We make no claims to be an expert on anything, but we do know that rule number one of working with big, expensive, mission-critical equipment is: Don’t break the big, expensive, mission-critical equipment. Unfortunately, though, that’s just what happened to the Deep Space Network’s 70-meter dish antenna at Goldstone, California. NASA announced the outage this week, but the accident that damaged the dish occurred much earlier, in mid-September. DSS-14, as the antenna is known, is a vital part of the Deep Space Network, which uses huge antennas at three sites (Goldstone, Madrid, and Canberra) to stay in touch with satellites and probes from the Moon to the edge of the solar system. The three sites are located roughly 120 degrees apart on the globe, which gives the network full coverage of the sky regardless of the local time.
Losing the “Mars Antenna,” as DSS-14 is informally known, is a blow to the DSN, a network that was already stretched to the limit of its capabilities, and is likely to be further challenged as the race back to the Moon heats up. As for the cause of the accident, NASA explains that the antenna was “over-rotated, causing stress on the cabling and piping in the center of the structure.” It’s not clear which axis was over-rotated, but based on some specs we found that say the azimuth travel range is ±265 degrees “from wrap center,” we suspect it was the vertical axis in the base. It sounds like the azimuth went past that limit, which wrapped the swags of cables and hoses that run the antenna tightly, causing the damage. We’d have thought there would be a physical stop of some sort to prevent over-rotation, but then again, running a structure that big up against a stop would be very much an “irresistible force, immovable object” scenario. Here’s hoping they can get DSS-14 patched up quickly and back in service.
Speaking of having a bad day on the job, we have to take pity on these Russian engineers for the “demo hell” they went through while revealing the country’s first AI-powered humanoid robot. AIdol, as the bot is known, seemed to struggle from the start, doddering from behind some curtains like a nursing home patient with a couple of nervous-looking fellows flanking it. The bot paused briefly before continuing its drunk-walk, pausing again to deliver a somewhat feeble wave to the crowd before entering the terminal stumble and face-plant part of the demo. The bot’s attendants quickly dragged it away, leaving a pile of parts on the stage while more helpers tried — and failed — to deploy a curtain to hide the scene. It was a pretty sad scene to behold, made worse by the choice of walk-out music (Bill Conti’s iconic “Gonna Fly Now,” better known as the theme from Rocky).
We just noticed that pretty much everything we have to write about this week has a “bad day at work” vibe to it, so to continue on with that theme, witness this absolutely disgusting restoration of a GPU that spent way too many years in a smoker’s house. The card, an Asus 9800GT Matrix, is from 2008, so it may have spent the last 17 years getting caked with tar and nicotine, along with a fair amount of dust and perhaps cat hair, from the look of it. Having spent way too much time cleaning TVs similarly caked with grossness most foul, we couldn’t stomach watching the video of the restoration process, but it’s available in the article if you dare.
And the final entry in our “So you think your job sucks?” roundup, behold the poor saps who have to generate training data for AI-powered domestic robots. The story details the travails of Naveen Kumar, who spends his workday on simple chores such as folding towels, with the twist of doing it with a GoPro strapped to his forehead to capture all the action. The videos are then sent to a U.S. client, who uses them to develop a training model so that humanoid robots can eventually copy the surprisingly complex physical movements needed to perform such a mundane task. Training a robot is all well and good, but how about training them how to move around inside a house made for humans? That’s where it gets really creepy, as an AI startup has partnered with a big real estate company to share video footage captured from those “walk-through” videos real estate agents are so fond of. So if your house has recently been on the market, there’s a non-zero chance that it’s being used to train an army of domestic robots.
And finally, we guess this one fits the rough-day-at-work theme, but only if your job is being a European astronaut, who may someday be chowing down on protein powder made from their own urine. The product is known as Solein — sorry, but have they never seen the movie Soylent Green? — and is made via a gas fermentation process using microbes, electricity, and air. The Earth-based process uses ammonia as a nitrogen source, but in orbit or on long-duration deep-space missions, urea harvested from astronaut pee would be used instead. There’s no word on what Solein tastes like, but from the look of it, and considering the source, we’d be a bit reluctant to dig in.
I think its “Aidol”.. the HaD sans-serif font makes it a little confusing, capital eye “I” looking just like a lower case ell “l”. could be wrong.
I think the idea was that the “Ai” parts clearly states that it is AI-based, and “idol” was, well, idol, so AI-idol. Supposedly.
IMHO, terrible name overall, and I suspect it didn’t register well with russian (or slavic) speaking crowd (spoiler – I am tri-lingual, and “Aidol” sounds decidedly weird in russian, kind of like scrounged up dog name – why would one hate his/her dog so much, he/she would give it such a weird name? Furthermore, in russian the word “idol” has negative meaning, it is not good to attach it to something that most people don’t trust to start with, humanoid robots).
Gee oh pee! Conserving in space.
The Gastropod podcast just had a really interesting episode on creating carbohydrates from constituent elements e.g. recovered CO2.
https://gastropod.com/yes-you-really-can-make-food-from-thin-air-and-we-tried-it/
Of course they have. That’s why they picked that name and probably thought it was clever. They also have a tin ear.
Better have an iron stomach to go with that tin ear.
(in reality, getting food from stuff growing in our own waste is just agriculture.)
Bingo. If It isn’t our waste, it’s something else’s waste.
“Any animal, plant, or man that dies merely returns to nature’s compost heap; becomes the manure without nothing could grow, nothing could be created. Death is simply part of the process.” — the Marquis de Sade, in Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade
There is actually a commercial “meal replacement” called Soylent – http://www.soylent.com. If you aren’t an astronaut, I always feel that these things are “food for people who don’t enjoy food”. But there is no question they knew the origin of the name. Presumably those who buy it either haven’t seen Soylent Green, or don’t care.
Have we already forget the techbro’s and their Soylent drink already? Made from the chemicals your body craves, not people!
Huh, they’re still in business.
the dss-14 damage is well known to those who use homebrew ham radio rotators. it’s common for a rotator to lap the coax and control lines around the tower until the tower is bound into a helix.
Although mechanical stops can damage a drivetrain, the common cheap solution in industry and 3d printers is to use limit switches. imo, it’s inexcusable that the design did not avail of them because accidents are inevitable.
I’m going to guess the limit switch (or perhaps limit switches, since things that expensive should have redundant systems) failed, or the control system ignored them.
In our time mechanical maintenance and regular visual inspection has been de-emphasized, and it is common to design control systems with limit switches as inputs to a PLC instead of interrupting motor power directly.
In addition I’ve seen installations where switches become unreliable because there is not enough “wetting current” from the controller to clear oxides from the contacts. The importance of this was well understood back in the land line telephone days, but younger EEs have not been exposed to those systems.
And that is why NC limit switches (normally closed) are a better design than NO (normally open). Failure due to an oxide layer, mechanical stress or rodents leads to a stopped machine (with NC) instead of a broken machine (with NO).
OK, I can see how an overrun can happen, because I’ve done it. But the last big rotator design I worked on had a lot of stored energy and moved way too fast for a human to intercept a rogue command, so had multiple redundancy, despite having a single quadrature (relative, not absolute) encoder:
1. Normal software had its soft limits, and normal operation never hit those.
2. Motor driver had its soft limits slightly outside those bounds, and smoothly decelerated to a stop (and fault condition) if those limits got hit.
3. Motor driver had its physical limit switches just outside that. Striking those triggered emergency deceleration to a stop in the overrun region (and hard fault condition), which unconditionally ended before hitting the hard stop.
4. Last-ditch crowbar switches just outside of the physical limit switches killed motor power and engaged the brake. These just basically kept the motor from burning up if it hit an end stop at full power: At full speed the system would blow right through these.
5. Sacrificial hard stops at the end of travel absorbed the energy in case of a failure and full-speed overrun. They were enough to prevent drivetrain damage, but left little doubt when they were used.
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