Miscellaneous

From the upcoming Special Edition Ascent: Commemorating Space Shuttle DVD/BluRay by NASA/Glenn a movie from the point of view of the Solid Rocket Booster with sound mixing and enhancement done by the folks at Skywalker Sound. The sound is all from the camera microphones and not fake or replaced with foley artist sound. The Skywalker sound folks just helped bring it out and make it more audible.

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The Phiddipus johnsoni, or red-backed jumping spider, named Nefertiti is shown here walking and preying on flies in her habitat while in orbit on the International Space Station and in her habitat readapting to gravity on Earth. (BioServe Space Technologies)

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For decades robots have been exploring Mars' atmosphere and surface, forging space science advances and paving the way for future human missions to Mars. While robots have been highly effective, some say only human space travel can inspire.

If given the opportunity, would you want to travel to Mars?

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Kanna Rajan
Visiting Professor, FEUP, University of Porto

January 16, 2015

Abstract
Ocean Sciences the world over is at a cusp, with a move from the Expeditionary to the Observatory mode of doing science. Recent policy decisions in the United States, are pushing the technology for persistent observation and sampling which hitherto had been either economically unrealistic or unrealizable due to technical constraints. With the advent of ocean observatories, a number of key technologies have however proven to be promising for sustained ocean presence. In this context robots will need to be contextually aware and respond rapidly to evolving phenomenon, especially in coastal waters due to the diversity of atmospheric, oceanographic and land-sea interactions not to mention the societal impact they have on coastal communities. They will need to respond by exhibiting scientific opportunism while being aware of their own limitations in the harsh oceanic environment. Current robotic platforms however have inherent limitations; pre-defined sequences of commands are used to determine what actions the robot will perform and when irrespective of the context. As a consequence not only can the robot not recover from unforeseen failure conditions, but they’re unable to significantly leverage their substantial onboard assets to enable scientific discovery.

To mitigate such shortcomings, we have designed, built, tested and deployed deliberative techniques to dynamically command low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and more recently with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with deep roots in work to command and control deep space probes for NASA. Our effort is aimed to use a blend of generative and deliberative Artificial Intelligence Planning and Execution techniques to shed goals, introspectively analyze onboard resources and recover from failures with the goal of providing tools and techniques for observing the evolving conditions in our oceans. With the advanced tool sets for commanding vehicles from the Univ. of Porto and working in collaboration with the Portuguese Navy and with colleagues in biology and ecology from Norway and Spain, we have begun to take critical steps towards such coordinated oceanographic observations using aerial, surface and underwater vehicles towards unstructured exploration of the subsea environments that are a rich trove of problems for autonomous systems. This work is a continuum of efforts from research at NASA to command deep space probes and Mars rovers, the lessons of which we have factored into the oceanic domain. In this talk I will articulate the challenges of working in this hostile underwater domain, lay out the differences and motivate our architecture for goal-driven autonomy on AUV’s and UAVs for dual-use exploration and surveillance.

Speaker Biography
Kanna is a Visiting Professor, Faculty of Engineering, Univ. of Porto affiliated with the Underwater Systems Technology Lab. Till recently he was the Principal Researcher in Autonomy at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (http://www.mbari.org) a privately funded non-profit Oceanographic institute which he joined in October 2005. Prior to that he was a Senior Research Scientist for the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Area at NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, California.

At NASA Ames, he balanced programmatic and technical responsibilities. He was the Principal Investigator of the MAPGEN Mixed-Initiative Planning effort to command and control the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on the surface of the Red Planet. MAPGEN continues to be used to this day, twice daily in the mission-critical uplink process at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Kanna was one of the six principals of the Remote Agent Experiment (RAX) team, which designed, built, tested and flew the first closed-loop AI based control system on a spacecraft. The RA was the co-winner of NASA's 1999 Software of the Year, the agency's highest group technical award (ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/planning-and-scheduling/remote-agent) which included CMU.

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Kids and adults came face-to-face with cutting-edge robotics at the Robot Rocket Rally, a three-day event hosted by Florida's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. NASA, universities, high schools and private industry demonstrated several exciting robotic technologies to encourage kids to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math.

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In the pilot episode of "Armed with Science", host George Zaidan visits the Naval Research Laboratory's Space Robotics Lab, where scientists are developing robotic technology that can help repair, reposition, or update satellites that are beyond human reach, about 20,000 miles higher than the Hubble Space Telescope. These satellites are critical for Navy and Marine Corps operations, but cannot be repaired in orbit currently.

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In this short video piece, Universe Today publisher Fraser Cain offers up something rare: his opinion. Should humans or robots be the ones to explore space? Which one makes more sense?

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Scariest & Deadliest Incidents In Space

The Scariest and Deadliest Moments in Space History

The Soviet leadership's attitude toward the pioneering cosmonauts and engineers as well as the facilities and the equipment was that everything was expendable in the all out effort to stay ahead of the Americans. As an example, revealed state archives indicate that in October 1960, a huge new booster rocket malfunctioned on the launch pad. Instead of taking safety precautions, the Kremlin ordered the launch director and engineers to fix the problem immediately and get the rocket launched that day.

The launch director and over 165 men were inspecting the rocket when it suddenly blew up in a huge ball of fire instantly killing everyone nearby. Rumors persist that this was actually an early manned launch attempt with a cosmonaut on board. Amazingly, this historic tragedy was never officially confirmed by the Soviet government.

The early American effort in space, however, proved disastrous at nearly every turn. As the entire world watched in wonder, the US news media aptly supplied wide coverage to several ruinous missions in sharp contrast to the highly guarded top secret Russian space program of which little or nothing was known.

At the height of the Cold War, the American space agency, NASA, held a distant and dismal second place to the formidable Russian space program and America seemed destined to remain permanently overshadowed in space by the seemingly superior Russian program. At the height of the Cold War on March 18, 1955, the Soviets launched cosmonauts Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov on a mission that would see the first man exit a spacecraft adding to their already massive list of space records.

After a flawless 10 minute spacewalk, Leonov ran into severe trouble when he tried to reenter the capsule. The effects of weightlessness in outer space had not been properly taken into account in the design of his spacesuit which ballooned out and made his return back to the spacecraft almost impossible.

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In this video the gaits and the morphology of evolved soft-robots space explorers is presented. Both the gaits and the morphology of the soft-robots is evolved simultaneously through a neuroevolutionary algorithm (NEAT). Novelty-search and traditional fitness-based search are used through the evolution. Both methods succeed in terms of the efficiency of the evolved soft-robot explorers. In novelty-search surprising soft-robot morphologies are evolved and a vast diversity of locomotion strategies is observed.

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ESA’s vision for human spaceflight and robotic exploration is part of humanity’s road to the stars. Exploring is about visiting new places and coming back with new experiences and knowledge to help us on Earth.

Our strategy includes three destinations where humans will work with robots to gather new knowledge: low-Earth orbit on the International Space Station, the Moon – our closest neighbour, and our third destination Mars.

The exploration programme includes Europe’s service module for NASA’s Orion spacecraft around the Moon, a landing on the Moon with Roscomos’ Luna lander and ESA’s Exomars rover on Mars.

A deep-space gateway farther afield than the International Space Station is considered as a springboard for exploration beyond the Moon.

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In October 2017, an object moving rapidly through the Solar System was observed by Pan-STARRS 1 (discovery image, 19 October 2017), Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (22 October 2017) and various other telescopes. It appears to be a dark, reddish, highly-elongated rocky or high-metal-content object. Astronomers calculated it is around 800 metres long and has a mean radius of around 104 metres. The orbit calculations revealed it did not originate from inside the Solar System, instead Oumuamua is the first interstellar asteroid discovered.

Credits:
ESO, M. Kornmesser, L.Calcada.
A brief visit from a red and extremely elongated interstellar asteroid
Karen J. Meech, Robert Weryk, Marco Micheli, Jan T. Kleyna, Olivier R. Hainaut, Robert Jedicke, Richard J. Wainscoat, Kenneth C. Chambers, Jacqueline V. Keane, Andreea Petric, Larry Denneau, Eugene Magnier, Travis Berger, Mark E. Huber, Heather Flewelling, Chris Waters, Eva Schunova-Lilly & Serge Chastel
Nature, DOI:10.1038/nature25020

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A neural network built by an astronomer and a Google software engineer was trained to spot patterns caused by planets, and it found a pair of surprise worlds in two separate star systems.

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This week on Offworld, we revisit the classic Pixar film WALL-E, and chat with roboticists from NASA and Softbank Robotics about the development of robots for use in space. What about the portrayal of space robots in WALL-E did we like, and what would apply to the kind of robots that would work alongside humans in space?

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When NASA issued a worldwide challenge to help them better track the asteroids and comets that surround Earth, Gema Parreño answered the call. She used #TensorFlow, Google’s machine learning tool, to create a program called Deep Asteroid, which helps identify and track Near Earth Objects.

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Panel discusses industry's role in the future of space exploration. Moderator: MIT Prof. Olivier de Weck, withKeoki Jackson, CTO, Lockheed Martin; Larry James, deputy director, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab; John Langford, CEO, Aurora Flight Sciences; Robert Smith, CEO, Blue Origin; Dave Thompson, chairman, CEO, Orbital Sciences. Event is "Apollo 50+50" - AeroAstro's March 13, 2019 symposium celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

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The International Space Station launched an Intel HP Enterprise manufactured supercomputer into space. The computer is capable of 1 trillion calculations for per second. The computer is powered by solar power. The computer is designed for SpaceX mission to MARS.The computer will process data for space-based experiments, which should save researchers on the ground valuable time. It will also save precious bandwidth in the tightly-controlled stream of data that NASA manages between the ISS and the ground.

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