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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 9 declined, 15 accepted (24 total, 62.50% accepted)

Submission + - Tianwen-2 Visits Kamo'oalewa July 4, Hayabusa-2 Flies Past Torifume July 5

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: China's Tianwen-2 spacecraft went into pseudo-orbit around Earth's quasi-moon Kamo’oalewa on July 4. It will spend the next several months mapping the small, rapidly-spinning object while getting progressively closer, then in April is scheduled to sample the surface using at least one of three methods that it is equipped for (touching, hovering and anchoring) and then return the samples to Earth while continuing to its next target, the comet 311P where it may attempt to land.
https://www.planetary.org/arti...

Previously thought to have been a fragment of the Moon's surface new data from Earth and Tianwen-2 indicate that instead it is a captured asteroid.
https://www.techtimes.com/arti...

The next day the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 did a fast flyby of the larger asteroid Torifume in a mission extension after its sample-return from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020, returning photos which show it to be an agglomeration of two smaller asteroids.
https://www.planetary.org/arti...

Submission + - China is mass-producing hypersonic missiles for $99,000 (substack.com) 2

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: https://kdwalmsley.substack.co...

A private company in China has developed hypersonic missiles, that cost the same as a Tesla Model X. This missile, the YKJ-1000 is being marketed for sale, at a reported price of $99,000, and it’s in mass production now after successful tests. That is far below what countries will spend to target and shoot down the missile if it’s heading their way.

Besides the low cost, they can be launched from anywhere. The launcher looks like any one of the tens of millions of shipping containers floating around on the ocean, or sitting at ports, or riding along on trucks, or sitting on industrial lots. The launchers for these missiles are hiding in plain sight, in other words.

Whatever tactical advantages great-power countries have in ballistics is going away, fast; 1,300 km is 800 miles, and so the range is anything within 800 miles of wherever someone can send a shipping container.

Submission + - Supercritical CO2 Generators Now In Production 1

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: https://kdwalmsley.substack.co...

Chinese engineers deployed the world's first commercially viable sCO2 power generators, at a steel mill in Guizhou.

The Supercritical Carbon Dioxide (sCO2) generator converts waste heat into electricity. Compared to traditional steam and thermal systems, the sCO2 design is more than 85% more efficient, and produces 50% more electricity. . .

SCO2 is supercritical carbon dioxide. CO2 that’s maintained in a state above critical temperature and pressure, which is over 31 degrees Celsius and 1070 psi. Once there, CO2 acts both as a liquid and as a gas, and in industrial applications, that becomes very useful. As a gas, there is less resistance, and as a liquid, it provides greater thrust. And, turning CO2 into supercritical CO2 is more energy efficient than turning water into steam. . .
-----
Not everyone is as optimistic. Long article which assumes the Chinese will be sloppy with implementation for some reason.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026...

Experience with hydrogen suggests that expecting seals to remain effectively perfect over many years of continuous high pressure operation is absurdly optimistic, and there is little reason to assume supercritical CO systems will escape a similar long term reality. . .

Submission + - Japanese train station shelter replaced overnight with 3D printed structure (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: Hatsushima station serves the town of Arida of about 25,000, and around 530 passengers a day board there. Because the population is shrinking when it came time to replace the aging wooden shelter the new structure could be smaller, presenting West Japan Railway with the opportunity to try something new. The company commissioned a new 3D printed shelter from Serendix, who printed the structure in four parts over seven days. The parts were shipped by rail to Hatsushima and a crew assembled them in around six hours, finishing before the first train of the morning at 5:45.

The structure itself is made of mortar, layered like dull-green frosting by a 3D-printing nozzle, reinforced by steel and framed at its edges by concrete. The result is a building that has "earthquake resistance similar to that of reinforced concrete houses," according to West Japan Railway (JR West), and costing about half of what the shelter would cost to build with traditional reinforced concrete. It also has a mandarin orange and scabbardfish [local products] embossed into its sides.


Submission + - Russia Launches World's Most Powerful Icebreaker (interestingengineering.com) 2

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: https://interestingengineering...

Russia launched a new nuclear-powered icebreaker named Chukotka. The latest vessel has joined the fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers. The launch was overseen by Russian President Vladimir Putin via video link.

The vessel in the Russia’s Project 22220 series is expected to have a life of 40 years and can endure extreme Arctic conditions. It can also plow through ice up to 2.8 meters (9.2 feet) thick. . .

The Chukotka is 173 metres long (567 ft), 34 metres wide and with a height from the waterline to the mainmast of 57 metres. The height of its side is 15.2 metres and it has a speed of 22 knots in clear water. The Project 22220 icebreaker will be powered by two RITM-200 reactors which each have a thermal capacity of 175 MW. It already has the reactors and most of its main equipment on board, reported World Nuclear News.

It’s also being claimed that the vessel is the largest and most powerful icebreaker in the world. With a crew capacity of 54 people, the vessel has a water displacement capacity of 33.5 thousand tons. The vessel has RITM-200 reactors, which have a thermal capacity of 350 MW.

Submission + - 3-D Printed Rocket Engine Blasts Off In India (ieee.org)

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: Indian company Agnikul used a 3-D printer from German company EOS to print the engine in one solid piece over the course of 72 hours. While other companies are using 3-D printers extensively this is the first one-piece engine printed. The advantages of this approach, besides speed of construction, include elimination of the welds that so frequently cause engine failure. The single-engine technology demonstration rocket produced 6 kilonewtons of thrust, and was used in a configuration roughly equivalent to the company's future second stage. Their planned commercial product will have 7 of these engines in the first stage, launching the single-engine second stage. https://spectrum.ieee.org/3d-p...

Assembling the rest of the rocket and integrating the engine took roughly two weeks. The company says that opens the door to providing low-cost, “on-demand” launch services to operators of small satellites, which otherwise need to wait for a ride share on a bigger rocket.

The big challenge now will be going from a single engine to a cluster of seven on Agnibaan’s first stage, says cofounder and CEO Srinath Ravichandran. This raises all kinds of challenges, from balancing thrust across the engines at lift-off to managing engine plume interactions when the engines gimbal to alter the trajectory. “But these are problems that people have figured out,” he says. “We believe that we should just be able to fine-tune it for our mission and go.”

The company is currently building facilities to carry out ground tests of engine clusters, says Ravichandran, and is targeting its first orbital launch for this time next year.


Submission + - Soil Samples From Lunar Far Side En Route to Mongolian Landing (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: Science News notes that China's Chang'e 6 lunar lander has retrieved two kilograms of rocks from the far side of the Moon, and is sending them to Earth.

On June 1, a grab-and-go mission named Chang’e-6 touched down in Apollo crater, which sits inside the much larger South Pole–Aitken basin, the biggest meteor impact site in the solar system.

During its two-day stay, Chang’e-6 used a scoop and drill to snag to 2 kilograms of lunar material, which was then loaded into an ascent vehicle that rocketed into lunar orbit on June 3. The samples onboard Chang’e-6 will be transferred to a return vehicle that will blast back to our planet. They are expected to land on Earth in Inner Mongolia on June 25. This is China’s second successful farside landing, following the Chang’e-4 mission in 2019. . .


Submission + - Ingenuity's Mission Is Finally Over

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: After three years and 72 flights of its 5-flight mission the mission of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars is finally over. Images show that Ingenuity suffered damage to one of its rotor blades and will not be able to take off again.

https://www.nasa.gov/news-rele...

Ingenuity landed on Mars Feb. 18, 2021, attached to the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover and first lifted off the Martian surface on April 19, proving that powered, controlled flight on Mars was possible. After notching another four flights, it embarked on a new mission as an operations demonstration, serving as an aerial scout for Perseverance scientists and rover drivers. In 2023, the helicopter executed two successful flight tests that further expanded the team’s knowledge of its aerodynamic limits. . .

Over an extended mission that lasted for almost 1,000 Martian days, more than 33 times longer than originally planned, Ingenuity was upgraded with the ability to autonomously choose landing sites in treacherous terrain, dealt with a dead sensor, cleaned itself after dust storms, operated from 48 different airfields, performed three emergency landings, and survived a frigid Martian winter.

Designed to operate in spring, Ingenuity was unable to power its heaters throughout the night during the coldest parts of winter, resulting in the flight computer periodically freezing and resetting. These power “brownouts” required the team to redesign Ingenuity’s winter operations in order to keep flying.

With flight operations now concluded, the Ingenuity team will perform final tests on helicopter systems and download the remaining imagery and data in Ingenuity’s onboard memory. The Perseverance rover is currently too far away to attempt to image the helicopter at its final airfield.

Submission + - MS Windows 40th Birthday (neowin.net)

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: Forty years ago today Microsoft introduced its new Graphical User Interface for MS-DOS. Inspired by the Xerox Park project Alto, as was the Apple Mac, it was their first attempt to address the user unfriendliness of the standard computer interface. Named Windows 1.0 after the 'windows' it created to view individual running programs, it generated quite a bit of interest at the initial reveal. Unfortunately difficulty in ironing out bugs (especially in memory management) delayed release for two years, to November 1985.

Submission + - Goldfish Taught to Drive Electric Vehicle (theguardian.com)

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: https://www.theguardian.com/en...

  Israeli researchers created a robotic car and report that they taught six fish – named after characters from Pride and Prejudice – to navigate it on land. . .

First, the team, led by Prof Ronen Segev, created a watery tank on wheels that moved in response to the movements and orientation of the fish. Then they set about teaching the goldfish (Carassius auratus) how to drive it . . .

he fish first had to connect their own swimming movements to the movements of the vehicle so they could navigate it. Then they were given a destination: a pink target board in a foreign room that elicited a food reward when the vehicle touched it. A computerised camera system attached to this “fish operated vehicle” recorded and translated the fish’s swimming directions.

After several days of training, the fish successfully navigated the vehicle to the target from different starting positions in the room – even if they faced obstacles like false targets or hitting a wall.

Submission + - James Webb Mirror Deployment Complete

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: For years naysayers have confidently declared that the numerous automated operations necessary to fully deploy the James Webb Space Telescope were going to guarantee its failure. Today they've been proven wrong.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-rel...
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope team fully deployed its 21-foot, gold-coated primary mirror, successfully completing the final stage of all major spacecraft deployments to prepare for science operations. . .

The two wings of Webb’s primary mirror had been folded to fit inside the nose cone of an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket prior to launch. After more than a week of other critical spacecraft deployments, the Webb team began remotely unfolding the hexagonal segments of the primary mirror, the largest ever launched into space. This was a multi-day process, with the first side deployed Jan. 7 and the second Jan. 8.

Mission Operations Center ground control at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore began deploying the second side panel of the mirror at 8:53 a.m. EST. Once it extended and latched into position at 1:17 p.m. EST, the team declared all major deployments successfully completed.

The world’s largest and most complex space science telescope will now begin moving its 18 primary mirror segments to align the telescope optics. The ground team will command 126 actuators on the backsides of the segments to flex each mirror – an alignment that will take months to complete. Then the team will calibrate the science instruments prior to delivering Webb’s first images this summer.

“I am so proud of the team – spanning continents and decades – that delivered this first-of-its kind achievement,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate in NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Webb’s successful deployment exemplifies the best of what NASA has to offer: the willingness to attempt bold and challenging things in the name of discoveries still unknown.”

Submission + - Unitree Selling Go1 Robot Dog for $2700-$8500 (ieee.org) 2

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: Original story at IEEE — https://spectrum.ieee.org/auto...

Sales video — https://youtu.be/xdfmhWQyp_8
As with any product video, it’s important to take everything you see here with a grain of salt, but based on Unitree’s track record we have no particular reason to suspect that there’s much in the way of video trickery going on.
There are three versions of the Go1: the $2700 base model Go1 Air, the $3500 Go1, and the $8500 Go1 Edu. This looks to be the sort of Goldilocks pricing model, where most people are likely to spring for the middle version Go1, which includes better sensing and compute as well as 50% more battery life an an extra m/s of speed (up to 3.5m/s) for a modest premium in cost. The top of the line Edu model offers higher end computing, 2kg more payload (up to 5kg), as well as foot-force sensors, lidar, and a hardware extension interface and API access.

Submission + - US Military's GPS Tests a Major Threat to Airline Safety (ieee.org) 1

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: In August 2018, a passenger aircraft in Idaho, flying in smoky conditions, reportedly suffered GPS interference from military tests and was saved from crashing into a mountain only by the last-minute intervention of an air traffic controller. “Loss of life can happen because air traffic control and a flight crew believe their equipment are working as intended, but are in fact leading them into the side of the mountain,” wrote the controller. “Had [we] not noticed, that flight crew and the passengers would be dead."...

There are some 90 ASRS reports detailing GPS interference in the United States over the past eight years, the majority of which were filed in 2019 and 2020. Now IEEE Spectrum has new evidence that GPS disruption to commercial aviation is much more common than even the ASRS database suggests. Previously undisclosed Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) data for a few months in 2017 and 2018 detail hundreds of aircraft losing GPS reception in the vicinity of military tests. On a single day in March 2018, 21 aircraft reported GPS problems to air traffic controllers near Los Angeles. These included a medevac helicopter, several private planes, and a dozen commercial passenger jets. Some managed to keep flying normally; others required help from air traffic controllers. Five aircraft reported making unexpected turns or navigating off course. In all likelihood, there are many hundreds, possibly thousands, of such incidents each year nationwide, each one a potential accident. The vast majority of this disruption can be traced back to the U.S. military, which now routinely jams GPS signals over wide areas on an almost daily basis somewhere in the country.

Todd E. Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. “When something works well 99.99 percent of the time, humans don’t do well in being vigilant for that 0.01 percent of the time that it doesn’t.”

Submission + - It's not too soon to start thinking about the next pandemic (linkedin.com)

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: Bill and Melinda Gates write:
To prevent the hardship of this last year from happening again, pandemic preparedness must be taken as seriously as we take the threat of war. The world needs to double down on investments in R & D and organizations like CEPI that have proven invaluable with COVID-19. We also need to build brand-new capabilities that don’t exist yet.

Stopping the next pandemic will require spending tens of billions of dollars per year—a big investment, but remember that the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to cost the world $28 trillion. The world needs to spend billions to save trillions (and prevent millions of deaths). I think of this as the best and most cost-efficient insurance policy the world could buy.

The bulk of this investment needs to come from rich countries. Low- and middle-income countries and foundations like ours have a role to play, but governments from high-income nations need to lead the charge here because the benefits for them are so huge.

Submission + - Chang'e 5 Returns to Earth with Lunar Sample (scmp.com) 2

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: In the first return of a lunar sample since the Soviets in 1976 the Chang'e 5 spacecraft landed in Inner Mongolia with 2 kilograms of material drilled from as much as two meters below the surface. Launched November 24 from the spaceport in Hainan the lander separated from the orbiter a week later and touched down in Oceanus Procellarum near Mons Rumker on the near side. Two days later, on December 3, the ascent stage took off from the moon with the sample, docking with the orbiter three days later. After jettisoning the ascent stage the orbiter returned to Earth and was recovered December 17.

Fairly bad video of the drilling and sample acquisition: https://youtu.be/Py5cndfk3Jw

Video of the recovery, with a IR camera shot showing the hot lander and what appears to be a fox running past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

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