Tag: Caltech

NASA Scientists Will Send This Robot Dog to Mars

Article by Kristin Houser                                       December 27, 2020                                    (freethink.com)

• So far, NASA has landed four rovers on Mars. But because they’ve all used wheels to move around, they’ve only been able to explore the parts of the planet that are relatively flat. The parts they can’t reach with a wheeled Mars rover, however, are some of the most enticing to explore. More than sixty researchers and engineers from NASA, CalTech, MIT, and other organizations built a robot dog that they think could be the ideal Mars rover for exploring those hard-to-reach areas.

• Mars is riddled with caves and lava tubes. Those underground structures could be the best places to look for evidence of ancient extraterrestrial life. They could also be the key to human life surviving on Mars in the future. Martian colonists might be able to seek shelter underground, avoiding radiation, frigid temperatures, and meteorites that could jeopardize their safety on Mars’ surface.

• Boston Dynamics’ robot dog, “Spot”, became the possible answer. Spot already has an eclectic resume — it’s herded sheep in New Zealand, scouted factories for Ford, and even helped the NYPD during a recent hostage situation. While the robot dog is highly capable, it wasn’t ready for a job as a Mars rover right out of the gate. So the engineers made some modifications, which they presented during the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting on December 14th.

• They gave Spot a new sensor package, including a thermal camera and LiDaR (laser-scanning) sensor, and mounted a new power and computing package to its back. They also equipped the robot dog with AI software to help it learn as it explores, and a communication system it could use to send data from below ground to the surface. They renamed their newly upgraded robot dog “Au-Spot”, and it has already taken first place in a DARPA challenge that required it to navigate courses designed to look like underground urban environments.

• The researchers are currently testing the robot’s ability to navigate obstacle courses and map outdoor locations similar to the subterranean structures of Mars, such as the lava tubes found in Northern California. NASA hasn’t announced any impending plans to send Au-Spot to the Red Planet. But Au-Spot’s behaviors could one day enable revolutionary scientific missions to take place on the Martian surface and subsurface.

 

Boston Dynamics’ robot dog Spot has an eclectic resume — it’s herded sheep in New Zealand, scouted factories for Ford, and even helped the NYPD during a recent hostage situation.

However, the multi-talented bot’s next job might be the most remarkable yet: exploring Mars for NASA.

Limitations of a Wheeled Mars Rover

NASA has landed four rovers on Mars so far, and because they’ve all used wheels to move around, they’ve only been able to explore the parts of the planet that are relatively flat.

Scientists want to be able to scope out the entire planet, though — and the parts they can’t reach with a wheeled Mars rover are some of the most enticing.

Mars is riddled with caves and lava tubes, and those underground structures could be the best places to look for evidence of ancient extraterrestrial life.

They could also be the key to human life surviving on the Red Planet in the future — Martian colonists might be able to seek shelter underground, avoiding some of the radiation, frigid temperatures, and meteorites that could jeopardize their safety on Mars’ surface.

Now, more than 60 researchers and engineers from NASA, CalTech, MIT, and other organizations have built a Spot robot dog they think could be the ideal Mars rover for exploring those subsurface structures.

The Roving Robot Dog

While Boston Dynamics’ robot dog is already highly capable, it wasn’t exactly ready for a job as a Mars rover right out of the box, so the researchers had to make some modifications, which they presented during the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) annual meeting on December 14.

11:43 minute video of Au-Spot, NASA’s robot dog (‘Thomas Touma’ YouTube)

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Milky Way is Littered with Dead Alien Civilizations

Article by Charlotte Edwards                                   December 21, 2020                                      (thesun.ie)

• A study has been published to the arXiv database that models the evolution of the Milky Way since its estimated beginning, around 13 billion years ago. Authored by three Caltech physicists and a high school student, the new model builds on the famous equation developed by SETI founder Frank Drake in the 1960s. Using astronomy and statistical modeling, the researchers estimated how much intelligent life could have lived – and died – within our Milky Way galaxy.

• The researchers looked at rocky earth-like planets outside our solar system that are near Sun-like stars, and considered whether there would have been a time period when life could have formed there – taking into account that intelligent beings typically end up destroying themselves. According to their model, intelligent life could have emerged 8 billion years after the Milky Way formed, in a region 13,000 light-years from the galactic center – which is half as far from the galactic center as Earth.

• The study suggests that early galactic civilizations reached their peak 5 billion years ago, but it is most likely they annihilated themselves due to something like nuclear war or climate change.

• The researchers are now waiting for their work to be peer reviewed.

• [Editor’s Note]  Okay. How is this disinformation? Let me count the ways. First, it is a study conducted by physicists at CalState in Pasadena, a town which is practically owned by the CIA. Their model was based on the highly conjectural ‘Drake Equation’ in which the number of possible intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, besides the Earth, ranges from millions to zero. This equation was arrived at by Frank Drake, who founded deep state-riddled SETI. Their new “study” promotes the theory that all other civilizations have died off from ‘nuclear war or climate change’, to bolster the public’s fear of climate change (as an excuse for many parts of the deep state’s agenda of fear and helplessness), and to promote the idea that we are most likely all alone in this galaxy. This study is only meant to propagate the deep state’s long-standing policy of preventing the public from knowing the truth – that our Milky Way galaxy is positively teeming with civilizations and a wide variety of species of intelligent beings, and our solar system is no exception.

 

Researchers used astronomy and statistical modelling to estimate how much intelligent life could have

                           Frank Drake

lived and died out in the Milky Way.

The study has been published to the arXiv database.

It builds on a famous 1960s equation that Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence founder Frank Drake created.

The new model was written by three Caltech physicists and a high school student.

It looks at when and where life is most likely to live in the universe and also takes into account the idea that intelligent beings seem to end up destroying themselves.

The researchers looked at rocky earth-like planets outside our Solar System that are near Sun-like stars.

Even if these planets are now un-habitable due to radiation or other factors, the scientists considered whether there would have been a time period when life could have formed there.

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Planet Nine Could Be Our Solar System’s Missing ‘Super Earth’

by Samantha Mathewson           October 12, 2017           (Space.com)

• NASA has detected an as yet unseen “Planet 9” determined to be 10 times the mass of the Earth and 20 times farther from the Sun than Neptune.

• Caltech astronomers say that this massive planet is causing bodies in our Solar System, including planets, to tilt.

• This could explain why Kuiper Belt objects orbit in the opposite direction from everything else in the solar system.

• The most common type of planets that have been discovered around other stars are rocky “Super Earths”. Planet 9 may be our Solar System’s Super Earth.

• The astronomers plan to search for the mysterious planet using the Subaru Telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii.

 

Planet Nine is out there, and astronomers are determined to find it, according to a new statement from NASA. In fact, mounting evidence suggests it’s hard to imagine our solar system without the unseen world.

The hypothetical planet is believed to be about 10 times more massive than Earth and located in the dark, outer reaches of the solar system, approximately 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune is. While the mysterious world still has yet to be found, astronomers have discovered a number of strange features of our solar system that are best explained by the presence of a ninth planet, according to the NASA statement.

“There are now five different lines of observational evidence pointing to the existence of Planet Nine,” Konstantin Batygin, a planetary astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, said in the statement. “If you were to remove this explanation and imagine Planet Nine does not exist, then you generate more problems than you solve. All of a sudden, you have five different puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain them.” [The Evidence for ‘Planet Nine’ in Our Solar System (Gallery)]

In 2016, Batygin and co-author Mike Brown, an astronomer at Caltech, published a study that examined the elliptical orbits of six known objects in the Kuiper Belt, a distant region of icy bodies stretching from Neptune outward toward interstellar space. Their findings revealed that all of those Kuiper Belt objects have elliptical orbits that point in the same direction and are tilted about 30 degrees “downward” compared to the plane in which the eight official planets circle the sun, according to the statement.

Using computer simulations of the solar system with a Planet Nine, Batygin and Brown also showed that there should be even more objects tilted a whopping 90 degrees with respect to the solar plane. Further investigation revealed that five such objects were already known to fit these parameters, the researchers said.

Since then, the astronomers have found new evidence that further supports the existence of Planet Nine. With help from Elizabeth Bailey, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at Caltech, the team showed that Planet Nine’s influence might have tilted the planets of our solar system, which would explain why the zone in which the eight major planets orbit the sun is tilted by about 6 degrees compared to the sun’s equator.

“Over long periods of time, Planet Nine will make the entire solar-system plane precess, or wobble, just like a top on a table,” Batygin said in the statement.

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