Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

New research, out today, Tuesday, November 4, published in IOP Publishing's Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, shows how knowledge gained from the pursuit of nuclear fusion research may reduce the threat to acceptable levels, making man's first mission to Mars a much greater possibility. The solar energetic particles, although just part of the 'cosmic rays' spectrum, are of greatest concern because they are the most likely to cause deadly radiation damage to the astronauts. Large numbers of these energetic particles occur intermittently as "storms" with little warning and are already known to pose the greatest threat to man. Nature helps protect the Earth by having a giant "magnetic bubble" around the planet called the magnetosphere.

The Department of Defense has put out a call: design a pack of robots. A so-called Multi-Robot Pursuit System would be used to "search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject." Each robot has to weigh 100 kilograms or less, act autonomously (with a human squad leader), negotiate obstacles, and provide immediate feedback. The robots would report back to a human operator, and defer to that human when the robot AI determines that a "difficult decision" is required. The first phase of development is to create the sensors for detecting humans and to conduct feasibility experiments. Then comes the building of a prototype with fully functional sensors. At that point, a third phase would try to establish whether a pack of such robots -- about three to five in number -- could realistically be used for missions involving, according to the proposal, "search and rescue, fire-fighting, reconnaissance, and automated biological, chemical, and radiation sensing with mobile platforms."