#ParkerSolarProbe

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Parker Solar Probe is alive and well after skimming by the Sun at just 15 million miles from our star’s surface. This is far closer than any spacecraft has ever gone — the previous record was set by Helios B in 1976 and broken by Parker on Oct. 29 — and this maneuver has exposed the spacecraft to intense heat and solar radiation in a complex solar wind environment.

“Parker Solar Probe was designed to take care of itself and its precious payload during this close approach, with no control from us on Earth — and now we know it succeeded,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. “Parker is the culmination of six decades of scientific progress. Now, we have realized humanity’s first close visit to our star, which will have implications not just here on Earth, but for a deeper understanding of our universe.”

Mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab received the status beacon from the spacecraft at 4:46 p.m. EST on Nov. 7, 2018. The beacon indicates status “A” — the best of all four possible status signals, meaning that Parker Solar Probe is operating well with all instruments running and collecting science data and, if there were any minor issues, they were resolved autonomously by the spacecraft.

Researchers have created a ‘modular’ robot which can analyze its environment and reconfigure itself to overcome obstacles and achieve tasks.

This video was reproduced with permission and was first published on October 31, 2018. It is a Nature Video production.

All this seems to indicate that the robotics industry isn’t going away anytime soon. If anything, the fact that investors are being more critical with their investments, paying more attention to market forces than to visionary-led promises means we’re entering a reality-driven age of investing in AI. The trouble is that this reality phase seems to be limited (so far) to the robotics industry. Tech companies in other corners of AI are still being wooed by investors with deep pockets and more patience than they have for robotics. Will the investments continue at the amounts and valuations currently supporting the industry? Or will these investors also be dragged down to earth by market and competitive realities? All that still remains to be seen. The hope is that the investment does continue, because after all, the quest for the intelligent machine has yet to be fully realized.

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This is particularly perplexing since many AI companies are flush with cash and raising money at increasingly eye-watering levels and valuations. How could it be that these robotics firms, run and operated by some of the most celebrated people in the AI industry could be failing when seemingly less-compelling solutions such as process automation tools and facial recognition applications are raising billions of dollars? Is robotics really that hard or is there something else going on in the industry?