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Category: space – Page 720

Biomorphic batteries could provide 72x more energy for robots

This approach to increasing capacity will be particularly important as robots shrink to the microscale and below—scales at which current stand-alone batteries are too big and inefficient.

“Robot designs are restricted by the need for batteries that often occupy 20% or more of the available space inside a robot, or account for a similar proportion of the robot’s weight,” said Nicholas Kotov, the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering, who led the research.

Applications for mobile robots are exploding, from delivery drones and bike-lane take-out bots to robotic nurses and warehouse robots. On the micro side, researchers are exploring swarm robots that can self-assemble into larger devices. Multifunctional structural batteries can potentially free up space and reduce weight, but until now they could only supplement the main battery.

Harvard Astronomers Propose That Our Star System Used to Be Binary

A team of Harvard astronomers have a wild new theory: the Sun used to have a companion star, making our solar system a binary one during its ancient history.

The astronomers say the theory could explain the formation of the Oort cloud, a theoretical cloud of dust and smaller objects in the distant regions of our solar system that many believe was created out of the left overs from the early solar system.

In a new preprint submitted last month to the preprint archive arXiv, the team suggests that the Sun used to have a long lost binary star companion. Such a system could explain how some objects were scattered to the far reaches of the solar system, sometimes even making it to neighboring systems and vice versa.

“Previous models have had difficulty producing the expected ratio between scattered disk objects and outer Oort cloud objects,” Amir Siraj, a Harvard undergraduate student involved in the research, said in a statement. “The binary capture model offers significant improvement and refinement, which is seemingly obvious in retrospect: most Sun-like stars are born with binary companions.”

A binary star system would be far more likely to capture the Oort cloud.

The theory could explain the existence of Planet Nine.

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Inner Complexity of Saturn Moon, Enceladus, revealed

Enceladus’ subsurface ocean composition hints at habitable conditions. A Southwest Research Institute team developed a new geochemical model that reveals that carbon dioxide (CO2) from within Enceladus, an ocean-harboring moon of Saturn, may be controlled by chemical reactions at its seafloor. Studying the plume of gases and frozen sea spray released through cracks in the moon’s icy surface suggests an interior more complex than previously thought.

“By understanding the composition of the plume, we can learn about what the ocean is like, how it got to be this way and whether it provides environments where life as we know it could survive,” said SwRI’s Dr. Christopher Glein, lead author of a paper in Geophysical Research Letters outlining the research. “We came up with a new technique for analyzing the plume composition to estimate the concentration of dissolved CO2 in the ocean. This enabled modeling to probe deeper interior processes.”

Analysis of mass spectrometry data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft indicates that the abundance of CO2 is best explained by geochemical reactions between the moon’s rocky core and liquid water from its subsurface ocean. Integrating this information with previous discoveries of silica and molecular hydrogen (H2) points to a more complex, geochemically diverse core.

Mix-StAGE: A model that can generate gestures to accompany a virtual agent’s speech

Virtual assistants and robots are becoming increasingly sophisticated, interactive and human-like. To fully replicate human communication, however, artificial intelligence (AI) agents should not only be able to determine what users are saying and produce adequate responses, they should also mimic humans in the way they speak.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have recently carried out a study aimed at improving how and robots communicate with humans by generating to accompany their speech. Their paper, pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2020, introduces Mix-StAGE, a new that can produce different styles of co-speech gestures that best match the voice of a and what he/she is saying.

“Imagine a situation where you are communicating with a friend in a through a ,” Chaitanya Ahuja, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “The headset is only able to hear your voice, but not able to see your hand gestures. The goal of our model is to predict the accompanying the speech.”

NASA’s Asteroid Mission Completes Final Test Before Sampling Run

While we were all busy watching the Perseverance rover head off on its journey to Mars, NASA’s asteroid sample mission has been gearing up for its big moment. The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx for short) has completed its final test approach of the surface. The next time it descends, OSIRIS-REx will scoop up pieces of the asteroid Bennu for return to Earth.

NASA launched OSIRIS-REx in 2016, sending it off to intercept 101955 Bennu, a carbonaceous asteroid about 1,610 feet (490 meters) in diameter. Bennu does get very close to Earth at points in its orbit — there’s even a small chance that it could impact the Earth in the next few centuries. Currently, it’s safely out of the way about 2 AU distant (an AU is the distance between Earth and the sun).

OSIRIS-REx rendezvoused with Bennu in 2018, and the team set to work finding a landing zone. NASA encountered the same issue as the Japanese Hayabusa2 team — Bennu was much more craggy than expected. To collect a sample, OSIRIS-REx has to make contact with the surface, and that’s dangerous with uneven surfaces and rocky prominences everywhere. Eventually, NASA selected several potential sites, naming them after birds. The Nightingale site, which is in a crater near the asteroid’s north pole, prevailed.