NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren makes his first call home after descending to Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft today. (Credit: NASA TV)
It took some doing, but three crew members from the International Space Station returned to Earth today and are on their way home in time for Christmas.
NASA’s Kjell Lindgren, Russia’s Oleg Kononenko and Japan’s Kimiya Yui touched down on the steppes of Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz capsule at 7:12 p.m. local time (5:12 a.m. PT), marking the first time since 2012 that a space station crew came down after dark. It’s the sixth night landing for the Soyuz in the 15 years since astronauts started living on the station.
The shift to an after-dark landing was made to accommodate the Dec. 21 launch of an upgraded Progress supply ship.
The winter weather in Kazakhstan brought further complications.
An artist’s conception shows the dwarf planet Eris. Astronomers say an even larger world may exist on the solar system’s edge. (Credit: NASA / JPL / Caltech)
An array of radio telescopes in Chile has picked up weird readings that appear to be coming from far-out objects – and that’s sparked a debate over whether they’re previously undetected worlds on the edge of our solar system, brown dwarfs, or just random glitches.
Readings from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, or ALMA, have led to the posting of at least two research papers on the arXiv pre-print server. Historically, some of the studies that scientists post to arXiv go on to make a splash, while others fizzle out.
Could it be yet another star associated with Alpha Centauri? The researchers rule out that scenario on the grounds that it hasn’t been seen before in other wavelengths.
This illustration gives a sense of how characters from alphabets around the world were replicated through human vs. machine learning. (Credit: Danqing Wang)
Researchers say they’ve developed an algorithm that can teach a new concept to a computer using just one example, rather than the thousands of examples that are traditionally required for machine learning.
The algorithm takes advantage of a probabilistic approach the researchers call “Bayesian Program Learning,” or BPL. Essentially, the computer generates its own additional examples, and then determines which ones fit the pattern best.
The researchers behind BPL say they’re trying to reproduce the way humans catch on to a new task after seeing it done once – whether it’s a child recognizing a horse, or a mechanic replacing a head gasket.
“The gap between machine learning and human learning capacities remains vast,” said MIT’s Joshua Tenenbaum, one of the authors of a research paper published today in the journal Science. “We want to close that gap, and that’s the long-term goal.”
Employees at Blue Origin’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., cheer as they watch the landing of the company’s New Shepard test spaceship on Nov. 23. “How do we steal that video?” Lt. Gov. Brad Owen joked after watching a clip showing the celebration. (Credit: Blue Origin)
Washington state legislators got an introduction to the state’s space industry today at Seattle’s Museum of Flight – and voiced amazement at how much is going on.
“I feel so illiterate in this field, it’s unbelievable,” state Sen. Mike Hewitt, R-Walla Walla, remarked at one point during today’s meeting of the Legislative Committee on Economic Development and International Relations. Afterward, Hewitt said he knew “100 percent” more about the field than he did at the start of the hearing.
State Sen. Maralyn Chase, D-Shoreline, marveled when she heard Aerojet Rocketdyne executive Roger Myers list all the missions his company in which his company has played a part, ranging from the Apollo missions to the moon, to the space shuttle program, to robotic missions that have visited every planet (yes, including Pluto).
“I would wager that most of the people in this state do not know what you’re doing in Redmond,” Chase told Myers.
That was the point of today’s hearing, presided over by Lt. Gov. Brad Owen: to let legislators know that there’s much more than Boeing to the state’s profile in the aerospace industry.
This color-coded representation of Ceres’ Occator Crater shows differences in surface composition, highlight bright patches inside the crater. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA)
For months, scientists have puzzled over weirdly bright spots of material shining on the asteroid Ceres, but now they say the spots are probably made of salty ice.
That determination, based on a detailed analysis of spectral data from NASA’s Dawn orbiter, comes in a paper published today by the journal Nature. Dawn’s images highlight one particular patch in a 106-mile-wide impact basin known as Occator Crater, but other spots are spread across the surface of the 590-mile-wide dwarf planet.
“The global nature of Ceres’ bright spots suggests that this world has a subsurface layer that contains briny water-ice,” the study’s principal author, Andreas Nathues of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, said in a NASA statement. He and his co-authors suggest that cosmic impacts dig up enough surface material to expose the shiny ice.
A photo tweeted by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly shows the International Space Station’s robotic arm about to grab onto a commercial Cygnus cargo ship. (Credit: Scott Kelly / NASA)
The International Space Station’s astronauts got their Christmas presents early today, in the form of HoloLens augmented-reality headsets from Microsoft and more than 7,000 pounds of other nice stuff, courtesy of a Cygnus commercial cargo ship.
Orbital ATK’s uncrewed Cygnus arrived at the station three days after Sunday’s launch atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket from Florida. NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren used the station’s robotic arm to grab onto the 20-foot-long (5.1-meter-long) capsule at 3:19 a.m. PT and bring it in for its berthing.
In a tweet, space station commander Scott Kelly joked that the delivery arrived “just in time for Christmas.”
Former Google executive Alan Eustace recounts his jump from the stratosphere at the University of Washington, with a photo of his descent in the background. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)
One year after setting the world altitude record for a jump from the stratosphere, former Google executive Alan Eustace says the sky isn’t the limit – and neither is his record.
“There’s no reason you can’t go higher,” Eustace told GeekWire today after a talk at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. The event was part of the UW School of Computer Science and Engineering’s Distinguished Lecturer Series.
The record-setting ride on Oct. 24, 2014, began with Eustace in a custom-made pressure suit, dangling from the end of a high-altitude balloon as it rose up from Roswell, N.M. Over the course of two and a half hours, he went into the stratosphere, up to an altitude of 135,890 feet (25.7 miles, or 41.4 kilometers).
“You can really start to see the beautiful Earth below, see the darkness of space,” he recalled during today’s talk.
Boeing employees and VIPs surround the first 737 MAX jet to roll out in Renton. (Credit: Boeing)
Thousands of Boeing employees turned out today for the rollout of the first Boeing 737 MAX jet, a redesigned version of the long-lived model that’s way more fuel-efficient.
The freshly painted blue-and-white MAX No. 1 had its coming-out party at Boeing’s final assembly factory in Renton, Wash. – sparking a flurry of tweets from attendees:
An artist’s conception shows Moon Express’ lander on the way to the lunar surface. (Credit: Moon Express)
Moon Express, the lunar exploration venture co-founded by Seattle entrepreneur Naveen Jain, has gotten the “all systems go” signal for its bid to put a robotic lander to the moon and win the Google Lunar XPRIZE.
The thumbs-up comes in the form of XPRIZE’s certification of Moon Express’ launch contract with Los Angeles-based Rocket Lab USA. If all goes according to schedule, Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle will blast off from a pad in New Zealand or the U.S. in 2017, sending Moon Express’ MX-1E lander to the lunar surface.
The Google Lunar XPRIZE flight would have to go much farther: The rules call for a privately funded lander to touch down on the moon, transport itself at least 500 meters (546 yards) and send video back to Earth. The first team to do all that within the rules wins $20 million. Another $10 million has been set aside for other prizes.
An artist’s conception visualizes how “connected vehicles” could communicate. (Credit: USDOT)
The U.S. Department of Transportation and billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen’sVulcan Inc. are offering $50 million to midsize cities, including Seattle, in a “Smart City” competition to promote next-generation transportation systems.
“Our national vision for transportation is still very much constrained by 20th-century thinking about technology,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told reporters today during a teleconference to announce the contest. “We are imagining connected and autonomous vehicles that practically eliminate crashes. And we are imagining this technology interacting with wired infrastructure to eliminate traffic jams as well.”
Foxx said the federal government would be unveiling new guidelines for autonomous vehicles sometime in the next few weeks, and requirements for vehicle-to-vehicle communications in the next year. But he also said DOT wants cities to come up with their own visions for transportation systems that are safer, more efficient and more environmentally friendly.
