The space agency announced today (June 27) that the next mission in its New Frontiers line of medium-cost missions will be Dragonfly, a rotorcraft designed to ply the skies of the huge, hazy and potentially life-hosting Saturn moon.
If all goes according to plan, Dragonfly will launch in 2026 and land on Titan eight years later, NASA officials said. The probe will then spend at least 2.5 years cruising around the 3,200-mile-wide (5,150 kilometers) moon, making two dozen flights that cover a total of about 110 miles (180 km).
Researchers in China are using drones as nodes in the development of an airborne quantum communications network. The article describes how such a network, using a quantum drone would be nigh unhackable.
In an unexpected last-second change, SpaceX has moved Falcon Heavy Flight 3’s center core landing on drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) from 40 km to more than 1240 km (770 mi) off the coast of Florida.
Drone ship OCISLY is already being towed to the landing site, necessary due to the sheer distance that needs to be covered at a leisurely towing pace. The current record for distance traveled during booster recovery was set at ~970 km by Falcon Heavy center core B1055 in April 2019. If successful, Falcon Heavy center core B1057 will smash that record by almost 30% after sending two dozen spacecraft on their way to orbit. Falcon Heavy Flight 3 is scheduled to lift off in support of the Department of Defense’s Space Test Program 2 (STP-2) mission no earlier than 11:30 pm ET (03:30 UTC), June 24th. A routine static fire test at Pad 39A will (hopefully) set the stage for launch on Wednesday, June 19th.
Breakthrough demonstrations using defective diamonds, high-flying drones, laser-bathed crystals and other exotica suggest practical, unhackable quantum networks are within reach.
Animals of all shapes and sizes have whiskers of some sort. Cats and dogs and rodents have them. Seals have them too. Some birds have them, as do insects and fish. Whiskers have shown up across such a diversity of animals because they’re an efficient and effective method of short range sensing. Besides just being able to detect objects that they come into direct contact with, whiskers can also sense fluid flows (like the speed and direction of moving air or water), and they work even if it’s dark or foggy or smoky.
While we’ve seen some research on whiskers before—I’m sure you remember the utterly adorable ShrewBot—there hasn’t been too much emphasis on adding whiskers to robots, likely because lidar and cameras offer more useful data at longer ranges. And that’s totally fine, if you can afford the lidar or the computing necessary to make adequate use of cameras. For very small, very cheap drones, investing in sophisticated sensing and computing may not make sense, especially if you’re only interested in simple behaviors like not crashing into stuff.
At ICRA last month, Pauline Pounds from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, demonstrated a new whisker sensing system for drones. The whiskers are tiny, cheap, and sensitive enough to detect air pressure from objects even before they make physical contact.
Thousands of tech fans descended on the Mojave desert for the conference, a public offshoot of Amazon Chairman Jeff Bezos’ previous invitation-only MARS conferences (the acronym stands for “Machine Learning, Robotics, Automation and Space”).
It resembled a tech summer camp, replete with offerings of cutting-edge technology demos, talks and social events.
In dozens of breakout sessions, business leaders discussed the future of jobs, drones, and tools powered by Amazon’s cloud platform in fields ranging from space exploration to health care.
