Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 222

Former astronaut and US Senator John Glenn died today, December 8th, at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus. He was 95.

Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth and the fifth person in space in 1962 when he flew with the Friendship 7 mission, a part of Project Mercury. His flight made him an instant hero. He received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978 and was inducted into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1990.

Glenn is also the oldest person to fly in space so far, and the only one to fly in both the Mercury and Space Shuttle programs. He was 77 when he flew on Discovery mission in 1998. The purpose of his flight was to study the effects of spaceflight on the elderly. NASA doctors have followed Glenn's health since he first became an astronaut.

SpaceX grounded its rockets for more than three months after September's Falcon 9 explosion, but they were supposed to end this year with a new launch on December 16th.

However, that launch has now been canceled, and SpaceX is looking at a new launch date in early January. On a blog posted on their website, SpaceX stated that they are completing the final steps necessary to safely return to flight.

After more than 12 years studying Saturn, its rings, and moons, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has entered the final year of its epic voyage. The conclusion of the historic scientific odyssey is planned for September 2017.

Now, the Cassini spacecraft has sent its first views of Saturn's atmosphere since beginning the latest phase of its mission. The new images show scenes from high above Saturn's northern hemisphere.

The ESA concluded a two-day Council meeting at the ministerial level in Lucerne, Switzerland and ministers in charge of space matters from ESA's 22 member states plus Slovenia and Canada have allocated 10.3 billion euros (roughly around $11 billion) for space activities and programs based on the vision of a United Space in Europe in the era of Space 4.0.

The members also approved the commitment to extend European participation in the International Space Station program to 2024. Funding for the ESA's extension will amount to about 807 million euros ($861 million) on usage and 153 million euros ($163 million) for science projects involving the Space Station.

NASA's Administrator Charles Bolden expressed his excitement about the decision on NASA's official blog.

The European Space Agency (ESA) member nations have approved an additional $425 million dollars to complete the ExoMars mission, a two-part multi-year Martian astrobiology life searching project and joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos). ESA asked for the additional funds after their Schiaparelli lander crashed onto the surface of Mars in October.

The member nations held a two-day meeting in Switzerland where it has been announced that they will provide extra funds.

The European-Russian ExoMars project have sent an orbiter and a test lander to Mars, which were supposed to lay groundwork for the next part of the mission scheduled in 2020 when they planned to send a rover to Mars.

"The Christmas tree is filled with flowers. I swear it's Christmas Eve", might not sound like a typical Christmas carol, it certainly won't make it to the top of the charts, but this is how an AI-generated song sounds.

The song, if we can call it that, was created with a program named "neural karaoke." Scientists uploaded a Christmasy image to the program and let it do its magic. The program then analyzed the photo and came up with words and a melody. The result is...unique.

The "neural karaoke" project from the University of Toronto is a demonstration of what artificial intelligence can do to make our lives more fun. It was created by student Hang Chu, who managed to teach the computer to create a simple melody in 100 hours.

After three and a half months, SpaceX could launch a new rocket this December. SpaceX grounded its rockets for more than three months after September's Falcon 9 explosion. The company struggled to determine the cause of the accident with Elon Musk stating that the explosion was caused by a "really surprising problem that's never been encountered before in the history of rocketry."

Musk later said that the cause of the accident was "a combination of liquid helium, advanced carbon fiber composites, and solid oxygen." He also expressed his hope that SpaceX will launch their next Falcon 9 rocket in December.

It seems that might happen on December 16th when SpaceX should launch satellites for Iridium Communications, a company that provides communications services through a constellation of more than 60 satellites.

The second day of the European Business Angels Network (EBAN) was dedicated to one of the most interesting technology topics and breakthroughs in recent years - artificial intelligence. The main speaker was IBM's Peter Hedges, one of the main experts in charge of the development of the famous Watson and head of IBM's cognitive computing in Europe.

Hedges started his keynote by saying that they started the Watson project ten years ago because they wanted to develop a system that can understand natural language. Just five years later, Watson has beaten the best players in Jeopardy.

"That was just the beginning. We later went on to teach Watson about medicine, finance, law...not so it could replace doctors or lawyers, but because it could be a great help to them", said Hedges, who has worked at IBM for over thirty years and still talks with the same enthusiasm like it's his first day at work.

I can only imagine those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are reading news that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of MDMA (ecstasy) in large-scale trials.

The new Phase 3 research will see 230 patients involved, funded by Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), an organization that pushes for the medical use of marijuana, LSD, and MDMA. MAPS funded the Phase 2 studies of MDMA with 130 PTSD patients. One study showed that out of 19 patients, 56% said that their PTSD symptoms weren't as strong after taking ecstasy with just three doses of MDMA - by the end of the study, two-thirds of them no longer met the criteria required for having PTSD - impressive.

Andrew Parrott, a psychologist at Swansea University in Wales said: "It sends the message that this drug will help you solve your problems, when often it just creates problems. This is a messy drug we know can do damage". But it's not as cut and dry as that, with a C.J. Hardin - a veteran who did three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, said: "I just felt hopeless and in the dark. But the MDMA sessions showed me a light I could move toward. Now I'm out of the darkness and the world is all around me".

The ESA's Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) arrived in Mars' orbit on October 19th as a part of ExoMars mission. The European Space Agency has now published a video compiled of a series of images taken in November by the TGO.

The first image sequence shown was taken at a distance of 5300 km, followed by a sequence acquired during closest approach of 235 km altitude. The video shows the Hebes Chasma region and Arisa Chasmata, which is located on the flanks of a large volcano on Mars named Arsia Mons.

The ExoMars mission will help us get a closer and better look at Mars and its regions, which should be favorable in our plan to colonize Mars.

NVIDIA announced its Xavier processor not too long ago, but now the company has officially launched its AI supercomputer chip - the first of its kind, ever.

The new Xavier board is a single-chip computer with over 7 billion transistors, with NVIDIA securing bragging rights of Xavier being capable of pushing over 20 trillion operations per second, at just 20W. Better yet, Xavier can be put together with a total of 50 boards, capable of driving up to 1 quadrillion operations per second, using 1kW of power - not too damn bad at all, if I might say so myself.

NVIDIA CEO and founder Jen-Hsun Huang sees a fast-approaching golden age of computing, with advances and leaps coming so quickly that it will pass our expectations. AI and supercomputing codes can be merged, and will see the offloading of traditional coding to technologies like neural networks - where we can expect things to get very, very interesting.

Just a month after their costly module crashed onto the surface of Mars, the European Space Agency (ESA) asked member nations to provide an additional $425 million dollars to complete the ExoMars mission.

ExoMars (Exobiology on Mars) is a two-part multi-year Martian astrobiology life searching project and joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos). The first part of the mission was executed in October when the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) successfully entered orbit around Mars.

However, ESA lost contact with its Schiaparelli lander shortly before it was supposed to land on Mars and it has later been confirmed that the 577 kg heavy module crashed onto the surface.

You'd think that by spending $4.4 billion on something, it would work... right? The US Navy has built its new destroyer, the USS Zumwalt, with an expensive receipt to cry over - and only weeks after it was officially commissioned, it has been put out of action.

The US Navy said it was their most technologically advanced destroyer, with hidden weapons and sharp angles that make it hard to spot on radar. Engineering problems persisted, and when the USS Zumwalt attempted to join with the US Third Fleet in San Diego, it only made it as far as the Panama Canal, reports Engadget.

The ammo for the $4.4 billion ship is also expensive, sitting at $800K per round, and with a purported 30 Zumwalts in development, the US Navy would be spending some big bank on these ships. The total cost for developing just three Zumwalts is already past $22 billion.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hasn't been seen in over a month, and just like NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden - who knows what's really going on. We can't question anything anymore without being attacked by someone, so now that I've triggered half the world - TITANPOINTE.

Titanpointe is the name of the NSA's new Spy Hub in New York, Hidden in Plain Sight, reports The Intercept. Project X is what Titanpointe is known as, and is a 29-storey building in NYC that is "capable of withstanding an atomic blast". The building has no windows, three basement levels, and enough food and supplies to see 1500 people survive two weeks "in the event of a catastrophe".

But it's not like the US government, or whoever the hell funded this massive All Seeing Eye in the middle of New York City cares much about the survival of the people inside - the heavily fortified building is made this way to keep its powerful computers, cables, and switchboards safe. Titanpointe houses "one of the most important telecommunications hubs in the United States - the world's largest center for processing long-distance phone calls, operated by the New York Telephone Company, a subsidiary of AT&T". You know, the same AT&T that just acquired Warner Bros., CNN, and HBO for $80 billion.

Elon Musk is getting closer to being the real life Tony Stark, with his private rocket launch service SpaceX requesting permission from the government to launch a "massive satellite network that would provide high-speed, global internet coverage", reports Reuters.

SpaceX would eventually launch 4425 satellites, with Musk predicting it would cost at least $10 billion, and that was nearly two years ago when he first announced the project in January 2015. The latest details on the project include technical detailed of the proposed network, but there isn't a mention of the costs involved.

The financial backers of SpaceX include Alphabet's Google Inc and Fidelity Investments, who have pumped over $1 billion into Elon Musk's space company. SpaceX will launch around 800 satellites at first, which will cover the United Spaces, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. SpaceX said in technical documents that it filed to the government: "The system is designed to provide a wide range of broadband and communications services for residential, commercial, institutional, government and professional users worldwide".

Expedition 50 launched today on a two-day trip to the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The Soyuz spacecraft carrying Peggy Whitson of NASA, Oleg Novitskiy of Roscosmos and Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency), is scheduled to dock with the Space Station's Rassvet module on Saturday, November 19th.

The crew will be welcomed by astronaut Shane Kimbrough and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko, who arrived at the Station a month ago.

The night of November 14th was reserved for a spectacular sight in our sky - the Supermoon. NASA published amazing images that show how beautiful the Supermoon was.

A Supermoon occurs when the Moon's orbit is closest (perigee) to Earth.

Moonrise over the Syr Darya river, Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

Tonight, the night of November 14th we'll get to witness a spectacular sight in our sky - the Supermoon. The full Moon of November 14th is not only the closest full Moon of 2016 but also the closest full Moon to date in the 21st century. The full Moon won't come this close to Earth again until November 25, 2034. The last time the full Moon was this close to Earth was in 1948.

NASA explained this phenomenon.

Elon Musk thinks they have finally solved the mystery of their September's Falcon 9 explosion. Speaking with CNBC, he stated that the explosion was caused by a "really surprising problem that's never been encountered before in the history of rocketry."

Just last week, Musk said that the cause of the explosion is one of the toughest puzzles the company has ever had to solve.

The explosion caused complications for NASA since SpaceX was supposed to transfer cargo to International Space Station. However, Orbital ATK stepped in and performed their first successful launch since October 2014 when the rocket failed, and the vehicle and payload were destroyed causing $15 million in damage.

The United States presidential election of 2016 is scheduled for Tuesday, November 8th, 2016. The astronauts aboard the International Space Station also have the ability to vote from space thanks to a bill passed by the Texas legislature in 1997.

For astronauts, the voting process starts a year before launch, when astronauts can select which elections (local/state/federal) that they want to participate in while in space. Then, six months before the election, astronauts are provided with a standard form: the "Voter Registration and Absentee Ballot Request - Federal Post Card Application."

Voting in space was first used the same year it was implemented, in 1997. NASA's astronaut David Wolf became the first American to vote from space, casting a ballot in a 1997 local election. At the time, he was aboard the Russian Mir Space Station.