Categories
GeekWire

Potentially habitable planet at the star next door

Proxima Centauri b
An artist’s conception shows Proxima Centauri b orbiting its parent star, a red dwarf, with the two other stars of the Alpha Centauri system in the far background. (Credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO)

The rumors you’ve heard are mostly true: Scientists say the star that’s closest to our solar system has a planet that could be at the right temperature for liquid water and life.

The star is called Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf that’s part of the Alpha Centauri system, 4.2 light-years away. The planet is called Proxima Centauri b, and it’s a terrestrial world whose existence has now been confirmed after 16 years of study.

It’s not yet known whether Proxima b has an atmosphere, or liquid water. But the computer models don’t rule out the possibility. That would make it the closest known exoplanet – and the closest known exoplanet with the potential for life.

As such, it could be the nearest haven for humanity in case things go horribly wrong in our own solar system. And it just so happens that scientists are working on a robotic mission to the Alpha Centauri system: The Breakthrough Starshot initiative received a $100 million kick-start from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner in April.

“We expect either to characterize it, if we get lucky, or maybe visit it in a couple of centuries,” Guillem Anglada-Escude, an astronomer at Queen Mary University of London, told reporters.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Reporter hunts for Amazon’s drones in Britain

160118-primeair

Amazon is expanding its drone testing operation in the English countryside, to smooth the way for what it hopes will be an aerial package delivery system. But exactly where are the tests taking place?

Based on clues from the BBC, plus interviews with local sources, Business Insider’s Sam Shead went out to farm fields southeast of Cambridge, near a place called Worsted Lodge.

In one of the fields, he found two bases that were located at each end of the acreage, about 400 meters (a quarter-mile) apart. Next to each of the bases, there were apparent landing spots made from patches of artificial grass.

The locale is near Amazon’s research and development center in Cambridge, which would make it handy for drone testing teams. But there’s at least one piece of evidence that’s missing: No drones were spotted.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Jet gets dropped off at museum … literally!

Blue Angels jet unloaded
A Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet jet is raised up from a flatbed truck using a crane at the Museum of Flight. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

The latest addition to the Museum of Flight’s airplane collection, a Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet jet, landed in Seattle today with the aid of a three-story-high crane.

The No. 2 jet, which is on permanent loan from the National Naval Air Museum in Pensacola, Fla., didn’t make the trip the way it did last year, by air. Instead, it was driven to Jet City on the back of a flatbed truck, over the course of six days.

The truck driver, Buddy Chapman of Blossom, Texas, said the sight caused a traffic jam wherever he stopped.

“You’d stop in the littlest town in Wyoming, and you wouldn’t be there but five minutes and you’d have 30 people around it,” he told GeekWire.

While aviation buffs and their kids watched, the truck pulled into a museum parking lot behind the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery, accompanied by a police escort. Sections of the detached wings were offloaded using a forklift, and then the giant crane pulled in to lift the jet off the back of a truck and set it back down.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Remote-controlled robots roam the office

Image: Deepak Savadatti on robot
Deepak Savadatti, the chief operating officer for BlueDot, carries on a conversation in the startup’s Bellevue office via a BeamPro telepresence robot. (GeekWire photo by Kevin Lisota)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – In a sixth-floor executive suite here, Deepak Savadatti’s robot has its own office with a view.

Savadatti himself may be sitting in front of a computer hundreds of miles away, at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He may be dialing in from a smartphone on the road, or at the beach. No matter where he is, his face pops up on the robot’s screen, his voice issues forth from a speaker, and he can even roll around the office to look out the window.

“My kids are surprised that this is working out so well,” Savadatti told GeekWire via robot. “It’s as real as it’s going to get. The very fact that I can move in and out gives me a lot of freedom to be able to have a real workday.”

It’s close to the ultimate in telecommuting: Savadatti’s telepresence robot lets him do his job as the chief operating officer of Bellevue-based BlueDot, the “innovation factory” founded by veteran tech entrepreneur Naveen Jain, while he’s sitting in a home office hundreds of miles away.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Blue Angels jet nears the end of the road

Image: Blue Angels jet
The Blue Angels Hornet jet destined for display at the Museum of Flight makes a stopover in Rock Springs, Wyo., over the weekend. (Credit: Museum of Flight)

A Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet jet is closing in on its new home at Seattle’s Museum of Flight – without flying a single mile.

Instead, the partially disassembled jet has been riding on top of a flatbed truck during a weeklong road trip that started in Pensacola, Fla., where the Blue Angels aerobatics team has its home base.

“The going has been a little slow through the South due to the tragic flooding in Louisiana, not to mention rains along the way,” museum spokesman Ted Huetter told GeekWire in an email.

The truck passed through Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Oregon over the weekend, and it’s expected to spend tonight in Ellensburg, Wash.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

One year before eclipse, spots are filling up fast

Image: 2012 eclipse
The sun’s corona gleams during a total solar eclipse seen from the northern tip of Australia in November 2012. (Credit: Romeo Durscher via NASA)

It’s exactly one year before the “Great American Eclipse” sweeps across the continent, but depending on where you want to stay, it’s already too late to make a reservation.

On one level, the solar eclipse of Aug. 21, 2017, should rank among the most accessible such phenomena for Americans – and it’s not to be missed. Partial phases of the eclipse should be visible, weather permitting, from most of North America. For example, up to 92 percent of the sun’s disk will be covered as seen from Seattle.

On another level, the eclipse is a hot ticket: Its total phase will be visible only along aroughly 70-mile-wide track that extends from Oregon to South Carolina. Totality means the moon blots out the sun’s entire disk, turning daylight to nighttime for up to two and a half minutes.

Statistically speaking, most of the best places to go for clear skies in August are in a swath of the West ranging from central Oregon to Nebraska. And by some measures, the absolute best is Madras, Ore.

But just try getting a room in Oregon.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Space elevator fans keep looking up

Image: Space elevator
An artist’s conception shows a space elevator rising up from Earth. (Credit: Pat Rawlings / NASA file)

Once upon a time, entrepreneurs were counting down to a date in 2018 when the first space elevator would open for business. NASA was setting aside millions of dollars to promote the technologies required for building that elevator. And space elevator fans were looking forward to a breakthrough that would drive the cost of space travel down to mere hundreds of dollars.

Today, the countdown is on indefinite hold. The NASA money is gone. And the dream of building the space elevator has been eclipsed by billionaire Elon Musk’s dream of putting colonists on Mars by the mid-2020s.

Nevertheless, the fans are still keeping the faith, and they’re backing up that faith with research studies. About 35 of them gathered today at Seattle’s Museum of Flight to kick off the 2016 Space Elevator Conference, presented by the International Space Elevator Consortium.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Space station crew installs new front door

Spacewalker at work
NASA’s Jeff Williams works on the space station’s International Docking Adapter. (Credit: NASA TV)

The International Space Station now has a door that will let crews float in from the commercial space taxis that SpaceX and Boeing are building, thanks to a nearly six-hour spacewalk.

NASA spacewalkers Jeff Williams and Kate Rubins installed the Boeing-built door, known as an International Docking Adapter or IDA, with an assist from the station’s robotic arm. This was the fourth spacewalk for Williams, and the first for Rubins.

The 5-foot-wide IDA was hooked up to one of the ports on the station’s Harmony module – a port that was originally designed for use by the now-retired space shuttle fleet. Analogous to an electrical-plug adapter, the IDA fits over the port to provide a standard interface for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, Boeing’s CST-100 Starlifter, and potentially other spacecraft including Russia’s Soyuz capsule.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Uber powers ahead on autonomous vehicles

Image: Volvo for Uber
Uber plans to use Volvo XC90 cars that have been modified for autonomous driving. (Credit: Uber)

Uber says it’s acquiring Otto, a venture working on self-driving trucks, and starting up an autonomous-vehicle experiment with Volvo in Pittsburgh.

The moves by the ride-share trailblazer, announced on Thursday, came just days after Ford laid out its plan to put autonomous ride-share vehicles on the road by 2021. Such moves signal that ride-sharing and ride-hailing will loom as a major frontier for automotive autonomy.

In a blog post, Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick said that Otto’s co-founder, Anthony Levandowski, would lead the company’s self-driving efforts in the San Francisco Bay area as well as Pittsburgh. “If that sounds like a big deal — well, it is,” Kalanick said.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Watch asteroid hunters play the Xtronaut game

Image: Xtronaut game
The Xtronaut board game gives players a taste of the science, economics and politics behind planning an interplanetary robotic mission. (Credit: Xtronaut via Amazon)

Watching a couple of guys play a board game on streaming video may not sound exciting – unless those two guys also play the real-life asteroid-hunting game.

That’s precisely the situation facing Chris Lewicki, president and CEO of Planetary Resources, based in Redmond, Wash.; and Dante Lauretta, a University of Arizona professor who’s the principal investigator for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission.

They’ll be battling over the playing board – and discussing developments in asteroid science and exploration – during a Google Hangout that starts at 11 a.m. PT Friday.

The game in question is Xtronaut, a simplified simulation of the mission-planning process for interplanetary robotic exploration. Lauretta’s the co-creator of the board game, which lifted off last year thanks to Kickstarter.

“We have been playing this game in the office, and can assure you it is JUST like planning a real mission,” Lewicki says on the YouTube page touting the Hangout.

Get the full story on GeekWire.