Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,945

Arthur C Clarke Remains Among Those Expected To Fly To The Moon Next Summer

Just amazing!

A small fraction of the cremated remains of 61 people will be flown to the Moon next July as part of the payload delivered by Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One lander. The payload is offered by Celestis, a company that provides memorial spaceflights. This particular one has intrigued people because among the many deceased whose ashes will be taken to the moon, there are the remains of science writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke.

Clarke is known to most people for being the author of 2001 – A Space Odyssey, a book in which an ancient alien civilization left one of its peculiar monoliths on the Moon. In the novel, this monolith is found in Tycho crater, but that is not where the Peregrine mission is landing. More aptly, the Astrobotic mission will land in a basaltic lava plain known as Lacus Mortis: the lake of death.

Lunar memorials started with the 1998 flight of the remains of Dr Eugene Shoemaker, who among his many accomplishments was the discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with his wife Dr Carolyn Shoemaker and David H. Levy. The comet is famous for hitting Jupiter in 1994. The Shoemakers were in a car-crash in 1997 that was fatal for Eugene.

NASA Uses Powerful Supercomputers and AI to Map Earth’s Trees, Discovers Billions of Trees in West African Drylands

Scientists from NASA ’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and international collaborators demonstrated a new method for mapping the location and size of trees growing outside of forests, discovering billions of trees in arid and semi-arid regions and laying the groundwork for more accurate global measurement of carbon storage on land.

Using powerful supercomputers and machine learning algorithms, the team mapped the crown diameter – the width of a tree when viewed from above – of more than 1.8 billion trees across an area of more than 500,000 square miles, or 1,300,000 square kilometers. The team mapped how tree crown diameter, coverage, and density varied depending on rainfall and land use.

China is launching a moon probe to collect the first lunar rocks since 1970s

China plans to launch an unmanned spacecraft to the moon this week to bring back lunar rocks — the first attempt by any nation to retrieve samples from Earth’s natural satellite since the 1970s.

The Chang’e-5 probe, named after the ancient Chinese goddess of the moon, will seek to collect material that can help scientists understand more about the moon’s origins and formation. The mission will test China’s ability to remotely acquire samples from space, ahead of more complex missions.

If successful, the mission will make China only the third country to have retrieved lunar samples, following the United States and the Soviet Union decades ago.

Rover that will explore Mars moon Phobos starts landing tests

The first rover to explore the moon of another planet has started practicing for its landing, even though that historic touchdown is at least six years away.

The 55-lb. (25 kilograms) robot is part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2024 and arrive at the Red Planet the following year.

Amazing magnetic spray turns tiny inanimate objects into insect-scale robots

Does the idea of miniature, insect-scale robots swarming toward their intended duties inside your body make your skin crawl?

Medical researchers led by Dr. Shen Yajing from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) don’t wish to alarm you but they’ve just devised a simple method of making millirobots which can be employed in various biomedical applications like targeted drug delivery and catheter navigation.

/* */