanese broadcasters and the BBC are working on a system 33 times more detailed than the best sets on the market. The BBC plans to use the technology, named Super Hi-Vision, to screen coverage of the 2012 Olympics on big screens in city centres across Britain.

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/ 14 September 2007

Japan launches lunar orbiter

Japan’s first lunar orbiter successfully blasted into space on Friday on the most extensive mission to investigate the moon since the United States’s Apollo programme began nearly four decades ago, officials said. A domestically developed rocket launched with no glitches from a small island in southern Japan.