Month: September 2018

Two tiny, hopping rovers that landed on asteroid Ryugu last week have beamed back some incredible new views of the asteroid’s rocky surface.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Hayabusa2 sample-return mission dropped the two nearly identical rovers, named Minerva-II1A and Minerva-II1B, onto the surface of Ryugu on Sept. 21. In a new video from the eyes of Minerva-II1B, you can watch the sun move across the sky as its glaring sunlight reflects off the shiny rocks that cover Ryugu’s surface.

“Please take a moment to enjoy ‘standing’ on this new world,” JAXA officials said in a statement released today (Sept. 27). The video was shot over the course of 1 hour and 14 minutes beginning on Sept. 22 at 9:34 p.m. EDT (0134 GMT on Sept. 23). [Japan’s Hayabusa2 Asteroid Ryugu Sample-Return Mission in Pictures]

Unlike the rovers that have landed on Mars, these twin rovers have no wheels. Instead of rolling across the asteroid’s surface, these are designed to “hop” across the asteroid’s surface.

They can hop horizontal distances of up to 50 feet (15 meters), and because Ryugu’s gravity is so weak, it can take them up to 15 minutes to land.

Our MINERVA-II1 rovers have sent back more images from the surface of Ryugu! Let’s take a look at these images in detail.



On September 23, 2018, We were able to confirm that Rover-1B hopped! [1/6]https://t.co/Fb60ozhqTd pic.twitter.com/8yD04TOJtK

— HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) September 27, 2018

The Minerva-II1 rovers have been snapping photos both from the surface of Ryugu and from the air while performing these giant leaps. When the hopping rovers are in motion, the images they take can appear a bit distorted, as you can see in the images from Minerva-II1B above.

The other rover, Minerva-II1A, managed to snap a photo of its shadow in between hops. In the rover’s shadow, you can see its antenna and its “pin” — a device that helps provide friction while hopping, protects the rover’s solar cells while landing, and measures the asteroid’s surface temperature with a built-in thermometer, JAXA officials said in the statement.

Another view from Minerva-II1A shows a bizarre, football-shaped rock formation on the surface of Ryugu.

The Minerva-II1 rovers aren’t the only spacecraft the Hayabusa2 mission will deploy at Ryugu. In October, it will drop a lander called MASCOT. And in 2019, another hopping rover, called Minerva-II2, will join the club.

Later next year, the Hayabusa2 mothership will descend to the asteroid’s surface to collect samples, which it will bring back to Earth sometime in 2020.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

September 27, 2018 at 01:06PM

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday issued about $120 million dollars’ worth of fines to two robocallers accused of spoofing real people’s phone numbers.

In one of the cases, the robocaller made 21 million calls overall and told the FCC that he spoofed real people’s numbers in Caller ID in order to avoid angry call-backs to his own phone. In the other case, the FCC said the robocaller made 2.3 million calls including 48,349 that spoofed the number of a single person. That unlucky person ended up getting about five angry call-backs a day for two months, the FCC said.

In the first case, the FCC fined telemarketer Philip Roesel and his companies more than $82 million. This is the same amount that the FCC proposed to fine Roesel a year ago—as is standard, the commission gave him a chance to respond before making the decision final.

Roesel and his companies made more than 21 million robocalls from late 2016 to early 2017 attempting to sell health insurance, the FCC said.

Roesel spoofed Caller ID to make it appear that the calls were coming from other numbers, in some cases numbers that belong to real people. This is a nuisance for people who receive the calls and for people whose numbers are spoofed, because recipients of robocalls often call the number they see on their Caller ID to complain.

Roesel told the FCC that he spoofed other people’s phone numbers because he wanted to avoid getting angry return calls, the FCC said.

Roesel’s response to the FCC argued that he “spoofed the caller ID to avoid having his cell phone ‘overwhelmed’ with return phone calls from consumers that he robocalled—to protect his own phone number from the same kind of disruption he was imposing on consumers,” the FCC said.

After reviewing Roesel’s response to the proposed fine, the FCC said it found “no reason” to cancel or reduce the proposed penalty.

“In response to the proposed fine, Mr. Roesel claimed that the Commission failed to prove intent to harm, that any value he received was not ‘wrongfully’ obtained, and that he did not know he caused harm,” the FCC said. “The Commission determined that the evidence did not support these claims and is imposing a fine in the amount originally proposed, one of the largest forfeitures ever imposed by the agency.”

The FCC noted that Roesel’s Caller ID spoofing “made it difficult for consumers to register complaints and for law enforcement entities to track and stop the illegal calls.”

48,349 calls from one spoofed number

In the other action announced yesterday, the FCC proposed a fine of more than $37.5 million against Affordable Enterprises of Arizona, accusing the outfit of “making millions of illegally spoofed telemarketing calls that appeared to originate from consumers and other numbers not assigned to the company.”

“One Arizonan received more than five calls per day on her cell phone from consumers complaining about telemarketing calls they thought she had made,” the FCC said in its announcement. The unlucky person received the calls for two months beginning around May 2017 before they finally stopped. Call records showed that Affordable Enterprises made at least 48,349 calls that spoofed her number, the FCC said.

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Every year at Oculus Connect, the virtual reality company’s developer summit, Facebook’s footprint gets bigger. That’s no surprise: Since the social-media giant bought Oculus for $3 billion in 2014, it’s slowly assumed strategic control of the scrappy startup, subsuming it into Facebook’s larger organizational structure. Even the summit moved from Los Angeles to Menlo Park-convenient San Jose in 2016. Yet, it’s never been as apparent as this year. Beginning with Mark Zuckerberg’s opening remarks yesterday morning and continuing throughout the day, Oculus Connect’s fifth edition felt more like a Facebook affair than an Oculus one. That’s not a judgment; it’s as plain as the words on executives’ business cards.

But Facebook’s ever-increasing presence at Oculus Connect isn’t about org charts or how close the convention center is to its offices. It’s about the reason the company bought Oculus in the first place. The reason it funds experiments like the goofy VR sandbox Spaces, pumps money into big-budget multiplayer VR games, and is spending what must be a fortune in licensing fees procuring live concerts and sporting events for Venues, its mass-attendance VR app. It’s about the steadily growing drumbeat that is by now a John Bonham solo: If VR is to be the next computing platform, it’s because of other people.

From the day’s start, you could hear it. Zuckerberg wasted no time calling out the idea of co-presence, the overwhelming sense in VR not just of being somewhere real, but being there with another person. “Just imagine all the ways that being able to feel really present with someone, no matter where they are,” he said, “imagine all the ways that’s going to change how we communicate, how we game, how we work, almost every category of what we do.”

Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s head of AR/VR, took up the refrain when he spoke about the company’s mixed-reality experiments and Oculus’ finally-official Quest standalone headset. “It’s not the number of connections that matter,” he said, as the words appeared behind him on the enormous screen—it’s the depth of those connections. Platitudes born of Facebook’s recent “meaningful interactions” about-face? Maybe. But triangulating his and Zuckerberg’s comments leads you straight to a point that just about everyone in the AR/VR industry agrees on: While the technology can seem cool or surprising in lots of different applications, interpersonal VR experiences often feel deeper, truer, than conventional social media platforms or multiplayer games.

No surprise, then, that Oculus’ platform and product announcements highlighted VR’s social aspects at every turn. Starting with the next Oculus Home update for the Rift rig, users will be able to invite their friends into their private VR domicile—just to hang out, or to watch shows and movies together. Owners of the Oculus Go, the company’s lower-end headset that’s not quite as suited to immersive social experience, will be able to “cast” what they’re doing to nearby phones or TVs, so their friends can get a sense of what they’re doing. And Venues will be adding NBA games to its schedule, allowing far-flung friends who are fans of rival teams to watch games together, their avatars in jerseys of their choosing.

Even Oculus’ own avatar system is getting changes meant to heighten the connection between people. Since their launch in 2016, those avatars have come equipped with some sort of sunglasses or goggles—the thinking being that until headsets can track your gaze, trying to simulate a user’s eyes falls into the creepiest crannies of the Uncanny Valley. But yesterday, a year after announcing that future versions would move their mouths and eyes, Rift product manager Lucy Chen unveiled “expressive” avatars, coming later this year.

(Admittedly, the Uncanny Valley hasn’t quite been bested. Also admittedly, the news came with more than a touch of Westworld, as Chen cited the company’s “research into simulated eye and mouth movement and microexpressions.”)

While the Go and Rift are available now, Facebook and Oculus’ biggest push at Oculus Connect is reserved for the Quest, a “six degree of freedom” standalone headset that launches next spring. In the cavernous demo hall at Oculus Connect, a handful of Rift games and an ongoing VR esports tournament are dwarfed by the floor space dedicated to three of those room-scale Quest titles, including a tennis game (Project Tennis Scramble) that had me running—literally running—to return crosscourt forehands. Across the convention center, a 4,000 square-foot playspace was hosting three-on-three matches of a special “arena-scale” version of the game Dead and Buried.

These aren’t world-changing games—they’re fun, and immersive, and they certainly make you feel like you’ve been doing something (as my quads can attest after 20 minutes of ducking and crouching in Dead and Buried: Arena). What makes them special in Facebook’s view isn’t what you’re doing, though; it’s how you’re doing it. Together. That thinking has motivated the company’s investment since 2014, and permeates everything from its AR research to its product marketing. Oculus has called its conference “Connect” for five years, but each year as Facebook’s influence grows larger, the name grows more fitting.

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