HN user
According to the article, the Phoenix has a reversible hydrogen fuel cell on board. Just a guess, but maybe it's filled with helium on the ground (for safety purposes),then generates hydrogen (from electricity and water) once aloft to replace any lost helium?
About #2 - I think the 'new' part they're touting here is no longer needing to ensure the telescope knows exactly where north and the horizon are. In other words, given a known location from GPS and some images of stars from the builtin camera, it'd be possible to calculate in which direction (az/el) the telescope was pointing. Is there a general term to describe this sort of thing?
For a great summary, see: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...
This situation sounds similar to what happened with AO-7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMSAT-OSCAR_7
Satellite is launched, goes silent after a few years due to electrical problems. Decades later, the onboard batteries have deteriorated such that they're just a short (no storage capacity), and the satellite works intermittently when the solar panels are exposed to enough sunlight.
That's the problem - science already memory-holes results that don't fit the authors' view of reality.
A single study with n=80, in a social psych journal, with a trendy soundbite conclusion? Of course it's not a false positive! The fact that the authors cite a paper by Jens Foerster is icing on the cake.
See reproducibility project (Nosek et al)... don't waste time reading psych research. Aside from that, 'consciousness' is a term they won't ever use - too hard to define...