Flying drones have been a part of modern warfare for a good few decades now. Initially, most of these drones were built by traditional military contractors and were primarily used by the world’s best-funded militaries. However, in recent conflicts in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere have changed all that. Small commercial drones and compact militarized models have become key tools on the battlefield, for offense, defence, and reconnaissance.
NASA’s upcoming Artemis I mission represents a critical milestone on the space agency’s path towards establishing a sustainable human presence on the Moon. It will mark not only the first flight of the massive Space Launch System (SLS) and its Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), but will also test the ability of the 25 ton Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) to operate in lunar orbit. While there won’t be any crew aboard this flight, it will serve as a dress rehearsal for the Artemis II mission — which will see humans travel beyond low Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
As the SLS was designed to lift a fully loaded and crewed Orion capsule, the towering rocket and the ISPS are being considerably underutilized for this test flight. With so much excess payload capacity available, Artemis I is in the unique position of being able to carry a number of secondary payloads into cislunar space without making any changes to the overall mission or flight trajectory.
NASA has selected ten CubeSats to hitch a ride into space aboard Artemis I, which will test out new technologies and conduct deep space research. These secondary payloads are officially deemed “High Risk, High Reward”, with their success far from guaranteed. But should they complete their individual missions, they may well help shape the future of lunar exploration.
With Artemis I potentially just days away from liftoff, let’s take a look at a few of these secondary payloads and how they’ll be deployed without endangering the primary mission of getting Orion to the Moon.
Testing any kind of project in the real world is expensive. You have to haul people and equipment around, which costs money, and if you break anything, you have to pay for that too! Simulation tends to come first. Making mistakes in a simulation is much cheaper, and the lessons learned can later be verified in the real world. If you want to learn to fly a quadcopter, the best thing to do is get some time behind the sticks of a simulator before you even purchase anything with physical whirly blades.
Oddly enough, the same goes for AI. Microsoft built a simulation product to aid the development of artificial intelligence systems for drones by the name of Project AirSim. It aims to provide a comprehensive environment for the testing of drone AI systems, making development faster, cheaper, and more practical.
For as long as humans have been sending probes to Mars, there’s been a desire to return rock, soil, and atmosphere samples back to Earth for more detailed analysis. But the physics of such a mission are particularly demanding — a vehicle that could land on the Martian surface, collect samples, and then launch itself back into orbit for the return to Earth would be massive and prohibitively expensive with our current technology.
Mars sample return tube
Instead, NASA and their international partners have been working to distribute the cost and complexity of the mission among several different vehicles. In fact, the first phase of the program is well underway.
But there’s still some large gaps in the overall plan. Chief among them is how the samples are to be transferred into the MAV. Previously, the European Space Agency (ESA) was to contribute a small “fetch rover” which would collect the sample tubes dropped by Perseverance and bring them to the MAV launch site.
But in a recent press release, NASA has announced that those plans have changed significantly, thanks at least in part to the incredible success of the agency’s current Mars missions.
When we think of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that use electrodes, we usually think of Utah arrays that are placed directly on the brain during open brain surgery, or with thin electrodes spliced into the exposed brain as postulated by Neuralink. While Utah arrays and kin as a practical concept date back to the 1980s, a more recent concept called Stentrodes – for stent-electrode array – seeks to do away with the need for invasive brain surgery.
As the name suggests, this approach uses stents that are inserted via the blood vessels, where they are expanded and thus firmly placed inside a blood vessel inside the brain. Since each of these stents also features an electrode array, these can be used to record neural activity in nearby neural clusters, as well as induce activity through electrical stimulation.
Due to the fact that stents are already commonly used by themselves in the brain’s blood vessels, and the relatively benign nature of these electrode arrays, human trials have already been approved in 2018 by an ethics committee in Australia. Despite lingering concerns about the achievable resolution and performance of this approach, it may offer hope to millions of people suffering from paralysis and other conditions.
Hydrogen has long been touted as the solution to cleaning up road transport. When used in fuel cells, the only emissions from its use are water, and it eliminates the slow recharging problem of battery-electric vehicles. It’s also been put forth as a replacement for everything from natural gas supplies to laptop batteries.
Toyota has been pushing hard for hydrogen technology, and has worked to develop vehicles and infrastructure to this end. The company’s latest efforts involve a toteable hydrogen cartridge – letting you take hydrogen power on the go!
The term “open source” can be tricky. For many people, it’s taken to mean that a particular piece of software is free and that they can do whatever they wish with it. But the reality is far more complex, and the actual rights you’re afforded as the user depend entirely on which license the developers chose to release their code under. Open source code can cost money, open source code can place limits on how you use it, and in some cases, open source code can even get you into trouble down the line.
Fedora turning their nose up at a software license wouldn’t normally be newsworthy. In fact, there’s a fairly long list of licenses that the project deems unacceptable for inclusion. The surprising part here is that CC0 was once an accepted license, and is just now being reclassified due to an evolving mindset within the larger free and open source (FOSS) community.
So what’s the problem with CC0 that’s convinced Fedora to distance themselves from it, and does this mean you shouldn’t be using the license for your own projects?
