Group items tagged

"NASA's proposed budget for 2011 is $19 billion," Brown says. "That's about three weeks of the war in Iraq." + interesting video on new rover design ("tumbleweed" rover)

that's why I quit ESA - I'll join NATO, more promising career ahead

I thought you became an EC bureaucrat ...

Rover Curiosity finds man-made shiny material on Mars. It seems the rover is littering plastic on the planet!

Their planetary protection officers will have some interesting questions to ask ...

On Saturday at 10:02 a.m. EST an Atlas V rocket carrying its precious cargo, the Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity rover, took off successfully from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral. A statement from NASA Project Manager Peter Theisinger confirmed that all had gone according to plan.

Interesting read if you're interested on the kind of coding that goes into something like the Curiosity rover. :) btw.. nice fill-packet being sent by Curiosity: "Elvis has Spirit. The answer is 42....END\r\n"

an experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. It might be a bit far-fetched but I thought it might be useful when exploring new planets. Combined with AI the robot would able to assess the terrain and deploy another robot the shape of which would be chosen to best suit its environment. I was thinking of this in the context of exploring places on other planets which are inaccessible by regular rovers (e.g. caves on Mars).

The famous Mars Rover Simulator was a piece of the Evolution in Robotic Island Ariadna!!!!! But again, its only an algorithm :) whats new?

Go Plymouth!

The researchers are busy working on a feasibility study assigned to them by the ESA. The idea is that by combining a rover that can navigate over large distances with a snake robot that can crawl along the ground and can get into inaccessible places, so many more possibilities could be opened up, e.g. collecting samples from tight spots that the rovers cannot reach.

"Developers, designers, innovators all kinds of creative thinkers" aka "nerd objective-C programmers with no life"?

Well, the ACT actually proposed a few of the topics (BEWARE, THERE BE CUCUMBERS!). Some are not necessarily software based, like creating a LEGO model of the ExoMars rover (although they stripped LEGO from the challenge description and now it just says "create an ExoMars rover from hardware" ... ). Also we had no clue that they would host part of the challenge here at ESTEC - so our 5 or 6 challenges will all be hosted in Rome... ...

"A new lightweight, energy-efficient tool for analyzing a material's chemical makeup could improve the detection abilities of various technologies, ranging from bomb-detecting drones to space rovers searching for signs of life". Raman Spectroscopy is about measuring vibrational modes in molecules. This vibrational modes are in the meV typically, turning Raman Spectroscopy into a high precision technique. This impressive work shows a new technique based on the use of optical fibers coupled to photomultipliers allowing its use, author's word, in extreme conditions such as unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) and Mars/Moon rovers.

I've seen those before! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWjj8EKTkWE

nice!!! They always have excellent ideas!

What about installing a webcam in ACT's meeting room?

nice article .... but "Jacques Blamont from JPL" is a bit ridiculous!!!

"has a new capability to make its own choices about whether to make additional observations of rocks that it spots on arrival at a new location"

We should have had this for the Movember :)

Typically, we send rovers to our planetary neighbors one at a time -- but what if we sent a small team of smaller, less impressive robots instead? That's the idea NASA is exploring at Kennedy Space Center with Swarmies: a quartet of four autonomous robots designed to work together to complete a single mission.

It's something...

Curiosity suffered from BSoD...

some of the quotes in there are a bit limit ... :-)

I would well imagine a team at an other space institution, with their own diigo, commenting on that news ... ;p Interesting trend nonetheless. At the NASA Space Apps Challenge, few teams proposed a similar G&C application but for the rover Curiosity... this is certainly a good approach for citizen science.

The Opportunity rover, which landed on Mars nearly eight years ago, has discovered a thin, bright mineral vein along the rim of a huge crater called Endeavour. This mineral is almost certainly gypsum that was deposited by liquid water billions of years ago, researchers said.

Found this on Twitter ;-) This is also a test to see if Diigo titles get processed correctly as re-tweets...

Yes. Worked.