McDonald’s has blessed March 2 as National Egg McMuffin Day, which is good news for breakfast enthusiasts.

The fast food giant took to Twitter Friday to announce that customers can get a free Egg McMuffin Monday.

“What’s better than breakfast? A FREE Egg McMuffin for breakfast,” the restaurant tweeted.

You can get yours by ordering on the McDonald’s app. It’s free on the App Store and Google Play.

To take advantage, order between 6 a.m. and 10:30 a.m.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today proposed fines of more than $200 million against the nation’s four largest wireless carriers for selling access to their customers’ location information without taking adequate precautions to prevent unauthorized access to that data. While the fines would be among the largest the FCC has ever levied, critics say the penalties don’t go far enough to deter wireless carriers from continuing to sell customer location data.

The FCC proposed fining T-Mobile $91 million; AT&T faces more than $57 million in fines; Verizon is looking at more than $48 million in penalties; and the FCC said Sprint should pay more than $12 million.

An FCC statement (PDF) said “the size of the proposed fines for the four wireless carriers differs based on the length of time each carrier apparently continued to sell access to its customer location information without reasonable safeguards and the number of entities to which each carrier continued to sell such access.”

The fines are only “proposed” at this point because the carriers still have an opportunity to respond to the commission and contest the figures. The Wall Street Journal first reported earlier this week that the FCC was considering the fines.

The commission said it took action in response to a May 2018 story broken by The New York Times, which exposed how a company called Securus Technologies had been selling location data on customers of virtually any major mobile provider to law enforcement officials.

That same month, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that LocationSmart — a data aggregation firm working with the major wireless carriers — had a free, unsecured demo of its service online that anyone could abuse to find the near-exact location of virtually any mobile phone in North America.

In response, the carriers promised to “wind down” location data sharing agreements with third-party companies. But in 2019, Joseph Cox at Vice.com showed that little had changed, detailing how he was able to locate a test phone after paying $300 to a bounty hunter who simply bought the data through a little-known third-party service.

Gigi Sohn is a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy and a former senior adviser to former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler in 2015. Sohn said this debacle underscores the importance of having strong consumer privacy protections.

“The importance of having rules that protect consumers before they are harmed cannot be overstated,” Sohn said. “In 2016, the Wheeler FCC adopted rules that would have prevented most mobile phone users from suffering this gross violation of privacy and security. But [FCC] Chairman Pai and his friends in Congress eliminated those rules, because allegedly the burden on mobile wireless providers and their fixed broadband brethren would be too great. Clearly, they did not think for one minute about the harm that could befall consumers in the absence of strong privacy protections.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime critic of the FCC’s inaction on wireless location data sharing, likewise called for more stringent consumer privacy laws, calling the proposed punishment “comically inadequate fines that won’t stop phone companies from abusing Americans’ privacy the next time they can make a quick buck.”

“Time and again, from Facebook to Equifax, massive companies take reckless disregard for Americans’ personal information, knowing they can write off comparatively tiny fines as the cost of doing business,” Wyden said in a written statement. “The only way to truly protect Americans’ personal information is to pass strong privacy legislation like my Mind Your Own Business Act [PDF] to put teeth into privacy laws and hold CEOs personally responsible for lying about protecting Americans’ privacy.”

Mother Nature has interfered again with a potentially prize-winning launch.

Spaceflight startup Astra had aimed to launch its first-ever orbital mission today (Feb. 29), from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Alaska’s Kodiak Island. But bad weather — specifically, strong winds and thick clouds — has pushed the attempt back at least another day.

The liftoff is part of the $12 million DARPA Launch Challenge, which seeks to spur the development of private American rockets that can carry small military satellites to orbit cheaply and on short turnarounds. (DARPA is short for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.)

If Astra’s first flight, which is carrying four small payloads, succeeds, the company will get $2 million. Acing a second launch in short order, from a different pad at the Kodiak complex, will bring in an additional $10 million.

The contest rules give Astra 14 days to launch mission number one, as counted from the opening of a DARPA-declared window on Feb. 17. Today was day number 13, which means that tomorrow (March 1) could technically be Astra’s last chance to get off the ground.

But DARPA may give Astra a fair bit of extra time to compensate for the weather, which has not cooperated much of the time. Just four of the 13 days to date have been “green” from a weather perspective, meaning environmental conditions presented no problems, Todd Master, the DARPA program manager for the competition, said during a webcast update today. The other days were either marginal or “red” — a trend that’s likely to continue tomorrow (March 1).

“Tomorrow’s looking like a red day,” Master said. “We’re going to get through today’s operation, see how that goes, and then assess from there.”

The operation he referred to was a portion of the regular launch-day countdown work with Astra’s 38-foot-tall (11.6 meters) Rocket 3.0, which the mission team wants to perform to iron out some kinks identified during a “wet dress rehearsal” yesterday (Feb. 28).

The competition rules call for Astra to get mission number two up by March 18. But that date also assumes no weather-delay compensation.

The DARPA Launch Challenge was announced in 2018, and 18 companies initially expressed interest in competing, Master has said. Three advanced to become “full participants” — Astra, Virgin Orbit and Vector Launch. But Virgin Orbit and Vector Launch dropped out, leaving California-based Astra as the sole competitor.

Astra was founded in 2016 but stayed in stealth mode until earlier this month. The Bay Area company attempted two suborbital test missions in 2018 but has not yet launched an orbital flight.

The program manager in charge of Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule program said Friday that additional checks would have uncovered problems with the spaceship’s software that plagued the craft’s first unpiloted orbital test flight in December, but he pushed back against suggestions that Boeing engineers took shortcuts during ground testing.

Boeing missed a pair of software errors during the Starliner’s Orbital Flight Test. One prevented the spacecraft from docking with the International Space Station, and the other could have resulted in catastrophic damage to the capsule during its return to Earth.

Both errors could have been caught before launch if Boeing had performed more thorough software testing on the ground, according to John Mulholland, vice president and manager of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner program.

Mulholland said Boeing engineers performed testing of Starliner’s software in chunks, with each test focused on a specific segment of the mission. Boeing did not perform an end-to-end test of the entire software suite, and in some cases used stand-ins, or emulators, for flight computers.

“We are recommitting ourselves to the discipline needed to test and qualify our products,” Mulholland said Friday in a conference call with reporters. “The Boeing team is committed to the success of the Starliner program, and we are putting in the time and the resources to move forward.”

The Orbital Flight Test, or OFT, in December was intended to demonstrate the Starliner’s performance in space for the first time ahead of the capsule’s first flight with astronauts this year. The issues that plagued the OFT mission might force Boeing and NASA to plan a second unpiloted test flight before moving on to a crewed mission.

Officials have not decided whether another automated test flight might be required, or said when the Starliner might fly in space again.

Boeing developed the Starliner spacecraft under contract to NASA, which is seeking to end its sole reliance on Russian Soyuz crew capsules to ferry astronauts to and from the space station. NASA awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion contract and SpaceX received a $2.6 billion deal in 2014 to complete development of the Starliner and Crew Dragon spaceships.

The Crew Dragon completed a successful unpiloted test flight to the space station in March 2019, and then demonstrated the capsule’s in-flight launch abort capability in January. Final preparations are underway for the first Crew Dragon flight with astronauts on-board, which could take off as soon as May.

After the OFT mission exposed inadequate testing, Boeing’s engineers are examining every line of Starliner software to ensure teams did not miss any other errors that went undetected during the spacecraft’s December test flight.

“Hindsight uncovered a couple of the issues, but I really don’t want you or anyone to have the impression that this team tried to take shortcuts,” Mulholland said. “They didn’t. They did an abundance of testing, and in certain areas, obviously, we have gaps to go fill. But this is an incredibly talented and strong team.”

One of the software problems was immediately apparent after the Starliner’s otherwise successful ascent into space Dec. 20 from Cape Canaveral aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. A mission elapsed timer on the capsule had a wrong setting, causing the spacecraft to miss a planned engine firing soon after separating from the Atlas 5’s Centaur upper stage.

The orbit insertion burn was required to inject the Starliner capsule into a stable orbit and begin its pursuit of the space station. After the automated sequence failed due to the on-board timer setting, ground controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston had to uplink manual commands for the Starliner spacecraft to perform the orbit insertion burn, but the ship burned too much fuel during the process, leaving insufficient propellant to rendezvous and dock with the space station.

Ground teams in Houston also encountered trouble establishing a stable communications link with the Starliner when they attempted to send commands for the orbit insertion burn, further delaying the start of the maneuver. Boeing says ground teams had issues connecting with the spacecraft on more than 30 additional occasions during the Starliner’s two-day test flight.

With a docking to the space station no longer possible, mission managers cut short the Starliner test flight and targeted a landing of the capsule at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, on Dec. 22.

After the mission timer problem, Boeing engineers reviewed other segments of the Starliner’s software code to search for other problem areas. They uncovered another software error that was missed in pre-flight testing, which could have caused the Starliner’s service module to slam into the craft’s crew module after the ship’s two elements separated just before re-entry into the atmosphere.

Controllers sent a software patch to the Starliner spacecraft to resolve the potential problem before it performed a deorbit burn to aim for landing in New Mexico.

Mulholland said Friday that more extensive testing before the Starliner test flight would have revealed the software errors.

Engineers traced the mission elapsed time problem to a coding error that caused the Starliner spacecraft retrieve the wrong time from the Atlas 5 rocket’s flight control system. The Starliner set its internal clocks based on a time captured from the Atlas 5’s computer hours before launch, when it should have retrieved the time from the launch vehicle in the terminal countdown.

Joint software simulations between Boeing and ULA focused only on the launch sequence, when the Starliner spacecraft is attached to the Atlas 5 rocket. The simulations ended at the time of the capsule’s deployment from the launcher, but testing would have revealed the timing error if the simulations continued through the time of the orbit insertion burn, which was scheduled to occur around a half-hour after liftoff.

“If we had run that integrated test for a number of minutes longer, it would have uncovered the issue,” Mulholland said.

“I think the sensitivity of this mission elapsed time was not recognized by the team and wasn’t believed to be an important aspect of the mission, so ideally we would have run that (software test) through at least … the first orbital insertion burn,” Mulholland said. “So from a hindsight standpoint, I think it’s very easy to see what we should have done because we uncovered an error.

“If we would have run the integrated test with ULA through the first orbital insertion burn timeframe, we would have seen that we would have missed the orbital insertion burn because the timing was corrupt,” he said. “When we got to that point in time, the software believed that the burn had happened many hours before, so it didn’t do the burn.”

Mulholland said Boeing teams thought it was more logical to break the Starliner mission phases into pieces, and run software testing on each segment of the flight.

“When you do a single run from launch to docking, that’s a 25-plus-hour single run in the computer,” he said.

“The team, at the time, decided that they would have multiple tests of different chunks of the mission,” Mulholland said. “It was not a matter at all of the team consciously shortcutting, or not doing what they believed was appropriate.”

Before every future Starliner mission, Boeing will run longer tests in software integration labs encompassing all events from launch through docking with the space station, then from undocking through landing, according to Mulholland.

Mulholland said more thorough testing could have also revealed the mis-configured software needed to safely jettison the Starliner’s service module before re-entry. Without a software patch, the service module, or propulsion element, could have rammed back into the crew module after separation, damaging the ship’s heat shield, or worse.

A propulsion controller is responsible for coordinating thruster burns on the service module to ensure it does not recontact the crew module after separation, which occurs after the Starliner’s deorbit burn and before re-entry.

The service module is designed to burn up in the atmosphere, while the reusable crew module descends back to Earth protected by a heat shield.

The propulsion controller on the Starliner service module is based on a design used by another program, and its software was improperly configured for the service module’s disposal burn after separating from the crew module, Mulholland said. The propulsion controller had a wrong “jet map,” which contains information about the service module’s thrusters and valves.

The Starliner uses two different jet maps: One when the entire spacecraft is connected — when the crew module computers command thruster firings — and another for the disposal burn after the service module is jettisoned.

“The only thing that was picked up was the one jet map for the integrated spacecraft, and we missed the jet map that was required for the service after separation,” Mulholland said.

He said software testing for the propulsion controller used an emulator, or a simulated component, rather than the actual controller intended to fly on the Starliner spacecraft. When Boeing ran the software simulation, the real propulsion controller was being used for test-firings of the service module thrusters in New Mexico.

“While that propulsion controller was outside supporting that other test was when they ran the qualification test of that section of the software, and because we had an incorrect emulator (and) it didn’t have the correct jet mapping, that issue was not uncovered during the qualification test,” Mulholland said. “Because that hardware was returned to the lab, we were able to, during the mission, re-run that sequence, identify the jet mapping issue and upload the software fix before we did the re-entry burn.”

One of many improvements Boeing says it is implementing is a requirement to ensure the proper hardware, avionics boxes and other components are included in future software tests.

“So if it is important to have a specific piece of avionics in the lab, we’ll be required to have that in there before we actually run the qualification test,” Mulholland said.

Another problem encountered during the Starliner test flight involved the ship’s communications link with NASA’s network of Tracking and Data Relay Satellites.

The spacecraft had trouble locking onto the TDRS network 37 times during the two-day test flight in December, according to Mulholland. Boeing engineers have identified the cause of one of the communications interruptions, which was caused by an explainable “false lock” condition, Mulholland said.

The other 36 instances of an unexpected communications outage all occurred over northern Europe and Russia, including on the Starliner’s first pass over the region minutes after launching from Florida. That’s when ground teams had trouble sending a command for the spacecraft to perform an orbit insertion burn after the mission elapsed timing error.

An independent review team chartered to investigate the problems that cropped up on the Starliner test flight is nearing the end of its inquiry. The results of the investigation will be announced next Friday, March 6.

But Mulholland said engineers are still looking into the communications issues, and a final verdict on the cause of the radio link interruptions is not expected next week.

Despite the problems in flight, the Starliner spacecraft safely returned to Earth and post-landing inspections show it can be flown again, Boeing says.

The ship’s heat shield and parachutes performed well, as did the Starliner’s life support systems, Mulholland said. Boeing was also able to test the functionality of the capsule’s docking system, but teams were unable to fully check the performance of the Starliner’s rendezvous and navigation sensors because the spacecraft did not dock with the space station.

Boeing technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida are readying a second Starliner vehicle for the next test flight, whether it is a redo of the unpiloted OFT mission, or the first test flight with astronauts on-board.

TUCSON, AZ — Tucson astronomers have discovered a possible “mini-moon” orbiting Earth!

On February 15, Astronomers Kacper Wierzchos and Theodore Pruyne noticed and started to track an asteroid that is caught in Earth’s orbit, and has been orbiting our planet for an estimated two to three years.

“These events are really rare,” said Wierzchos, and astronomer at Cataline Sky Survey in Tucson. “This is maybe the second, maybe the third asteroid out of one million known that has entered the orbit of Earth.”

Wierzchos said there is still a possibility that the “mini-moon” is a man-made object, but all signs point to the fact that this is a natural object. The “mini-moon” is considered small and is often compared to the size of a car.

“We probably capture and lose these tiny little things all the time,” said Patrick Young, Associate professor of Astrophysics at Arizona State University. “The fact that we manage to see such a tiny thing is pretty impressive.”

The “mini-moon” will only be around for a little while longer. Wierzchos said its trajectory will shoot it back out into space next month.

The U.S. Senate today voted unanimously to pass the Secure and Trusted Telecommunications Networks Act. Written as a response to recent concerns around Chinese hardware manufacturers, the bill would ban purchase of telecom equipment from embattled Chinese manufactures like Huawei and ZTE.

H.R. 4998, which passed the House last December, would also include $1 billion in funding to help smaller rural telecoms “rip and replace” existing equipment from specific manufacturers. The bill still needs to be signed off by Trump in order to become a law, though Politico notes that the administration has already acknowledged support for the funding, which would be managed by the FCC.

“Telecommunications equipment from certain foreign adversaries poses a significant threat to our national security, economic prosperity, and the future of U.S. leadership in advanced wireless technology,” Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said of the bipartisan bill in a statement. “By establishing a ‘rip and replace’ program, this legislation will provide meaningful safeguards for our communications networks and more secure connections for Americans. I thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for coming together to help move this bill to the President’s desk.”

Huawei in particular has been the focus of U.S. concern over alleged ties to the Chinese government for a number of years. The Trump administration has targeted the company over spying concerns — charges Huawei has long staunchly denied. Last May, the company was added to an entity list, effectively barring U.S. companies from conducting business with the hardware giant.

When Amazon launched a funky membership program called Amazon Prime in 2005, Walmart boasted larger profits than Amazon had revenue. Fifteen years later, though, Prime is the key reason for Amazon’s dominance over Walmart in online sales.

That pressure has pushed the traditional retailer to burn tens of billions of dollars to fight back while its executives have cycled through various stages of reaction to Prime’s ascent: denial, followed by meek competition, followed by a reversal that seemed to signal Walmart wanted to stick to a free, no-membership strategy.

But Recode has learned that over the past 18 months, the world’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer has explored creating its own paid membership program that would include perks that Amazon can’t replicate, in part to avoid a direct comparison to Prime. Amazon now accounts for nearly 40 percent of all online retail sales in the US, according to eMarketer, and Prime is a huge reason why. Walmart is a distant No. 2 with only a little more than 5 percent of the US e-commerce market.

As soon as next month, Walmart plans to start publicly testing a membership program called Walmart+, according to sources. The program is expected to essentially launch as a rebrand of Walmart’s existing Delivery Unlimited service, which charges customers $98 a year for unlimited, same-day delivery of fresh groceries from one of the 1,600-plus Walmart stores in the US where the program is available. The company is also considering launching Walmart+ with a feature that would allow customers to use text messaging to place orders. Sources said that the amount of the Walmart+ fee could still change or the company might test multiple price points.

But the long-term vision for Walmart+ is for the program to add more perks, which could include discounts on prescription drugs at Walmart pharmacies and fuel at Walmart gas stations, as well as a Scan & Go service that would allow shoppers to check out in Walmart stores without waiting in line — a tool Walmart briefly tested but discontinued nearly two years ago.

Still, no additional perks beyond grocery delivery are set in stone, which has led some insiders to worry that the pressure to simply act might be supplanting a strong rollout plan and business case, according to sources. It’s unlikely that a $98 annual program built exclusively around grocery delivery would be enough to successfully compete with Amazon Prime. Those overseeing the program, however, believe that testing different perks and learning from those tests will benefit both customers and the business in the long term.

A Walmart spokesperson confirmed that a membership program called Walmart+ was in development but declined to provide other details.

The reality Walmart is facing is that Prime, which boasts more than 150 million members worldwide, has become a retail wrecking ball that’s impossible for competitors to ignore, even if they’re hard-pressed to truly compete with all it offers. Prime costs $119 a year in the US, and it comes with unlimited one-day shipping on more than 10 million products, same-day grocery deliveries from Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh, access to a large catalog of TV shows and movies available for online streaming, and more. Prime customers spend more and shop more frequently than Amazon’s non-Prime shoppers.

Even with its huge lead over all US competitors, Amazon isn’t satisfied, pushing into prescription drugs in 2018 with the acquisition of the online pharmacy PillPack, and developing multiple grocery store concepts beyond Whole Foods. Earlier this week, Amazon opened a new, high-tech supermarket that allows shoppers to pluck fresh foods like fruits, vegetables, and meat off of shelves, walk right out, and get automatically charged for the merchandise afterward.

In recent years, Amazon has also made moves for Prime to appeal to households with less disposable income that historically have favored shopping at Walmart. Amazon added a monthly payment option for Prime fees in 2016, a 45 percent Prime fee discount for those on government assistance in 2017, and ways for Prime customers to pay for orders with cash. Today, more than half of Walmart’s top-spending families are Amazon Prime members, according to sources. While Walmart’s overall grocery business is larger than Amazon’s, one fear is that top Walmart customers could eventually turn to Amazon for groceries as they get sucked further into the Prime suite of perks.

This state of affairs, in which even an industry titan like Walmart has struggled to combat Amazon’s e-commerce offensive, highlights the power Amazon has amassed that has made it a target of a broader congressional investigation of Big Tech and a separate probe by the Federal Trade Commission. Recode reported last year that the FTC was exploring the question of whether Prime’s bundling of various features allows Amazon to unfairly undercut competitive services.

At Walmart, the Walmart+ initiative is a top priority for Janey Whiteside, the company’s chief customer officer who joined from American Express in 2018, according to sources. Other top Walmart leaders, including CEO Doug McMillon, have played an active role in planning. The goal for the program is to eventually save Walmart customers both time and money, and presumably to encourage them to keep spending heavily with the brick-and-mortar giant. Executives believe the program needs to strike a balance of being valuable enough that customers will pay for it, while different enough from Amazon Prime that it doesn’t promote a direct comparison that would likely be impossible for Walmart to win.

Perks like prescription drug and fuel discounts could provide an edge, since they are frequent purchases and Amazon doesn’t own gas stations or its own brick-and-mortar pharmacies. (Amazon does own the online pharmacy PillPack, though its current target customer is someone who regularly takes multiple medications versus one-off patients.) The Walmart+ rollout also comes with a belief that top-spending Walmart families that subscribe to Amazon Prime will still be attracted to Walmart+ because its fresh grocery prices are often lower than those Amazon offers.

In the past, some Walmart executives have opposed a paid membership program, seeing Walmart’s competitive advantage as giving shoppers everyday low prices without the need to splurge on a membership fee. Some feared a program would look tame in comparison to Prime, which had a decade head start.

One of the first big moves Marc Lore made as US e-commerce chief following Walmart’s acquisition of his startup Jet.com in late 2016, was to ax a new Walmart membership that offered unlimited two-day shipping on a much smaller selection of goods than Amazon Prime’s catalog, but at half the price. Lore said at the time that two-day shipping had become “table stakes” — a consumer expectation single-handedly created by Amazon Prime.

Last year, Walmart followed up Amazon’s announcement that Prime would soon offer 10 million products for one-day delivery with a free, one-day delivery promise of its own for orders of $35 or more — no membership fee required. But Walmart’s one-day selection is about 1/50th of the size of Amazon’s.

Over the past few years, Walmart has also worked to build on its huge grocery business, which accounts for more than half of its store sales. The company is the US grocery leader when it comes to an order-online, pickup-at-store service, which is still the main driver of Walmart’s e-commerce growth. But last year Walmart also unveiled the $98-a-year Grocery Unlimited service that’s being rebranded as Walmart+, as Amazon ramped up its own grocery delivery services, and other competitors like Instacart and Shipt helped make the behavior more popular.

Same-day grocery delivery, however, is expensive. Grocery store profit margins are traditionally small to begin with, before even paying for the labor to pick orders and then deliver them. Walmart executives have said that having workers pick both grocery delivery and pickup orders from stores close to customers helps keep costs down. Walmart has also started testing robots that can pick out groceries, which it hopes will someday improve the economics even more.

In a best-case scenario, Walmart executives hope Walmart+ will lead customers to pay for more products and services with better profit margins, potentially helping to bring down losses in Walmart’s e-commerce business — a stress point that previously caused friction between leaders in Walmart’s store business and e-commerce business. Walmart executives said at a recent investor event that US e-commerce losses will be flat or slightly down from last year’s numbers.

From the time Walmart spent $3 billion to acquire Jet.com in 2016, executives have stressed both internally and externally that the traditional retailer has built-in advantages over Amazon. Walmart+ is the time to prove it.

A celestial phenomenon is set to occur between Venus and the moon Thursday night, according to NASA’s calendar.

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and you’ve got a clear sky Thursday, look to the southwest and you’ll see a very bright Venus alongside a crescent moon, together two of the brightest objects in the night sky.

Why Venus is so bright

Venus, also known as the “evening star,” is the third brightest object in the sky after the sun and the moon.The planet is as bright as it is because of a characteristic called “albedo,” which astronomers use to describe how bright a planet is by specific measurements, according to EarthSky, a website by scientists providing updates on events of the cosmos. When sunlight hits a planet, some of the light is absorbed by the planet’s surface or atmosphere, and some is reflected.

Albedo is a comparison between the sunlight that strikes an object and how much of it is reflected. The albedo of Venus is close to .7, meaning its thick cloud covering reflects about 70% of the light striking it back into space. Venus is also the Earth’s closest neighbor in the solar system as it’s the planet next-inward from Earth in the orbit around the sun.

Why we’ll see a crescent moon

The moon takes 29.5 days to orbit the Earth. The waxing crescent moon we’ll see Thursday night comes after the new moon we just saw on Sunday, February 23 — meaning the visible side of the moon was between the Earth and the Sun, so we couldn’t see it.

But as the moon moves away from that position on its journey around the Earth, we’re gradually able to see the side of the moon illuminated by the sun — a waxing crescent moon visible in the western sky for a few days while on its way to becoming full again.

Why they’re meeting and how you can see it

We’re currently in the middle of an “evening apparition” of Venus, which is the period of time during which the planet climbs higher in the sky until it reaches its greatest separation from the sun.When a planet is at its greatest elongation is when it appears farthest from the sun as seen from Earth, so its appearance is also best at that point. Venus is expected to reach its maximum elongation for the year in the east of the evening sky by March 24, 2020, according to EarthSky. On this night, Venus will stay out for a maximum amount of time after sunset.

The planets and the moon follow roughly the same path through the sky, which is called the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the plane of the solar system on which all the planets orbit the sun, and the moon travels nearby. The moon and planets occasionally appear to pass closely by each other in the night sky.

In reality, Venus will actually be about 84 million miles from Earth on February 27, while the moon is nearly 250,000 miles away. But our Earthly perspective will still make for a seemingly close sighting.

As long as the weather is clear, those who live in the Northern hemisphere can see the meeting between the crescent moon and Venus by heading outdoors after sunset and looking to the southwest horizon. Below the constellation Aries, you should see the crescent moon below and to the side of Venus.

If you miss it tonight, you won’t have to wait long before a similar phenomenon occurs in the last days of March.

Amazon wants to kill the supermarket checkout line.

The online retailing giant is opening its first cashier-less supermarket, where shoppers can grab milk or eggs and walk out without waiting in line or ever opening their wallets. It’s the latest sign that Amazon AMZN, -0.70% is serious about shaking up the $800 billion grocery industry.

At the new store, which opened Tuesday in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, shoppers scan a smartphone app to enter the store. Cameras and sensors track what’s taken off shelves. Items are charged to an Amazon account after leaving.

“I love the convenience of literally grabbing and going” said Art Kuniyuki, a payroll and benefits manager from Seattle, who spent $15 on Barilla pasta, Dove chocolate and other groceries shortly after the store opened.

Called Amazon Go Grocery, the new store is an expansion of its two-year-old chain of 25 Amazon Go convenience stores. It’s 10,400 square feet — more than five times the size of the convenience stores — and stocks much more beyond the sodas and sandwiches found at Amazon Go.

Cameron Janes, who helps oversee Amazon’s physical stores, said the technology had to be tweaked to account for how people squeeze tomatoes to test for ripeness or rummage through avocados to find just the right one. Nothing at the store is weighed. One blood orange goes for 53 cents; a banana is 19 cents.

Amazon is not new to groceries. It made a splash in 2017 when it bought Whole Foods and its 500 stores. It’s also been expanding its online grocery delivery service. But it’s still far behind rival Walmart WMT, -0.34% , the nation’s largest grocer, which has more than 4,700 stores. Walmart’s online grocery service has also been popular with customers, who buy online and then drive to a store to pick up their order.

Amazon also plans to open another type of grocery store in Los Angeles sometime this year, but the company said it won’t use the cashier-less technology at that location and has kept other details under wraps. The company declined to say if it plans to open more Amazon Go Grocery stores, and said there are no plans to bring the technology to Whole Foods stores.

Much of the fruits and vegetables come from the same suppliers at Whole Foods, Janes said. And it has products from the Whole Foods store brand 365, such as organic oatmeal and bagged baby carrots. But it also sells Oreos, Cheez-Its and other stuff banned from the natural grocer.

Families can shop together with just one phone scanning everyone in. Anything they grab and leave the store with will be added to the tab of the person who signed them in. But shoppers shouldn’t help out a stranger reaching for the top shelf: Amazon warns that grabbing an item for someone else means you’ll be charged for it if they walk out with it.

Hoping to catch up to Amazon, other retailers and startups are racing to bring similar cashier-less technology to stores. Earlier this month, 7-Eleven said it is testing a cashier-less store for employees inside its offices in Irving, Texas.

But cashier-less stores have come under scrutiny from lawmakers and advocates who say they discriminate against low-income people who may not have a credit card or bank account. Amazon has since let customers pay with cash at its convenience stores, and the company said shoppers can do the same at the grocery store by alerting a worker to let them in through the turnstile.

The stores also eliminates the job of cashiers. Janes declined to say exactly how many people the store employs, only saying it is “several dozen.” Workers greet customers and walk around aisles restocking shelves. One employee stands by the alcohol section to check IDs of shoppers who want wine or beer.

While cashier-less stores remove the annoyance of waiting in line to pay, it also kills some joys of the supermarket. There’s no one to bag groceries. Instead, Amazon gives out reusable bags so shoppers can fill them as they shop. And there’s no deli counter, butcher or fishmonger. Instead, sliced ham, steaks and salmon fillets are already packaged and found in refrigerated shelves.

“Just walk out technology is kind of cool, in theory,” said David Bishop, a partner at retail consultancy Brick Meets Click, but he said shoppers decide where to shop based on other factors besides how quickly they can get in and out of the store.

Bishop said those who want thinly sliced ham may skip Amazon Go Grocery and walk two blocks away to the Kroger KR, -1.98% -owned QFC supermarket, which is about five times the size.

Still, Bishop said, it’s hard for the grocery industry to ignore Amazon, which has the cash and technology to experiment with groceries. “They’re not giving up,” he said of Amazon.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been given the green light to move into the Port of Los Angeles.

The L.A. City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to approve a lease agreement for the companty to occupy a currently vacant terminal. The site will allow SpaceX to research, design and manufacture spacecrafts with the goal of sending people to Mars.

“This is an exciting item, colleagues,” councilmember Joe Buscaino, in whose district the company will be located, said at Tuesday’s meeting. “It’s crazy that here we are in 2020, preparing ourselves to send people to Mars and it’s going to happen in our own backyard.”

SpaceX will pay $1.7 million annually for 10 years to rent the space, and the lease includes two 10-year options to renew.

Buscaino noted that SpaceX will compliment a recently approved investment in the San Pedro Public Market.