Cosmic Log
Imagine a world where headset-wearing flight attendants can instantly know how you’re feeling based on a computer analysis of your facial expression.
Actually, you don’t need to imagine: That world is already in beta, thanks to Air New Zealand, Dimension Data and Microsoft HoloLens.
Hyperloop One showed off the results of its first full-system test of a magnetically levitating rail vehicle in a vacuum environment, and said its next round of testing will target speeds of 250 mph.
The crucial test for Phase 1 of Hyperloop One’s development program took place back on May 12 at its 500-meter-long DevLoop test track in the Nevada desert, but the results were reported just today.
In a news release, Hyperloop One said the test vehicle coasted above the first portion of the track for 5.3 seconds, thanks to magnetic levitation. The car achieved peak acceleration of 2 G’s and Phase 1’s target speed of 70 mph, powered by the company’s proprietary linear electric motor.
The long-awaited close-ups of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot have arrived from NASA’s Juno orbiter, and they’re spectacular.
Juno has been orbiting the giant planet for more than a year, but last weekend’s flyby was the closest that the probe came to the solar system’s most famous superstorm. The JunoCam imager captured data from as little as 2,200 miles above the cloud tops, and the probe flew directly over the Great Red Spot at a distance of 5,600 miles.
It took a couple of days for the data to be transmitted and distributed, but today, image-processing wizards around the world got their chance to work their magic on the 10,000-mile-wide spot.
Moon Express has laid out the plan it intends to follow to send probes to the surface of the moon and start bringing lunar samples back to Earth by 2020.
The plan calls for completing work on Moon Express’ MX-1E lander and its 3-D-printed PECO rocket engine, setting it on Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle and sending it to the moon by the end of this year.
At least two more missions would follow, heading for the moon’s south polar region in 2019 and 2020.
The Florida-based company’s lunar exploration architecture was unveiled today at a Capitol Hill news conference in Washington, D.C.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk got a rock-star reception last September at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico when he unveiled his long-promised plan to send scads of settlers to Mars. Now he’s working on a reprise, and it just might be announced at this September’s IAC meeting in Australia. Musk dropped the hint overnight when a follower asked him on Twitter to say when he’d unveil Version 2.0 of the plan, which is supposed to explain in more detail how all those Mars missions be paid for. “Maybe the upcoming IAC in Adelaide,” he replied.
I, for one, welcome our cute new robot overlords at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport – as long as they don’t boss me around.
Two types of humanoid robots are getting tryouts this week at Sea-Tac: One is SoftBank’s Pepper robot, which is programmed to help travelers find food and drink establishments at the airport. The other is a Furo robot, which provides tips to get through the security lines faster.
Tri Alpha Energy, the fusion energy venture backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, says it has achieved first plasma in its latest generator.
The $100 million device at Tri Alpha’s lab in Foothill Ranch, Calif., had been known as C-2W, but it’s been renamed “Norman” in honor of company co-founder Norman Rostoker, a fusion physicist who died in 2014 at the age of 89.
“We believe this machine will continue to prove the approach to plasma physics he first envisioned and to which he dedicated his life,” Michl Binderbauer, Tri Alpha’s president and chief technology officer, said today in a news release.
The hundreds of thousands of customers who have plunked down deposits for the mass-market Tesla Model 3 electric car are finally getting a glimpse of what they’re buying.
In a pair of tweets, Tesla CEO Elon Musk showed off “Production Unit 1” for the Model 3, which rolled off Tesla’s assembly line in Fremont, Calif., and went through final checkout.
As you can see, the car is basic black. In a follow-up tweet, Musk noted that Ira Ehrenpreis, an early investor in Tesla who’s also on the company’s board, had the rights to the first Model 3 because he was the first to put down a full deposit.
However, Musk added in Twitter shorthand that he “gave those rights to me as my 46th bday present. Tks Ira!”
You know that viral photo of Vice President Mike Pence putting his hand on a piece of space hardware marked with a “Do Not Touch” sign? Don’t worry about it, NASA says.
The picture, snapped by news photographers on July 6 during Pence’s tour of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, spread like Photoshopped wildfire around the internet. It’s easy to see why: Pence looks like someone blatantly caught with his hand in the figurative cookie jar.
One hundred megawatts. That’s how much electrical power the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery system will store when Tesla builds it for the state of South Australia.
And it’ll be built in 100 days, or it’s free.
The agreement, announced today in Adelaide, follows through on a pledge that Tesla CEO Elon Musk made during a Twitter exchange with Australian billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes about South Australia’s power woes back in March.