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Category: space – Page 623

Elon Musk says Tesla’s robot will make physical work a ‘choice’

Are you ready?

After dominating the electric vehicle market and throwing his hat into the billionaire space race, Tesla boss Elon Musk announced the latest frontier he’s aiming to conquer: humanoid robots.

The irascible entrepreneur said Thursday he would have an initial prototype of an androgynous “Tesla Bot” by next year.

Based on the same technology as the company’s semi-autonomous vehicles, the robot will be able to perform basic repetitive tasks with the aim of eliminating the need for people to handle dangerous or boring work, Musk said at an online event on Tesla’s advances in artificial intelligence (AI).

Elon Musk unveils plans for humanoid robot that uses Tesla’s artificial intelligence

I’d like to see anything as far as a Humanoid Robot. But, at this point i think it would be a mistake to try and re invent the wheel. Boston Dynamics last sold for 2 billion dollars, a steal really, and a shame they didn’t try to bring it back to the USA. Anyways, as far as Humanoid Robots, unless he is willing to solve the issue of building robotic hands that can perfectly match human hands this wont go anywhere. Once that is done though you have a realistic labor force for the Moon and Mars.

Tesla Inc. showcased its artificial-intelligence systems on Thursday amid renewed criticism for Autopilot, its most-talked-about AI-based system, as it unveiled its next big project: a humanoid robot.

At the company’s first AI Day, Chief Executive Elon Musk gave a preview of the Tesla Bot, a 5-foot-8-inch robot with a screen for a face, weighing about 125 pounds and capable of moving about 5 mph — slow enough for people to run away from and small enough so a human could overpower it, Musk joked. He said a prototype is expected next year.

Musk said building a humanoid robot is a logical next step for Tesla, since, he said, it’s already “the world’s biggest robotics company,” with its cars basically robots. The humanoid robot will use all the tools in Tesla’s vehicles — sensors, cameras, neural networks, etc. — to autonomously navigate the outside world.

China to harvest sun’s energy in space and beam it to Earth for power by 2030

Over the last few decades, various forms of solar power stations have been proposed from around the world but they remained theoretical because of major technical challenges.

At Bishan, Chinese researchers would first need to prove that wireless power transfer worked over a long distance.

Civilian and military researchers will look at applications for the technology amid concerns about radiation and the potential for beams misfired from space.

Exploring how tantalum behaves at high pressures and temperatures

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have explored high-pressure behavior of shock-compressed tantalum at the Omega Laser Facility at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). The work showed tantalum did not follow the predicted phase changes at high pressure and instead maintained the body-centered cubic (BCC) phase until melt.

The results of the work are featured in a Physical Review Letters paper and focuses on how researchers studied the melting behavior of at multi-megabar pressures on the nanosecond timescale.

“This work provides an improved physical intuition for how materials melt and respond at such extreme conditions,” said Rick Kraus, lead author of the paper. “These techniques and improved knowledge base are now being applied to understanding how the iron cores of rocky planets solidify and also to more programmatically relevant materials as well.”

NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Finds A Changing Landscape

NASA’s Curiosity rover explores Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall (8-kilometer-tall) mountain within the basin of Gale Crater on Mars.

Curiosity’s Deputy Project Scientist, Abigail Fraeman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, gives viewers a descriptive tour of Curiosity’s location. The panorama was captured by the rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, on July 3 2021, the 3,167th Martian day, or sol, of its mission.

Curiosity landed nine years ago on August 5 2012, with a mission to study whether different Martian environments could have supported microbial life in the ancient past, when long-lived lakes and groundwater existed within Gale Crater.

For more about Curiosity, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/ and https://nasa.gov/msl/

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Hidden Magnetic Patterns Inside Meteorites Reveal Secrets of The Early Solar System

The Solar System is positively lousy with magnetic fields. They drape around (most of) the planets and their moons, which interact with the system-wide magnetic field swirling out from the Sun.

Although invisible to the naked eye, these magnetic fields leave their marks behind. Earth’s crust is riddled with magnetic materials, for example, that retain a paleomagnetic record of the planet’s changing magnetic field. And meteorites, when we are lucky enough to find them, can tell us about the magnetic field in the environment they formed in, billions of years ago.

Most of the meteorites we study in this manner are from the asteroid belt, which sits between Mars and Jupiter. But astronomers from Japan have just developed a new means of probing the magnetic materials within meteorites from much, much farther away — and thus provided a new tool for understanding the outer reaches of the early Solar System.

Shenzhou-12 crew prepares for second spacewalk

The Shenzhou-12 crew, astronauts Nie Haisheng (commander), Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo, prepares for the second extravehicular activity (EVA or spacewalk) planned during their three months mission on the Tianhe core module (天和核心舱), the first and main component of the China Space Station (中国空间站), informally known as Tiangong (天宫, Heavenly Palace). During the last 30 days, the Shenzhou-12 (神舟十二号) astronauts “activated the magnetic levitation experiment facility” that “includes a chamber of high-level micro-gravity”, “completed assembly of a space centrifuge, an equipment used for centrifugalizing samples”, and performed some “spring cleaning” in the Tianhe core module.

Credit: China Central Television (CCTV)/China National Space Administration (CNSA)

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