“Chang’e 4’s landing was no mean feat in itself. The reason why it is so difficult to send anything, robot or man, to the far side of the Moon, is because it is difficult to maintain communications with ground control on Earth with a giant rock in between (the Moon!).”
Chang’e-4 is the first spacecraft ever to land on the Moon’s far side.
Two unmanned commercial satellites have docked in orbit for the first time. On February 25, Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1) linked up with the Intelsat 901 (IS-901) communication satellite at an altitude of 22,416 mi (36,076 km) above the Earth as part of a project to extend the service life of satellites that are running low on propellants.
The building and launching of satellites is extremely expensive, so it’s more than just frustrating when a perfectly good spacecraft has to be disposed of or abandoned simply because it has run out of the propellants needed to keep it in its proper orbit and pointed at Earth. There have been a number of solutions proposed for this problem – in this case Northrop’s MEV-1 is designed to match orbits with aging satellites, dock, and take over the job of maintaining orbit and attitude.
MEV-1 was launched on October 9, 2019, and then executed a series of orbital maneuvers to rendezvous with IS-901, 180 mi (290 km) above geosynchronous orbit. Northrop says the target communication satellite was removed from service last December after over 19 years of service and its customers transferred to other Intelsats.
While robotics and automation create a plethora of opportunities for skilled labor, they substitute many jobs of unskilled labor. Philips’ automated shaver factory in the Netherlands employs one-tenth of the workforce of its factory in China that makes the same shavers. Such developments accentuate inequality and pose severe social pressure in developed countries, which would need to be addressed by government in the years to come.
Technology can complement humans but it can also eliminate their jobs.
Lilac Nachum
Scientists from Imperial College London have proposed a new regulatory framework for assessing the impact of AI, called the Human Impact Assessment for Technology (HIAT).
The researchers believe the HIAT could identify the ethical, psychological and social risks of technological progress, which are already being exposed in a growing range of applications, from voter manipulation to algorithmic sentencing.
For now, it’s a simple network. But, it could be an important first step toward smarter and more adaptive prosthetics and brain-computer interfaces — and potentially lay the groundwork for a world where neural implants create real brain networks.
“On one side it sets the basis for a novel scenario that was never encountered during natural evolution, where biological and artificial neurons are linked together and communicate across global networks; laying the foundations for the Internet of Neuro-electronics,” Themis Prodromakis, a nanotechnology researcher and director at the University of Southampton’s Centre for Electronics Frontiers said in a press release.
“On the other hand, it brings new prospects to neuroprosthetic technologies, paving the way towards research into replacing dysfunctional parts of the brain with AI chips.”
