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Microsoft backs effort to extend fiber internet in Africa

Worker laying fiber cable in African village
Microsoft’s Airband Initiative is supporting fiber connectivity in Africa. (Liquid Intelligent Technologies Photo)

Microsoft says it’s partnering with a fiber-cable connectivity venture called Liquid Intelligent Technologies to bring high-speed internet access to an additional 20 million people in Africa by 2025.

The collaboration is part of Microsoft’s Airband Initiative, which aims to help extend broadband coverage to 250 million people living in unserved and underserved areas of the world, including 100 million people in Africa.

Microsoft President Brad Smith announced the partnership with Liquid in advance of the Fifth U.N. Conference on the Least Developed Countries, which gets underway next week in Doha, Qatar. Microsoft will co-chair the meeting’s Private Sector Forum.

“The private sector can plan an important role in creating opportunities for the 880 million people living in LDCs [least developed countries], where only 36% of the population uses the internet today, and it’s important for Microsoft to do its part,” Smith said in a blog posting.

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Study documents satellite interference with Hubble

Satellite streaks on Hubble images
Satellite streaks cross these images from the Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA / ESA / STScI / Kruk et al. / Nature)

An analysis of more than 100,000 images from the Hubble Space Telescope, conducted with the aid of artificial intelligence and hundreds of human volunteers, confirms that satellites including SpaceX’s Starlink spacecraft are increasingly interfering with astronomical observations.

The images used in the study, which is the subject of a paper published today by Nature Astronomy, largely predate the deployment of Starlink broadband internet satellites. But the trend line suggests that more and more satellites will cause more and more interference.

“This is an attempt to define a baseline before the swarm of artificial satellites for future follow-up studies of the impact of megaconstellations on space-based astronomy,” said the research team, which is led by Sandor Kruk of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

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Hydrogen-powered plane aces its first flight

Universal Hydrogen plane in flight
Universal Hydrogen’s prototype plane takes its first flight in Moses Lake, Wash. (Universal Hydrogen Photo)

A prototype aircraft with a hydrogen-fueled powertrain successfully completed an initial 15-minute flight today at Grant County International Airport in Moses Lake, Wash., marking a significant step for zero-emission aviation.

Los Angeles-based Universal Hydrogen had the 40-passenger De Havilland Dash 8-300 turboprop converted to use hydrogen to power an electric propulsion system mounted on the plane’s right wing. The system incorporates a fuel cell built by Plug Power and a megawatt-class motor built by Everett, Wash.-based MagniX. Seattle-based AeroTEC assisted with the engineering for the conversion.

The engine on the left side was left unconverted to serve as a backup in case the hydrogen-based system encountered problems.

Universal Hydrogen and its partners worked in Moses Lake for months to get the plane — nicknamed Lightning McClean — ready for today’s first aerial tryout, conducted under the conditions of an experimental airworthiness certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The flight began at 8:41 a.m. PT and reached a maximum altitude of 3,500 feet. “We were able to throttle back the fossil-fuel turbine engine to demonstrate cruise principally on hydrogen power,” test pilot Alex Kroll said in a news release. “The airplane handled beautifully, and the noise and vibrations from the fuel cell powertrain are significantly lower than from the conventional turbine engine.”

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Amazon and Google make a couple of quantum leaps

Visualization of electric field energy density for metamaterial waveguide, from AWS' Palace simulation
This Palace simulation visualizes the electric field energy density for a metamaterlal waveguide. (AWS Graphic)

Today’s news from the frontier of quantum computing includes Amazon Web Services’ release of cloud-based simulation software for modeling the electromagnetic properties of quantum hardware, Google’s latest technological advance aimed at lowering the error rate of quantum calculations, and new recommendations about the public sector’s role on the frontier.

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A new type of salt crystal could exist on Europa

Galileo's view of Europa's surface
An image from NASA’s Galileo orbiter shows Europa’s surface of salt-streaked ice. (Credit: NASA / JPL / Ted Stryk)

A prime target in the search for extraterrestrial life is Europa, a moon of Jupiter that’s covered with a sheet of salty ice. But what kind of salt is there? Researchers say they’ve created a new kind of salt crystal that could fill the bill, and perhaps raise hopes for finding life under the ice.

This salt crystal is both exotic and common: It’s actually table salt — also known as sodium chloride, with the chemical formula NaCl — but bound up with water molecules to form a hydrate that doesn’t exist naturally on Earth.

Earthly sodium chloride hydrates are composed of one salt molecule linked by hydrogen bonds with two water molecules. In contrast, the hydrates created in the lab consist of two NaCl molecules to 17 water molecules, or one NaCl molecule to 13 water molecules. (The structure for a third type of “hyperhydrated hydrate” couldn’t be determined.)

That’s promising news for scientists who study Europa and other ice-covered worlds — including two other Jovian moons, Callisto and Ganymede; and the Saturnian moons Enceladus and Titan. Spectral observations indicate that Europa’s surface ice contains salts, including sodium chloride, but the observed levels of concentration don’t match up well with Earth’s run-of-the-mill NaCl hydrates.

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Clean-energy funding gives ‘Hydrogen Valley’ a boost

Zero-emission haul truck
This ore-hauling truck is powered by a hydrogen-fueled powerplant. (First Mode / Anglo American Photo)

First Mode, the clean-energy company that was recently transformed from a Seattle startup into an Anglo American subsidiary, is getting a boost from Washington state.

The Washington State Department of Commerce awarded $250,000 in economic development funding to the Economic Alliance of Lewis County to help First Mode with design and construction costs related to the company’s future facility in Centralia, Wash.

First Mode is planning to turn a former coal mine site, leased from TransAlta, into a proving grounds for its hydrogen-fueled hybrid powertrain for heavy mining trucks. The building plan calls for providing 7,500 square feet of office space and 20,000 square feet of outdoor yard space, with an option for expansion.

The powertrains have been under development at First Mode’s lab in Seattle, and last year a prototype truck made its debut at a platinum mine in South Africa.

Eventually, Anglo American plans to have First Mode convert hundreds of ultra-class haul trucks to run on hydrogen and battery power. The technology for the trucks and the fueling and charging infrastructure will be tested at the Centralia site.

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Microsoft’s AI chatbot gets into some ugly arguments

Bing Chat screenshot
Users have reported getting into tiffs with Bing Chat over “fake news.” (GeekWire Illustration / Bing screenshot via Microsoft)

It turns out we’re not the only ones getting into fact-checking fights with Bing Chat, Microsoft’s much-vaunted AI chatbot.

Last week, GeekWire’s Todd Bishop recounted an argument with the ChatGPT-based conversational search engine over his previous reporting on Porch Group’s growth plans. Bing Chat acknowledged that it gave Bishop the wrong target date for the company’s timeline to double its value. “I hope you can forgive me,” the chatbot said.

Since then, other news reports have highlighted queries that prompted wrong and sometimes even argumentative responses from Bing Chat.

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Blue Origin aims to turn moon dirt into solar cells

Solar cell made from simulated lunar regolith
Blue Origin says coin-sized solar cells like this one could be made from lunar material. (Blue Origin Photo)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture isn’t just working on rockets and space stations: The Kent, Wash.-based company is also developing a technology that could someday transform the moon’s soil into materials for electricity-producing solar cells and transmission wire.

That branch of Blue Origin’s advanced development programs takes the spotlight in a blog item posted to the company’s website. The underlying approach — called molten regolith electrolysis, or MRE — has been the subject of research for decades, but Blue Origin says it’s refined the technique over the past two years.

“We can make power systems on the moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth,” the company says. “We have pioneered the technology and demonstrated all the steps. Our approach, Blue Alchemist, can scale indefinitely, eliminating power as a constraint anywhere on the moon.”

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Blue Origin wins a launch order for NASA Mars mission

Illustration: ESCAPADE probes orbiting Mars
An artist’s conception shows ESCAPADE probes at Mars. (Rocket Lab / UC-Berkeley Illustration)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won its first NASA order for a New Glenn rocket launch, with Mars as the mission’s ultimate destination.

The task order calls on Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin to provide launch service for NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE, as part of the space agency’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare program, also known as VADR.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which is currently still under development, would be tasked with sending two robotic probes spaceward from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida in late 2024.

The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft would study how Mars’ weak magnetosphere interacts with the solar wind, and how energy and plasma enter and leave the magnetosphere. The cruise to Mars would take about 11 months, followed by several months of orbital adjustments in preparation for the science mission.

Learning about Mars’ magnetosphere would provide a new perspective on space weather, on strategies for protecting astronauts from space storms — and potentially on the evolution of the Red Planet’s climate. Scientists say Mars lost much of its atmosphere and became less hospitable for life because it didn’t have a strong magnetosphere to protect it from the stripping-away effect of the solar wind.

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FCC clears Amazon’s satellite maintenance plan

Illustration: Vulcan liftoff with Amazon satellites
An artist’s conception shows a ULA Vulcan Centaur rocket launching Amazon’s Kuiper satellites. (Amazon Illustration)

The Federal Communications Commission says Amazon’s 3,236-satellite Project Kuiper constellation is fully cleared for deployment after the company filed an acceptable plan for dealing with the risks of orbital debris.

This week’s order follows up on the conditional approval that the FCC issued in 2020. At the time, the FCC said the plans for Kuiper could proceed, but Amazon had to update its orbital debris mitigation plan to address concerns about collision risks, coordination with other satellite systems, and procedures for satellite disposal.

After a back-and-forth with the Kuiper team and its rivals at SpaceX and Viasat, as well as interested parties at NASA and other federal agencies, the FCC it was satisfied with Amazon’s modifications.

“Our action will allow Kuiper to begin deployment of its constellation in order to bring high-speed broadband connectivity to customers around the world,” the agency said in the order it adopted Feb. 8.

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