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Category: space – Page 659

Chinese Space Station taikonauts conduct second spacewalk

The crew of Shenzhou-12 has conducted the second spacewalk of the mission, and the second spacewalk of the new Chinese Space Station’s lifetime. The extravehicular activity (EVA) comes two months into their planned 90-day mission in low Earth orbit.

Mission commander Nie Haisheng and first operator Liu Boming exited the Tianhe core module at 00:38 UTC on Friday, August 20. The goals of the EVA included the installation of a new panoramic camera (known as Panoramic Camera D) as well as a backup thermal control pump. Second operator Tang Hongbo stayed inside the station to support the two spacewalkers, similar to how crew onboard the International Space Station support American and Russian spacewalks.

Haisheng and Boming exited the depressurized docking node of the Tianhe module, which is being used as an EVA airlock until the Wentian lab module, equipped with its own airlock for crewmembers, arrives in the spring of 2022. Panoramic Camera D was successfully installed, and the station was prepared for future EVAs and module installations. To that end, the taikonauts finished installing additional foot restraints onto the station as well as a work platform on the station’s robotic arm.

The Next Steps for Sampling on Perseverance

I will always remember the moments around our first sampling attempt. Longtime friend (and Sampling System Chief Engineer) Louise Jandura and I were in the operations area awaiting the next data downlink. It was “so far, so good” with our earlier morning results showing we had achieved a full-depth borehole. Other members of the team began to filter in as images of the sealed sample tube came up on the ops room monitors. We were all starting to get that feeling you can get in this business when a big milestone comes together because, at first look, it appeared to be our first cored sample. But within minutes, the team noted that the volume probe indicated no sample was in the tube, and we quickly switched to problem-solving mode – once again trying to solve another problem tossed our way from the surface of Mars.

Our team has been working hard over the last 12 days to both ensure we have adequately assessed the data from the first coring attempt and also developed a solid plan forward. After further review of the engineering and imaging data, our final conclusion is the same as our initial assessment: The rock simply wasn’t our kind of rock.

The Sampling and Caching System aboard the rover performed as expected – quite well, as a matter of fact. However, the rock we chose for this first effort did not. The act of coring into it resulted in the rock breaking apart into powder and small fragments of material, which were not retained in the tube due to their size. Although we had successfully acquired over 100 cores in a range of different test rocks on Earth, we had not encountered a rock in our test suite that behaved in quite this manner.

Elon Musk says Tesla’s robot will make physical work a ‘choice’

Are you ready?

After dominating the electric vehicle market and throwing his hat into the billionaire space race, Tesla boss Elon Musk announced the latest frontier he’s aiming to conquer: humanoid robots.

The irascible entrepreneur said Thursday he would have an initial prototype of an androgynous “Tesla Bot” by next year.

Based on the same technology as the company’s semi-autonomous vehicles, the robot will be able to perform basic repetitive tasks with the aim of eliminating the need for people to handle dangerous or boring work, Musk said at an online event on Tesla’s advances in artificial intelligence (AI).

Elon Musk unveils plans for humanoid robot that uses Tesla’s artificial intelligence

I’d like to see anything as far as a Humanoid Robot. But, at this point i think it would be a mistake to try and re invent the wheel. Boston Dynamics last sold for 2 billion dollars, a steal really, and a shame they didn’t try to bring it back to the USA. Anyways, as far as Humanoid Robots, unless he is willing to solve the issue of building robotic hands that can perfectly match human hands this wont go anywhere. Once that is done though you have a realistic labor force for the Moon and Mars.

Tesla Inc. showcased its artificial-intelligence systems on Thursday amid renewed criticism for Autopilot, its most-talked-about AI-based system, as it unveiled its next big project: a humanoid robot.

At the company’s first AI Day, Chief Executive Elon Musk gave a preview of the Tesla Bot, a 5-foot-8-inch robot with a screen for a face, weighing about 125 pounds and capable of moving about 5 mph — slow enough for people to run away from and small enough so a human could overpower it, Musk joked. He said a prototype is expected next year.

Musk said building a humanoid robot is a logical next step for Tesla, since, he said, it’s already “the world’s biggest robotics company,” with its cars basically robots. The humanoid robot will use all the tools in Tesla’s vehicles — sensors, cameras, neural networks, etc. — to autonomously navigate the outside world.

China to harvest sun’s energy in space and beam it to Earth for power by 2030

Over the last few decades, various forms of solar power stations have been proposed from around the world but they remained theoretical because of major technical challenges.

At Bishan, Chinese researchers would first need to prove that wireless power transfer worked over a long distance.

Civilian and military researchers will look at applications for the technology amid concerns about radiation and the potential for beams misfired from space.

Exploring how tantalum behaves at high pressures and temperatures

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have explored high-pressure behavior of shock-compressed tantalum at the Omega Laser Facility at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). The work showed tantalum did not follow the predicted phase changes at high pressure and instead maintained the body-centered cubic (BCC) phase until melt.

The results of the work are featured in a Physical Review Letters paper and focuses on how researchers studied the melting behavior of at multi-megabar pressures on the nanosecond timescale.

“This work provides an improved physical intuition for how materials melt and respond at such extreme conditions,” said Rick Kraus, lead author of the paper. “These techniques and improved knowledge base are now being applied to understanding how the iron cores of rocky planets solidify and also to more programmatically relevant materials as well.”

NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Finds A Changing Landscape

NASA’s Curiosity rover explores Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall (8-kilometer-tall) mountain within the basin of Gale Crater on Mars.

Curiosity’s Deputy Project Scientist, Abigail Fraeman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, gives viewers a descriptive tour of Curiosity’s location. The panorama was captured by the rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, on July 3 2021, the 3,167th Martian day, or sol, of its mission.

Curiosity landed nine years ago on August 5 2012, with a mission to study whether different Martian environments could have supported microbial life in the ancient past, when long-lived lakes and groundwater existed within Gale Crater.

For more about Curiosity, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/ and https://nasa.gov/msl/

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Hidden Magnetic Patterns Inside Meteorites Reveal Secrets of The Early Solar System

The Solar System is positively lousy with magnetic fields. They drape around (most of) the planets and their moons, which interact with the system-wide magnetic field swirling out from the Sun.

Although invisible to the naked eye, these magnetic fields leave their marks behind. Earth’s crust is riddled with magnetic materials, for example, that retain a paleomagnetic record of the planet’s changing magnetic field. And meteorites, when we are lucky enough to find them, can tell us about the magnetic field in the environment they formed in, billions of years ago.

Most of the meteorites we study in this manner are from the asteroid belt, which sits between Mars and Jupiter. But astronomers from Japan have just developed a new means of probing the magnetic materials within meteorites from much, much farther away — and thus provided a new tool for understanding the outer reaches of the early Solar System.

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