The vast distance to Pluto – some 4.7bn km – means bit rates are extremely slow, and it will take a full 16 months for everything seen in the next few days to trickle back to Earth.
Closest approach to Pluto on Tuesday is set for exactly 11:49:59 GMT (12:49:59 BST; 07:49:59 EDT).
Mr Hocking, who led the new work, commented: “The important thing about our algorithm is that we have not told the machine what to look for in the images, but instead taught it how to ‘see’.”
Source: Analysing galaxy images with artificial intelligence: astronomers teach a machine how to ‘see’
The new work appears in “Teaching a machine to see: unsupervised image segmentation and categorisation using growing neural gas and hierarchical clustering”, A. Hocking, J. E. Geach, N. Davey & Y. Sun. The paper has been submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Preparations are ongoing to resume the originally planned science operations on July 7 and to conduct the entire close flyby sequence as planned. The mission science team and principal investigator have concluded that the science observations lost during the anomaly recovery do not affect any primary objectives of the mission, with a minimal effect on lesser objectives.
Source: NASA’s New Horizons Plans July 7 Return to Normal Science Operations
The updated document, Recommendation for Random Number Generation Using Deterministic Random Bit Generators, describes algorithms that can be used to reliably generate random numbers, a key step in data encryption.
Source: NIST revises key computer security publication on random number generation
For 85 seconds Philae “spoke” with its team on ground, via Rosetta, in the first contact since going into hibernation in November.
Source: Rosetta’s lander Philae wakes up from hibernation | Rosetta – ESA’s comet chaser
Now the scientists are waiting for the next contact. There are still more than 8000 data packets in Philae’s mass memory which will give the DLR team information on what happened to the lander in the past few days on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Short recap: Philae is the craft that landed on the comet and Rosetta is circling about being the direct link to the lander kind of like how Apollo missions operated for manned moon landings. Both Philae and Rosetta travelled to the comet together and then 211 days ago Rosetta launched Philae onto the surface of the comet where it bounced funny landing next to a cliff that blocked sunlight to its solar panels. Apparently it now has gathered enough juice to be somewhat operational. This is quite an amazing feat involving every STEM discipline from mathematics to rocket science.
I wonder if they’ll reconsider shutting down this program as mentioned here.
xkcd has been all over this story from the landing; From: http://xkcd.com/1446/
The mission is currently set to end in December 2015, after which Rosetta could simply be switched off as it continues to orbit the comet, and the mission team disperse to work on new projects. But for several months now a plan has been quietly hatched to see the craft go out with a bang by being brought down to a collision with 67P.
Source: Rosetta team propose ending mission by landing on comet – Sen.com
It would see the spacecraft brought gradually closer to the comet in a slowly spiralling orbit that would allow its cameras and instruments to gain ever more detailed views and measurements of the twin-lobed icy body. Then eventually—probably in September 2016—it would collide with the comet, bringing the mission to an end.
The researchers used a cellulose material for the substrate of the chip, which is the part that supports the active semiconductor layer. Taken from cellulose, a naturally abundant substance used to make paper, cellulose nanofibril (CNF) is a flexible, transparent and sturdy material with suitable electrical properties.
Source: Computer chips made of wood promise greener electronics
In a conventional chip, the support substrate is made of the same material as the active layer, but in the CNF chip, only the active layer is semiconductor material
Likewise, the laser analyses were done at nine different focus settings to obtain one good set of data. In the meantime, the team went back to the drawing board. They figured out that if they discarded a lot of the old code on board their distant subject, they could make room for software that could command the instrument to take the nine images on its own and analyze them on-board to find the best focus.
Source: Mars Rover’s ChemCam Instrument gets sharper vision
The program to run the whole instrument is only 40 kilobytes. The first tests on Mars were completed earlier this week.
Because these new magnets also have energy efficient characteristics, they can be used to create a new generation of sensors and actuators with vanishingly small heat signatures, said the researchers. These magnets could also find applications in efficient energy harvesting devices; compact micro-actuators for aerospace, automobile, biomedical, space and robotics applications; and ultra-low thermal signature actuators for sonars and defense applications.
Since these new magnets are composed of alloys that are free of rare-earth elements, they could replace existing rare-earth based magnetostriction alloys, which are expensive and feature inferior mechanical properties, said researchers.
Source: Expanding Magnets Have Potential to Energize the World | UMD Right Now :: University of Maryland
Quantum computers must overcome the challenge of detecting and correcting quantum errors before they can fulfill their promise of sifting through millions of possible solutions much faster than classical computers.
Source: IBM Shows First Full Error Detection for Quantum Computers – IEEE Spectrum
Detecting quantum errors is anything but straightforward. Classical computers can detect and correct their bit-flip errors by simply copying the same bit many times and taking the correct value from the majority of error-free bits. By comparison, the fragility of quantum states in qubits means that trying to directly copy them can have the counterproductive effect of changing the quantum state.