We’ve seen the Arkyd 100 telescope before, Planetary Resources’ impressively small asteroid-hunting machine that offers performance matching any on-earth scope (yes, even the really big ones on the tops of mountains) in a package that’s about the size of a quarter keg of beer. Its length of 425mm fully deployed (16.7 inches) is absolutely dwarfed by Earth’s current great orbital scope: the Hubble Space Telescope, which is 13.2 meters (or 43 feet) long. The space shuttle cargo bay could carry a single Hubble into orbit. If it were still operating, it could take a thousand Arkyd 100 scopes in a single shot.
But, of course, it isn’t still operating, which is perhaps partly why Planetary Resources is looking for $1 million in earthly support. The extra-orbital mining company has turned to Kickstarter to raise a little early funding and to help get its first fully functional Arkyd 100 scope into orbit. If you jump in early, you can get your face in orbit too — well, a picture of it anyway. More details after the break.
Picture an optical telescope, a really good optical telescope, and you have to think big. The most powerful consumer-grade models often stand taller than their operators. The grand, institutionally owned ones are hidden beneath giant domes above the clouds on mountaintops. The world’s best, the Hubble Space Telescope, is as big as a school bus and sits out in orbit, while its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be roughly the size of a Boeing 737.
What, then, could a telescope smaller than a trash can possibly do? Quite a lot, as it turns out — if you can get it outside of the Earth’s pesky atmosphere, that is. Planetary Resources plans to take rocks floating aimlessly in the solar system and turn them into valuable commodities. But, before we get there, the company hopes to revolutionize space exploration in the same way that 3D printing and microfunding have revolutionized manufacturing. Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman Peter Diamandis chatted with us, telling us why the company made the unusual decision to put its first orbital optical telescope up for grabs on Kickstarter.
The latest arrivals to the International Space Station docked in record time, NASA has confirmed, with the Express Soyuz Flight safely opening hatches at just past midnight this morning. Expedition 36 – which brought three engineers from NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, and the European Space Agency – took under six hours to reach the orbiting research platform, having taken off in the evening of Tuesday, May 28. Their arrival brings the ISS’ crew back up to six, following the departure earlier this month of Commander Chris Hadfield and his two colleagues.
The current compliment of orbiting engineers now includes NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano, as well as Flight Engineer Chris Cassidy of NASA and Commander Pavel Vinogradov and Flight Engineer Alexander Misurkin of Russian Federal Space Agency, who made it to the ISS on March 28. The latter three will remain until September, before returning to Earth.
Soyuz docking with ISS:
There’s plenty to be done in the intervening period. Five spacewalks are planned to ready the ISS for the Russian Multipurpose Module to be installed in December, with another to take the Olympic torch outside on November 9th. The sextet will also be responsible for ISS-side management of various supply vessels expected over the coming 5.5 months, which will include cargo hauls from the ESA, Russia, and Japan.
That’s in addition to the ongoing scientific experiment load ongoing on the ISS, which will be added to with a new project investigating how longer periods in space might impact bone density. It’s also expected to also help understand osteoporosis for those back on Earth.
What remains to be seen, however, is whether any of the six crewmembers can engage with the public back on Earth in the same way that Commander Hadfield did. The Canadian astronaut made a name for himself with his outreach efforts, deftly using social media and YouTube to stoke interest in science and technology.
Even Hadfield’s closing days on the space station were notable, with the engineer recording a special version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity complete with a full music video (albeit with some assistance from people back home).
While riding her bike on Sunday, May 19th, at approximately 3:30pm, highly accomplished and well-regarded robotics researcher Dr. Kanako Miura was struck by a large truck near Charlesgate Park in the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Miura, 36, died at the scene. Official reports conclude that it was simply a terrible accident on a busy road.
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A guest of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dr. Miura arrived last October for what was planned to be year of research at the world-class MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). She had been invited to share her pioneering work on improving the understanding of human bipedal locomotion and applying that practical knowledge to advanced humanoids, i.e., Dr. Miura made robots that walk like us.
“She was really part of the fabric of our group. She was not just a visitor in our group, she became a close friend and a member of our family. The energy she brought to her work was contagious, and her enthusiasm was easy to see. She loved giving tours, and showing off the lab, and she had an unfailing optimism in the future and importance of humanoid robots.”
-Professor Russ Tedrake, Director; Center for Robotics, CSAIL
Dr. Miura held a B.E. in Aerospace Engineering and an M.E. and Ph.D. in Information Science from prestigious Tohoku University. She also earned an additional Ph.D. in Electronics and Automation from equally renowned Université Louis-Pasteur in 2004. Such certifications alone evidence a formidable intellect; factoring in the linguistic challenges between Japanese, French, and English – well, that pushes the dial up a bit further.
The considerable expertise Dr. Miura brought to MIT arose from post-doctoral research at Tohoku University, a subsequent research position with communications giant NTT Docomo, and her eventual ascent to senior researcher at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in the Intelligent Systems Research Institute’s Humanoid Robotics Department.
While at AIST, Dr. Miura worked on the world-famous HRP-4C Future Dreamrobot (nicknamed “Miim,” from the Japanese). You might not know the name, but chances are you’ve seen photos or video of the agile and strikingly human robot:
HRP-4C has also “met” with the highest levels of foreign government:
With the above robot as the platform and Dr. Miura as the lead researcher, the AIST team made several valuable and distinct contributions to mobility and agility in humanoid robotics. The video below, for example, demonstrates the “slip turn” motion. “Slip turn” is very human-like movement that allows a biped to rapidly change direction with minimal change in body orientation. How is this an advancement? Well, think about the baby steps a robot like ASIMO has to take when changing direction, as opposed to this:
Another project led by Dr. Miura was the development of a more human-like gait for bipedal robots. When we walk, movement in the pelvis precipitates and works in conjunction with movement in the knees. A natural human step ends with the back foot balancing and pushing off the toe, and this leads to the standard leg-swing motion of the human stride. Here’s that recreated in robot form – and again, sorry ASIMO, but your flat-footed shuffling must yield:
Dr. Miura also led a project that would allow a robot to mimic human movement based on motion capture technology.
After contributing so much to her field, in addition to eventually being courted for the year of study and collaboration at MIT, she was also recognized here at home with the 2010 AIST President Award:
Such is the noble reality of robotics research. No single person can crank out a perfect human facsimile, and there are no Tony Starks – there are researchers like Dr. Miura, diligently working through small but profound iterations and laying the foundation for generations of robotics research to follow.
Unfortunately, no one at Akihabara Newsor Anthrobotic.com knew or had ever met Dr. Miura. However, through the words of Professor Tedrake and other public and private discussions, it is easy to appreciate that she was not only a brilliant and motivated scholar, but also a warm and engaging person. How we wish to have had the pleasure of interacting with such a comprehensive intellect.
Though something small, we hope it a fitting memorial to share her work here. That awareness of her contributions might inspire others toward learning about robotics, engineering, or science of any kind, is a fitting legacy.
Seems safe to assume she’d agree.
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Reno J. Tibke is the founder and operator of Anthrobotic.com and a contributor at the non-profit Robohub.org.
GlacierWorks, founded by renowned mountaineer David Breashears, has joined forces with Internet Explorer to put the world’s highest peak at your fingertips with Everest: Rivers of Ice. The exploration platform works in any browser, but it’s specifically optimized for IE 10’s touch-based technology. In addition to bringing the Himalayas to your screen, Microsoft is using the project to show off the potentiality of its Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN) interface, cooked up by the the teams at Microsoft Research in both India and Redmond. Using RIN, developers can design nonlinear narratives that weave together different types of multimedia, like multitouch interactive maps with embedded video, gigapixel panoramas and data visualizations. GlacierWorks’ project incorporates all of these, as it allows you to explore Everest’s valleys while learning about glacier activity and climate change in the Himalayas. If a trip to Nepal is out of your budget, you can watch a preview in the video after the break.
The International Lunar Observatory Association and Moon Express have spent years working on their privately-backed, Moon-bound ILO-X telescope. Today, they can finally share the nuts-and-bolts details of their flight test hardware. Not surprisingly, the roughly shoebox-sized device won’t come close to matching Hubble between its tiny 130mm, f/5.6 aperture and 6.4-megapixel resolution. However, oneupmanship isn’t the point — ILOA mostly wants its inaugural telescope to be accessible enough that schools, scientists and the public at large can get a peek at deep space through the internet. Most of the challenge rests in getting ILO-X to its ultimate destination. Moon Express won’t deliver the telescope to the Moon until sometime in 2015, which will leave us waiting some time for another vantage point on the universe.
In a report filed by a group from the University of Alberta it’s been shown that samples from 400-year-old plants known as bryophytes were able to grow anew in special laboratory conditions. These plants had been frozen during the “Little Ice Age” that took place from approximately AD 1550 to AD 1850, appearing around Canada’s Teardrop Glacier at Sverdrup Pass.
Bryophytes are known for their ability to survive long Arctic winters, but the amount of time they’ve been dormant in this situation is unprecedented. According to Catherine La Farge, lead author of the study, the plants in question were found at the edge of a glacier that’d been retreating 3-4m per year. This retreat has accelerated “sharply” since 2004, according to the BBC.
Above you’ll see some of this 400-year-old moss from ABC Science photographed by Dr La Farge herself.
“When we looked at them in detail and brought them to the lab, I could see some of the stems actually had new growth of green lateral branches, and that said to me that these guys are regenerating in the field, and that blew my mind.
If you think of ice sheets covering the landscape, we’ve always thought that plants have to come in from refugia around the margins of an ice system, never considering land plants as coming out from underneath a glacier.” – Dr La Farge
Imagine seeing plants that should very well have been dead for hundreds of years appearing with new green growth on their form. It’s exciting enough finding a brand new bud on a plant that’s been in our basement over the winter!
According to Dr La Farge, this is just one piece of the puzzle. Retreating ice at Sverdrup Pass is currently uncovering species new to science – these new cyanobacteria and green terrestrial algae “really need to be studied”, said Dr La Farge – and we’re expecting her to take charge to do it!
Earlier today, we learned that Samsung had bested Nokia on its home turf by claiming the lion’s share of phone sales in Finland last quarter, but its invasion of Nokia’s territory won’t end there. Samsung will soon unveil a new research hub in Espoo, Finland, and a company rep confirmed that the center will open its doors on June 13th. Though specifics about the nature of research are being kept under wraps, a recent job posting from Oikotie revealed what could be the center’s name: Samsung Electronics Research Institute. SERI could potentially be related to Samsung’s partnership with Finland’s VTT Technical Research Center, announced last month, to explore energy efficient technologies. Beyond that, details are sparse, but we’ll keep you posted as more information on Samsung’s latest R&D endeavor trickles in.
After the horrific tsunami hit Japan in 2011, officials have been attempting to think up ways to protect areas from flooding. It’s obviously really expensive to implement an entire new infrastructure, but researchers at Kyoto University and Hitachi Zosen Corp. have made a cheaper option that looks promising. It’s a new floodgate that raises and lowers based on the water level, and it does it automatically without sensors or any electricity — it’s powered by mother nature.
The new floodgate uses a water reservoir underneath the gate, along with a highly-buoyant material that acts as the sensor of sorts. When the floodgate detects water, the gate begins to raise as the reservoir fills up. Obviously, it won’t stop a full-blown tsunami attack, since the flood gate only goes up a little over 16 feet high, but it should protect buildings from water seeping in through doorways and such.
Because the floodgate raises and lowers automatically, there’s no human interaction needed at all, and since there’s no complex electrical system to power the gate, maintenance is left to a minimal. You might be thinking why they couldn’t just make a permanent wall, but this particular floodgate is meant for walkways, roads, and doorways where regular foot and car traffic can get through, as the floodgate can be up to 33 feet across.
It’s not said if larger floodgates like these will be made, but for the time being, we could see these things start to get implemented into doorways and such, with the possibility of larger models coming in the future that could replace entire flood walls, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens with these smaller gates.
There’s no word on when these new floodgates will begin to pop up, but we’re guessing it shouldn’t be too long, as we’re sure Japan officials, as well as other flood-prone areas around the world, are wanting in on this new technology as soon as possible.
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