Month: July 2019

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TESS helps scientists find a super-cool super-Earth

Planet GJ 357 d
An artist’s conception depicts GJ 357 d orbiting its host star. (Cornell University Illustration / Jack Madden)

Astronomers are sharing a flood of findings from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, including the detection of a potentially habitable super-Earth far beyond our solar system.

The planet is said to circle an M-type dwarf star called GJ 357, about 31 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra. Known as GJ 357 d, the world is at least six times more massive than Earth — and orbits the star every 55.7 days, at a distance that’s only 20% as far away as Earth is from our own sun.

With that orbit, GJ 357 d would be broiling-hot if it were in our solar system. But its parent star is so much dimmer than our sun that the super-Earth could conceivably be just warm enough to have liquid water. That characteristic serves as the definition for habitable zones around alien suns.

“This is exciting, as this is humanity’s first nearby super-Earth that could harbor life – uncovered with help from TESS, our small, mighty mission with a huge reach,” astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, who’s the director of Cornell University’s Carl Sagan Institute, said in a news release.

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‘Mission success’: Solar sail shifts its orbit

LightSail 2 solar sail
This image was taken during the LightSail 2 sail deployment sequence on July 23. The sail is almost fully deployed here and appears warped near the edges due to the spacecraft’s 185-degree fisheye camera lens. The image has been color corrected and some of the distortion has been removed. The sun is visible at center. (Planetary Society Photo / CC BY-NC 3.0)

It may be “mission accomplished” for the Planetary Society’s solar sail experiment, but its privately funded LightSail 2 mission is far from over.

Five weeks after LightSail 2’s launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, the nonprofit membership society celebrated the spacecraft’s ability to raise the highest point of its orbit by a little more than a mile (1.7 kilometers), using the force of sunlight pressing against its 18.4-foot-wide, 4.5-micron-thick reflective Mylar sails.

Demonstrating solar sail steerability was the point of the decade-long campaign to build and fly LightSail 2 and its predecessor, LightSail 1. The project’s estimated $7 million cost was covered by contributions from Planetary Society members and other donors.

“On behalf of the tens of thousands of people around the world who came together to help the dream of solar sailing move forward, we’re thrilled to declare mission success for LightSail 2,” Planetary Society chief scientist Bruce Betts, who serves as program manager for LightSail, told journalists today during a teleconference.

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Voom’s Seattle office redefines working remotely

Voom helicopter service
Voom, a subsidiary of Airbus, offers helicopter booking services in Brazil and Mexico. (Airbus Photo)

Add the Airbus subsidiary Voom to the list of tech startups with engineering centers in the Seattle area — and to the list of pioneers in co-located and distributed workplaces.

Both of those talking points are highlighted in a blog posting on working remotely, written last month by Robert Head, a senior software engineer at Voom. The posting was brought to light today by the Puget Sound Business Journal.

The California-based startup has been offering its app-based, on-demand helicopter taxi service in Mexico City and São Paulo, and last month it stealthily expanded its trials to the San Francisco Bay Area in league with Coastal Helicopters.

In his blog posting, Head, who works remotely from Ashland, Ore., talked about software development rather than flight plans. “When Voom decided to grow our own internal team of developers, we chose to locate the office not in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, but rather in Seattle, which has a similarly booming technology scene and an ecosystem of great talent,” he wrote.

Today LinkedIn lists 16 Voom employees as working in the Seattle area, and the company’s careers webpage has seven openings for Seattle workers, including a spot for a vice president of engineering. But the point of Head’s posting wasn’t how Voom conducts its operations in Seattle. Instead, he focused on how the Seattle office serves as a springboard for a far more widely dispersed team.

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Blue Origin partners with NASA on moon lander tech

Jeff Bezos and Blue Moon lander mockup
Jeff Bezos shows off a mockup of the Blue Moon lunar lander in May. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space venture, Blue Origin, has been selected to participate in three partnerships with NASA to advance technologies that could come into play for Artemis missions to the moon — and eventually for Mars missions as well.

The three projects were included in a newly released list of 19 public-private partnerships that have been forged with a dozen companies under the terms of an Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity, or ACO.

NASA issued the announcement last October. The arrangement doesn’t involve the transfer of funds, but rather the sharing of expertise, facilities, hardware and software for technologies that could be the focus of future contracts.

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Scientists fine-tune brain-to-speech translator

David Moses and Edward Chang
Eddie Chang (right), a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Francisco, discusses findings with postdoctoral researcher David Moses. (UCSF Photo / Noah Berger)

Neuroscientists have demonstrated a computerized system that can determine in real time what’s being said, based on brain activity rather than actual speech.

The technology is being supported in part by Facebook Reality Labs, which is aiming to create a non-invasive, wearable brain-to-text translator. But in the nearer term, the research is more likely to help locked-in patients communicate through thought.

“They can imagine speaking, and then these electrodes could maybe pick this up,” said Christof Koch, chief scientist and president of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science, who was not involved in the study.

The latest experiments, reported today in the open-access journal Nature Communications, were conducted by a team at the University of California at San Francisco on three epilepsy patients who volunteered to take part. The work built on earlier experiments that decoded brain patterns into speech, but not in real time.

“Real-time processing of brain activity has been used to decode simple speech sounds, but this is the first time this approach has been used to identify spoken words and phrases,” UCSF postdoctoral researcher David Moses, the study’s principal investigator, said in a news release.

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First Mode looks ahead to moon missions

First Mode's Chris Voorhees
First Mode’s president and chief engineer, Chris Voorhees, shows off the employee-owned company’s digs near Seattle’s Pike Place Market. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

One year after engineers from the Planetary Resources asteroid mining company peeled off to form their own employee-owned startup, known as First Mode, they can point to the profitable work they’ve done on space missions that are heading for Mars and, yes, an asteroid.

But now they’re widening their focus to take in projects that are closer to home — including mining operations back here on Earth, and NASA’s Artemis effort to send astronauts to the moon’s surface by 2024.

“We’re growing our own infrastructure here,” Chris Voorhees, the company’s president and chief engineer, told GeekWire during a tour of First Mode’s office space in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood, not far from Pike Place Market.

So far, First Mode has made a name for itself as a design and engineering consultancy, but now it’s putting the infrastructure in place to build hardware as well. Its in-house clean room bears testament to that ambition.

“We really like the idea of flight hardware getting delivered out of Pike Place Market,” Voorhees said. “We think that’s pretty cool.”

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AI researchers want to make it easier to be green

High-performance computing
High-performance computing is becoming the lifeblood of artificial intelligence research. (Intel Photo)

The development of ever more powerful models for artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the world, but it doesn’t come cheap. In a newly distributed position paper, researchers at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence argue that more weight should be given to energy efficiency when evaluating research.

The AI2 researchers call on their colleagues to report the “price tag” associated with developing, training and running their models, alongside other metrics such as speed and accuracy. Research leaderboards, including AI2’s, regularly rate AI software in terms of accuracy over time, but they don’t address what it took to get those results.

Of course, cutting-edge research can be expensive in all sorts of fields, ranging from particle physics done at multibillion-dollar colliders to genetic analysis that requires hundreds of DNA sequencers. Financial cost or energy usage isn’t usually mentioned in the resulting studies. But AI2’s CEO, Oren Etzioni, says that times are changing – especially as the carbon footprint of energy-gobbling scientific experiments becomes more of a concern.

“It is an ongoing topic for many scientific communities, the issue of reporting costs,” Etzioni, one of the position paper’s authors, told GeekWire. “I think what makes a difference here is the stunning escalation that we’ve seen” in the resources devoted to AI model development.

One study from OpenAI estimates that the computational resources required for top-level research in deep learning have increased 300,000 times between 2012 and 2018, due to the rapid development of more and more complex models. “This is much faster than Moore’s Law, doubling every three or four months,” Etzioni said.

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Boeing-built moon buggies win landmark status

Astronaut John Young and lunar rover
Apollo 16 astronaut John Young collects samples near the mission’s lunar rover in 1972. (NASA Photo)

King County now has three landmarks that are out of this world. Literally.

Tonight, the King County Landmarks Commission unanimously approved historic landmark designation for the Boeing-built rovers that were left behind on the moon by the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions nearly a half-century ago.

The landmark decision, delivered during a meeting in Kent, Wash., came in response to a request from Kent city officials and the Kent Downtown Partnership. Why Kent? That’s where the Boeing assembled and tested the lunar rovers.

“Above all, the designation for the City of Kent acts as a reminder of the dedicated engineers who changed history through the creation of the Lunar Roving Vehicles 50 years ago,” Kent Mayor Dana Ralph said in a statement. “The momentous recognition for Kent Valley allows for continued education and remembrance of the tangible impact these vehicles have had on space exploration indefinitely.”

The next step will be to win landmark recognition from Washington state and get the rovers added to the Washington Heritage Register.

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SpaceX launches Dragon to slime the space station

SpaceX has launched the same robotic Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station for a third time, sending about 5,000 pounds of cargo that includes a bag of goopy green slime.

The slime, provided by Nickelodeon, will be used on the space station to demonstrate fluid flow in zero gravity — and undoubtedly delight youngsters who’ll watch the crew poke, squish, pull and prod the green stuff in future videos.

It’s just one of the dozens of science experiments included on the manifest for SpaceX’s latest resupply mission. Other experiments will build up layers of human tissue through 3-D printing, grow moss as a potential food source in zero-G, and investigate new twists in silica deposition that could improve the performance of automobile tires.

A new docking adapter for future commercial space taxis will be delivered as well, along with more mundane supplies such as food and clothing.

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Northrop Grumman to build moon-orbiting habitat

Cygnus-derived habitation module
An artist’s conception shows Northrop Grumman’s habitation module, which is based on the design of the Cygnus cargo spacecraft. (Northrop Grumman Illustration)

NASA says it’s choosing Northrop Grumman to build the habitation module for its future moon-orbiting Gateway outpost, because it’s the only company that can do the job in time for a 2024 lunar landing.

In a procurement document released last week, the space agency said the other companies that were competing to build the Minimal Habitation Module as part of NASA’s NextSTEP program — Bigelow Aerospace, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, NanoRacks and Sierra Nevada Corp. — couldn’t have their hardware ready in time to meet the deadline set by the Trump administration.

“NGIS [Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, formerly Orbital ATK] was the only NextSTEP-2 contractor with a module design and the production and tooling resources capable of meeting the 2024 deadline,” NASA said.

For that reason, NASA is going with a sole-source process to award the contract for the habitation module, short-circuiting the full and open NextSTEP-2 Appendix A competition. As long as Northrop Grumman submits an acceptable proposal with a price tag that’s “fair and reasonable,” NASA will give its go-ahead.

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