Month: October 2019

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NASA will send rover to seek water ice on the moon

VIPER rover
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s VIPER rover roaming the moon. (NASA Ames Illustration / Daniel Rutter)

NASA says it’ll send a rover to the moon’s south pole by the end of 2022 to answer one of the biggest questions surrounding its Artemis moon program: Just how accessible is the water ice that’s mixed in with moon dirt?

The mobile robot — whose race car name, VIPER, is actually an acronym standing for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover — would be the first U.S. rover launched to the lunar surface since the moon buggies that went with the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions in 1971 and 1972.

“VIPER is going to rove on the south pole of the moon, and VIPER is going to assess where the water ice is,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said today at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C. “We’re going to be able to characterize the water ice, and ultimately drill and find out just how is the water ice embedded in the regolith on the moon.”

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Video from space processed in the cloud

Space station twirl
Astronaut Andrew Morgan does a zero-gravity flip on the International Space Station with a push from his two NASA crewmates, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir. (NASA via YouTube)

Amazon Web Services and NASA have demonstrated how cloud-based video processing can distribute live streams from space, with a shout-out from the International Space Station.

The demonstration took center stage today in Los Angeles at the annual meeting of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, or SMPTE.

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Suborbital spacefliers will get pinned

Beth Moses gets pinned
Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut trainer, Beth Moses, gets her suborbital spaceflier pin from Michael Lopez-Alegria of the Association of Space Explorers. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Will the customers who fly on the suborbital spaceships operated by British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin get astronaut wings? That’s not in the cards, because those wings are typically reserved for flight crews. But at least they’ll get a lapel pin to mark their achievement.

The pin, created by the Association of Space Explorers, made its debut today on the lapel of Beth Moses, chief astronaut instructor at Virgin Galactic. She was pinned here at the International Astronautical Congress by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, the association’s president.

Moses already has her commercial astronaut wings from the Federal Aviation Administration, by virtue of her trip beyond the 50-mile mark in February as a crew member aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity rocket plane. But she’s glad to have the pin as well.

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Google’s ‘quantum supremacy’ feat earns respect

Quantum computing chip
The Sycamore processor is at the heart of Google’s quantum computing project. (Google Photo / Erik Lucero)

Word that a Google-led team of researchers had achieved “quantum supremacy” with a new type of computer chip leaked out weeks ago, but today’s publication of the team’s study in the journal Nature gave outsiders their first good look at what was done. And most of them were impressed.

There were the usual caveats, of course: The project focused on a specific problem in random number generation that’s doesn’t relate directly to everyday applications, and it could be years before the technology behind Google AI Quantum’s Sycamore chip becomes commercially available.

Nevertheless, the computational demonstration provided evidence that quantum computers can do some tasks far more quickly than classical computers.

“This is an exciting scientific achievement for the quantum industry, and another step on a long journey towards a scalable, viable quantum future,” Microsoft, one of Google’s competitors in the realm of quantum computing, said in a statement emailed to GeekWire.

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Olis will lend a hand with Maxar’s lunar robotic arm

Maxar robotic arm
An artist’s conception shows the SAMPLR robotic arm working on the moon. (Maxar Technologies Illustration)

Seattle-based Olis Robotics says it’s been selected by Maxar Technologies to provide software that will prepare operators on Earth to control a robotic arm on the moon.

The software will be used in connection with a robotic-arm experiment known as SAMPLR (Sample Acquisition, Morphology Filtering and Probing of Lunar Regolith).

SAMPLR is one of a dozen payloads chosen by NASA to fly on commercial lunar landers in support of the space agency’s Artemis program to send astronauts to the moon by 2024.

The robotic arm is a flight spare left over from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Both of those rovers landed on the Red Planet back in 2004, and the mission was brought to a close this February.

SAMPLR will be attached to a lander to be named later, as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. It’ll be NASA’s first robotic  arm sent to the moon in more than 50 years.

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Semantic Scholar takes in the full sweep of science

Semantic Scholar screengrab
The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s academic search engine, Semantic Scholar, keeps track of more than 175 million research papers from all fields of science. (Semantic Scholar Graphic)

Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence says its academic search engine, Semantic Scholar, is now in high gear — thanks to a power boost from Microsoft that helped expand its reach to every field of science.

Over the course of just a few months, Semantic Scholar’s database has gone from indexing 40 million research papers in computer science and biomedicine to taking in more than 175 million papers. The database not only covers the time-honored physical sciences, but also political science and sociology, art and philosophy.

“That’s enabled us to take the research that we’ve done in making AI a tool for overcoming information overload in science [and turn it into] a tool that is now usable by, essentially all scholars around the world,” Doug Raymond, general manager of Semantic Scholar, told GeekWire.

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Boeing shifts execs amid 737 MAX controversy

Stan Deal
Stan Deal, who was in charge of Boeing Global Services, now heads the aerospace giant’s commercial airplanes division. (Boeing via Twitter)

Boeing is shifting the head of its growing Global Services division to take over its troubled Commercial Services division, in hopes that his familiarity with supply chains and customers will counter a growing controversy over automated control systems on Boeing’s 737 MAX jets.

The company said Stan Deal, who had been president and CEO of Boeing Global Services, is replacing Kevin McAllister, who was president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

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Jeff Bezos announces Blue Moon lander team

Jeff Bezos
m Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos discusses his space ambitions during a fireside chat at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his Blue Origin space venture is heading up a team of top space companies — including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper — to build a landing system to take NASA astronauts to the moon as early as 2024.

“This is a national team for a national priority,” Bezos said here at the International Astronautical Congress, where he received the International Astronomical Federation’s first Excellence in Industry Award on Blue Origin’s behalf.

Blue Origin would serve as the prime contractor for the lander project, with its Blue Moon lander serving as the heart of the system.

Bezos said Northrop Grumman, which built the lunar lander for the Apollo program a half-century ago, would be responsible for the orbital transfer vehicle that would take astronauts from a moon-orbiting Gateway platform to a lower lunar orbit.

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ConsenSys Space starts satellite-tracking campaign

TruSat satellite tracker
ConsenSys Space says TruSat will let amateur observers contribute to satellite tracking via an app. (TruSat / ConsenSys Space Illustration)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A year after taking over the assets of a Redmond, Wash.-based asteroid mining company known as Planetary Resources, ConsenSys Space has unveiled its first project: an app-based system that makes use of amateur observers and Ethereum blockchain technology to keep track of satellites.

The open-source TruSat app was released tonight in conjunction with the International Astronautical Congress here in Washington, and is aimed at addressing what’s expected to be a satellite traffic jam in low Earth orbit.

TruSat is an initiative led by ConsenSys Space in partnership with the Secure World Foundation, the Society of Women in Space Exploration and Moriba Jah, a space scientist and aerospace engineer at the University of Texas at Austin.

It’s aimed at analyzing the naked-eye satellite observations that are made by volunteers and submitted via the app, to come up with more accurate information about the orbits of thousands of satellites. Blockchain technology, which is best known as a software-based foundation for cryptocurrencies, would be used in this case to provide transparency about the source of orbital data.

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Space agencies focus on their Gateway roles

Jim Bridenstine at IAC
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is surrounded by top officials from other space agencies as he talks about what lies ahead for NASA and its partners on the final frontier. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Not everyone has signed on the dotted line to join NASA’s plan to start sending astronauts to the moon in 2024 via an outpost in lunar orbit known as the Gateway, but the world’s leading space agencies are already staking out their roles.

Russia, for example, plans to work on its own space transportation system that would parallel NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. Europe and Japan are planning to provide logistical support for space operations. And Canada will be supplying the Gateway’s robotic arm.

Space agency officials laid out the status of their plans for the final frontier today during a panel discussion and follow-up news briefing at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington.

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