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NASA’s Opportunity rover is seen but not heard

Opportunity on Mars
A high-resolution image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Opportunity rover as a bright blip inside the white box. The box marks a 154-foot-wide area in Mars’ Perseverance Valley. Click on the image for a larger version. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona Photo)

NASA’s Opportunity rover still hasn’t made contact after a weeks-long Martian dust storm forced it to go into hibernation, but at least the skies are now clear enough to spot the solar-powered robot from orbit.

And mission managers say they’re a long way from giving up on Opportunity, which began its work on the surface of Mars almost 15 years ago.

Oppy shows up as a blip on the slopes of Perseverance Valley in a color image captured Sept. 20 by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, from a height of 166 miles.

The orbiter’s clear view raises hopes that winds will sweep dust off Opportunity’s solar panels, as has happened several times before, and allow the rover to build up enough power to resume transmissions.

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NASA turns to the search for technosignatures

Image: Alien megastructure
An artist’s representation  shows a megastructure known as a Dyson sphere capturing the energy from a distant star. Such a structure could create observable technosignatures pointing to the civilization behind its construction. (Credit: Danielle Futselaar / SETI International)

It’s been a quarter-century since Congress cut off NASA funding for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, but now the space agency is revisiting the topic under another name: technosignatures.

“I’m excited to announce that NASA is taking the 1st steps to explore ways to search for life advanced enough to create technosignatures: signs or signals, which if observed, would let us infer the existence of technological life elsewhere in the universe,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a tweet today.

The search is the focus of a workshop taking place this week at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, with experts on the search for exoplanets, artificial radio signals and other potential pointers in attendance. House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, is due to give a welcome message.

That’s a far cry from 1993, when a congressional effort spearheaded by Sen. Richard Bryan killed off NASA’s 10-year SETI program, which was known as the High Resolution Microwave Survey, or HRMS. “This hopefully will be the end of Martian hunting season at the taxpayer’s expense,” Bryan declared at the time.

Since then, much has changed.

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Boeing seals the deal on acquiring satellite company

Altair satellite
An artist’s conception shows Millennium Space Systems’ Altair satellite. (Millennium Illustration)

As promised, Boeing has completed its acquisition of California-based Millennium Space Systems, a provider of small-satellite solutions. Millennium, which has about 260 employees, will operate as a subsidiary of Boeing Phantom Works. When the acquisition plan was announced in August, Boeing said it’d be completed by the end of September. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Boeing joins NSF to support STEM training

France Cordova and Heidi Capozzi
The National Science Foundation’s director, France Cordova, worked on the STEM training partnership with Heidi Capozzi, senior vice president of human resources at Boeing. (NSF Photo)

The National Science Foundation and Boeing say they’ve forged a $21 million partnership to accelerate skill development and increase diversity in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, known collectively as STEM.

Supported by $10 million in funding from Boeing, NSF will team up with learning institutions to develop online training in critical skill areas for students and Boeing employees.

The skill areas being targeted include model-based engineering and systems engineering, mechatronics, robotics, data science and sensor analytics, program management and artificial intelligence. Boeing and NSF expect the first project to launch in 2019.

To complement that part of the program, NSF’s Directorate for Education and Human Resources will invest $10 million in awards focused on skill development and training for America’s STEM workforce.

Boeing also will contribute $1 million to the NSF INCLUDES initiative, which aims to boost U.S. innovation by broadening participation in STEM fields. INCLUDES stands for “Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science.”

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White House issues quantum computing strategy

Quantum summit
A White House summit on quantum information science brings together Jake Taylor of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, France Cordova of the National Science Foundation, Paul Dabbar of the U.S. Energy Department, Walter Copan of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Mike Griffin of the Defense Department. (White House / OSTP Photo via Twitter)

Federal officials and industry leaders — including representatives from Microsoft and Google — met today at a White House summit to spark new initiatives in quantum information science.

Among the recommendations contained in a newly released strategic overview: setting up a U.S. Quantum Consortium, modeled after past efforts such as the non-profit, industry-led Semiconductor Research Corp.; and establishing a set of Grand Challenges to focus quantum computing research.

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Alaska Airlines adds VR to in-flight entertainment

Alaska Airlines VR
Alaska Airlines offers SkyLights’ Allosky virtual reality headset for in-flight entertainment. (Alaska Airlines Photo)

Alaska Airlines is adding virtual reality to its in-flight entertainment menu in an experiment aimed at recreating a movie theater experience at 35,000 feet.

The Seattle-based airline has partnered with SkyLights, a French-American immersive-media company, to offer VR headsets and noise-canceling headphones to first-class customers on 10 flights that go between Seattle and Boston, and Boston and San Diego.

The users can watch 2-D and 3-D films such as “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” or “Ready Player One.” They can also click into 360-degree, head-tracking virtual-reality videos.

SkyLights’ lightweight Allosky VR headsets have been adopted for tryouts on other airlines, ranging from Joon and XL Airways to Lufthansa, but Alaska Airlines’ experiment ranks among the most ambitious yet.

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Japan launches cargo ship to space station

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency today launched a robotic cargo ship to the International Space Station, filled with more than five tons of supplies, equipment and experiments.

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Hopping rovers send back pictures from asteroid

View of Ryugu
An image from the Hayabusa 2 mission’s Rover-1A shows the surface of the asteroid Ryugu at left. The bright white region is due to sunlight. The image, captured at 11:44 a.m. JST Sept. 22 (7:44 p.m. PT Sept. 21), is blurry because it was taken while the rover was in the middle of a hop over the surface. (JAXA Photo)

Two mini-rovers have sent their first pictures back from the surface of the asteroid Ryugu, a day after they were dropped off by Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft.

The pictures are blurry because they were taken while the rovers were falling and hopping around the half-mile-wide asteroid, more than 180 million miles from Earth.

As fuzzy as they are, the photos represent a huge victory for the $150 million Hayabusa 2 mission, which was launched nearly four years ago to get an unprecedented look at the surface of an asteroid.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency first tried to put a rover on the surface of an asteroid more than a decade ago, during a mission to a space rock called Itokawa. That part of the mission fizzled, however, when the MINERVA rover carrier missed the mark and sailed off into interplanetary space.

Hayabusa 2, in contrast, dropped its MINERVA-II-1 carrier right on target. The carrier deployed two 7-inch-wide, disk-shaped rovers that touched down on Ryugu’s rock-strewn terrain.

It took a while to get the pictures back to Earth because they had to be uploaded from the rovers to the mothership — and then relayed back to Earth for processing.

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TESS probe finds its first potential planets

TESS spacecraft
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, with an alien sun and planet in the background. (NASA / GSFC Illustration)

Astronomers on the team for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission, or TESS, are reporting their first potential planet discoveries, just days after the spacecraft’s first science image was unveiled.

The first reported candidate planet was detected orbiting a star known as Pi Mensae, a sunlike yellow dwarf star nearly 60 light-years from Earth that was already known to harbor a world that’s more than 10 times as massive as Jupiter.

The newly detected prospect is closer to its parent star in the southern constellation Mensa, making a complete orbit every 6.3 Earth days.

In a paper published on the ArXiv pre-print website and submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the team’s scientists say Pi Mensae c appears to be about twice as wide as Earth and 4.5 times as massive.

Its density is estimated as roughly equal to water’s density, which suggests the planet is a super-Earth that “may have held on to a significant atmosphere,” the scientists say.

The second candidate planet orbits a red dwarf star known as LHS 3844, 49 light-years away in the constellation Indus. LHS 3844 b is thought to be a “hot Earth,” with a diameter about a third wider than Earth’s. It swings around its sun every 11 hours.

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Hayabusa 2 probe drops off rovers at asteroid

Hayabusa 2's shadow
Japan’s Hayabusa 2 probe takes a picture of the asteroid Ryugu from a distance of about 135 meters (440 feet) with its own shadow seen on the surface. (JAXA Photo)

Japan’s Hayabusa 2 probe began the climactic phase of its mission overnight by sending out its first two rovers as it hovered less than 200 feet over an half-mile-wide asteroid, more than 180 million miles from Earth.

During the drop-off, the 18-foot-wide spacecraft even took a picture of its own shadow, spread out on the asteroid Ryugu’s rocky surface like a black-and-white copy of the Canadian flag.

The release of Hayabusa 2’s MINERVA-II-1 rovers occurred at 9:06 p.m. PT Sept. 20, mission controllers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency reported in a tweet. Hayabusa 2 dipped as low as 55 meters (180 feet) for the release, then retreated back from the asteroid.

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