Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 3

We all know that the leather jacket that NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang wears is iconic, to say the least, but now he has a new one: gifted to him by a humanoid robot made by 1X Technologies.

Jensen recently visited the 1X Technologies HQ in San Francisco, where the NVIDIA CEO was greeted by a humanoid robot, gifting him one of the very best black leather jackets on the market, custom-made by California-based ERL clothing brand. 1X Technologies might be a name you haven't heard of, but the company has been working on its Neo Gamma humanoid robot, with plans to ship hundreds of thousands of them before the end of 2025.

As for Jensen's new leather jacket, but sports an NVIDIA logo embroidered into the clothing, and I'm sure will join the wardrobe of leather jackets that the NVIDIA CEO has in his house. It looks awesome, and I definitely want one.

FigureAI has developed a new AI-powered walking controller for its Figure 02 humanoid robot, taking the android movement patterns into slightly more natural territory.

Announced yesterday, the update was showcased in new footage comparing the previous and current movement systems. There's a clear difference - while the robot's gait still appears mechanical, it now includes more human-like elements such as heel strikes, toe-offs, and synchronized arm swings. It's a subtle improvement, but enough to push the Figure 02 away from the rigid, protocol-droid motion of earlier iterations.

The system was trained entirely in simulation using reinforcement learning - a method where virtual robots learn to walk through trial and error. That training was then transferred directly to the real-world robot without manual tuning, allowing for consistent performance across multiple machines.

Distinguished astronaut Koichi Wakata has shared a video from a past stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS) where he celebrated the beginning of the Major League Baseball season in a quick video.

Wakata, the fourth Japanese astronaut in space and the first Japanese astronaut to command the ISS shared a video on his X account on March 19 that showed him celebrating the beginning of the Major League Baseball seasons during Expedition 68, which launched on October 5, 2022 and completed its mission on March 11, 2023. Wakata celebrated the MLB being back by sharing an awesome video of him playing a "solo game of baseball" in microgravity, where he says, "you don't need a whole team, you can play all of the positions!"

The video shows Wakata gently pitching a baseball to one side of the JAXA module attached to the ISS. Wakata then quickly pulls himself toward the other side of the module and picks up a makeshift bat, which he uses to tap the baseball back to where he came from. Wakata then makes a successful mid-air catch, getting himself out. Wakata completed 157 days in space as part of Expedition 68 and Crew-5, where he worked alongside NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin, and Anna Kikina, and other ISS crew members.

The two NASA astronauts who were initially going up to the International Space Station (ISS) for nine days but ended up staying there for 286 days weren't paid any overtime.

In a recent article by The New York Times, a NASA spokesperson revealed the two NASA astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, received a regular 40-hour-per-week salary, with no additional pay for holidays or weekends, despite the obvious egregious overtime they both ensued. Additionally, Mike Massimino, a veteran of two Space Shuttle missions, said, "[There's] no hazard pay, there's no overtime, there's no comp time," and ultimately, "there's no incentive to stay in space longer."

However, astronauts do receive incidental amounts for reach they're in space, but since Suni and Butch were on a long-term stay, it only equated to about $5 per day, which totals out to just $1,430 for the entire duration of the trip - 286 days.

The General of the US Space Force has warned foreign satellites appear to be practicing combat in space, according to statements released at the McAleese Defense Programs Conferences held in Washington.

The comments come from Vice Chief of Space Operations General Michael Guetlein, who said the US is currently developing new capabilities for warfare that's off-planet, with the goal being to assume "space superiority" over foreign nations such as China, Russia, and any other competing country. The main competitor here is China, as the general said officials have witnessed Chinese satellites performing maneuvers and displaying a level of control that is indicative of "dogfighting in space."

These maneuvers were first spotted by commercial satellites, and then the information was sent to Space Force. For quite some time, China has been expanding its presence in space with various satellites, and even the launch of a refueling station that was sent to geosynchronous orbit.

Space is a weird, beautiful, and terrifying place, but sometimes, it can produce some of the most awe-inspiring pieces of art, such as what veteran NASA astronaut Don Petitt just captured.

Petitt, who is stationed aboard the International Space Station (ISS), has captured what looks like the ending of Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" when Cooper passes through the black hole and is spat out the other side into the fourth dimension. However, unlike Interstellar, this is completely real footage captured by a real-life astronaut.

So, what is it? Petitt set up his camera to perform a long exposure shot of the Earth out of the window of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule called Freedom. The long streaks seen in the image/video are star trails created as the ISS flies over the Earth at 14,500 mph.

NVIDIA has announced at GTC a new partnership with Disney Research and Google DeepMind to develop Newton, a new open-source physics engine designed to simulate robotic movements in real-world settings.

The new platform is built on top of the NVIDIA Warp framework and is designed to optimize robot learning and be compatible with other frameworks, such as Google DeepMind's MuJoCo-Warp and NVIDIA Isaac Lab. Additionally, NVIDIA, Disney, and Google DeepMind plan to enable Newton to be compatible with Disney's physics engine, which will be used to advance its robotic character platform, increasing the power of its next-generation entertainment robots.

In its press release, NVIDIA writes that Disney will be one of the first companies to use Newton. Newton will power Star Wars-inspired BDX droids that will now begin to appear in Disney theme parks. One of these droids joined NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on stage, with Huang saying that NVIDIA is committed to "bringing more characters to life in a way the world hasn't seen before."

The two astronauts that NASA assured us weren't stranded aboard the ISS, but just didn't have a viable means of transportation back to Earth, have finally touched back down on our home planet after nine months of being aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore took up Boeing's Starliner capsule to the ISS on June 5, and prior to launch and on the journey there, leaks were detected from the vessel. The leaks were helium, the fuel for the capsule, and after safely making it to the ISS to begin their week-long stay it was determined by NASA the capsule didn't meet the safety standards for a return journey.

The stay aboard the ISS extended from one week to nine months, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently stating the situation with the ISS turned into a political football for the Biden administration as SpaceX offered to bring the astronauts back home early but was denied as the Biden administration didn't want "anyone who is supporting Trump [to] look good," according to Musk. However, Suni and Butch finally made it back home with the help of SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which also transported fellow astronauts Nick Hauge and Aleksandr Gorbunov, a cosmonaut with Russia's federal corporation Roscomos.

NASA has confirmed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the world's most powerful space telescope, has captured direct images of multiple exoplanets within Earth's galactic neighborhood.

The space agency has taken to its blog to announce Webb has observed the planets within HR 8799, and through its imaging, it has gathered strong evidence that the system's four gas giant planets formed much like Jupiter and Saturn, which slowly built solid cores that eventually pulled in gas from a protoplanetary disk. The young star system is only located 130 light years away and has long been a target of planetary studies, given the age of HR8799 is only 30 million years old, which is just a fraction of our own solar system's 4.6 billion years old.

Webb's results have been published in The Astrophysical Journal. NASA explains in its blog post that gas giants can form in two ways. The first is by building solid cores with heavier elements that attract gas. The second is when particles of gas rapidly coalesce into massive objects from a young star's cooling disk. The first process is called core accretion, and the second is called disk instability. Webb's results indicate the planets within HR 8799 have taken the first route, and by understanding these processes, researchers can better distinguish between the two when hunting for more exoplanets while also contextualizing the evolution of our own solar system.

SpaceX is nearing its goal of putting humans on the surface of Mars, but before we go, the company will send humanoid robots, with the first slated to launch next year.

That is, of course, if Elon Musk's famously optimistic plans come to fruition in time and Starship development continues to make leaps and bounds. However, the latter doesn't seem to be the case as of late, or at least for the last two launches of Starship, the company's selected mode of transportation to Mars. SpaceX lost contact with Starship in the last two launches, resulting in a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly Protocol (RUD) having to be initiated, or boom.

SpaceX will need to overcome significant design hurdles in order to get Starship to a place where a Mars journey is viable, and one of those hurdles is getting the upper stage, or the cargo part of the rocket, back on the surface of Earth for evaluation and improvement. However, that requires a technological breakthrough in heatshield technology, according to Elon Musk, who explained the struggles of simply recovering that part of the rocket in his last appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast.