Today on In Case You Missed It: A new rover concept from Harvard's SSR Lab shows a rover extruding a fast-drying foam over rocks to keep vehicles from getting stuck on other planets. University of Nottingham researchers are building an algorithm...
Curiosity may have spent a while limbering up for the mission ahead, but now it's found evidence of an ancient streambed on Mars that once had "vigorous" water flow. Photos of two rock outcroppings taken by the rover's mast camera between the north rim of Gale Crater and the foot of Mount Sharp reveal gravel embedded into a layer of conglomerate rock. The shape of the small stones indicate to NASA JPL scientists that they were previously moved, and their size (think from grains of sand to golf balls) are a telltale sign that water did the work instead of wind. Evidence of H2O on Mars has been spotted before, but this is the first direct look at the composition of riverbeds NASA has observed from above.
According to Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich, it's estimated that water flowed at the site anywhere from thousands to millions of years ago, moved at a clip of roughly 3 feet per second and was somewhere between ankle and hip deep. "A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment," Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger said. "It is not our top choice as an environment for preservation of organics, though. We're still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment."
NASA's Curiosity rover finds ancient streambed on Mars, evidence of 'vigorous' water flow originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Sep 2012 02:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It never ceases to amaze us that what is essentially a species of really successful primates is able to launch a rocket into space, have it travel around 350 million miles and land on Mars, pretty much right where it wants it. The logistics, engineering, science and all around awesomeness required to do this is just mind boggling. Even more amazing is that the descent of this rover on an otherworldly land is then captured in images by a satellite this same species of primates placed there a few years prior! The above picture, in case you haven’t seen it yet, is just that: NASA’s Curiosity rover descending towards Mars’ surface as captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the red planet since 2006.
The touchdown, as you surely know, was flawless; news of this has been pretty hard to miss. But there are two (pretty geeky) factoids about the mission you may not have heard in the media yet: what’s Curiosity’s brain and what does it have to do with Apple, and what’s the image file type it’s transmitting in? For the answer to these questions, hit the jump.
It turns out that the processor running everything in the rover is
a RAD750 radiation-hardened single board computer.
This computer, in turn, is based on the IBM PowerPC 750 CPU, which Intel first introduced on November 10, 1997. This CPU was used by Apple in many computers in the late 1990s, including the original iMac.
As one Redditor puts it, “Curiosity is essentially a 2-CPU Power Macintosh G3 with some nifty peripherals and one HELL of a UPS.”
As for the file type used in the images, it turns out it’s a custom solution. Boingboing was at the post-landing press conference and asked the following: “Given the great distance and technical challenges involved in transmitting timely data back from Mars, what file type and image compression algorithm(s) did they use for those first “rush” thumbnails? There’s a 14 minute delay involved for any signals from Mars to Earth.” And here’s the answer they got:
“JPL imaging specialist Justin Maki, tells Boing Boing:
The images are wavelet-compressed, much like JPEG 2000. The main difference is that the algorithm used on MSL (and MER) use is computationally less complex than JPEG-2000.
The compression software was written at JPL by Aaron Kiely and Matt Klimesh.
Matt tells Boing Boing:I don’t have much to add beyond Justin’s answer. It is a custom file format and the compression algorithm is in many ways similar to the algorithm for JPEG-2000 compression, but with lower computational complexity.
No name for the format (and I wouldn’t necessarily characterize it as proprietary), but we call the compressor “ICER” (not an acronym, just a rearrangement of the letters of “Rice”; the Rice algorithm is a data compression algorithm first used decades ago).
So there you have it. Of course you didn’t hear about these because they’re relatively unimportant things to know, but we think it’s an exciting time to be a geeky, successful primate and these kinds of details get us perked up.
VIA [ BoingBoing ] AND [ CultOfMac ]
By far the greatest challenge for robots with legs is staying upright when the going gets rough. A team at the University of Pennsylvania's Kod*lab has a hunch that we don't need extra smarts to make that happen -- just an extra appendage. The upgraded X-RHex Lite (XRL) carries a tail that will swing in the right direction to keep the robot upright if it's caught out by a fall, much like a cat. That's impressive for a nearly 18-pound robot (the previous Tailbot was 0.4 pounds), but we're pretty sure no feline has six springy legs; the XRL can crash to the ground and still get back up like it ain't no thing, which gives it a fudge factor others don't have. We don't know if the hexapod critter will lead to more than further experiments. If there are fewer stuck rovers on future exploration missions, though, we'll know who to thank.
Continue reading X-RHex Lite robot grows a tail, always lands on its feet (video)
X-RHex Lite robot grows a tail, always lands on its feet (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Jul 2012 22:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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