Dominique Luchart's Blog, page 582

India-based 10club, which acquires small e-commerce brands and scales those businesses, raises $40M seed round (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

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SpaceX’s Starship could launch to orbit for 1st time as soon as July, ,

SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell says the company is still “shooting for July” for the first orbital flight of its huge Starship Mars rocket, although she acknowledged the company may not meet that target.

“I’m hoping we make it, but we all know that this is difficult,” Shotwell said during the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference on Friday (June 25).

“We are really on the cusp of flying that system, or at least attempting the first orbital flight of that system, in the very near term,” Shotwell said during the meeting, which was held virtually and is available for viewing on YouTube. She said there is a big internal push at SpaceX to develop Starship swiftly, as founder Elon Musk wants “a sustaining capability that will take people to the moon and Mars.”

Related: SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy rocket in pictures

Shotwell did not mention the lack of an orbital flight license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which has remained silent so far about what it thinks about the company’s orbital plans. An environmental assessment of Starship launch operations is currently being performed, CNN Business reported on June 16, and it’s unclear if FAA certification for the uncrewed orbital test flight will come in time to meet a July deadline.

“The FAA has not provided an update on the status of the environmental assessment, which would include publication of a draft version for public comment before a final version. It is unlikely that process could be done in time to support a launch in the near future,” SpaceNews reported on Saturday (June 26).

Earlier this month, CNN Business’ Jackie Wattles wrote that the reviews and approvals likely won’t be done in time for an early July launch, citing a source familiar with the licensing process.

“Depending on the outcome of that [environmental] assessment, it [SpaceX] may also be required to go through a more detailed review culminating in an updated environmental impact statement. Only after that process is complete can the Federal Aviation Administration move on to licensing a possible orbital Starship launch,” Wattles wrote.

Musk first tweeted about the July target back in March, about a week after SpaceX’s SN10 Starship prototype briefly stuck the landing after a 6-mile-high (10 kilometers) test flight but then exploded.

Then in May, SpaceX filed a flight plan with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, around the same time that the SN15 prototype aced its 6-mile-high flight, a first for the Starship program.

The orbital flight plan stated that the Starship orbital mission will launch from the usual location near Boca Chica, Texas, for an ambitious round-the-world uncrewed flight that will splash down off the coast of Hawaii. If all goes to plan, the first-stage Super Heavy booster will come down in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after liftoff, roughly 20 miles (32 km) off the Texas coast. The Starship upper stage will soar into orbit and make a soft splashdown roughly 62 miles (100 km) off the northwest coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. (The 6-mile-high hops all employed just a Starship prototype, with no Super Heavy component.)

Related: SpaceX could land astronauts on the moon in 2024, Elon Musk says

Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to work on Super Heavy, which has not yet gotten off the ground. On June 15, for example, Musk tweeted a photo showing two pieces of the massive rocket about to come together.

While talking about Starship’s orbital shot, Shotwell also pointed to SpaceX’s anticipated primary commercial market for Starship, which is point-to-point deliveries of cargo and passengers. (Presumably these deliveries would help the company drive revenues while continuing to plan for eventual human Mars missions, which is SpaceX’s ultimate goal for Starship.)

“That will change the world for everybody, having that capability,” Shotwell said of SpaceX’s delivery system, “and I’m sure we’ll see good competition, stiff competition, there. Which we look forward to, of course.”

She also hinted that Starship could be used to clean up low Earth orbit from space debris. Historically, it’s been difficult to fund cleanups in this zone due to the large areas involved, not to mention legal and technical difficulties.

“I do think Starship is going to be a capability where we can go and pull space junk out of orbit,” Shotwell said. “I know it’s hard; I get that. But we’ve done lots of hard things in the past.”

In addition to providing an update on Starship, Shotwell spoke briefly about SpaceX’s Starlink constellation of satellites while accepting an award from the National Space Society. In about six weeks — that is, early to mid-August — the company hopes to have “global continuous coverage of the Starlink constellation,” she said.

SpaceX has been launching batches of Starlink satellites regularly, assembling a constellation that may eventually number in the tens of thousands. Astronomers continue to express concern about Starlink’s impact on the night sky. One spot of special concern is telescopes that image wide swaths of the sky for time-lapse images, for applications such as asteroid hunting. SpaceX, meanwhile, has been working to mitigate the brightness of individual Starlink satellites.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity could keep flying the Martian skies for months, ,

The future of aerial Mars exploration looks bright.

NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity, which landed inside Mars’ Jezero Crater with the agency’s Perseverance rover in February, has now completed eight Red Planet flights. That’s three more than the maximum targeted for the 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) chopper’s original technology-demonstration mission — and Ingenuity isn’t done yet.

The little rotorcraft’s current extended-mission activities, which center on showcasing the potential of Mars helicopters to serve as scouts for rovers, will “continue for at least a few more months, with a cadence of a couple of flights a month,” Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley, a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said last Monday (June 21) during a webcast meeting of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG).

Video: Watch NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity fly in 3D

Balancing the needs of a helicopter and rover mission simultaneously requires a complicated “dance,” and the upcoming Ingenuity flights will give members of both teams valuable practice, Farley said. (Ingenuity and Perseverance are separate missions, but the helicopter relies on the rover — which is just now digging into its life-hunting, sample-gathering work — as a communications relay.)

“Along the way, we hope to acquire reconnaissance imagery of places that we cannot go,” Farley said. “And we are also using the helicopter to develop terrain meshes that could, in the future, allow rovers to drive across landscapes that they cannot actually see from their mast-mounted cameras.”

To date, the farthest distance that Ingenuity has traveled on a single sortie is 873 feet (266 meters; achieved on Flight 4, on April 30), and the longest it has stayed aloft is 140 seconds (Flight 6, May 22). The Ingenuity team would like to shatter both of those marks in the next few months, if possible.

“We’ve gone 266 meters; we’re looking to stretch that to a kilometer [0.6 miles],” Ingenuity operations lead Teddy Tzanetos, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said during the MEPAG meeting on June 21.

“That would mean three minutes flight time total,” Tzanetos said. “And that would really be pushing the limits of what the technology demonstrator is capable of, in terms of a flight vehicle.”

The helicopter team will also prioritize scouting regions of interest to Perseverance, such as the geologic unit on the floor of Jezero known as Seitah, and mining the reams of scientific and engineering data generated by Ingenuity, Tzanetos added.

The data-mining work could inform the design of Ingenuity’s successors, which are already starting to take shape — as concepts at least. For example, engineers have begun drawing up plans for a much larger, much more capable rotorcraft called the Mars Science Helicopter, Tzanetos said during his MEPAG talk.

The Mars Science Helicopter is a joint project involving JPL, NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and the defense contractor AeroVironment. The envisioned craft would sport six rotors, weigh about 66 lbs. (30 kilograms) and be able to carry science payloads weighing up to 11 lbs. (5 kg) or so, Tzanetos said. (Those are the weights here on Earth; the hexacopter would be lighter on Mars, whose gravity is just 38% as strong as our planet’s.)

The Mars Science Helicopter would be capable of flying about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) in a single sortie, Tzanetos said. Such an aircraft would be able to explore “locations that rovers couldn’t access, like cliffside walls, or difficult-to-traverse terrains, or even down into caves,” he said.

Again, the Mars Science Helicopter is just a concept at the moment, not a full-fledged mission. But thanks to Ingenuity’s ongoing work, the hexacopter might find its way to the Red Planet at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Mike Wall is the author of “ Out There ” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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Dust problems draining power from NASA’s InSight Mars lander, ,

Martian dust accumulating on the panels of NASA’s InSight lander could force the Red Planet mission to end its work within the next 10 months, its principal investigator warned during a recent update.

To save power and preserve InSight’s essential items like heaters in the cold Martian environment, mission managers have already turned off several instruments on the lander. NASA has also tried a new way of encouraging the wind to blow off sand, but with limited success.

“The dust accumulation on the solar arrays has been considerable. We have about 80% obscuration of the arrays,” said Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator for the InSight mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, according to SpaceNews.

Related: NASA’s InSight Mars lander mission in photos

Banerdt showed the impact of the declining power levels during a June 21 meeting of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group. When InSight landed near the Martian equator in November 2018, he said, the robot was generating roughly 5,000 watt-hours of power. Today that level is less than 700 watt-hours.

The declining energy levels are not a huge surprise. InSight is in an extended phase of its mission to understand the origin story of the Martian interior and, by extension, that of rocky planets like Earth. A team reviewing the potential for InSight to extend its mission last year warned that the spacecraft’s power margins would require new measures to keep going after July 2021. Otherwise, power levels “are likely to reach critically low levels during the proposed EM [extended mission]” that ends in December 2022, compromising potential science return, the panel said at the time.

Sometimes a lucky gust of wind from a dust devil can blow accumulated dirt and dust off a spacecraft, as happened during NASA’s long-running Spirit and Opportunity Mars rover missions. “In the case of InSight, the spacecraft’s weather sensors have detected many passing whirlwinds, but none have cleared any dust,” JPL officials said in a statement on June 3.

InSight managers have thus been implementing backup plans. They spent more than a year trying to shake off the dust through methods like pulsing the lander’s solar array deployment motors but met with little success, JPL officials said. Then, starting on May 22, engineers attempted a new method of budging the dust by using InSight’s robotic arm to trickle sand near the panels.

If InSight aimed the sand stream just right, some grains were expected to “saltate,” or bounce off the solar panel surface, JPL officials said. The bouncing grains skimming off the panels could then carry off some of the smaller dust particles already lying there, using the prevailing Martian winds.

“We had some success with that,” Banerdt said on June 21 of the various attempts. The first try on May 22 increased energy output by 25 to 30 watt-hours, he said. But the second and third attempts only showed a moderate increase, although he said the three cleanings offered “a little bit of headroom that we didn’t have before.”

Now the managers are trying to triage which, if any, of the science instruments can stay on through aphelion — the farthest Mars gets from the sun during its elliptical orbit, which the planet will reach on July 12. Sensors for weather and magnetic field data are now used sporadically at most. InSight’s main instrument, its seismometer suite, has remained operational so far, although Banerdt warned that it may need to be turned off as available light diminishes.

Related: A brief history of Mars missions

“There may be a month or two of time where we might have to turn off the seismometer, but we’re trying to tighten our belts and sharpen our pencils to see whether we can operate straight through,” Banerdt said. Even after aphelion, he warned, energy levels are expected to fall again by April 2022 due to more dust on the panels and in the atmosphere, along with changes in orbital geometry.

“Unless we get a fairly significant increase in our solar array output, we’re likely to end our mission sometime around that time next year,” Banerdt added, as the mission would fall below its required “survival energy” to keep functioning.

While relying on solar panels may seem risky in such a dusty environment, doing so lessens the amount of mass at launch, lowering cost and complication for the mission, JPL officials said. Adding dust-removing brushes or fans could add failure points or problems to a long-running mission.

Bigger NASA Mars robots such as the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers use nuclear power, making them more flexible in working in severe environments — but also more dependent on dwindling plutonium-238 decay levels over time. Perseverance, which just landed in February, should have enough power to go for 14 years, NASA officials have said. Curiosity is still going strong, nearly nine years after landing on Mars in August 2012.

Some members of the public have suggested using the new Mars helicopter Ingenuity to fly near InSight and blow off the dust, JPL officials said. This operation is not only dangerous but impossible, they said, given the sheer distance between the two spacecraft — about 2,145 miles (3,452 kilometers).

The next major mission challenge for InSight after aphelion will be around Oct. 7, when Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun. This period of “solar conjunction” happens every two years and can interrupt signals between the planets, so NASA stops active communications with its Mars missions for a few weeks as a precaution.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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An in-depth look at the rise of influencers, from Kim Kardashian to FaZe Clan and Elon Musk, using their huge platforms to promote altcoins to fans (Matt Binder/Mashable)

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Google Messages will auto-delete OTPs and sort like Gmail, but only in India,

Google is updating its Messages app in India to allow it to delete one-time passwords (OTPs) automatically, to stop the single-use codes from clogging up your inbox, the company has announced. Alongside it, Google also says the app will be able to sort messages into categories, keeping your personal correspondence away from notifications about bank transactions and special offers.

As someone that almost exclusively uses WhatsApp for personal communication, my phone’s default texting app is typically a graveyard of six-digit codes, which by design become useless mere minutes after they’re received. Having the ability to automatically delete them after 24 hours should make Messages less cluttered and more usable.

The new Gmail-style categories.Source: Google

It’s a similar story when it comes to categorizing messages. Google says it’s using a machine learning model to sort messages into categories like personal, transactions, OTPs, and offers, which sounds very similar to what it already offers for emails in Gmail. The sorting process happens on-device, Google says, so it should still work while offline.

Google says the new features will roll out “over the coming weeks” in India, on Android phones running version 8 and above. A spokesperson for the company declined to comment on whether the feature could see a release outside of the country.

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Voyager Innovations, which develops popular Filipino payment and financial app PayMaya, raises $121M in new funding and $46M in previously committed funds (Catherine Shu/TechCrunch)

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Boiling ‘baby bubble’ where stars are born comes into view, ,

A dramatic new image of a cosmic gas bubble reveals never-before-seen details of this birthplace of stars.

The bubble surrounds the Westerlund 2 star cluster, one of the brightest star-forming regions in the Milky Way. Westerlund 2 is about 20,000 light-years from Earth, and it hasn’t been observed in high resolution until now. The new image shows that the star cluster is surrounded by a single bubble of gas, not two as previously hypothesized, and that it’s likely to keep birthing stars well into the future.

“When massive stars form, they blow off much stronger ejections of protons, electrons and atoms of heavy metal, compared to our sun,” study lead author Maitraiyee Tiwari, a postdoctoral associate in astronomy at the University of Maryland, said in a statement. “These ejections are called stellar winds, and extreme stellar winds are capable of blowing and shaping bubbles in the surrounding clouds of cold, dense gas. We observed just such a bubble centered around the brightest cluster of stars in this region of the galaxy, and we were able to measure its radius, mass and the speed at which it is expanding.”

Related: Milky Way gallery: See awe-inspiring images of our galaxy

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The Westerlund 2 star cluster lies in the RCW 49 galactic nebula (shown here), which is one of the brightest star-forming regions in the Milky Way. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltec/E.Churchwell (University of Wisconsin))

Westerlund 2 was identified in the 1960s, but previous images of the star-forming cluster were based on radio waves and long-wavelength signals called submillimeter waves, which could provide only a rough outline of the star cluster and didn’t provide much detail about the gas bubble. The new study used measurements from the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, a 747 jet that carries an 8.8-foot (2.7 meters) reflecting telescope into the stratosphere to avoid interference from most of Earth’s atmosphere.

The new observations included a near-infrared measurement of the movement of carbon in the shell of the star-birthing bubble, which was key for getting a clear picture of the bubble itself. With this measurement, the researchers could determine whether (and how fast) the carbon was moving toward or away from Earth, allowing them to create a three-dimensional representation of the bubble’s outer edge.

New stars are still forming in this shell, the researchers found. They were also able to track the bubble’s history: About a million years ago, the bubble “popped” on one side, sending a stream of charged gas called plasma streaming into space and slowing down star formation temporarily. The birth of a new bright star 200,000 to 300,000 years ago recharged the system with new solar wind from the infant star, re-energizing the shell and causing it to expand more rapidly.

“That started the process of expansion and star formation all over again,” Tiwari said. “This suggests stars will continue to be born in this shell for a long time, but as this process goes on, the new stars will become less and less massive.”

The research was published Wednesday (June 23) in The Astrophysical Journal.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Earth has a ‘pulse’ of 27.5 million years, ,

Most major geological events in Earth’s recent history have clustered in 27.5-million-year intervals — a pattern that scientists are now calling the “pulse of the Earth,” according to a new study.

Over the past 260 million years, dozens of major geological events, from sea level changes to volcanic eruptions, seem to follow this rhythmic pattern.

“For quite a long time, some geologists have wondered whether there’s a cycle of around 30 million years in the geologic record,” said lead author Michael Rampino, a professor in the departments of biology and environmental studies at New York University. But until recently, poor dating of such events made the phenomenon difficult to study quantitatively.

“Many, but maybe even most, [geologists] would say that geological events are largely random,” Rampino told Live Science. In the new study, Rampino and his team conducted a quantitative analysis to see if they were indeed random or if there was an underlying pattern.

Related: Photos: The world’s weirdest geological formations

The team first scoured the literature and found 89 major geological events that occurred in the past 260 million years. These included extinctions, ocean anoxic events (times when the oceans were toxic due to oxygen depletion), sea level fluctuations, major volcanic activity called flood-basalt eruptions and changes in the organization of Earth’s tectonic plates.

Then, the researchers put the events in chronological order and used a mathematical tool known as Fourier analysis to pick up spikes in the frequency of events. They discovered that most of these events clustered into 10 separate times that were, on average, 27.5 million years apart. That number may not be “exact,” but it’s a “pretty good estimate” with a 96% confidence interval, meaning it’s “unlikely to be a coincidence,” Rampino said.

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A new study finds that major geological events occurred in clusters every 27.5 million years. (Image credit: NYU)

The researchers looked only at the past 260 million years — when the dating of such events is most accurate — but they think the results likely extend further back in our planet’s history. For example, data from sea level changes go back around 600 million years and also seem to follow this pulse, Rampino said.

It’s not clear what’s causing such a pulse in geological activity, but it could be internally driven by plate tectonics and movement inside the mantle, the researchers wrote in the study. Or it could have something to do with the movement of Earth in the solar system and the galaxy, Rampino said. For example, the 27.5 million year pulse is close to the 32 million year vertical oscillation around the midplane of the galaxy, according to the study.

One theory is that the solar system sometimes moves through planes containing larger amounts of dark matter in the galaxy, Rampino said. When the planet moves through dark matter, it absorbs it; large amounts of captured dark matter can annihilate and release heat, which can produce a pulse of geological heating and activity, Rampino said. Perhaps this interaction with large amounts of dark matter correlates with the pulse of the Earth, Rampino said. (But of course, this is just a theory. Scientists still don’t know what dark matter is made of, and don’t know how it’s distributed in the solar system.)

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Rampino and his team hope to get even better data on the dating of certain geological events and plan to analyze a longer time period to see if the pulse extends further back in time. They also hope that if, one day, they can get better numbers on the astronomical movements of Earth through the solar system and the Milky Way, they can see if there’s any correlation in the astronomical and geological cycles.

In any case, if such a pattern exists, the last cluster was about 7 million to 10 million years ago, so the next one would likely come in 15 million to 20 million years, Rampino said.

The findings were published online June 17 in the journal Geoscience Frontiers.

Originally published on Live Science.

Editor’s note: This article was corrected to say that the next cluster of events could occur in 15 million to 20 million years, not 10 million to 15 million years.

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Lenovo unveils $679 Yoga Tab 13 Android tablet that works as a portable monitor, with a stainless steel kickstand and 1080p display (Monica Chin/The Verge)

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