Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 11

In June NASA conducted an internal tabletop exercise where it gave a team 14 years to deflect a large asteroid that has a 72% chance of hitting Earth. NASA found it doesn't have clear decision-making processes for such a situation, there is a lack of global coordination infrastructure in place with other space agencies, no asteroid impact disaster management plans in place, and ultimately, a limited readiness to quickly implement needed space missions.

While just being a tabletop exercise and there luckily being no dangerous asteroid on the way, NASA underscored key holes in Earth's planetary defense system, holes that need to be filled with various systems and particularly responses to any potentially threatening asteroids. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission was one such response that proved Earth is capable of changing the orbit, and therefore trajectory, of an asteroid. When the news was confirmed, Earth just unlocked a new planetary defense weapon.

Unfortunately, there are problems with this method of asteroid prevention, and they are the time it takes for a launch to take place and the costs behind it. Another method has been proposed by Nathan Moore, a postdoctoral researcher at New Mexico's Sandia National Laboratories, who proved on a small scale that a powerful X-ray pulse fired at the surface of two different replica asteroids can alter their speed.

SpaceX is continuing to battle with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and in a new set of events, the Elon Musk-led company has posted a letter outlining what it claims to be "incorrect statements" made by FAA administrator Michael Whitaker.

On September 17, the FAA issued a proposal for a fine of $633,009 for a set of safety violations it claims SpaceX carried out during rocket launches in 2023. The proposal claimed the regulator didn't approve of two requests from SpaceX for a June 2023 launch of a Falcon rocket. According to the regulator SpaceX proceeded with the launch anyway. This violation amounted to $350,000, and the remainder was for a third violation with the Falcon Heavy launch that occurred in July 2023.

According to the FAA, SpaceX used an unapproved fuel farm as the source of the rocket's propellant, adding $283,009 to the total. SpaceX has now responded to these claims, writing it "rejects any allegations from FAA that SpaceX violated any laws." More specifically, SpaceX said it is false that it has launched without a permit, and all the Falcon missions outlined by the FAA the company received did receive licenses for.

A US government regulatory body has issued a proposal to fine Elon Musk's SpaceX more than half a million dollars for safety violations.

The regulator is, unsurprisingly, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the regulatory body that investigates and ultimately grants licenses for flight within US airspace. The FAA has been investigating SpaceX after every launch of its Starship launch vehicle, the world's largest and most powerful rocket.

However, Starship isn't the only SpaceX rocket in the FAA's sights, as the regulator is stringent with making sure the Elon Musk-led company, and any other space-fairing company, is following all the licensing requirements issued to them. 

Neuralink has just received "breakthrough device" designation for its experimental BCI (brain-computer interface) implant that would restore vision to the blind.

Elon Musk's startup received the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "breakthrough device" designation, which is given to particular medical devices that provide treatment or diagnosis of life-threatening conditions. It's aimed at speeding up the development and review of devices that are currently under development.

The new experimental device is known as "Blindsight" and will "enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see" said Elon.

Chinese scientists have successfully completed an experiment using SpaceX Starlink satellite signals to detect stealth targets in the South China Sea.

In a new report from the South China Morning Post, the experiment used a consumer-level DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone (which is about the size of a bird, to give you some perspective) was used to simulate a stealth aircraft. The radar cross-section of the drone was similar to an actual stealth fighter, but instead of using traditional ground-based radar emissions, the scientists detected the drone by analyzing electromagnetic signals from a Starlink satellite passing over the Philippines.

The scientists' detection method uses forward scatter, where an object like a plane or a drone disrupts electromagnetic waves from a satellite, causing small signal disturbances, these disturbances are captured and analyzed to determine where the object is located. This technique doesn't need the radar to emit signals, which makes it harder to someone trying to find your location, or jam it.

Heart Aerospace has just unveiled its first full-scale demonstrator airplane, which marks an important milestone in the development of the Swedish startup and its hybrid-electric airplane journey with its regional hybrid-electric aircraft, the ES-30.

Heart Aerospace's co-founder and CEO, Anders Forslund, said: "Our industry is approaching a 30-year innovation cycle, and we have less than 25 years to decarbonize aviation. We need to develop new methods to get net zero aerospace technologies to market faster. It is a testament to the ingenuity and dedication of our team that we're able to roll out a 30-seat aircraft demonstrator with a brand-new propulsion system, largely in-house, in less than two years".

The 32-meter wingspan in demonstrator form is dubbed Heart Experimental 1 (Heart X1) which will be used as a platform for testing and development of Heart's ES-30 electric aircraft. At first, the new HX-1 will be used for ground-based testing, which will see a focus on the charging operating, taxing, and turnaround procedures. After that, Heart is scheduled to lift off for its first fully electric flight in Q2 2025, where in preparation for this flight, the Swedish aero startup will run critical systems through hardware tests, both on and off the electric plane.

A robot has entered the Unit 2 reactor at the Fukushima power plant and if its mission is successful it will collect a small amount of nuclear waste that will then be examined by researchers.

The Fukushima power plant went into meltdown in 2011 following a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, causing approximately 880 tons of nuclear waste that will take until 2050 to clear away and decontaminate the area completely. Unfortunately, this estimation is on the side of optimistic, as researchers aren't even sure what kind of state the nuclear fuel is in, hence the involvement of a small robot grabber.

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO), the company that owns the site, has previously sent robots inside the reactor cores, and, unfortunately, they have experienced mixed success. In 2015, the company sent a robot into Unit 1, where it died three hours later after being exposed to a radioactive area. An underwater robot managed to get more success in 2017. In approximately two weeks, the robot will be pushed into the Unit 2 reactor by metal poles that extend up to 72 feet.

SpaceX has decided to voice its opinion on the lack of launch license it has obtained for the fifth launch of the world's most powerful rocket, Starship.

The Elon Musk-led company took to its official blog to share a lengthy update on the current situation Starship is facing, which is delayed launches due to regulatory red tape. SpaceX explains that Starship has been ready at the launch pad since the first week of August, but it still hasn't received a launch license from the US government. "Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware."

As for Flight 5 specifically, SpaceX writes that it received a launch license estimation from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the regulatory body responsible for granting approval for SpaceX to fly Starship. SpaceX is estimated to receive its license for Flight 5 sometime in late November, which would make it more than a two-month delay from the previously estimated date of mid-September.

A new study has detailed how mice skin can be turned transparent to see inside their bodies while they are still alive.

The new procedure doesn't harm the animals and involves the use of food dye that is applied to the skin of the mice. According to a new study published in the scientific journal Nature, the researchers are able to get a full view into the insides of a mouse, with a full view of their blood vessels, organs, and everything else. With technology such as this, the researchers hope to eventually use it on humans to be able to better diagnose any medical afflictions and ultimately learn more about the human body.

So, how does it work? The team explained the dye absorbs blue and ultraviolet light, making it much easier for light to pass through the skin of the mouse, leading to transparency. The Standford researchers explained the dye is "biocompatible" and that once it's washed off the mice, the rodent loses its transparency and excretes any leftovers through its urine.

Researchers have used the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii to peer out to edge of the Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt to discover any objects. 11 objects were discovered, and they appear to be orbiting in a "ring".

The two stories (here) and (here) are set to be published in the Planetary Science Journal and detail evidence for a cluster of objects just outside of the Kuiper Belt, which is approximately 40 to 50 astronomical units (AU), or the distance between Earth and the Sun, away from our planet.

As for the objects, researchers discovered 11 of them at a distance of between 70 to 90 AU, and if they are confirmed, it could have big implications for our understanding of the evolution of the Kuiper Belt and, by extension, our own Solar System.

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft that transported two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) has returned home without the astronauts.

Boeing's first astronaut mission to the ISS ended in failure when NASA deemed its Starliner spacecraft unsafe to transport the two astronauts it took to the ISS in June back to the surface of Earth. The mission was originally meant to be eight days, but now the astronauts will stay aboard the ISS until February next year when they will hitch a ride on Boeing's competitor's spacecraft, SpaceX's Dragon capsule.

Starliner parachuted into New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range on Friday. It has since been collected and will undergo a thorough evaluation to determine what caused the helium leaks that ultimately led to its mission's failure. Preliminary analysis of Starliner's problem from engineers led to the suspicion that Starliner's thrusters were getting too hot, causing the protective seals to swell and eventually obstruct the flow of propellant or liquid helium.

A new study published in the scientific journal Environment International has analyzed radio wave exposure to the human brain to see if it causes any form of brain cancer in hopes of putting to bed the widespread concern smartphones and other radio-wave-emitting devices cause brain cancer.

The widespread concerns that wireless devices cause cancer can be traced back to many different sources, particularly one study from 2011 that resulted in the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifying radio waves as a carcinogen or cancer-causing. However, the new study published in Environment International used a much larger data set than the 2011 study, leading the researchers to be much more confident in their conclusion, which was that radio-waves wireless technologies, including smartphones, don't cause cancer and cause no physical harm to human health.

Notably, the study was a review of previous studies commissioned by the World Health Organization. In the final analysis, 63 studies on the same subject were included, and the aforementioned conclusion was reached-wireless technologies don't cause any physical harm to humans. Moreover, the team found that even if a human used a smartphone for more than 10 years with an increased call rate that resulted in the device being placed near the head, there was still no association between smartphones and brain cancer.

There are many objects out in deep space that humans have yet to discover, but NASA can add one more to the "discovered" list and that is a fossil lurking millions of light years away from our planet.

The newly discovered object is called the Tucana Dwarf Galaxy, and it's located approximately 3 million light years away from Earth. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has honed its extremely sensitive instruments on the location of the galaxy, revealing some of its contents, which are believed to be groups of billions of old stars.

Now why would old stars be of any use to astronomers? NASA explains this galaxy is referred to as a dwarf spheroidal galaxy, which a smaller galaxy that contains stars that aren't very bri due to their old age. Additionally, these galaxies contain a small quantity of dust, making visibility much easier for optical space telescopes such as Hubble. Notably, the Tucana Dwarf Galaxy is approximately 3.6 million light years away from the center mass of the Local Group of galaxies, which includes our own Milky Way galaxy.

A beluga whale was discovered with a camera mount harness that stated "Equipment of St. Petersburg," which led to online speculation the whale was used for covert Russian intelligence operations.

The whale was originally discovered in 2019 and quickly gained the attention of thousands of people for the ambiguity surrounding its camera harness. Over the next five years, the whale, which was promptly named Hvaldimir, was spotted several times and has even been the star of a few viral clips that depicted the whale returning a dropped GoPro and even playing fetch with humans.

Unfortunately for those fond of the whale, and perhaps even Russian intelligence agencies, Hvaldimir was recently discovered deceased by Norwegian non-profit Marine Mind, which has been tracking the location of the whale for quite some time. The team posted the news on Instagram and wrote that it's not obvious how Hvaldimir died, and that the whale was only approximately half of its total lifespan.

1X has revealed NEO, its humanoid robot that's designed to be your helper around the home.

The intelligent android assistant, as 1X calls it, is a prototype model, as you might guess, and we've been treated to a short clip of the NEO Beta robot in action.

The idea is to produce a soft robot, rather than a mechanical or stiff android, to look more naturally human. Indeed, some commenters don't believe it's a robot in the video that's just been shared, and are saying it's just a human in a suit.

A company attending the World Robot Conference in Beijing last week has used humans in robot costumes to showcase humanoid robotics.

Last week, social media platforms received an influx of exceedingly impressive humanoid robots as the World Robot Conference took place in Beijing, which is essentially a gathering of robotics companies to display the projects they are working on and network with each other. However, some people are being fooled by a select number of videos claiming the subjects in the video are humanoid robots, but they are just humans cosplaying as humanoid robots.

At first many thought the technology in developing humanoid robots had reached a lifelike level, but then an image of one of the female humanoid robots having lunch. The company behind the two cosplayers reportedly is Ex-Robots, and the reasoning behind the presence of the women is currently unknown.

An astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) phoned home to report a mysterious sound coming from Boeing's Starliner capsule.

NASA astronaut Barry (Butch) Wilmore contacted NASA's ground crew on Saturday, informing them of a strange sound that was presumably coming from the Boeing's Starliner, which NASA recently deemed too dangerous to ferry the NASA astronauts it transported to the ISS back in June. Starliner arrived at the ISS in June with some leaks, which later turned into even more leaks and then the eventual ruling out by NASA as the designated method of transportation back to the surface of Earth.

Most importantly, the two astronauts initially intended to stay aboard the ISS for a week, but their stay will now span more than 200 days. Wilmore informed NASA that it was hearing a repeated sound that was described by a member of NASA's ground team as "almost like a sonar ping." Given the location of space, the mysterious sound has a somewhat automatic ominous nature, but unfortunately, the explanation will more likely than not be disappointingly ordinary.

A new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters details a hole that was created in Earth's atmosphere following the Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) of SpaceX's Starship rocket during it second orbital test flight.

The study was published in the scientific journal on August 26, and claims SpaceX created a hole in Earth's ionosphere, which is located between 50 and 400 miles above Earth's surface. This region of Earth's atmosphere is where gasses are stripped of electrons and turned into plasma, but following the explosion of SpaceX's Starship rocket researchers detected a first-of-its-kind disturbance.

According to the study multiple ground-based instruments and satellites detected the disturbance in the region of the atmosphere where the rocket exploded, with it lasting for anywhere between 30 to 40 minutes before fully recovering. The team explained the ionospheric holes aren't particularly new with chemical rockets exploding, as researchers know that carbon dioxide and water vapor can result in ionized oxygen atoms reforming into normal oxygen atom. The region this occurs in causes a "hole" to form in the plasma sea that is the ionosphere.

It was only last week we heard about Neuralink's second human patient using the company's new brain-computer interface (BCI) called "Link" to play Counter-Strike 2, and now we have an update from Nolan Arbaugh, the Neuralink's first human patient.

Arbaugh's success with the first BCI implant has truly been remarkable as the 29-year-old paraplegic has demonstrate competent control over a computer cursor through simply thinking where he wants the cursor to move.

In a nutshell, the BCI implant within both of the Neuralink patients' heads measure electrical signals within the brain and coverts them into readable input data for a computer to process in real-time. The device gives patients such as Arbaugh the ability to play Mario Kart, and even describe his skill within first-person-shooter games as unfair as he has "an aimbot". But more importantly, it changes the life for someone like Arbaugh as he is now able to interact with the world in a way that without Neuralink wasn't possible.

It was back in May we last heard about NASA launching its Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, which if successful could revolutionize space travel in the solar system and perhaps even further out into the seemingly endlessness of the universe.

NASA launched a tiny CubeSat on the back of Rocket Lab's Electron rocket on April 23, and reported the next-generation technology was successfully placed 600 miles above the surface of Earth in a Sun-synchronous orbit. The CubeSat was then ready to move onto the next part of its mission, the lengthy unfurling process that will eventually result in the sail appearing as a square that's approximately 860 square feet, or about half the size of a tennis court.

NASA has now provided an update on the mission, writing the solar sail is "now fully deployed in space after a successful test of its sail-hosting boom system." The space agency goes on to explain aboard the solar sail are four cameras that captured panoramic views of the reflective saily and supporting composite booms. NASA states on September 4 images from these cameras will be published to showcase the achievement.