Month: July 2017

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How to scan a T. rex skull for $150

Researchers ran into a problem when they tried to scan and study the hole-ridden jawbone from Sue, the Field Museum of Natural History’s famous T. rex skeleton in Chicago. The jaw was just too big for their high-resolution 3-D scanner. So they turned to MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group, which has created a low-cost 3-D scanning system that uses Microsoft’s Kinect video-game camera. The MIT team scanned the entire 5-foot-long skull to a resolution of 500 micrometers, taking advantage of free software and a hardware rig that cost only $150.

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VP vows return to moon and ‘boots on Mars’

Mike Pence at KSC
Vice President Mike Pence addresses a gathering at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with a prototype Orion spaceship as a backdrop. (NASA via YouTube)

Vice President Mike Pence, the newly minted chairman of a revived National Space Council, said today that President Donald Trump is committed to a return to the moon and a push onward to Mars.

Pence laid out the broad strokes of the Trump administration’s aspirations for space exploration during a visit to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“Here from this bridge to space, our nation will return to the moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars,” Pence declared.

He cast last week’s revitalization of the National Space Council, which was disbanded by the Clinton administration in 1993, as a signal that space policy would be given a higher profile.

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Robotic mannequin checks how clothes fit

Mannequin diagram
This diagram shows a mannequin with adjustable hip, waist and chest size, with a camera system to record how the garment looks from different angles. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO)

Amazon has won yet another patent for a system that would use robotic mannequins to check the fit of garments purchased online – and take selfies showing how the clothes look.

The first patent, issued in January, addresses the robo-selfie part. A patent published on July 4 focuses on the sensor-equipped mannequin, which can be adjusted to fit the shape of the prospective buyer and take pressure readings to determine whether the garment is too loose, too tight or just right.

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Third time’s the charm for SpaceX launch

SpaceX Falcon 9 launch
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket rises from its Florida launch pad, carrying the Intelsat 35e satellite into orbit. (SpaceX via YouTube)

SpaceX finally launched the Intelsat 35e telecommunications satellite today atop a Falcon 9 rocket after two earlier attempts were aborted at T-minus-9 seconds.

Those two attempts, on July 2 and 3, were called off by SpaceX’s computer system when the parameters it had didn’t match up with what it expected. But when the engineers checked, it turned out there was nothing wrong with the rocket.

The computer’s go/no-go parameters were tweaked to be more forgiving, SpaceX launch commentator John Insprucker said today.

This time, the countdown ticked past the 9-second mark and the Falcon 9 rose smoothly from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:38 p.m. ET (4:38 p.m. PT).

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SpaceShipTwo aims for space by year’s end

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo
Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity glides over California’s Mojave Desert. (Virgin Galactic Photo)

Virgin Galactic’s billionaire founder, Richard Branson, has been toning down his predictions about the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane’s future trips to space. Until now.

During a trip to Hong Kong to inaugurate a new Virgin Australia route from Melbourne, Branson said the second SpaceShipTwo, known as VSS Unity, “will be back in space by the end of the year.”

“I plan to go to space next year,” he told Australian Business Traveller.

Bloomberg News quoted Branson as saying that rocket-powered tests would be scheduled every three weeks, culminating in test flights to outer-space altitudes by November or December. Commercial passenger operations should start by the end of 2018, after Branson’s inaugural ride, he said in an interview.

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Biomedical labs get $10 million boosts

Jay Shendure
University of Washington geneticist Jay Shendure will direct one of the newly created Allen Discovery Centers. (Allen Institute Photo)

The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to speed the pace of biomedical breakthroughs, is adding two more research centers to its lineup – including one at the University of Washington.

Each of the Allen Discovery Centers will receive $10 million in grants over the next four years, with the potential for a total $30 million boost over eight years.

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Tesla Model 3 car is ready for its debut

Tesla Model 3
The Model 3 electric car is Tesla Motors’ most affordable model. (Credit: Tesla Motors)

Tesla’s billionaire CEO, Elon Musk, says the first production model of the company’s anxiously awaited mass-market Model 3 electric car will roll off its assembly line on July 7.

Pre-production prototypes of the car have been spotted over the past few months, but in a series of tweets on July 2, Musk said the model met all of its regulatory requirements two weeks ahead of schedule and is ready for purchase.

Musk said the first 30 customers would get their Model 3’s at a party on July 28, and that the production rate at Tesla’s plant in Fremont, Calif., would ramp up to 20,000 cars per month by the end of the year

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Balloon leak ends ‘space sandwich’ flight

World View Enterprises said its “Zinger 1” mission to keep a KFC chicken sandwich aloft in the stratosphere was terminated earlier than planned, due to a small leak in an altitude-control balloon system on its Stratollite platform. The company’s CEO, Jane Poynter, said today in a statement that the payload was brought down about 17 hours after the balloon launch on June 29 in Arizona. “Within the first few hours of flight, all system test objectives were met,” she said. Poynter added that the chicken sandwich “performed flawlessly.”

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Elon Musk’s latest project? A car elevator

Car elevator
A video tweeted by Elon Musk shows the work being done in a pit dug into an SpaceX parking lot. (Elon Musk via Twitter)

The billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, says he spends only about 2 percent of his time working on tunnels, and some of that time was allotted this week to tweeting about the digging that’s being done on SpaceX’s property in Hawthorne, Calif.

Musk tweeted video clips that highlighted the riggings for a “car/pod elevator” that’s taking shape in an old parking lot. “Should be operating next week,” he said.

In its on-the-scene report, the Daily Breeze says the finishing touches are being put on a roughly 600-foot-long bore pit and tunnel entrance, dug 20 feet beneath the ground-level lot.

Musk’s aim is to extend the tunnel as an experiment that could lead to a high-speed transit system for cars beneath Los Angeles. He jokingly calls his venture The Boring Company.

One problem: Musk hasn’t yet gotten the regulatory go-ahead to dig beyond SpaceX property.

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