Monday, September 9, 2024

6 THE STAR NEWS • Monday, September 9, 2024 @JamaicaStar www.facebook.com/JamaicaStar • www.jamaica-star.com Are you one of the “Lucky 60”? We are searching for 60 lucky persons to help us! We have 60 NextGenTV Set Top Boxes to test and you could get one as we seek your help at this pilot stage of the Broadcast Services, Digital Switch Over (DSO) roll out. Complete this survey for us and help us select the “Lucky 60.” All collected data will be kept confidential and will not violate any guidelines set forth by the current Data Protection Act. We respectfully request that you respond honestly. Thank You, To access the survey you can either scan the code or access the link https://forms.office.com/r/JHUB2QpDyp NextGenTV Digital Switch Over (DSO) Set Top Box testers (AP): T hree sisters from Ohio who inherited a dime kept in a bank vault for more than 40 years knew it had some value – but they had no idea just how much until just a few years ago. The extraordinarily rare coin, struck by the US Mint in San Francisco in 1975, could bring more than $500,000 (approximately J$78.3 million), said Ian Russell, president of online auction entity GreatCollections , which specialises in currency, and is handling an auction that will end in October. What makes the dime depicting President Franklin D. Roosevelt so valuable is a missing ‘S’ mint mark for San Francisco, one of just two without the mark known to exist. The other one sold at a 2019 auction for $456,000 and then again months later to a private collector. While serious coin collectors have long known about the existence of these two rare dimes, their whereabouts had remained a mystery since the late 1970s. “They were hidden for decades.” Russell said. “Most major collectors and dealers have never seen one.” The mint in San Francisco made more than 2.8 million special uncirculated ‘proof’ sets in 1975 that featured six coins and were sold for $7. Collectors a few years later discovered that two dimes from the set were missing the mint mark. The sisters from Ohio, who inherited one of those two dimes after the recent death of their brother, want to remain anonymous, given their sudden windfall, Russell said. They shared with Russell that in 1978, their brother and mother bought the first error coin to be discovered for $18,200, which would amount to roughly $90,000 today. Their parents, who operated a dairy farm, saw the coin as a financial safety net. One of the sisters said her brother often talked about the rare coin. But she never saw it first-hand until last year. Russell, whose company is based in Irvine, California, said their brother reached out to him about seven years ago and eventually told him about the coin. He, too, kept the secret. When Russell told one of the sisters just a few years ago about the coin’s potential value, he said she remarked, “Is that really possible?” Sisters inherit rare coin worth big bucks This undated image provided by GreatCollections shows a 1975 proof set dime mistakenly made without the San Francisco Mint’s letter ‘S’ mintmark. AP NEW MEXICO (AP): B oeing’s first astronaut mission ended on Friday night with an empty capsule landing and two test pilots still in space, left behind until next year because NASA judged their return too risky. Six hours after departing the International Space Station, Starliner parachuted into New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, descending on autopilot through the desert darkness. It was an uneventful close to a drama that began with the June launch of Boeing’s long-delayed crew debut and quickly escalated into a dragged-out cliffhanger of a mission stricken by thruster failures and helium leaks. For months, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams’ return was in question as engineers struggled to understand the capsule’s problems. Boeing insisted after extensive testing that Starliner was safe to bring the two home, but NASA disagreed and booked a flight with SpaceX instead. Their SpaceX ride won’t launch until the end of this month, which means they’ll be up there until February — more than eight months after blasting off on what should have been a quick trip. Wilmore and Williams should have flown Starliner back to Earth by mid-June, a week after launching in it. But their ride to the space station was marred by the cascade of thruster trouble and helium loss, and NASA ultimately decided it was too risky to return them on Starliner. So with fresh software updates, the fully automated capsule left with their empty seats and blue spacesuits along with some old station equipment. “She’s on her way home,” Williams radioed as the white and blue-trimmed capsule undocked from the space station 260 miles (420 kilometres) over China and disappeared into the black void. Williams stayed up late to see how everything turned out. Cameras on the space station and a pair of NASA planes caught the capsule as a white streak coming in for the touchdown, which drew cheers. There were some snags during re-entry, including more thruster issues, but Starliner made a “bull’s-eye landing,” said NASA’s commercial crew Programme Manager Steve Stich. Even with the safe return, “I think we made the right decision not to have Butch and Suni on board,” Stich said at a news conference early Saturday. “All of us feel happy about the successful landing. But then there’s a piece of us, all of us, that we wish it would have been the way we had planned it.” Test pilots left in space In this photo provided by NASA, Boeing and NASA teams work around NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test Starliner spacecraft after it landed uncrewed on Friday at White Sands, New Mexico. AP