All posts by Naomi Smith

Naomi is a UK-based Journalist, writer and online content creator with around six years experience. She has a master's degree in investigative journalism and experience working as a beat reporter, primarily covering aviation law, regulation and politics. She has written for online publications on a variety of topics, including politics, gaming and film.
Tech

NASA Announces New Tipping Point Partnerships for Moon and Mars Technologies

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The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on 27 September that is had selected fourteen American companies as  partners whose technologies will help enable the agency’s “Moon to Mars exploration approach”.

The selections are based on NASA’s fourth Tipping Point competition, and have a combined total award value of around US$43.2 million.

They address a multitude of areas, including cryogenic propellant production and management, sustainable energy generation, storage and distribution, efficient and affordable propulsion systems, autonomous operations, rover mobility, and advanced avionics.

“These promising technologies are at a ‘tipping point’ in their development, meaning NASA’s investment is likely the extra push a company needs to significantly mature a capability,” Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), said in a statement.

“These are important technologies necessary for sustained exploration of the Moon and Mars. As the agency focuses on landing astronauts on the Moon by 2024 with the Artemis program, we continue to prepare for the next phase of lunar exploration that feeds forward to Mars,” he added.

STMD will make milestone payments over a performance period of up to 36 months through firm-fixed price contracts. Each industry partner is required to contribute a minimum percent, based on the company’s size, of the total cost for each project.

The selected proposals, organized by technology area, are: 

Cryogenic Propellant Production and Management 

•   Blue Origin LLC of Kent, Washington, $10 million

A ground demonstration of hydrogen and oxygen liquefaction and storage, representing rocket and spacecraft propellant that could be produced on the Moon. The demonstration could help inform a large-scale propellant production plant suitable for the lunar surface.

•   OxEon Energy LLC of North Salt Lake, Utah, $1.8 million

OxEon Energy will work with the Colorado School of Mines to integrate an electrolysis technology to process ice and separate the hydrogen and oxygen. The molecules could then be cooled to produce fuel for cislunar transport. This technology could provide a flexible and scalable solution for future in-situ resource utilization operations on the Moon.

•   Skyre Inc. of East Hartford, Connecticut, $2.6 million

Skyre, also known as Sustainable Innovations, along with partner Meta Vista USA LLC, will develop a system to make propellant from permanently frozen water located at the Moon’s poles, including processes to separate the hydrogen and oxygen, keep the product extremely cold and use hydrogen as a refrigerant to liquefy oxygen.

•   SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, $3 million

SpaceX will collaborate with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to develop and test coupler prototypes – or nozzles – for refueling spacecraft such as the company’s Starship vehicle. A cryogenic fluid coupler for large-scale in-space propellant transfer is an important technology to aid sustained exploration efforts on the Moon and Mars.

Sustainable Energy Generation, Storage and Distribution

•   Infinity Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Inc. of Windsor, Connecticut, $4 million

The company will collaborate with NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to develop a scalable, modular and flexible power and energy product that utilizes new manufacturing methods to reduce cost and improve reliability. The technology could be used for lunar rovers, surface equipment and habitats.

•   Paragon Space Development Corporation of Houston, $2 million

Paragon Space Development Corporation will work with Johnson and NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland to develop an environmental control and life support system as well as a thermal control system for lunar missions that maintain acceptable operating temperatures throughout the Moon’s day and night cycle. The design of these systems could be adapted for crewed missions to Mars.

•   TallannQuest LLC of Sachse, Texas, $2 million

Working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the company, also known as Apogee Semiconductor, will develop a flexible, radiation-hardened switching power controller capable of being configured based on a mission’s power needs. This technology could be used for missions to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa, and other destinations.

Efficient and Affordable Propulsion Systems

•   Accion Systems Inc. of Boston, $3.9 million

The first interplanetary CubeSats, NASA’s MarCO-A and B, used a set of cold gas thrusters for attitude control and course corrections during their cruise to Mars, alongside the Mars InSight lander. Accion and JPL will partner to mature a propulsion system to demonstrate the same capabilities as those required for the MarCO mission, but with a smaller and lighter system that uses less power. The propulsion system could enable more science opportunities with these small, flexible platforms.

•   CU Aerospace LLC of Champaign, Illinois, $1.7 million

CU Aerospace, NearSpace Launch and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will build and test a 6-unit CubeSat equipped with two different propulsion systems. These systems were developed with NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding and offer high performance, low cost and safe pre-launch processing. The company plans to deliver the flight-ready CubeSat to NanoRacks for launch and deployment.

•   ExoTerra Resource LLC of Littleton, Colorado, $2 million

ExoTerra will build, test and launch a 12-unit CubeSat with a compact, high impulse solar electric propulsion module. Once flight-ready, the system will be demonstrated in-space as the CubeSat moves from low-Earth orbit to the radiation belts surrounding Earth. This small electric propulsion system could open up the inner solar system for targeted science exploration missions, using affordable spacecraft that range from 44 to 440 pounds.

Autonomous Operations

•   Blue Canyon Technologies Inc. of Boulder, Colorado, $4.9 million

As access to space increases, so does the need for ground resources, such as tracking stations. With an in-space demonstration, Blue Canyon Technologies will mature an autonomous navigation software solution for SmallSats and CubeSats so they can traverse space without “talking” to Earth.

Rover Mobility

•   Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, $2 million

Astrobotic and Carnegie Mellon University will work with JPL and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to develop small rover “scouts” that can host payloads and interface with multiple large landers. This project received previous NASA funding through SBIR awards. The new partnership will develop more mature payload interfaces and increase rover capabilities.

Advanced Avionics

•   Intuitive Machines LLC of Houston, $1.3 million

Development of a spacecraft vision processing computer and software to reduce the cost and schedule required for deploying optical, or laser, navigation capabilities on government and commercial missions.

•   Luna Innovations of Blacksburg, Virginia, $2 million

Luna Innovations is partnering with Sierra Nevada Corporation, ILC Dover and Johnson to prove the viability of sensors that monitor the structural health and safety of inflatable space habitats located in orbit or on the surface of other worlds.

Gadgets

NASA has chosen three mission proposals to study space weather

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The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on 3 September it has chosen three proposals for concept studies of missions that could “help us better understand the dynamic space weather system driven by the Sun that manifests near Earth”.

The proposals will look at what “drives” different part of the system, and could ultimately help to predict and mitigate its effects on spacecraft and astronauts as NASA’s Artemis program looks to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon by 2024.

Each of these Heliophysics Mission of Opportunity proposals will receive US$400,000 to conduct a nine-month mission concept study. After the study period, NASA will choose one proposal to go forward to launch. Each potential mission has a separate launch opportunity and time frame.

The proposals were selected based on potential science value and feasibility of development plans. The total cost for the mission ultimately chosen will be capped at US$55 million and is funded by NASA’s Heliophysics Explorers’ program.

“NASA’s research to understand the space we travel through relies on exploring key details about a vast system from the Sun, to Earth, to the edges of the solar system,” Peg Luce, deputy director for heliophysics in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, said in a statement.

“Each of these proposals could add a significant tool from a unique vantage point to help us understand that system,” she added.

The selected proposals are:

Extreme Ultraviolet High-Throughput Spectroscopic Telescope (EUVST) Epsilon Mission

EUVST would aim to provide an answer to a fundamental question in solar physics: How does the interplay of solar material – a hot plasma – and magnetic fields drive solar activity and eruptions, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections?

The mission would launch with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Solar-C mission, planned for 2025. EUVST would observe simultaneously, for the first time and over a wide range of the lower solar atmosphere, how magnetic fields and plasma interact.

Those observations could help us learn more about how the two systems contribute to the dynamic atmosphere around the Sun. The principal investigator for EUVST is Clarence Korendyke at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

Aeronomy at Earth: Tools for Heliophysics Exploration and Research (AETHER)

AETHER would explore the ionosphere-thermosphere system and its response to geomagnetic storms. From a position aboard the International Space Station, it could gather observations of the ionosphere – the area of our atmosphere that overlaps with the lower regions of space.

These observations would be complemented by ground observations of electrons in the same region. The mission would provide information on how the neutral, terrestrial-weather-driven thermosphere interacts with the ionosphere’s charged particles.

Understanding how the neutral atmosphere affects the ions and vice versa is key to better understanding the complex space weather system surrounding our planet, which affects spacecraft and astronauts flying through it.

The launch of AETHER would be no later than 2024. The principal investigator for AETHER is James Clemmons at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE)

EZIE would focus on an electric current known as the auroral electrojet, which circles through the atmosphere around 60 to 90 miles above Earth, near the poles. Using three SmallSats to measure magnetic fields, EZIE would observe the structure of electrojets and explore what causes them and how they evolve.

Electrojets are part of a larger space weather system that can lead to oscillations in Earth’s magnetic fields, creating geomagnetic storms that can interfere with spacecraft and – at their most intense – utility grids on the ground.

Knowing how electrojets form and grow could contribute to ultimately predicting such storms. EZIE would launch as part of the agency’s CubeSat Launch Initiative. EZIE also would launch no later than 2024.

The principal investigator for EZIE is Jeng-Hwa Yee at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

Tech

MIT scientists have created the blackest material ever

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Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a material that is ten times blacker than anything that has previously been reported, the university said on 12 September.

The material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs), microscope filaments of carbon that the team grew on a surface of chlorine-etched aluminium foil, which captures around 99.995 percent of any incoming light – making it the blackest material on record.

“There are optical and space science applications for very black materials, and of course, artists have been interested in black, going back well before the Renaissance,” Brian Wardle, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, said in a statement.

“I think the blackest black is a constantly moving target. Someone will find a blacker material, and eventually we’ll understand all the underlying mechanisms, and will be able to properly engineer the ultimate black,” he added.

The CNT material could have practical as well as artistic use (the engineers used it to create artwork in collaboration with Diemut Strebe, an artist-in-residence at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology), such as “optical blinders that reduce unwanted glare, to help space telescopes spot orbiting exoplanets”, Wardle said.

Wardle’s co-author on the paper – published the journal ACS-Applied Materials and Interfaces – is former MIT postdoc Kehang Cui, now a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

They weren’t seeking to create an ultrablack material, but were instead experimenting with ways to grow carbon nanotubes on electrically conducting materials such as aluminium, to boost their electrical and thermal properties.

But while trying to grow CNTs on aluminium, Cui literally ran up against a barrier: an every-present layer of oxide that coats aluminium when it’s exposed to air. The oxide acts as an insulator to block, rather than conduct, electricity and heat.

Cui found that salt – or sodium chloride – could be used to remove the oxide layer. At the same time, Wardle’s group was using salt to grow carbon nanotubes, and in their tests with salt, Cui noticed that chloride ions were eating away at aluminum’s surface and dissolving its oxide layer.

“This etching process is common for many metals,” Cui said. “For instance, ships suffer from corrosion of chlorine-based ocean water. Now we’re using this process to our advantage.”

He found that soaking aluminium foil in saltwater allowed him to remove the oxide layer. Cui transferred the foil to an oxygen-free environment to prevent re-oxidation, then placed the etched aluminium in an oven, where the group used a process called chemical vapor deposition to grow carbon nanotubes.

By removing the oxide layer, the researchers were able to grow carbon nanotubes on aluminate at much lower temperatures than they otherwise would. They also saw that the CNTs significantly enhanced the material’s thermal and electrical properties – this was expected, but the colour of the material was not.

 “I remember noticing how black it was before growing carbon nanotubes on it, and then after growth, it looked even darker,” Cui said. “So I thought I should measure the optical reflectance of the sample.

“Our group does not usually focus on optical properties of materials, but this work was going on at the same time as our art-science collaborations with Diemut, so art influenced science in this case,” Wardle added.

Wardle and Cui, who have applied for a patent on the technology, are making the new CNT process freely available to any artist to use for a non-commercial art project.

According to MIT, the research are not entirely sure what processes made the material quite so black, but they suspect that it has something to do with the combination of etched aluminium – which is somewhat blackened already – with the carbon nanotubes.

Scientists believe that forests of carbon nanotubes can trap and convert most incoming light to heat, reflecting very little of it back out as light, thereby giving CNTs a particularly black shade.

“CNT forests of different varieties are known to be extremely black, but there is a lack of mechanistic understanding as to why this material is the blackest. That needs further study,” Wardle said.

The material is already gaining interest in the aerospace community. Astrophysicist and Nobel laureate John Mather, who was not involved in the research, is exploring the possibility of using Wardle’s material as the basis for a star shade — a massive black shade that would shield a space telescope from stray light.

“Optical instruments like cameras and telescopes have to get rid of unwanted glare, so you can see what you want to see,” Mather commented. “Would you like to see an Earth orbiting another star? We need something very black. … And this black has to be tough to withstand a rocket launch. Old versions were fragile forests of fur, but these are more like pot scrubbers — built to take abuse.”

Tech

Engineers assemble NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope

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Image courtesy of Billy Brown on Flickr, under a Creative Commons 2.0 license

In what the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) described as a “major milestone”, engineers have successfully connected the two halves of the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time at Northrop Grumman’s facilities in Redondo Beach, California.

The agency said on 28 August that the engineers “carefully lifted the Webb telescope (which includes the mirrors and science instruments) above the already-combined sunshield and spacecraft using a crane”.

The team “slowly guided the telescope into place, ensuring that all primary points of contact were perfectly aligned and seated properly”. Now that the observatory has been mechanically connected, the next steps will be to electrically connect the two halves and test the connections.

The next part of the test for the Webb project will be for the engineers to “ fully deploy the intricate five-layer sunshield, which is designed to keep Webb’s mirrors and scientific instruments cold by blocking infrared light from the Earth, Moon and Sun”.

The ability of the sunshield to deploy to its correct shape will be critical to the success of the mission, the agency said. Both of the telescope’s major components have been individually tested in all of the environments they could encounter during a rocket ride and orbiting mission a million miles away from the Earth.

The fully assembled observatory will now go through additional environmental and deployment testing with a scheduled launch date in 2021. Webb is an international project led by NASA with its partners, European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency.

The James Webb Space Telescope is a large, space-based observatory, optimized for infrared wavelengths, which will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA intends for the telescope to cover longer wavelengths of light than Hubble and to have greatly improved sensitivity. The longer wavelengths should let it “look further back in time to see the first galaxies that formed in the early universe, and to peer inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today”.

The construction of the telescope has been marred by delays and cost overruns that have pushed the launch date from 2018 to 2021.

The JWST is named after James E. Webb, NASA’s second administrator. Webb is best known for leading Apollo, a series of lunar exploration programs that landed the first humans on the Moon. He also initiated a vigorous space science program that was responsible for over 75 launches during his tenure, including America’s first interplanetary explorers.

 “The assembly of the telescope and its scientific instruments, sunshield and the spacecraft into one observatory represents an incredible achievement by the entire Webb team,” Bill Ochs, Webb project manager for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. 

“This milestone symbolizes the efforts of thousands of dedicated individuals for over more than 20 years across NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, Northrop Grumman, and the rest of our industrial and academic partners,” he added.

“This is an exciting time to now see all Webb’s parts finally joined together into a single observatory for the very first time,” Gregory Robinson, the Webb program director at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, said. “The engineering team has accomplished a huge step forward and soon we will be able to see incredible new views of our amazing universe.”

Gadgets

NASA and HPE join forces to build new supercomputer to support crewed moon mission

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Image by Peter Dargatz from Pixabay

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) said on 22 August they have developed a custom-designed supercomputer to run simulations for the agency’s Artemis program, a mission to land the next humans on the lunar South Pole by 2024.

Named after Robert Grant Aitken, an American astronomer specializing in binary star systems, the supercomputer will help NASA’s Ames Research Centre to model and simulate entry, descent, and landing (EDL) for Artemis and other missions.

“Aitken” – which will run thousands of complex simulations more quickly at 3.69 petaFLOPs of theoretical performance to enable accurate and safe landings on the moon – is an initial development of a four-year, multi-phase collaboration between HPE and NASA Ames.

The supercomputer is based on an end-to-end, purpose-built high-performance computing (HPC) platform, which includes special liquid cooling capabilities for optimal energy efficiency, HPE said in a statement.

Aitken is located in NASA Ames’ new modular supercomputing facility, based on a Modular Data Centre (MDC) approach jointly developed with HPE, to deliver advanced HPC solutions that drive greater efficiency and significantly reduce electricity and water use.

The new facility, based in Mountain View, California, will combine native Bay Area temperature and evaporative methods to cool the supercomputer, replacing the need for a cooling tower and millions of gallons of water.

“HPE has a longstanding collaboration with NASA Ames, and together, we continue to build innovative HPC technologies to fuel space and science discovery that increase overall efficiency and reduce costs,” Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC and AI, at HPE, said.

“We are honoured to have designed the new Aitken supercomputer and power capabilities for humanity’s next mission to the moon,” he said.

Design Specs

HPE designed the NASA Ames’ new supercomputer using the end-to-end, purpose-built HPE SGI 8600 system that integrates compute, software, networking and other IT infrastructure solutions from its robust ecosystem of partners, including:

  • 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors for advanced compute performance
  • Mellanox InfiniBand to enable scalable bandwidth for high-performance networking
  • Schneider Electric SmartShelter Containers that enable easy-to-deploy, prefabricated IT infrastructure packaged within a secure, weather proof, fire-rated, data module for remote or special applications

Other features include:

  • 1,150 nodes, 46,080 cores, and 221 TB of memory.
  • 3.69 petaflops of theoretical peak performance.
  • Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.03.
Tech

ESA finishes Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover build

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Image by Aynur Zakirov from Pixabay

The European Space Agency (ESA) said on 27 August that it had completed construction of the Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover in the UK, before it headed to an Airbus facility in Toulouse, France, for four months of testing to confirm it is compatible with the mission operations and the Martian environment.

Engineers at the Airbus Defence and Space site in Stevenage, England, attached the final pieces of the rover’s scientific suite of instruments, including the rover’s “eyes”: a set of high-resolution cameras that will allow it to guide itself on Mars via panoramic and close-up images of the terrain.

The rover will “seek out interesting geological locations to examine with its scientific tools and to drill to retrieve underground samples, on a quest” to determine if there has ever been life on Mars, and to better understand the history of water on the planet, the ESA said.

It was assembled in a sterile cleanroom under stringent cleanliness rules to avoid that organics, including traces of human life, are accidentally carried to Mars and contaminate the samples. The next round of tests will be conducted using vibration benches, in a chamber that simulates the range of environmental conditions scientists expect it to face on the so-called red planet.

The rover’s instruments will need to be able to work in environment that is much harsher than we experience on Earth. For example, it can expect temperatures as low as -120°C outside, and –60°C inside the rover.

The composite spacecraft comprising the carrier module, descent module, surface science platform and a replica rover will simultaneously undergo environmental testing to confirm it is ready to endure the environment of space on its eight-month journey to Mars.

Last year the ‘structural and thermal model’ of the rover successfully completed a rigorous environmental test campaign. However, the parachute system that will slow down the rover’s descent is reportedly still not yet up to scratch.

Earlier this year, the analytical laboratory that will process and analyse the drilled samples inside the rover also completed a series of tests to verify that the mechanisms and instruments during science operations can produce satisfactory results under challenging conditions.

The mission is currently expected to launch in just under a year from now – within a launch window between 26 July and 13 August 2020 – on a Russia Proton-M launcher and to arrive at Mars in March 2021.

“Completing the build of the Rosalind Franklin rover under the strict cleanliness requirements, with all the science instruments onboard, is a major milestone of our ExoMars programme,” David Parker, the ESA’s Director of Human and Robotic Exploration, said in a statement. “It is thanks to the dedication of all the teams involved that we are able to celebrate this moment today.”

“We’re looking forward to completing the final rounds of tests before the rover is declared flight ready and closed inside the landing platform and descent module that will deliver it safely to the surface of Mars,” he added.

In addition to the 2020 mission, the ExoMars programme also includes the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) launched in 2016. The TGO is already both delivering scientific results of its own and relaying data from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover and Insight lander, and will relay the data from the ExoMars 2020 mission once it arrives at Mars.

Tech

ISS upgrade lets astronauts send and receive data at double the speed

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Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on 19 August that a recent upgrade to the communications technology aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will allow astronauts to send and receive data at double the speed they previously could.

The station now supports a 600 megabit-per-second (Mbps) connection, doubling the amount of data that the station can transmit and receive at a time paving the way for similar future upgrades on Gateway, NASA’s upcoming outpost in lunar orbit, and other exploration missions.

The unique environment of the space station allows astronauts to conduct research that would not be possible on Earth, and these experiments and technology demonstrations have become increasingly reliant on high data transfer rates between the station and Earth-bound researchers.

The work that takes place on this orbiting laboratory provides knowledge in human research, experience in long-duration spaceflight, and capabilities for technology demonstrations that could enable future missions.

With a data rate increase, the station will be able to accommodate new experiments and technology demonstrations, NASA said, that require higher resolution images/videos or more detailed data than was previously possible.

The space station communicates with Earth through radio frequency signals using a system of Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) and ground-based antennas called the Space Network. The satellites are placed in a high orbit above the Earth, over various strategic locations so that they can relay data to the ground from anywhere in orbit.

Landlines then send the signal to various NASA centres and their computer systems turn it back into readable data. To send data back, the process repeats in the other direction. This all happens with less than a one-second delay in communication.

“NASA’s communications networks play a pivotal role in every NASA mission, enabling data from human spaceflight, space and Earth science research missions and technological demonstrations to reach Earth for the benefit of humanity,” George Morrow, the acting director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.

“This increase in data rate capability for the [ISS] underlines our commitment to provide high-quality operational services for NASA exploration missions today and in the future,” he added.

“This project demonstrated that advanced radio frequency waveforms can be used efficiently to increase data rates and improve performance for high-rate communication services,” Risha George, the upgrade project lead for the Space Network, said.

“Operational use of these advanced waveforms proves that they can also be used for future missions, such as on the Gateway, a small spaceship that will orbit the Moon and provide a stepping stone to human exploration on Mars,” she explained.

According to NASA, several components in this global communications system have been upgraded to support the increased data rate, including new digital ground architecture for the Space Network. Technicians updated the station’s software-based modem, improved data processors at a number of NASA centres, and enhanced routers, interfaces, and other equipment and software on the ground.

The circuits and bandwidth of the terrestrial data lines between the various Earth-based components were also upgraded, prior to extensive testing to ensure the upgrades worked correctly. While this was happening, the network continued to provide real-time support to over 40 missions.

 “Partnerships like this are crucial to our continued success as an agency,” Penny Roberts, the upgrade project lead for the space station, concluded. “Our continued partnership will transition us to 600 Mbps, and who knows where else we will go together.”

Tech

NASA Opens Call for Artemis Lunar Landers

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Image by Susan Cipriano from Pixabay

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is seeking proposals for human lunar landing systems designed and developed by US companies for the Artemis program, which intends to send the first woman and next man to the Moon by 2024, the agency said on 30 September.

This final industry call comes after NASA issued two drafts on 19 July and 30 August, encouraging companies to help shape a key component of the mission. NASA is expected to award multiple contracts to develop and demonstrate a human landing system.

Proposals are due on 1 November, a timeline that the agency describes as “ambitious” and “consistent with the sequence of events leading to this point”.

Companies have been preparing for, reviewing, and commenting on several drafts of NASA’s broad agency announcement since mid-July, and the agency believes this means they should be prepared for such a tight timeline.

“In order to best accelerate our return to the Moon and prepare for Mars, we collaborated with industry on ideas to streamline the procurement process,” Marshall Smith, director of the Human Lunar Exploration Program at NASA, said in a statement.

“The private sector was eager to provide us feedback throughout this process, and we received more than 1,150 comments on the draft solicitations issued over the summer,” he added.

According to NASA, is can take six to eight years to develop typical spaceflight hardware, so with less than five years until the agency expects to be landing astronauts on the Moon, every word and requirement counts.

After reviewing companies’ comments, the agency removed requirements that were seen as “potential barriers to speed while preserving all [of NASA’s] human safety measures”, such as high numbers of formal technical reports that would require considerable resources and risk delays.

Taking this into consideration, NASA has designed a less formal oversight process, which can be used to access critical contractor data, while minimizing administrative overheads; as a result, NASA reduced the number of required contract deliverables significantly.

“Reports still are valuable and necessary, but to compromise and ease the bulk of the reporting burden on industry, we are asking for access to the companies’ systems to monitor progress throughout development,” Nantel Suzuki, the Human Landing System program executive at NASA, said.

“To maximize our chances of successfully returning to the Moon by 2024, we also are making NASA’s engineering workforce available to contractors and asking proposers to submit a collaboration plan,” they added.

When called upon to accelerate its return to the Moon, NASA said it would meet this goal by “any means necessary”. Its preferred approach is for the crew in the Orion spacecraft and the un-crewed human landing system to launch separately and meet in lunar orbit at the Gateway.

NASA said it wants to “explore all options” to achieve the 2024 mission and that it “remains open to alternative, innovative approaches”.

Another shift in its approach centred around how best to achieve sustainability on the Moon by 2028. NASA originally wanted the human landing system to be refuellable to ensure a more sustainable exploration architecture.

However, multiple companies were concerned about this requirement, the agency said, so NASA agreed to remove it so that the industry has “greater flexibility to address the more fundamental attribute of sustainability, which is long-term affordability”.

“They were absolutely right,” Lisa Watson-Morgan, the Human Landing System program manager at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Centre, said. “We are operating on a timeline that requires us to be flexible to encourage innovation and alternate approaches. We still welcome the option to refuel the landing system, but we removed it as a requirement.”

NASA’s Artemis program intends to send a suite of new science instruments and technology demonstrations to study the Moon, landing the first woman and next man on the lunar surface by 2024, and establishing a sustained presence by 2028. The agency plans to leverage its Artemis experience and technologies to prepare to send astronauts to Mars.

Tech

Electricity consumption from China’s internet industry to increase by two thirds by 2023

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Image by 756crystal from Pixabay

A new study by non-governmental environmental organization Greenpeace has found that China’s growing data centre industry will increase by 66 percent by the year 2024, the organization said on 9 September.

The report outlines two potential scenarios for future data centre sector emissions in China from 2019 to 2023. If the data centre sector’s renewable energy intake remains steady at 23 percent, CO2 emissions from the industry are projected to reach 163 million tonnes by 2023.

However, if the sector’s renewable energy intake increases to 30 percent, 16 million tonnes of carbon emissions can be avoided by 2023, equal to the emissions from roughly 10 million round-trip transatlantic flights. 

Data centres are networks of computer servers that host emails, photos and videos, online transactions and more. Electricity consumption from China’s data centre industry is predicted to increase by two thirds over the next five years.

By 2023, the sector is projected to consume 267 TWh of electricity, more than Australia’s total 2018 electricity consumption. China’s data centre industry is currently powered 73% by coal.

Researchers identified three ways for data centre companies to increase their renewable energy uptake: by building or investing in renewable projects, procuring clean power directly from renewable energy generators, and purchasing green power certificates.

The spike in electricity usage in the country is mostly likely fuelled largely by data-intensive industries like cloud computing, which is a critical part of the Chinese government’s plan to increase the country’s artificial intelligence capabilities in order to compete with the United States.

Coal accounts for 73 percent of the energy used by data centres and Greenpeace has appealed to China’s technology sector to lead efforts to develop renewable sources of energy as an alternative. As China’s power market reforms deepen, a growing number of procurement mechanisms should become available. 

“Power market reforms and rapid growth in wind and solar power have created unprecedented opportunities for China’s internet giants to procure clean energy,” Greenpeace East Asia climate and energy campaigner Ye Ruiqi, said in a statement.

“The data centre sector can and should play a leading role in China’s energy transition from heavy reliance on coal to renewable energy,” they added. “While China’s data center industry has made significant improvements in terms of energy efficiency, [its] massive carbon footprint is proof that much more action is needed to increase reliance on clean energy sources.”

“There is a clear path toward renewable energy-powered data centers in China and an opportunity for innovative companies to lead the way,” Ye concluded.

Full report available HERE (in Chinese). Abridged English version available HERE. 

Tech

NASA asks students to name Mars 2020 rover

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The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has launched a competition – in partnership with Future Engineers and Battelle Education – challenging K-12 students in United States public, private and home schools to name its recently completed Mars 2020 rover.

To take part in the Name the Rover contest, students have to write an essay of up to 150 words to explain the reasons for the selected name. Participants have until 1 November to send their essays in and the winner will be announced on 1 February.

The judging criteria will include:

  • Appropriateness and significance of the chosen name.
  • Originality of the chosen name.
  • Originality and quality of the essay​ and/or finalist interview presentation.
  • Bonus points will be available for entries with the highest public poll votes in the final judging round.

Participants in the competition should note that no personal names should be used in submissions in order to adhere to privacy requirements.

Individual K-12 Students in US public, private, and home schools (including US territories and possessions, and schools operated by the US for the children of American personnel overseas) are eligible to compete but team entries are not allowed.

Children and students who live in the same household with NASA, Battelle Education, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory or Caltech employees cannot enter.

According to NASA, the Mars 2020 rover will “seek signs of past microbial life, collect surface samples as the first leg of a potential Mars Sample Return campaign, and test technologies to produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere to prepare for future human missions”.

The mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the Red Planet. It will look to addresses “high-priority” questions, such as the potential for life on Mars, seeking signs of habitable conditions on the planet in the ancient past and even past microbial life itself.

The rover has a drill that can collect core sample of the “most promising rocks and soils”, setting them aside in a “cache” on the surface so that a future mission could potentially return them to Earth for scientists to study them in laboratories with room-sized equipment that cannot be transported to Mars.

The mission is expected to provide opportunities to “gather knowledge and demonstrate technologies” that will address the “challenges of future human expeditions to Mars”, including testing a method producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere and improvements to landing techniques.

The mission is currently timed to launch in July 2020 when Earth and Mars are in “good positions relative to each other” for landing on Mars; it takes less power to travel to Mars at this time, as opposed to other times with the two planets are in different positions in their orbits.

In an effort to keep mission costs and risks as low as possible, the rover design in based on NASA’s previously successful Mars Science Laboratory mission, including its Curiosity rover and landing system.

Business

IBM launches new mobile app to help US veterans transition back to civilian life

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Computer hardware company IBM on 28 August launched a new mobile app in partnership with the US Veterans Affairs Department (VA) to help veterans, active-duty service members, and reservists “understand and strengthen their mental fitness, social connections, and overall well-being”.

The app – which was developed by by IBM iX and the VA, and embedded with technology from mental health and fitness platform Total Brain – is called GRIT or “Get Results in Transition”, and will feature a digital assistant and AI chatbot, scientific assessments, and job-matching and employment.

It is the “first branded digital solution” dedicated to helping those “live under considerable stress and/or are going through a significant life transition like leaving the military to re-enter civilian life”, IBM said.

GRIT is allegedly completely confidential and secure, and uses personalized data to create a detailed profile of an individual, which – when coupled with artificial intelligence – enables the app to “glean unique insights” and get to know each user “personally”.

The app is intended to provide service members and veterans with “useful insights and tools to aid them in monitoring their mental health, building emotional and cognitive capacities and resilience, finding the right jobs and housing opportunities, enhancing their social connections for support, etc”.

GRIT is the result of a long-standing collaboration between IBM and the VA looking at how technology might “contribute to solutions for veterans transitioning out of service”.

Initially, VA clinicians, mobility experts and veterans joined IBM in a series of design thinking workshops to explore ideas about to address the need for resources and assistance, which led to a prototype and additional feedback and research.

GRIT was then re-tailored to help users “gain personal insights into their emotional well-being, provide resources to improve their individual situations, and serve as a mechanism to address social determinants that greatly impact . . . well-being”.

As part of a five-month contract awarded in June, IBM is facilitating a field test for the app that will engage veterans, active-duty service members, and reservists to use it in a real-life setting in order to evaluate the user experience and GRIT’s usefulness, and provide feedback for improvements.

Partners for the field test – which is set to end in November when IBM’s contract concludes – include Total Brain, Burning Glass and collaboration with organizations including Easter Seals, the Wounded Warrior Project, American Warrior Partnership and the National Guard.

Using the results of the field test, IBM intends to develop a “comprehensive plan” for the full launch of GRIY, which is planned as the “first instantiation” of a bigger platform called “THRIVE360° of Mental Fitness”, which IBM said it intends to deploy with other communities in similar situations.

“This is a historic public-private partnership with the VA — one that helps veterans bridge the gap when they are transitioning out of service and at their most vulnerable,” Kathleen Urbine, partner, emerging technology and mobile lead, IBM Services, said in a statement.

“Our partnership with Total Brain has been crucial in supporting the mental health and fitness aspect of this tool and we look forward to continuing this important work,” she added.

Total Brain’s CEO, Louis Gagnon, said that the company was “thrilled to partner with IBM” to develop “easy-to-use, ubiquitous and adaptive technology that recognizes the importance of both individual and social determinants” to address the health and wellbeing of veterans.

“The very concept of well-being is a holistic one; hence, its improvement must come from a holistic solution. Furthermore, we cannot think of a more deserving community,” he added.

Tech

Leading cloud service providers team up for new security initiative

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The Linux Foundation announced on 21 August at its Open Source Summit the intention to form the Confidential Computing Consortium, a community “dedicated to defining and accelerating the adoption of confidential computing”.

Many of the companies involved in the consortium are some of the world’s leading cloud service providers – including Google Cloud, Microsoft, Alibaba Cloud, IBM, Red Hat, Baidu, Intel, Red Hat, Swisscom, Arm and Tencent.

The consortium will bring together hardware vendors, cloud providers, developers, open source experts and academics to accelerate the confidential computing market; influence technical and regulatory standards; and build open source tools that provide the right environment for trusted execution environment (TEE) development.

Participants plan to make several open source project contributions to the Confidential Computing Consortium, including:

The proposed structure for the Consortium includes a Governing Board, a Technical Advisory Council and separate technical oversight for each technical project. It is intended to host a variety of technical open source projects and open specifications to support confidential computing.

Confidential Computing Consortium will be funded through membership dues, and will anchor industry outreach and education initiatives.

“The earliest work on technologies that have the ability to transform an industry is often done in collaboration across the industry and with open source technologies,” Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation, said in a statement.

“The Confidential Computing Consortium is a leading indicator of what’s to come for security in computing and will help define and build open technologies to support this trust infrastructure for data in use,” he added.

“Confidential computing provides new capabilities for cloud customers to reduce trusted computing base in cloud environments and protect their data during runtime,” Xiaoning Li, chief security architect, Alibaba Cloud, said. “We are very excited to join [Confidential Computing Consortium] and work with the community to build a better confidential computing ecosystem.”

“Security is consistently top of mind for our customers, and, really, for all of us, as security incidents and data breaches make the headlines,” Chris Wright, senior vice president and Chief Technology Officer at Red Hat, added. “While hardware support for security continues to advance, creating secure computing environments can still be challenging.”

“We are developing the Enarx project to help developers deploy applications into computing environments which support higher levels of security and confidentiality and intend to bring it to the . . . Consortium,” he said. “We look forward to collaborating . . . to help make confidential computing the norm.”

“Confidential computing offers CPU-based hardware technology to protect cloud users’ data in use, which we believe will become a basic capability for cloud provider in future,” concluded Wei Li, vice president of Tencent Security, the head of Cloud Security.

For more information and to contribute to the project, visit: https://confidentialcomputing.io

Gadgets

Knight Foundation invests US$6 million in research on US technology policy

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The Knight Foundation has pledged to invest US$6 million into research conducted by three non-profit policy institutes into the future of US technology policy, including “potential approaches for regulating the tech sector”.

The three organisations that will receive funding are:

  • The Centre for Democracy & Technology (US$3 million): To support research on the future of digital discourse, with a focus on how online platforms moderate content and how technology impacts our democracy.
  • Open Markets Institute – Centre for Liberty and Journalism (US$2 million): To research the impact of corporate concentration by internet companies on journalism and media, and how the negative effects of concentration might be addressed.
  • R Street Institute (US$1 million): To study and explore a multi-stakeholder approach to the management of online content that balances concerns of consumers with those of corporations, and to improve the government’s technology policy-making.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is a national foundation that invests in journalism, the arts and in the “success of cities where brothers John S. and James L. Knight once published newspapers”. The foundation’s stated goal is to “foster informed and engaged communities, which [it believes] are essential for a healthy democracy”.

The foundation expects this latest investment to “support nonpartisan, independent research on several issues at the forefront of national tech policy debates, including questions about the market concentration of major social media and digital services providers and growing concern about how those digital platforms manage content”.

“We’re in the middle of the largest debate of our time on how to enjoy the benefits of technology while mitigating the increasingly apparent costs,” Sam Gill, vice president for communities and impact at Knight Foundation, said in a statement.

“Yet so far the discussion is more heat than light. These organizations combine an unflinching willingness to have an opinion with a deep commitment to evidence and independence,” he added.

The investment is part of Knight’s recent overarching US$50 million commitment to support research on how technology is transforming our democracy and the way in which people are informed in the digital age.

Nearly US$39 million of this commitment is intended to support cross-disciplinary research at 11 American universities and research institutions, while US$5 million will be distributed through an open funding opportunity focused on “research into the rules and norms governing our use of digital technology”.

Across the investment portfolio is a common set of questions about how digital technology has changed the way information is produced, distributed and consumed — and the new approaches needed to ensure a healthy democracy in the digital age, the foundation said.

Tech

NASA greenlights Europa Clipper mission

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The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has given the greenlight to Europa Clipper, a mission that will investigate the possibility that Jupiter’s moon Europa is habitable, the agency said on 19 August.

This decision allows NASA engineers to progress to completion of final design, followed by the construction and testing of the entire spacecraft and science payload.

The mission is intended to conduct an in-depth exploration of Jupiter’s moon Europa and investigate whether the icy moon could harbour conditions suitable for life, improving humankind’s insights into astrobiology.

Under the current projected schedule, the probe will be launched in 2023 and will orbit Europa for around three years, collecting information about the moon’s subsurface ocean. Scientists believe that this ocean may contain microbial life.

The mission will carry a “highly capable, radiation-tolerant” spacecraft that will perform repeated close flybys of the icy moon from a long, looping orbit around Jupiter. The craft’s payload of selected scientific instruments will include cameras and spectrometers to produce high-resolution images of the moon’s surface, and determine its composition.

The Europa Clipper will attempt to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and search for subsurface lakes, like those beneath Antarctica, using an ice penetrating radar. It will also carry a magnetometer to measure the strength and direction of the moon’s magnetic field so scientists can find out how deep and salty its ocean is.

It will use a thermal instrument to “scour” the moon’s surface for recent eruptions of warmer water, while using other instruments to search for evidence of water and tiny particles in the thin atmosphere.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope observed water vapor above the south polar region of Europa in 2012, providing the first strong evidence of water plumes.  If the existence of the plumes can be confirmed, it will help scientists to investigate the chemical makeup of the moon’s potentially inhabitable environment while minimizing the need to drill through layers of ice.

The agency has plans to also send a lander to Europa in 2025. The United States Congress has mandated the agency to launch the Europa Clipper and the Europa Lander missions on the Space Launch System – a vehicle whose development has reportedly been beset by delays.

“We are all excited about the decision that moves the Europa Clipper mission one key step closer to unlocking the mysteries of this ocean world,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.

“We are building upon the scientific insights received from the flagship Galileo and Cassini spacecraft and working to advance our understanding of our cosmic origin, and even life elsewhere,” he added.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is leading the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for the Science Mission Directorate.

The mission is managed by the Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama.

Gadgets

US Department of Defence seeks machine learning experts

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The United States Department of Defence (DoD) is seeking machine learning experts to create computer vision algorithms that can speed up analyses of aerial and satellite imagery.

Hosted by the DoD’s Defence Innovation Unit (DIU), the xView2 Challenge seeks to automate post-disaster damage assessment with “computer vision algorithms that will speed up analysis of satellite and aerial imagery by localizing and categorizing various types of building damage caused by natural disasters”.

In a call for submissions posted on the DoD website on 15 August, the agency said this is the DIU’s second prize competition focused on furthering innovation in computer vision for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief efforts. It runs from August through November.

The contest builds upon the agency’s xView1 Challenge, which sought out computer vision algorithms to locate and identify distinct objects on the ground useful to first responders.

The challenge will be underpinned by a new annotated building damage dataset – xBD – created by a team of academics and industry experts led by the DUI to “enable localization and damage assessment before and after disasters”.

“While several open datasets for object detection from satellite imagery already exist — for example, SpaceNet and xView — each represent only a single snapshot in time and lack information about the type and severity of damage following a disaster”, the DUI noted.

The new database is expected to allow machine learning/artificial intelligence practitioners to generate and test models to help automate building damage assessment.

It uses open source electro-optical imagery encompassing 700,000 building annotations across 5,000 square kilometres in 15 countries, and includes seven disaster types – wildfire, landslides, dam collapses, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes/tsunamis and wind and flooding damage.

The findings will be applied to a number of different operational and academic use cases covering areas such as obstructed roads, resource allocation decision-making, and object recognition and identification among others.

Baseline models, developed collaboratively between DIU and Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, will be publicly available as a starting point for the Challenge.

In addition to advancements in damage assessment, the DUI envisions that the xBD dataset will provide researchers, companies and other groups with the “means and motive to develop algorithms that bring humanitarian assistance and disaster response” into the age of artificial intelligence.

There are three competition prize tracks. The open source track will see teams compete for leader board positions and awards for top scores. By releasing their models publicly under a permissive open-source license, teams become eligible for an additional award.

Teams can join the nonexclusive government purpose rights track when they grant government purpose rights and their solutions will be used to help future disaster recovery efforts.

Meanwhile, teams on the evaluation only track retain their intellectual property and only grant DIU the right to benchmark their solution and compete for leader board positions. Top teams in this last category will still be eligible for a special monetary prize pool for their submissions.

The best solutions for all three categories will be eligible for a share of a US$150,000 prize purse and top solvers will also be invited to present their work at the December NeurIPS 2019 Workshop on AI for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. Winners of any cash prize will be considered eligible to be awarded follow-on work with the DoD.

“DIU’s goal in hosting this challenge is to enlist the global community of machine learning experts to tackle a critically hard problem: detecting key objects in overhead imagery in context and assessing damage in a disaster situation,” Mike Kaul, DIU artificial intelligence portfolio director, said in a statement.

“We are always looking for ways to improve rapid damage assessment to ensure we and our partners deliver the right resources to the right places at the right time,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (a partner in the challenge) Regional Administrator, Robert Fenton, added. “We are confident the DIU Challenge can contribute to that goal.”

Other partners include NASA Earth Science Disasters Program, , California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, Cal Fire, the California National Guard, DOD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, the United States Geological Service, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Security Innovation Network.

Tech

NASA selects proposals to further study the “fundamental nature of space”

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The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on 13 August that it had selected two proposals for a US$75 million mission to help scientists better understand the “fundamental nature of space and how it changes in response to planetary atmospheres, radiation from the Sun, and interstellar particles”.

Each of the proposals will receive US$400,000 in funding to conduct a nine-month long mission concept study as part of NASA’s heliophysics program aka the Heliophysics Science Mission of Opportunity.

Following the completion of these studies, NASA will choose one of the proposals to launch as a secondary payload on the agency’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP). According to NASA, the proposals were selected based on “potential science value and feasibility of development plans” and the whole mission is funded by NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Probes program.

IMAP currently is scheduled to launch in October 2024 to orbit a point between Earth and the Sun known as the first Lagrangian point (L1). From there, researchers expect it will help them to “better understand the interstellar boundary region, where particles from the Sun collide with material from the rest of the galaxy”.

This distant area controls the amount of harmful cosmic radiation entering the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble that shields the solar system from charged particles that surround it. Cosmic rays from the galaxy and beyond affect astronauts and can harm technological systems, and may play a role in the presence of life in the universe.

Under the Spatial/Spectral Imaging of Heliospheric Lyman Alpha (SIHLA) proposal, scientists want to map the entire sky to determine the shape and underlying mechanisms of the boundary between the heliosphere, the area of our Sun’s magnetic influence, and the interstellar medium, a boundary known as the heliopause.

The observations would gather far-ultraviolet light emitted from hydrogen atoms, which is key for examining many astrophysical phenomena, including planetary atmospheres and comets, because a large part of the universe is composed of hydrogen.

SIHLA will focus on mapping the velocity and distribution of the solar wind – the outpouring of particles from the Sun – helping to develop scientists’ understanding of what drives structure in the solar wind and heliopause.

The Global Lyman-alpha Imagers of the Dynamic Exosphere (GLIDE) mission would study variability in Earth’s exosphere – the uppermost region of its atmosphere – by tracking far ultraviolet light emitted from hydrogen.

The proposed mission would fill an existing measurement gap, as only a handful of such images previously have been made from outside the exosphere, NASA said. The mission would “gather observations at a high rate, with a view of the entire exosphere, ensuring a truly global and comprehensive set of data”.

Understanding the ways in which Earth’s exosphere changes in response to influences of the Sun above or the atmosphere below, would give scientists “better ways” to forecast and mitigate the ways in which space weather can interfere with radio communications in space.

“Launching missions together like this is a great way to ensure maximum science return while keeping costs low,” Peg Luce, deputy director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, said in a statement.

“We carefully select new heliophysics spacecraft to complement the well-placed spacecraft NASA has in orbit to study this vast solar wind system – and our rideshare initiative increases our opportunities to send such key missions into space,” she added.