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.
Business

Successful Orion test brings NASA closer to Moon, Mars missions

Leave a comment
Image by Aynur Zakirov from Pixabay

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on 2 July that it had carried out a successful test of the Orion spacecraft’s launch abort system, which it claimed can “outrun a speeding rocket and pull astronauts to safety during an emergency during launch”.

During the three minute test – called Ascent Abort-2 – a test version of the Orion crew module launched at 7 am EDT from Space Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on a modified Peacekeeper missile that was procured through the US Air Force and built by Northrop Grumman.

The test spacecraft travelled to an altitude of approximately six miles where it experienced “high stress aerodynamic conditions expected during ascent”, the agency said. The abort sequence was subsequently triggered and the abort motor fired within milliseconds to pull the crew module away from the rocket.

This intentionally caused its “attitude motor” to flip the capsule end-over-end to properly orient it and then jettison the fired motor, releasing the crew module for “splashdown” in the Atlantic Ocean”, testing the systems ability to correctly function under such conditions.

NASA said that a team is now collecting 12 data recorders that were ejected during the test capsule’s descent. The information from these recorders will “provide insight into the abort system’s performance”.

The abort structure is shaped like a tower and consists of two parts: the “fairing assembly”, a shell made from a lightweight, composite material to protect the capsule from heat, sound and air flow; and the launch abort tower. The system is built specifically for deep space missions and to ride on NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.

NASA said it had accelerated the test schedule and lowered its costs by simplifying the test spacecraft, and eliminating parachutes and other related systems. It had already qualified the parachute system for crewed flights through a series of development and qualification tests completed at the end of 2018.

The agency called the test a “milestone” in the agency’s preparation for its series of “Artemis” missions to the Moon – named after the twin sister of Apollo and goddess of the Moon in Greek mythology – that are intended to lead to astronaut missions to Mars.

The Orion spacecraft is intended for Artemis 1, the first un-crewed mission with the SLS rocket – an integrated system traveling thousands of miles beyond the Moon. Artemis 2 will be the first mission with astronauts.

Technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida are preparing to attach the Orion crew and service modules ahead of testing at the agency’s Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio, later this year.

According to NASA, the agency recently reached “major milestones” for the SLS rocket as their assembled four of the five parts that will make up the “massive core stage” that will launch Artemis 1 and delivered four engines to be integrated into the core stage, along with the engine section, this summer.

When completed, the entire core stage will be the largest rocket stage NASA has built since manufacturing the Saturn V stages for NASA’s Apollo lunar missions in the 1960s, the agency said. Alongside the SLS and Gateway, Orion is part of the “backbone” of NASA’s deep space exploration program,  that will land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024.

“We’re building the most powerful rocket in the world to send astronauts to the Moon in the Orion spacecraft for Artemis missions,” Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.

“With this exploration system designed to safely carry humans farther into space than ever before, we’ll also have an equally powerful launch abort system that will pull the crew away if there is a problem with the rocket during the early portion of ascent,” he added.

“Launching into space is one of the most difficult and dangerous parts of going to the Moon,” Mark Kirasich, Orion program manager at Johnson Space Centre in Houston, said.

“This test mimicked some of the most challenging conditions Orion will ever face should an emergency develop during the ascent phase of flight,” he added. “Today, the team demonstrated our abort capabilities under these demanding conditions and put us one huge step closer to the first Artemis flight carrying people to the Moon.”

Business

Penn State part of US$4 million National Science Foundation big data grant

Leave a comment
Image by Alefar from Pixabay

Penn State University announced on 1 July that it would receive part of a US$4 million multi-institution grant from the US National Science Foundation aimed at “identifying innovative solutions for societal, scientific and industry challenges through strategic data science partnerships”.

As part of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub, Penn State will continue to collaborate on big data projects that are too large and complex for individual organizations to manage independently, the university said.

Hosted by Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, the Northeast Hub was launched in 2015 through a US$1.25 million National Science Foundation grant. The additional four years of funding is expected to allow the Hub to strengthen its role in fostering regional networks of stakeholders and support big data projects.

The additional funding will “support translational data science projects, such as improving education through big data and integrating health data from traditional and novel sources, as well as provide initial funding for the early exploration of new projects”, the university said.

It will also allow the Hub to continue its collaboration with six Big Data Spokes – multi-sector projects that convene additional members in support of projects deemed to be priorities for the Hub.

In a statement, Vasant Honavar, professor and co-principal investigator on the project, described the Northwest Big Data Hub as a “unique platform” that helps researchers “leverage the expertise and resources of multiple institutions in the region” and “harness the power and potential of data to address pressing regional and national challenges”.

“Accelerating science in many domains calls for the development of advanced artificial intelligence that can partner effectively with humans on all aspects of science — from formulating questions and hypotheses to designing and executing experiments, acquiring and analyzing data, to integrating results of studies with existing scientific knowledge,” he added.

One such study is the Virtual Data Collaboratory, an effort funded by the National Science Foundation, and led by researchers at Penn State and Rutgers University, to develop “a federated data and computing infrastructure” to support research that “transcends institutional and disciplinary boundaries”.

This work is expected to “enrich” the initiatives of Penn State’s Institute for CyberScience, where Honavar serves as associate director, to “accelerate scientific discovery and enable new forms of discovery”.

Noting that the scientific community needs technology that can “scale up to meet the ever-increasing complex challenges” of research, Jenni Evans, director of ICS, professor of meteorology and atmospheric science, described the project as “a major step in fostering both the leadership and partnerships necessary to help researchers . . . seeking solutions to the most pressing problems facing our world.”

“The Big Data Hub has built an extensive network of data science experts and stakeholders from academia, industry and local government across the northeast,” said Jeannette M. Wing, the Hub’s principal investigator and Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute at Columbia University.

“The new NSF grant will allow us to expand this work in two ways: first, by addressing cross-cutting themes on data privacy and data ethics, to ensure positive social impact; and second, by coordinating with the three other regional hubs toward a national network of data science institutions,” she added.

“The Hub offers institutions like Penn State a platform to engage in ambitious data science research projects on a regional or national scale that require expertise and resources beyond those available at any single institution,” Honavar said. “While each Hub is shaped by the unique opportunities and challenges offered by the region it serves, they also share some of the priorities. This offers opportunities for partnerships between two or more Hubs on projects at a national scale.”

In addition to Honavar and Wing, the executive committee of the Northeast Hub includes René Bastón, Columbia University; James Hendler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Gadgets

Mike Pence unveils NASA spacecraft for Artemis 1 lunar mission on Moon landing anniversary

Leave a comment
Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

American Vice President Mike Pence visited and gave remarks at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on 20 July to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the  Apollo 11 Moon landing and announce the completion of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Orion crew capsule for the first Artemis lunar mission, the agency said.

Fifty years ago, NASA’s goal was to prove that the agency could land humans on the Moon and return them safely to Earth. Now, it is looking further afield with its new goal returning to the Moon in a “sustainable” way to prepare to send astronauts to Mars for the first time ever.

Artemis 1 will launch NASA’s Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket around the Moon to test the system and pave the way for landing the first woman and the next man on the Moon in five years, as well as future missions to Mars.

“Thanks to the hard work of the men and women of NASA, and of American industry, the Orion crew vehicle for the Artemis 1 mission is complete and ready to begin preparations for its historic first flight,” Vice President Pence said at the event.

He was joined on stage by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin, Kennedy Center Director Robert Cabana, Lockheed Martin Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Marillyn Hewson, and Rick Armstrong, son of Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong.

Before going to the Operations and Checkout Building, Pence, Aldrin and Armstrong visited Kennedy’s historic launch pad, 39A, where the Apollo 11 mission lifted off.

“Similar to the 1960s, we too have an opportunity to take a giant leap forward for all of humanity,” Bridenstine said. “President Trump and Vice President Pence have given us a bold direction to return to the Moon by 2024 and then go forward to Mars.

“Their direction is not empty rhetoric. They have backed up their vision with the budget requests need to accomplish this objective,” he added. “NASA is calling this the Artemis program in honour of Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology, the goddess of the Moon. And we are well on our way to getting this done.”

According to NASA, engineers have recently completed building and outfitting the Orion crew module at the Kennedy Space Centre. The underlying structure of the crew module – the pressure vessel – was made at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans and shipped to the centre, where teams integrated thousands of parts into the crew module and conducted tests to certify its systems for flight.

Orion’s European Service Module, which will provide the power and propulsion for Orion during the mission, also is complete. Contributed by the European Space Agency, the service module was manufactured by Airbus in Bremen, Germany, and shipped to the centre in November 2018 for final assembly and integration.

Engineers have begun operations to join the crew module to the service module, and teams are connecting the power and fluid lines. Once the modules are joined, they will install a “heatshield backshell panel” on the spacecraft and prepare it for a September flight to NASA’s Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio, where they will test if the joined modules can withstand deep space.

When testing in Ohio is complete, the spacecraft will return to the Kennedy Space Centre for final processing and inspections. Teams then will fuel the spacecraft and transport it to the centre’s Vehicle Assembly Building for integration with the SLS rocket before it is rolled out to Launch Pad 39B for the launch of Artemis 1.

NASA describes Orion as part of its “backbone” for deep space exploration, along with SLS and the lunar Gateway. During Artemis 1, SLS will send the uncrewed spacecraft – consisting of the crew and service modules – thousands of miles past the Moon for the first in a series of increasingly complex missions. 

Artemis 2 will be the first of these new missions to the Moon to have astronauts on board, followed by Artemis 3. Through Artemis, the agency plans to “establish a sustainable human presence at the Moon by 2028 to continue scientific research and discovery, demonstrate new technologies, and lay the foundation for future missions to Mars”.

Gadgets

Paciolan announces Apple Wallet support for US college sports

Leave a comment
Image courtesy of Brandonrush on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Paciolan, a ticket service provider for college athletics in the United States, said on 10 June that fans would now be able to add contactless tickets to Apple Wallet, and enter stadiums using just their iPhone and Apple Watch.

The first schools to offer contactless tickets for the fall 2019 football season include Baylor University, Louisiana State University, Michigan State University, University of Mississippi, Georgia Tech, and Rutgers University.

Students and fans will be able to enter stadiums “easily and securely” by placing their Apple Watch or iPhone near a reader. This is the next step in the development of Paciolan’s mobile ticketing strategy to “help reduce fraud” and help colleges better understand who attends their games, the company said.

According to Paciolan, contactless ticketing – which uses near-field communications technology – will “significantly” reduce fraud risk as it eliminates the use of printed tickets and barcodes, effectively “rendering screenshots useless”.

The company “gives venues access to the full custody chain of each digital ticket including if it was re-sold on the secondary market or transferred to another user”, which it claim will reduce “anonymous event attendance”, allowing athletic programs to personalize attendee experience and communications.

“This innovation aligns . . . with our commitment to keeping our clients at the forefront of frictionless mobile fan experiences,” Keith White, Chief Technology Officer at Paciolan, said in a statement. “It improves security and . . . data capability by increasing the known fan base and giving the ticket office key insights to drive business decisions and maximize revenue.”

Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Internet Services, noted that Apple had a stated goal of replacing the physical wallet to give fans “the convenience and security” of having their tickets on their mobile devices in order to make attending college sports “easier than ever”.

“We are thrilled to offer Ole Miss fans . . . tap-and-go entry with iPhone into our games,” Michael Thompson, Deputy AD for External Relations and Business Development at the University of Mississippi, added. He noted that the technology will enable Ole Miss to provide a “more tailored experience” to attendees.

“We are excited to roll out contactless ticketing for our students this football season,” said Brian Broussard, Associate Athletic Director for Ticket Sales & Operations at Louisiana State University. “All 14,000 students will be able to take advantage of tap-and-go mobile technology which will make it a faster and easier process to enter [the stadium].”

Business

Angelic halo orbit chosen for humankind’s first lunar outpost

Leave a comment
Image by Peter Dargatz from Pixabay

The European Space Agency (ESA) said on 18 July that mission planners at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the ESA’s Operations Centre (ESOC) have decided on the path of the Lunar Gateway, humankind’s first permanent outpost to orbit the Moon.

Instead of orbiting around the Moon in a low lunar orbit like the Apollo missions, the Gateway will follow a highly “eccentric” path in which it will pass 3000 kilometres from surface of the Moon at its closest and 70,000 kilometres at its furthest away.

This path is called a “near-rectilinear halo” orbit (NHRO) and it will actually rotate with the Moon – as see from Earth it will appear “a little like a lunar halo”. According to the ESA, orbits like this are possible because of the “interplay between the Earth and Moon’s gravitational forces”.

As the two large bodies “dance” through space, a smaller object can be “caught” in a variety of stable, or near-stable, positions in relation to the orbiting masses, which are also known as “libration” or Lagrange points.

Such locations are “perfect for planning long-term missions, and to some extent dictate the design of the spacecraft, what it can carry to and from orbit, and how much energy it needs to get – and stay – there”, the ESA said.

Travelling on the NRHO path, one revolution of the Gateway in its orbit about the Moon would take around seven days, a time period that was chosen in order to limit the number of eclipses (when the Gateway would be in the Earth or Moon’s shadow). The Gateway will need to make “regular small station-keeping manoeuvres” to stay in position.

“Finding a lunar orbit for the gateway is no trivial thing,” Markus Landgraf, an Architecture Analyst working with ESA’s Human and Robotic Exploration activities, said in a statement. “If you want to stay there for several years, the near rectilinear halo orbit is slightly unstable and objects in this orbit do have a tendency of drifting away.”

The Gateway will be a “permanent and changeable” human outpost, much like the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits the Earth, acting as a base for astronauts and robots exploring the lunar surface.

In a press release, the ESA compared The Gateway to a “mountain refuge” as it “will also provide shelter and a place to stock up on supplies for astronauts en route to more distant destinations, as well as providing a place to relay communications and a laboratory for scientific research”.

The plan is that it should act as a “staging post” from where parts of spacecraft can be left behind, picked up or assembled. After lift-off, only a moderate manoeuvre should be needed to slow a visiting spacecraft to rendezvous with the Gateway, the ESA said.

The “fundamental limiting factor” when moving parts from Earth to a potential lunar base and the surface of the Moon is the vast amount of energy required to escape our planet’s gravitational pull. To land on the Moon as opposed to hurtling straight past it, we have to slow down by losing that same energy.

In theory, we can save some of this energy by leaving parts of the spacecraft in orbit and taking only what we need to the surface of the Moon. The Lunar lander will transport people, robots and infrastructure down to the surface – and back up again – when the Gateway is closest to the Moon.

“In human spaceflight we don’t fly one single, monolithic spacecraft,” Florian Renk, a Mission Analyst in ESOC’s Flight Dynamics Division, explained. “Instead we fly bits and pieces, putting parts together in space and soon on the surface of the Moon. Some parts we leave behind, some we bring back – the structures are forever evolving.”

The ESA plans to assemble and operate the Gateway during the 2020s, during which time they anticipate it will “move between different orbits and enable the most distant human space missions ever attempted” and “offer a platform for scientific discovery in deep space and build invaluable experience for the challenges of future human missions to Mars”.

Mission analysis teams at ESOC are “continuing to work closely with international partners to understand how the choice of orbit affects vital aspects of the mission . . . including landing, rendezvous with future spacecraft and contingency scenarios needed to keep people and infrastructure safe”.

“The flight dynamics expertise here at ESOC is unique in Europe,” Rolf Densing, ESA’s Director of Operations, concluded.

“Our analysts and flight dynamics experts provide support to a full range of missions, including some of the most complex and exciting like the lunar Gateway,” he said. “We can’t wait to see this ambitious international endeavour realised.”

Gadgets

Amazon pledges to “upskill” 100,000 US employees by 2025

Leave a comment
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Amazon said on 11 July that it would “upskill” 100,000 of its employees across the United States by 2025, spending US$700 million to provide access to training programs that “will help them move into more highly skilled roles within or outside of Amazon”.

The company – which has been previously criticised for its treatment of workers and working conditions – said that the programs will “serve employees from all backgrounds and Amazon locations”, including its corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfilment centres, retail stores and transportation network.

Amazon expects the programs to reach 300,000 employees in the US this year. They include the Amazon Technical Academy – which will look to equip “non-technical Amazon employees with the essential skills to transition into, and thrive in, software engineering” – and Associate2Tech – which trains “fulfilment associates” to move into technical roles “regardless of their previous IT experience”.

The Machine Learning University will offer employees with technical backgrounds an opportunity to access machine learning skills through an on-site training program, while Amazon Apprenticeship will offer “paid intensive classroom training and on-the -job apprenticeships” with Amazon itself.

According to the company, a review of the company’s jobs and analysis of hiring data from its US workforce found that Amazon’s fastest growing highly skilled jobs over the last five years were data mapping specialist (832% growth), data scientist (505%), solutions architect (454%), security engineer (229%) and business analyst (160%).

“Within customer fulfilment, highly skilled roles have increased over 400%, including jobs like logistics coordinator, process improvement manager and transportation specialist within our customer fulfilment network,” the company said.

“Through our continued investment in local communities in more than 40 states across the country, we have created tens of thousands of jobs in the US in the past year alone,” Beth Galetti, Senior VP of HR at Amazon, said in a statement. “For us, creating these opportunities is just the beginning. While many of our employees want to build their careers here, for others it might be a stepping stone to different aspirations.”

We think it’s important to invest in our employees, and to help them gain new skills and create more professional options for themselves,” she added. “With this pledge, we’re committing to support 100,000 Amazonians in getting the skills to make the next step in their careers.”

“The future of work is now and the challenge is not just adapting to new technologies, but adapting to the dynamism of the economy, which will only accelerate,” Jason Tyszko, Vice President at the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, added.

“Amazon is demonstrating the new role employers must play to counter that challenge, fostering a new relationship with workers where maintaining and growing their skills is an imperative for business success,” he said.

Startups

NASA invests in small businesses for space tech development

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

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on 18 June that it would invest US$45 million in small businesses and research institutions developing space technologies on the basis that these companies would “help . . . land astronauts on the Moon in five years and establish a sustainable presence there, as part of the agency’s larger Moon to Mars exploration approach”.

NASA has selected 363 proposals from organisations spread across 41 states to “help advance the types of capabilities needed for those future missions, as well as to support the agency in other areas”. These projects form part of NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs.

Around 100 of the selected companies will be first-time recipients of a NASA SBIR or STTR contract and over 20 percent of the businesses are from underrepresented communities, including minority and women-owned businesses, the agency said.

The projects will support a number of areas – including aeronautics, human space exploration and operations, science and space technology – covering research and development for various applications.

These include an intelligent rover wheel with integrated sensing and perception subsystems to improve mobility, a laser-based mass spectrometer that could be used to search for life on other planets, a light-weight solar panel, long-term auto-pilot technology for unmanned vehicles and  new mapping techniques.

According to the agency, the selected proposals were chosen based on their “technical merit and feasibility” as well as the “experience, qualifications and facilities” of the submitting organisations, the effectiveness of the proposed work plan and commercial potential, among other criteria.

NASA’s SBIR and STTR programs aim to encourage small businesses and research institutions to “develop innovative ideas that meet the specific research and development needs of the federal government” and stimulate technological innovation in the private sector.

They also intend that the programs should “encourage participation of socially and economically disadvantaged persons and women-owned small businesses”, and “increase the commercial application for research results”. Several of the chosen proposals will have applications here on Earth – for example, the rover wheel could also be used on Earth-bound autonomous tractors and other off-road vehicles.

The agency’s SBIT and STTR programs are conducted in three phases starting with the proposal; then the development, demonstration and delivery of the innovation; and then the commercialisation of the resulting products. The 363 selected proposals are all still in phase one; contracts granted during this phase last for either six months (SBIR) or 13 months (STTR) with maximum funding of US$125,000.

Both programs are managed by NASA’s Ames Research Centre in Silicon Valley, California, for the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). The STMD is responsible for “developing . . . cross-cutting, pioneering, new technologies and capabilities needed by the agency to achieve its current and future missions”. 

“We are excited about the entrepreneurial, innovative ideas that these small businesses are bringing to the table,” Jim Reuter, associate administrator for the STMD, said in a statement. “The technologies show great promise in helping NASA achieve its objectives across all mission areas, including our efforts to send American astronauts to the Moon, and then on to Mars, while also providing a long-term boost to the American economy.”

Gadgets

Arianespace and ESA announce Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer launch contract

Leave a comment
Image by Jonny Lindner from Pixabay

The European Space Agency (ESA) has unveiled plans for a spacecraft to study Jupiter and three of its largest moons – Ganymede, Europa and Callisto – in the first “large-class mission” of the ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015–2025 programme.

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer – aka “Juice” – will ride into space on an Ariane launch vehicle, Arianespace and ESA confirmed on 17 June at the International Paris Air Show. Its mission is “devoted to complete a unique tour of the Jupiter system”.

The launch period for Juice will start in mid-2022 aboard an Ariane 5 or an Ariane 64 launch vehicle – depending on the final launch slot from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, South America, the ESA said.

The satellite is expected to have a mass at lift-off of around six tonnes and will be placed in Earth’s escape orbit in a direction to Jupiter, beginning a journey of 600 million kilometres that will end in October 2029 after a 7.5 year cruise which should include gravitational assists from Earth, Venus and Mars.

The Jupiter tour includes several flybys of each planet-sized world, and ends with orbit insertion around Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System. Juice will carry what the ESA described as “the most powerful scientific payload ever flown to the outer Solar System””, consisting of ten state-of-the-art instruments and one science experiment that uses the spacecraft telecommunication system with ground-based radio telescopes.

Juice’s instruments are expected to enable scientists to “compare each of the icy satellites” and to “investigate the potential for such bodies to harbour habitable environments such as subsurface oceans”. According to the ESA, they will also carry out observations of Jupiter, its atmosphere, its magnetosphere, its other satellites and rings.

European multinational aerospace corporation Airbus is developing and building the Juice spacecraft. As prime contractor for design, development, production, and testing of the satellite, Airbus will lead a consortium of more than 80 companies covering more than 110 contracts.

“Juice is the first ‘large-class’ mission in our Cosmic Vision programme and of prime importance for investigating the habitability potential of ocean-worlds beyond our own,” Günther Hasinger, the ESA’s Director of Science, said in a statement. “We’re delighted to confirm it will have a flying start with an Ariane launch vehicle, setting it on course to fulfil its scientific goals in the Jupiter system.”

“Arianespace is honoured to be awarded this new scientific mission from ESA, which will advance our understanding of the Universe,” Stéphane Israël, Chief Executive Officer of Arianespace, added.

Israël sees the contract as “confirmation of Arianespace’s ability to ensure Europe’s independent access to space for all types of missions”.

“We are once again marshalling all of our strengths and capabilities to support Europe’s spaceborne ventures, with a launch services offering based on Ariane 5 and Ariane 6 so we can deliver the availability and flexibility needed by ESA for its latest emblematic mission,” he said.

Gadgets

SpinLaunch secures first contract for “revolutionary” new space launch services

Leave a comment
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Johnathan Yaney, founder and CEO of spaceflight technology development company SpinLaunch, announced on 19 June that the company had been awarded a responsive launch prototype contract by the US Department of Defence (DoD), facilitated by the Defence Innovation Unit (DIU).

SpinLaunch said it was developing a “kinetic energy-based launch system” which it claimed would “provide the world’s lowest-cost orbital launch services for the rapidly growing small satellite industry”.

Referencing a recent joint report from the DIU and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the company noted that the future and growth of the US space economy is expected to be “critically dependent on continuing reductions in the costs and risks associated with launch”.

The report found that “there is a bifurcation of launch providers between lower-cost, ‘bulk’ carriers . . . and higher-cost, ‘niche’ providers offering lower lift-mass, but launch to a specific orbit.”

In January 2019, SpinLaunch moved from Silicon Valley to its new 140,000 square foot headquarters in Long Beach, California and last month broke ground on a new US$7 million test facility on 10 acres at New Mexico’s Spaceport America. The company anticipates that its first kinetic energy flight tests will occur early 2020 and has announced its plans for first launch by 2022.

“SpinLaunch fills this gap by providing dedicated orbital launch with high frequency at a magnitude lower cost than any current ‘niche’ launch system,” Yaney said in a statement.

“This will truly be a disruptive enabler for the emerging commercial space industry,” he added. “There is a promising market surge in the demand for LEO constellations of inexpensive small satellites for disaster monitoring, weather, reconnaissance, communications and other services.”

In 2018, SpinLaunch raised US$40 million in a Series A financing round from Airbus Ventures, Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.

The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU)was established in 2015 to “reinvigorate and lead” DoD outreach to commercial innovation hubs across the United States, beginning with Silicon Valley to Washington, DC, Boston and Austin.

Its stated mission is to “execute transformative projects with scalable impact across the joint force; accelerate the adoption of commercial technology, from AI, autonomy, cyber, human systems and space, to strengthen the National Security Innovation base (NSIB)”.

Business

Trusted Computing Group launches initiative to develop “world’s tiniest TPM”

Leave a comment
Image by Michael Schwarzenberger from Pixabay

The Trusted Computing Group (TCG), founded in 2003 by major technology companies to secure computers’ cryptographic keys, announced plans on 13 June to develop the “world’s tiniest Trusted Platform Module (TPM)” for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Put most simply, a TPM is a tamper resistant piece of cryptographic hardware – or security coprocessor – built onto the system board of a computer that implements primitive cryptographic functions onto which more complex features can be built.

Among other functions, it can perform public key cryptographic operations and compute hash functions, manage and generate security keys, securely store those keys and other secret data, and generate random numbers.

TPMs are frequently left out of IoT products due to size, budget or space constraints, which is what TCG is hoping to address with this initiative by developing a TPM small enough to be “integrated directly within the host chip,” eliminating space concerns for developers who still want to incorporate the additional security provided by a TPM.

Many manufacturers still want to build devices that include Roots of Trust for Measurement (RTM), Storage (RTS) and Reporting (RTR) so that these devices can work securely within the TCG Measurement and Attestation framework.

Also read: Top 5 Best Crypto Exchanges to Trade Bitcoins, Altcoins

Attestation is a mechanism for software to prove its identity, and prove to a remote party that its operating system and application software are intact and trustworthy. The verifier trusts that the attestation data is accurate because it is signed by a TPM whose key is certified by a trusted Certification Authority.

TCG said it had formed a new Measurement and Attestation RootS (MARS) Subgroup to “develop specifications that will enable manufacturers to build compliant chips with very little overhead for them and their customers”.

The company exhibited the first prototype for such a TPM – known as “Radicle” – due the inaugural session of the MARS subgroup at the TCG member’s meeting held this year in Warsaw, Poland, in June.

In a statement, TCG said that the team had also “agreed on the scope of its work, which will focus on the hardware requirements necessary to control and operate the primitives supporting the RTS and RTR, and the software API to access them”.

“As we put greater trust in things like autonomous cars, smart homes and healthcare sensors, and connect them to the Internet, we need to take steps to make sure connected devices are ubiquitously secure to protect them from data breaches and hackers,” Dr Joerg Borchert, President of TCG, said in a statement.

“As an international standard, TCG’s TPM is widely deployed and a proven solution,” he added. “This makes our technologies ideally suited to deliver on the new security needs emerging as we move towards a world where everything is connected. The work undertaken at our latest members’ meeting will ultimately deliver the specifications needed to achieve this.”

“In a nutshell, we want to specify what the tiniest TPM needs to be so it can be integrated directly within the host chip,” Tom Brostrom, Chair of the MARS subgroup, said. “This will ensure that devices that aren’t big enough to integrate a separate TPM will still be able to retain the required RTS/RTR capabilities.

“In turn, this will allow greater reach of trusted computing technologies over a wider set of devices and use cases,” he concluded.

Tech

UK and NASA state intent to work on future Moon missions

Leave a comment
Image by Susan Cipriano from Pixabay

The UK and US space agencies have signed a joint statement of intent, which “paves the way for UK commercial satellite communication and navigation services to be used by future NASA missions to the Moon”, the UK space agency said on 16 July, the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch.

The agreement was announced by the UK’s science minister, Chris Skidmore, at the Policy Exchange in London on ‘Embracing the New Space Age’. According to the UK Space Agency, the statement of intent on Lunar Research and Exploration “highlights the common interests of the UK and US in space, and the role that both nations can play in addressing major scientific questions”.

The agency said that it recognised “the scientific benefits of missions to the Moon and the important role that the growing commercial space sector will play in providing services on the lunar surface and in orbit”.

NASA and the UK Space Agency will establish a working group to coordinate joint scientific research and identify future opportunities to work together later this year.

“As the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 shows, NASA is an organisation steeped in history but also one which is constantly looking to the future and breaking new ground,” Skidmore said in a statement.

“The government is committed to growing the UK space sector, fostering the key capabilities we have in areas such as satellite communications, navigation and robotics, while developing new facilities such as spaceports, as part of our Industrial Strategy,” he added.

He said that there would be “significant opportunities” for the UK and US to collaborate over the next fifty years and welcomed the statement of intent as a “step towards future missions”.

“International collaboration is at the heart of space exploration and we want to work with partners around the world to deliver incredible science, develop innovative technologies and explore the solar system,” Graham Turnock, CEO of the UK Space Agency, said. “[We] are already working on missions [with NASA] such as the Mars InSight lander, but there is so much more we can achieve together in the new space age.”

The UK continues to be a member of the European Space Agency (ESA), playing a major role in missions such as Solar Orbiter and ExoMars, both due to launch in 2020, and hosting the European Centre for Space Applications and Communications in Harwell, Oxfordshire.

“Since human’s first steps on the moon 50 years ago, services from space have become woven into our everyday lives,” Graham Peters, Chair of the UK space trade association, said. “This statement of intent for Lunar Research and Exploration projects between the UK and NASA is welcome news for the UK space industry and, as part of our strategy to continue to grow the sector, we want the UK to establish a National Space Programme to sit alongside our investments in ESA.”

“Amongst other things a national programme will enable us to establish new international partnerships, retain sovereign space capability and harness satellite technologies to help deliver the UK commitment to net zero carbon emissions by 2050,” he added.

The UK Space Agency also awarded on the same day £2 million for 10 new projects to develop innovative technologies that “could transform weather forecasting and the study of climate change, through the Centre for Earth Observation Instrumentation”.

Tech

AI and Google Street View could hold the key to stopping invasive plants

Leave a comment
Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay

Scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology will use a grant from the New York State Department of Environmental Conversation (DEC) to identify and map five invasive plant species around New York State, the university said on 20 June.

Instead of using traditional methods of data collection, the two faculty members plan to train an artificial intelligence (AI) to recognise the plants in images from Google Street View and other sources, allowing officials to identify high-priority treatment sites, identifying where the species have spread and subsequently prioritising where to intervene.

Invasive plants can quickly damage ecosystems, cause economic hardships for farmers and pose health risks to the public, but regulators tasked with halting their progress often have limited resources.

The two researchers, Assistant Professor Christopher Kanan and Associate Professor Christy Tyler, believe that this new approach will be “a big improvement over current tracking methods, which rely on field reports and volunteer crowd-sourcing”.

“There are limitations to crowd-sourcing,” Kanan said in a statement. “Rural roads are hard to get to and hard to monitor and often you can’t even pull over to the side of the road easily.”

“If we can figure out where these species are, using artificial intelligence, organizations like the Department of Environmental Conservation can better allocate their resources toward managing these plants,” he added.

Kanan and Tyler have already identified working models for two species – common reed (Phragmites) and Japanese knotweed—which they will further fine-tune, the university said. They will also develop new models for identifying giant hogweed, tree-of-heaven and purple loosestrife.

These plants are some of the most problematic species in New York because they quickly crowd out native plants, are hazardous to humans or host insects that wreak havoc on crops.

“We started with two target species that are pretty obvious, noxious, public enemy number one-type species that are common on roadways,” Tyler explained. “We picked them because they are priority species and distinctive looking plants that can be picked up easily by computers.”

“Moving forward, tree-of-heaven is an important one because it’s the host of the spotted lantern fly, a new invasive insect that has huge potential for crop damage, especially tree fruit including apples, pears, peaches and grapes. That will be a bigger challenge because it looks a lot like other species,” she said.

Once the computer models are functional and begin making predications about where the invasive species are located, Tyler’s environmental science students can verify the identification in the images and in the field to confirm that the algorithm works.

Students in the environmental science senior capstone class, with Visiting Assistant Professor Kaitlin Stack Whitney, have already helped with this verification process. Ultimately, the results will be communicated to managers through the New York State Partnership for Invasive Species Management (PRISM).

“Most of the big successes in computer vision use deep neural networks with images that are fairly small. Google Street View images have over 1,000 times more pixels . . . images typically used. Standard algorithms totally break down in this situation,” the researchers said. “

We have developed efficient methods for detecting regions of these high-resolution images that are likely to contain plant matter and then we determine if an invasive plant is present in the scene,” they concluded. “For needle in the haystack type problems, this multi-stage process seems to be very successful.”

The project is funded by the DEC’s Invasive Species Grant Program, which is designed to “support projects that target both aquatic and terrestrial invasive species”. The DEC received 96 applications and awarded approximately US$2.8 million from the New York State Environmental Protection Fund to 42 projects.

Startups

Simple ‘smart’ glass reveals the future of artificial vision

Leave a comment
From left to right, Zongfu Yu, Ang Chen and Efram Khoram developed the concept for a “smart” piece of glass that recognizes images without any external power or circuits. Photograph by Sam Million Weaver and courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have identified a way to create artificially intelligent glass that is capable of recognizing images without the use of sensors, circuits or a power source, the university said on 8 July.

The glass uses “light propagation” and could be used in smartphones as part of Face ID without draining the battery – and potentially without using any power at all.

“We’re using optics to condense the normal setup of cameras, sensors and deep neural networks into a single piece of thin glass,” University of Wisconsin-Madison electrical and computer engineering professor Zongfu Yu explained in a press release. “This is completely different from the typical route to machine vision.”

He envisions pieces of glass that look like translucent squares embedded with tiny strategically placed bubbles and impurities that would bend light in specific ways to differentiate among different images.

For proof of concept, Yu and his team devised a method to make such glass that identified handwritten numbers. Light emanating from an image of a number enters at one end of the glass, and then focuses to one of nine specific spots on the other side, each corresponding to individual digits. The glass was dynamic enough to detect, in real-time, when a handwritten three was altered to become an eight.

“The fact that we were able to get this complex behaviour with such a simple structure was really something,” Erfan Khoram, a graduate student in Yu’s lab, remarked.

The researchers used a technique similar to a machine-learning training process to design the glass to recognise numbers, except they “trained” an analogue material instead of digital codes, placing air bubbles of different shapes and sizes, and small pieces of light-absorbing materials, at specific locations in the glass.

“We’re accustomed to digital computing, but this has broadened our view,” Yu added. “The wave dynamics of light propagation provide a new way to perform analogue artificial neural computing.”

One advantage is that the computation required is “passive” and intrinsic to the material, which means that a single piece of image recognition could be used multiple times, and another is that the process works at the speed of light as the glass distinguishes between images by distorting light waves.

“We could potentially use the glass as a biometric lock, tuned to recognize only one person’s face,” Yu said. “Once built, it would last forever without needing power or internet, meaning it could keep something safe for you even after thousands of years.”

The glass would be inexpensive and easy to make, although the up-front training process could be time consuming and computationally demanding. Looking ahead to the near future, the scientists’ next move is to find out if the method will work for more complex tasks, such as facial recognition.

“The true power of this technology lies in its ability to handle much more complex classification tasks instantly without any energy consumption,” Ming Yuan, a collaborator on the research and professor of statistics at Columbia University, said.

“These tasks are the key to create artificial intelligence: to teach driverless cars to recognize a traffic signal, to enable voice control in consumer devices, among numerous other examples,” he added.

Unlike human vision, which is very general in its capabilities to discern an unknown number of different objects, the smart glass could excel in specific applications like number recognition, identifying letters and faces, and so on.

“We’re always thinking about how we provide vision for machines in the future, and imagining application specific, mission-driven technologies.” Yu concluded. “This changes almost everything about how we design machine vision.” 

University of Wisconsin–Madison graduate students Ang Chen and Dianjing Liu also contributed to the research, with Qiqi Wang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Startups

Researchers are using machine learning to screen for autism in children

Leave a comment
Image by 192635 from Pixabay

Researchers at Duke Engineering and the Duke School of Medicine have created an app to screen young children for signs of autism by scanning their reactions as they watch movies, the university said on 11 July.

The app uses a video coding algorithm which tracks and looks for movements that display the child’s emotions and ability to pay attention, which can indicate autism risk. The initial study was conducted using an app from the Apple Store and based on Apple’s ResearchKit open source development platform.

The first results from the pilot study of this five year project started coming in last year, leading to “new insights about autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and has the potential to transform how children’s development is screened and monitored”.

The app first administers caregiver consent forms and survey questions and then uses the phone’s selfie camera to collect videos of young children’s reactions while they watch movies designed to elicit autism risk behaviours, such as patterns of emotion and attention, on the device’s screen.

The videos of the child’s reactions are sent to the study’s servers, where automatic behavioural coding software tracks the movement of video landmarks on the child’s face and quantifies the child’s emotions and attention. For example, in response to a short movie of bubbles floating across the screen, the video coding algorithm looks for movements of the face that would indicate joy.

“Babies who go on to develop autism typically don’t pay attention to social cues,” Geraldine Dawson, director of the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development, said in an article published on Wired and cited by the university in its announcement. “They’re more interested in non-social things, like toys or objects. They’re also less emotionally expressive. They smile less, particularly in response to positive social events.”

Guillermo Sapiro, professor of electrical and computer engineering, is using Amazon Web Services and tools called TensorFlow and PyTorch to build machine learning algorithms that connect children’s facial expressions and eye movements to potential signs of ASD. His group is also using these cloud computing tools to develop such algorithms for privacy filters for the images and videos they collect.

Through the app, the Duke team was able to collect behavioural data from around 1,700 children, which is far more than the 50 to 100 typically found in an ASD study. With that amount of data in hand, the researchers have so far found the app to be almost 90 percent accurate for some subsets of behaviours.

Tech

Scottish supercomputer satellites launched into orbit

Leave a comment
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

A pair of Glasgow-built satellites which could revolutionize how data is downloaded from space were successfully launched on 5 July, the UK Space Agency said.

Both satellites were developed under the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) Pioneer program, which turns research and development investment into successful commercial products and services by offering varying degrees of support to projects with different levels of operational and commercial maturity.

The two new satellites, operated by Spire Global and supported by the UK Space Agency, will be able to “process and cherry-pick data from other satellites in orbit before transmitting it to Earth, optimizing and freeing up bandwidth for other tasks and users”.

Spire Global is a data and analytics company that “collects data from space to solve problems on Earth”. It owns and operates a networks of small satellites, known as nanosatellites, identifies, tracks, and predicts the movement of the world’s resources and weather systems – and provides that information to governments and businesses to inform decision-making processes at those institutions.

“Over the past five years, Glasgow has become the best place in Europe to build these innovative, small satellites, with Spire Global alone manufacturing more than 100 on the Clyde,” Graham Turnock, Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency, said in a statement.

“These new Glaswegian nanosats were launched from Russia, but we are working hard to ensure that in future we can design, build, test, launch and manage satellites as part of the UK government’s modern Industrial Strategy,” he added. “We are also a leading member of the [ESA] which delivers significant economic benefits back to businesses in the UK.”

“The whole idea of the Pioneer Programme is to give European and Canadian industries access to space, rapidly and at low cost,” Khalil Kably, Pioneer Programme Manager for the ESA, said. “As soon as they have an innovative idea, such as supercomputing by Spire here, we want people to be able to try it in orbit. It’s the ability to go from a new idea to market very quickly, through in-orbit validation.”

“We see these parallel supercomputing scalable devices as a crucially important next step for a new level of accuracy and timeliness in space data analytics,” Peter Platzer, CEO of Spire Global concluded. “The UK Space Agency and ESA have been extremely forward-looking and supportive of Spire’s innovative approach to deploying space technology to solve problems here on Earth.”

The UK Space Agency is also supporting a space incubation centre in Glasgow and has provided support to the Scottish Centre of Excellence in Satellite Applications, based at the University of Strathclyde and working across the whole of Scotland.

The Centre’s role is to raise awareness of the potential of satellite services and data to be used in new and improved products and services in other so-called “space enabled” markets – including, for example, offshore renewable energy and aquaculture.

The UK Space Agency said it wants the country to “lead the new space age” and is looking to drive growth across the sector as part of the government’ Industrial Strategy with initiatives such as the £50m Spaceflight programme.

Startups

Google digital news initiative lands first in Youngstown, Ohio

Leave a comment
Image courtesy of Sollok29 on Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Google announced on 18 July that Youngstown, Ohio, will be the first city in its Compass Experiment, a joint venture with newspaper publishing company McClatchy to revive local news. This is a timely announcement as the city’s only daily newspaper is due to close its doors on 31 August this year.

The Compass Experiment, part of the Google News Initiative, is a local digital news lab founded between the two organizations. The Youngstown site is one of three initial digital-only news operations – with the two sites yet to be named – that they intend to launch and operate “ in small to mid-sized US communities that have limited sources of local, independent journalism” over the next three years.

The project’s goal is to not only “support the dissemination of news in these communities, but also make the local operations financially self-sustaining, through experimentation with a variety of revenue models”, and share lessons learned with “with the broader news community” with the intention of replicating the same – or similar – model elsewhere in the country.

Each site will be independently built and “may launch with different platforms and revenue models”. They will also be entirely owned and operated with McClatchy, which the companies said has “sole editorial control over content”.

Compass consulted with Penelope Muse Abernathy, the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina and author of a 2018 study on the loss of local journalism in the United States, when analyzing potential communities for the project’s first local digital news sites. 

In a blog post, Mandy Jenkins, general manager of the Compass Experiment, noted the closure of Youngstown’s daily newspaper, The Vindicator, will leave the city “and a larger region of about 500,000 people, without a daily newspaper”.

“The timing of such a loss couldn’t be worse for Youngstown, which has suffered through a tremendous economic downturn over the last 40 years,” she added. “While the area may be struggling financially, Youngstown has a distinct identity and a strong sense of community, which is why we want to help build a path forward for local news.”

“We at McClatchy are looking forward to continuing our close collaboration with Google as we embark on this next important step. Over the course of the next three years, we will be sharing our successes, failures and what we’ve learned to the media industry at large,” she said.

According to the Pew Research Center, the estimated circulation of daily newspapers in the US fell to 28.6 million in 2018, down from 48.6 million a decade earlier –  and newsroom jobs have dropped by 25 percent since 2008. Facebook also recently admitted it’s struggling to find enough local news.