cross pond high tech

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Struggling to get a phone signal at home on planet Earth? Perhaps you’ll have better luck on the moon.

Nokia has been selected by NASA to build the first cellular network on the moon, the Finnish company said on Monday, as the U.S. space agency plans for a future where humans return there and establish lunar settlements.

NASA aims to return humans to the moon by 2024 and dig in for a long-term presence there under its Artemis programme.

Nokia said the first wireless broadband communications system in space would be built on the lunar surface in late 2022, before humans make it back there.

It will partner with a Texas-based private space craft design company, Intuitive Machines, to deliver the equipment to the moon on their lunar lander. The network will configure itself and establish a 4G/LTE communications system on the moon, Nokia said, though the aim would be to eventually switch to 5G

The network will give astronauts voice and video communications capabilities, and allow telemetry and biometric data exchange, as well as the deployment and remote control of lunar rovers and other robotic devices, according to the company.

The network will be designed to withstand the extreme conditions of the launch and lunar landing, and to operate in space. It will have to be sent to the moon in an extremely compact form to meet the stringent size, weight and power constraints of space payloads.

Nokia said the network would be using 4G/LTE, in use worldwide for the last decade, instead of the latest 5G technology, because the former was a more known quantity with proven reliability. The company would also “pursue space applications of LTE’s successor technology, 5G”.

With sounds from Bach and Chuck Berry to humpback whales and a baby crying, an album used by NASA in the 1970s is set to be publicly released.

The phonograph album — known as "Voyager Golden Record" — originally was launched into space on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts in 1977. NASA officials at the time hoped the record would be picked up by alien life.

 

The original album likely still is floating in space as it was made from copper and coated in gold to protect it from space conditions.

 

The soundtrack is available on SoundCloud, and a CD was released in the early 1990s. Through a Kickstarter campaign, record label Ozma Records gave album copies to those who helped to reach the $1.4 million goal. The album is expected to be released in January.

• NASA patented an efficient new trajectory for sending smaller robotic spacecraft to the moon.
• The agency says it patents and licenses technologies to ensure they can achieve the "widest distribution" possible.
• The new trajectory may help a planned spacecraft called the Dark Ages Polarimeter Pathfinder reach lunar orbit and repeatedly fly through a "cone of silence" on the far side of the moon.
• That spacecraft could detect signals from the first atoms, stars, galaxies, black holes, dark matter, and more, leading to big discoveries about how the universe evolved.

NASA put its obstacle avoidance and vision-based research to the test, by racing an A.I.-In October, NASA’s California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory pitted a drone controlled by artificial intelligence against a professional human drone pilot named Ken Loo. According to NASA's press release, it had been researching autonomous drone technology for the past two years at that point, funded by Google and its interest in JPL’s vision-based navigation work. The race consisted of a time-trial where the lap times and behaviors of both the A.I.-operated drone and the manually-piloted drone were analyzed and compared. Let’s take a look at the results.NASA said in its release that the company developed three drones; Batman, Joker, and Nightwing. Researchers focused mostly on the intricate algorithms required to navigate efficiently through a race like this, namely obstacle avoidance and maximum speed through narrow environments. These algorithms were then combined with Google’s Tango technology, which JPL had a significant hand in as well. Task Manager of the JPL project, Rob Reid said, “We pitted our algorithms against a human, who flies a lot more by feel. You can actually see that the A.I. flies the drone smoothly around the course, whereas human pilots tend to accelerate aggressively, so their path is jerkier.” As it turned out, Loo’s speeds were much higher, and he was able to perform impressive aerial maneuvers to his benefit, but the A.I.-infused drones were more consistent, and never gave in to fatigue. “This is definitely the densest track I’ve ever flown,” said Loo. “One of my faults as a pilot is I get tired easily. When I get mentally fatigued, I start to get lost, even if I’ve flown the course 10 times.”Loo averaged 11.1 seconds per lap, while the autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles average 13.9 seconds. In other words, while Loo managed to reach higher speeds overall, the drones operating autonomously were more consistent, essentially flying a very similar lap and route each time. “Our autonomous drones can fly much faster,” said Reid. “One day you might see them racing professionally!” infused drone against a human opponent.