ISS Infested With Space Bugs!
The International Space Station is infested with mysterious space bugs that may be leaving astronauts at risk of “serious harm,” according to a new study.
Scientists discovered a thriving ecosystem of “infectious organisms” aboard the station which are similar to bugs found in hospitals on Earth.
A NASA team found five different varieties of Enterobacter, with researchers calculating that there is a “79 percent probability that they may potentially cause disease.”
The flow of raw images sent from Mars, straight to the Web, has begun!
Insight begins sharing raw images on mission website.
There was jubilation when InSight landed, but I’m just as happy to be writing about a distinct InSight event: The flow of raw images sent from Mars, straight to the Web, has begun. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has begun sharing images from InSight’s two cameras to the mission website. You can check this website any time, any day, to see if there are new images from Mars, and sometimes, you’ll be able to see them even before mission team members do. Here, for example, is the first image returned from InSight’s Instrument Deployment Camera, sent straight to the Web.
Relive the excitement in 360 degrees.
Also included in the dispatch: this snapshot from the lander’s arm showing the instruments in their new “plain perfect” home. Get the latest: https://go.nasa.gov/2FDGbwu
Success!!!
HAPPENING NOW: NASA — National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s InSight lander is set to make a perilous maneuver to touch down on Mars, capping off a trip that started seven months and more than 300 million miles ago. https://abcn.ws/2RagLb8
Everything you need to know about how to watch #MarsLanding with NASA and the Times Square Alliance #RewriteTomorrow
A team of engineers at TRACLabs Inc. in the U.S. is making inroads toward the creation of a planetary base station monitoring system similar in some respects to Hal 9000—the infamous AI system in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this case, it is called cognitive architecture for space agents (CASE) and is outlined in a Focus piece by Pete Bonasso, the primary engineer working on the project, in the journal Science Robotics.
Bonasso explains that he has had an interest in creating a real Hal 9000 ever since watching the movie as a college student—minus the human killing, of course. His system is designed to run a base situated on another planet, such as Mars. It is meant to take care of the more mundane, but critical tasks involved with maintaining a habitable planetary base, such as maintaining oxygen levels and taking care of waste. He notes that such a system needs to know what to do and how to do it, carrying out activities using such hardware as robot arms. To that end, CASE has been designed as a three-layered system. The first is in charge of controlling hardware, such as power systems, life-support, etc.
The second layer is more brainy—it is in charge of running the software that controls the hardware. The third layer is even smarter, responsible for coming up with solutions to problems as they arise—if damage occurs to a module, for example, it must be sealed off from others modules as quickly as possible. The system also has what Bonasso describes as an ontological system—its job is to be self-aware so that the system can make judgment calls when comparing data from sensors with what it has learned in the past and with information received from human occupants. To that end, the system will be expected to interact with those humans in ways similar to those portrayed in the movie.