Lifeboat Foundation

The future of space stations is uncertain once the International Space Station ends its mission — China and private industry could fill the void. — Retiring the International Space Station in the coming years presents a big void — what will be the future of space stations once the International Space Station meets its fiery death in the coming years? And SHOULD the ISS be decommissioned, or might the mission lifetime be extended?

Construction of the International Space Station (ISS), started in 1,998 was completed in 2011. Since that time, the ISS has housed travelers in space from 19 countries. Possessing the only laboratory for long-duration microgravity research, discoveries aboard the orbiting outpost have led to a bevy of new discoveries.

Now, its mission could be over as early as 2,024 as that is the time agreements between NASA and international partners comes to an end. However, on the 25 August, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson stated his support for extending the mission of the space station until the year 2030.

Etienne Léopold Trouvelot sketched the cosmos for Harvard. His pastels capture solar flares, eclipses, star clusters, and Jupiter’s biggest storm.

About six years ago, the CEO of Toyota Research Institute published a seminal paper about whether a Cambrian explosion was coming for robotics. The term “Cambrian explosion” refers to an important event approximately half a billion years ago in which there was a rapid expansion of different forms of life on earth. There are parallels with the field of robotics as modern technological advancements are fueling an analogous explosion in the diversification and applicability of robots. Today, we’re seeing this Cambrian explosion of robotics unfolding, and consequently, many distinct patterns are emerging. I’ll outline the top three trends that are rapidly evolving in the robotics space and that are most likely to dominate for years to come.

1. The Democratization Of AI And The Convergence Of Technologies.

The birth and proliferation of AI-powered robots are happening because of the democratization of AI. For example, open-source machine learning frameworks are now broadly accessible; AI algorithms are now in the open domain in cloud-based repositories like GitHub; and influential publications on deep learning from top schools can now be downloaded. We now have access to more computing power (e.g., Nvidia GPUs, Omniverse, etc.), data, cloud-computing platforms (e.g., Amazon AWS), new hardware and advanced engineering. Many robotics startup companies are capitalizing on this “super evolution” of technology to build more intelligent and more capable machines.

The BepiColombo spacecraft has its first high-speed encounter with the innermost planet of the Solar System.

BepiColombo will complete its first of six Mercury flybys on October 1st. Some cameras will be operating so we’ll get some images. Some science, too.

BepiColombo made a quick visit to Venus in August and is on to its next rendezvous. On October 1st it’ll perform a flyby of Mercury, the spacecraft’s eventual destination. This visit is just a little flirtation—one of six—ahead of its eventual orbital link-up with Mercury in late 2025.

Continue reading “BepiColombo Meets Mercury for the First Time on October 1” »

In the 2030’s, gravitational-wave detectors will be thousands of times more sensitive than Advanced LIGO

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory supported by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT. It’s designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. It’s multi-kilometer-scale gravitational wave detectors use laser interferometry to measure the minute ripples in space-time caused by passing gravitational waves. It consists of two widely separated interferometers within the United States—one in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana.

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Continue reading “Ellie in Space and Warren Redlich reflect on BOCA CHICA” »

The videos are amazing.

By diligently tracing dashcam footage from a particularly spectacular fireball seen over central Europe in February 2,020 a team of scientists identified the possible source of the space rock.

The fireball, which appeared on Feb. 28 and 10:30 a.m. local time, was recorded by a handful of cameras spread across Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Austria and Hungary. And the footage appeared to show a space rock breaking into 17 smaller pieces during an airburst event, when an asteroid survives the harsh passage through Earth’s atmosphere but explodes before hitting the planets’ surface.