Cosmic Log
Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is really psyched about the electric pickup truck he’s got on the drawing board — and he’s also cool with the Space Force and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space effort.
Those are just a few of the talking points that emerged when he sat down for an 80-minute Q&A on Halloween, after months of cajoling from Recode alpha-geek Kara Swisher.
Russian investigators say last month’s launch of a Soyuz rocket carrying two spacefliers to the International Space Station went awry because a sensor that was bent during the rocket’s assembly spoiled the separation of one of its boosters.
When the damaged sensor malfunctioned, the booster didn’t separate cleanly from the Soyuz’s core, throwing the rocket off course and forcing an abort sequence just minutes into the Oct. 11 ascent. The Soyuz crew capsule was thrown clear of the rocket and made a parachute-aided descent. Thanks to the escape system, NASA’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Alexey Ovchinin made a safe landing in Kazakhstan.
Space station managers worried that the failure might force an extended suspension of Soyuz flights. But Russia’s Roscosmos space agency said three other spacefliers — NASA’s Anne McClain, Canada’s David Saint-Jacques and Russia’s Oleg Kononenko — would be launched to the station on Dec. 3.
Dawn is dead, but Dawn is not gone: Today NASA said that the Dawn spacecraft has fallen out of contact with Earth, presumably because it’s run out of the thruster fuel that was used to keep its antennas oriented toward Earth and its power-generating solar panels oriented toward the sun.
After Dawn missed out on communications sessions on Wednesday and today, NASA declared an end to the mission.
During its 11 years in space, Dawn sent back unprecedented closeups of the asteroid Vesta as well as Ceres, which is the largest known asteroid and the smallest confirmed dwarf planet.
Dawn will continue circling Ceres for decades to come in the main asteroid belt, 257 million miles out from the sun.
How many different kinds of cells are there in the brain? At least 133 kinds, including two types of neurons not recognized before, according to a pair of studies featured on the cover of this week’s issue of the journal Nature.
The “parts list” builds on 15 years of work at Seattle’s Allen Institute, focused on analyzing genetic activity in nearly 24,000 of the 100 million brain cells in the mouse cortex. Each cell type exhibited a different combination of genes that were turned on or off.
“This is by far the most comprehensive, most in-depth analysis of any regions of the cortex in any species,” senior study author Hongkui Zeng, executive director of structured science at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said in a news release. “We can now say that we understand the distribution rules for its parts list.”
SpaceX says it has reorganized its satellite development operation in Redmond, Wash., to accelerate design and testing of the elements for its planned satellite broadband constellation — and high-level departures were reportedly part of the shift.
Word of the reorg came in response to a Reuters report, quoting unnamed SpaceX employees as saying that CEO Elon Musk traveled to the Redmond facility in June to fire members of the satellite program’s senior management team.
Musk was reportedly unhappy with the pace of the testing program, which was highlighted by the launch of two demonstration satellites in February. The casualties were said to include the SpaceX vice president in charge of the satellite program, Rajeev Badyal, a veteran of Microsoft and Hewlett Packard; and satellite designer Mark Krebs, who led Google’s aircraft and spacecraft teams before coming to SpaceX.
After months of financial uncertainty, the Planetary Resources asteroid-mining venture says its assets have been purchased by the Brooklyn-based ConsenSys blockchain venture.
In a news release, Planetary Resources said its CEO and president, Chris Lewicki, and general counsel Brian Israel have joined ConsenSys in connection with the acquisition. ConsenSys will operate its space initiatives out of Planetary Resources’ former facility in Redmond, Wash.
Further details about the transaction are confidential, Planetary Resources spokeswoman Stacey Tearne told GeekWire in an email.
ConsenSys is a production studio that creates enterprises in a wide range of business areas based on the Ethereum platform for cryptocurrency and other blockchain applications. It has spawned 50 ventures, or “spokes,” including an online poker site, a legal services site and a “transmedia universe integrated with blockchain technology” called Cellarius.
The company’s founder is Joe Lubin, who co-founded Ethereum. Today, Lubin paid tribute to Planetary Resources for its “world-class talent, its record of innovation, and for inspiring people across our planet in support of its bold vision for the future.”
NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting telescope now belongs to the ages, with its fuel completely spent and its instruments shut down — but the planet quest continues, thanks to a treasure trove of downloaded data as well as a new generation of robotic planet-hunters.
Space agency officials declared the end of spacecraft operations today, nine and a half years after the car-sized probe was launched. The hydrazine fuel ran out about two weeks ago, signaled by a sharp drop in pressure readings for the propulsion system.
“In the end, we didn’t have a drop of fuel left over for anything else,” Charlie Sobeck, project system engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center, said during a teleconference.
Kymeta Corp., the antenna company backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, says that CEO Nathan Kundtz will be leaving his post next month to make room for an executive who’ll be focused on the startup’s next stage of evolution.
Marc Stolzman, the Redmond, Wash.-based company’s president and chief financial officer, will take charge of day-to-day operations while the board of directors conducts a search for the next CEO. Kundtz, who has been with Kymeta since it was spun out of Intellectual Ventures in 2012 and has served as CEO since 2015, will continue his relationship with the company in an advisory role.
In a news release, both Kundtz and Kymeta said the changeover was amicable.
It’s notable that the newest class of Allen Distinguished Investigators, announced today by the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, includes researchers who are developing new treatments for lymphoma. Lymphoma is the type of blood cancer that led to the death of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the namesake and funder of the research program.
The decision to focus on that disease — along with nuclear biophysics, neuroimmunology, brain cells and Alzheimer’s disease, and cellular development and aging — was made last year, long before the billionaire philanthropist was diagnosed with a recurrence of his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Nevertheless, the choice is in line with Allen’s willingness to tackle the toughest challenges in bioscience.
The U.S. Air Force is looking for a few good apps to visualize satellites and other objects in Earth orbit — and it’s willing to pay $100,000 in prizes for them.
That’s the bottom line for the Air Force Visionary Q-Prize Competition, or VQ-Prize, which runs through Jan. 15. The tech challenge is aimed at encouraging non-traditional industry partners to develop visualization tools to enhance space situational awareness for the Pentagon’s space operators.
“The need for timely and accurate object tracking is paramount to the defense of space, and this competition will help augment existing capabilities with visualization tools that enable operators to intuitively absorb and quickly navigate massive amounts of space object data,” Brig. Gen. William Liquori, the Air Force Space Command’s director of strategic requirements, architectures and analysis, said in a news release.
The software tools can include flat-screen user interfaces as well as virtual-reality and augmented-reality solutions. Contestants can include universities, individuals and small businesses. No background in space applications is required.