Touchdown on Mars! NASA’s InSight Lands to Peer Inside the Red Planet

https://www.space.com/42541-mars-insight-lander-success.html



PASADENA, Calif. — Mars just welcomed a new robotic resident.


NASA’s InSight lander touched down safely on the Martian surface today (Nov. 26), pulling off the first successful Red Planet landing since the Curiosity rover’s arrival in August 2012 — on the seventh anniversary of Curiosity’s launch, no less.


An “I’m OK” ping from InSight came down to Earth at 2:54 p.m. EST (1954 GMT), eliciting whoops of joy and relief from mission team members and NASA officials here at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the InSight mission. [NASA’s InSight Mars Lander: Full Coverage]


But the tension hasn’t completely dissipated and won’t for a while yet: Mission team members won’t know whether InSight successfully deployed its solar panels until 8:35 p.m. EST (0135 GMT on Nov. 27) at the earliest. Without those arrays extended, the lander cannot survive, let alone probe the Red Planet’s interior like never before — the main goal of the $850 million InSight mission.


The agonizing delay is unavoidable; NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter won’t be in position to relay the deployment confirmation to mission control until more than 5 hours after touchdown, agency officials said.


If the arrays do unfurl as planned, InSight will join a relatively select club. Less than 40 percent of all Mars missions over the decades have successfully arrived at their destination, be that an orbital path around the planet or its dusty red surface.


A long road to Mars


InSight launched on May 5 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, in the first-ever liftoff of an interplanetary mission from the U.S. West Coast. (Florida’s Space Coast is the traditional jumping-off point for such far-flung voyagers.)


InSight shared its Atlas V rocket ride with two briefcase-size cubesats called MarCO-A and MarCO-B, which have been making their own way to Mars over the past 6.5 months. The MarCO duo (whose name is short for “Mars Cube One”) have been embarked on an $18 million demonstration mission, which seeks to show that tiny spacecraft can explore deep space.


MarCO-A and MarCO-B also played a key role in today’s excitement, relaying data from InSight to mission control here at JPL during the lander’s harrowing entry, descent and landing (EDL) sequence.


And harrowing it was. InSight hit the thin Martian atmosphere at about 12,300 mph (19,800 km/h), nailing its entry angle of exactly 12 degrees. If the lander had come in any steeper than that, it would have burned up; any shallower, and it would have skipped off the atmosphere like a flat stone across a pond.


As the lander streaked through the Martian skies, its heat shield endured temperatures around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius) — hot enough to melt steel. Atmospheric drag slowed InSight down tremendously, to about 840 mph (1,350 km/h), at which point the lander deployed its supersonic parachute.


InSight soon fired up its small onboard thrusters to decelerate further, finally touching down on a flat equatorial plain called Elysium Planitia at around 5 mph (8 km/h). (These numbers are based on pre-landing modeling work by the InSight EDL team; the actual figures may end up being slightly different.)


All of this happened in just 6.5 minutes — InSight’s total travel time in the Martian air, from atmospheric entry to touchdown. The lander’s EDL sequence was a bit shorter than Curiosity’s famous “7 minutes of terror” experience, which featured a rocket-powered sky crane that lowered the heavy, car-size rover onto the Martian surface on cables. (InSight’s EDL mirrors that of NASA’s Phoenix lander, which touched down near the Red Planet’s north pole in May 2008. InSight’s body is also based heavily on that of Phoenix; both landers were built for NASA by aerospace company Lockheed Martin.)


MarCO-A and MarCO-B didn’t follow InSight onto the surface. The bantam probes flew right on by Mars, their work done and their place in history as the first interplanetary cubesats cemented. [NASA’s Mars InSight Lander: 10 Surprising Facts]


“We believe that this is a really interesting technology overall, and we’ve really shown something unique in deep space that will allow us to further future missions in a compact and efficient way,” MarCo-A mission manager Cody Colley of JPL said here yesterday (Nov. 25) during a pre-landing news conference.


Their work is probably done, I should say: It’s possible that MarCO-A and MarCO-B could observe an asteroid or other celestial body if their paths bring them close enough, and if funding for an extended mission is granted, John Baker, NASA’s program office manager for the MarCO mission, told Space.com.


Probing the Martian interior


As exciting as the landing was, it was just the prelude to the main event — InSight’s science work on the Red Planet.


Over the next two Earth years, the lander will probe Mars’ interior structure and composition in unprecedented detail. InSight will use two main science instruments to do this: a heat probe that will hammer itself up to 16 feet (5 meters) beneath the Martian surface, and a suite of three incredibly precise seismometers, which will be on the lookout for “marsquakes,” meteorite strikes and other jolts.


“Incredibly precise” doesn’t do these seismometers justice, actually.


“They can see vibrations with an amplitude of about the size of an atom — maybe a fraction of an atom,” InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt, also of JPL, said during yesterday’s news conference. 


The seismometer suite is therefore encased in a vacuum chamber, to minimize disturbances that could muck up the data. In late 2015, the mission team detected a leak in this chamber. The leak was fixed, but not in time for InSight to launch in March 2016, as originally planned. Launch windows for Mars missions roll around just once every 26 months, so the lander had to wait until this past May to get off the ground.


The science team will also track InSight’s position in space using the 789-lb. (358 kilograms) lander’s communications gear. This information will allow scientists to measure the slight wobble of Mars’ axis of rotation, which in turn will help them better understand the planet’s core, NASA officials have said.


Together, all of this data will give scientists an unprecedented look at the Red Planet’s interior.


“That is the goal of the InSight mission — to actually map out the inside of Mars in three dimensions, so that we understand the inside of Mars as well as we have come to understand the surface of Mars,” Banerdt said.


And scientists can use Mars as a sort of laboratory to understand how rocky planets in general form, he added. That’s because the Red Planet’s insides have been more or less frozen in place since shortly after Mars formed about 4.5 billion years ago. We can’t look to Earth as a time capsule in this way because our planet’s insides have been roiled continuously over the eons by plate tectonics, mantle convection and other processes.


InSight (whose name is short for “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport”) features an unusual degree of international cooperation. The burrowing heat probe was provided by the German Aerospace Center, and France’s national space agency CNES led the consortium that developed the seismometer suite. [Mars InSight: NASA’s Mission to Probe Red Planet’s Core (Gallery)]


“A slow-motion mission”


Don’t expect InSight to dazzle you with pretty pictures. The mission isn’t interested in cool surface features, which explains why it landed on Elysium Planitia; the plain is smooth and flat with a paucity of boulders, boosting the odds of a safe landing (and of the burrowing heat probe being able to get deep down into the Martian dirt). And InSight is a lander, not a rover, so any photos that it takes over the course of its mission will depict the same terrain.


It’ll also take a while for the spacecraft to get up and running on Mars. InSight will use its robotic arm to place the heat probe, the seismometer suite and a weather shield (which will surround the seismometers) on the ground. 


No other Mars mission has done such an instrument deployment — science gear tends to be fixed to the bodies or arms of Red Planet spacecraft — and the InSight team wants to make sure they get it right. So, once they get a look at InSight’s Martian surroundings, they’ll practice the deployment over and over using a testbed lander here at JPL.


Actual deployment probably won’t happen until two or three months from now, Banerdt said. And it’ll take another month or so to calibrate the instruments for use on the Red Planet.


So, it’ll be at least six months before the InSight team even “gets a glimmer of what we’re looking for,” Banerdt said. And it’ll likely take the full two-year mission lifetime, or close to it, to get a really detailed look at the Martian interior.


“Once we get to the surface, InSight is a slow-motion mission,” Banerdt said.


Space.com managing editor Tariq Malikcontributed to this story. Mike Wall’s book about the search for alien life, “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate) is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally published on Space.com

via Space.com https://www.space.com

November 26, 2018 at 02:03PM

Comcast raises cable TV bills again—even if you’re under contract

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1418277


A person's hand pointing a TV remote at a TV.

Getty Images | Rene Wassenbergh | EyeEm

Comcast is raising its controversial “Broadcast TV” and “Regional Sports Network” fees again on January 1, with the typical total price going from $14.50 to $18.25 a month.

The newly raised broadcast TV fee will be $10 a month, and the sports fee will be $8.25 a month, Cord Cutters News reported last week. The new fee sizes are confirmed in a Comcast price list for the Atlanta market.

About a year ago, Comcast raised the broadcast TV fee from $6.50 to $8 and the sports fee from $4.50 to $6.50.

The new price hikes will take effect in most of Comcast’s regional markets across the US on January 1, but some cities will get the increase later in 2019, a Comcast spokesperson told Ars. The fee sizes can vary by city based on which stations are available, so in some cases they could be less than $10 and $8.25, Comcast said.

The fees, which have become common in the industry, are controversial because they are not included in Comcast’s advertised prices and because Comcast imposes fee increases even on customers who are under contract. The broadcast and sports fee increases won’t be immediately applied to customers who pay Comcast’s promotional rates, which typically last one year, Comcast told Ars. But promotional-rate customers do pay the fees and would be hit with any increases after their promotional terms expire.

Equipment rental fees are rising, too. Comcast last year raised its modem rental fee from $10 to $11 a month. The new price list for January 1 lists an “Internet/Voice Equipment Rental” fee as $13. Comcast confirmed to Ars that the modem rental fee is rising $2 a month. Customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own modem.

Comcast agreed to improve fee disclosures

Comcast faced a class-action lawsuit over the TV and sports fees, but the company settled out of court in May. Comcast did not disclose the terms of the settlement when asked about the case today. We contacted the plaintiffs’ lawyer and will provide an update if we get one.

“We have always listed the Broadcast TV and Regional Sports Network fees separately on customers’ bills and have included clear disclosures about them in our advertising,” Comcast told Ars today.

Separately, Comcast this month agreed to pay $700,000 in refunds and forgive debts for more than 20,000 Massachusetts customers to settle allegations that it used deceptive advertising to promote long-term cable contracts. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey found that Comcast advertised a $99 lock-in rate but “did not adequately disclose equipment costs and mandatory monthly fees” that would add to monthly bills and “failed to adequately disclose that the fees could increase while the customer was locked into the long-term contract.”

As part of the settlement with Massachusetts, Comcast also agreed to improve the disclosures it makes to customers before they sign long-term contracts.

Comcast and other pay-TV operators that charge broadcast TV and sports fees say they’re necessary to cover the rising costs of programming. But payments to programmers are a standard expense in any cable TV company’s business, and those contribute greatly to the general monthly rates that customers have to pay. Breaking some of these programming costs out into separate fees allows Comcast to raise customers’ prices each year even if the customers have multi-year contracts.

After last year’s increases were announced, Comcast said that the sports and broadcast fees “allow us to be more transparent with our customers about the factors driving price changes, and represent only a portion of our costs of carrying broadcast and regional sports networks.”

On the new increases for January 1, 2019, Comcast provided this statement to Ars today:

We continue to make investments in our network and technology to give customers more for their money—like faster Internet service and better Wi-Fi, more video across viewing screens, better technology like X1 and xFi, and a better customer experience. While we try to hold costs down, price changes are necessary for a number of reasons, including the continually increasing costs associated with carrying the programming our customers demand, especially broadcast television and sports programming, which are the largest drivers of price increases.

It’s not clear why Comcast uses faster Internet speeds to justify increases in its TV fees, since paying more for TV channels doesn’t increase a customer’s broadband speeds.

Petition for cable fee transparency

The broadcast TV fee accounts for the retransmission consent fees that TV stations charge cable companies for the right to retransmit their broadcast signals. Sports fees account for the cost of carrying regional sports networks that air local professional sports games in each market.

In some cases, Comcast is the one collecting these fees from other TV providers because Comcast is a large owner of TV programming. A lobby group for small cable TV companies this month asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether Comcast uses its ownership of TV programming to harm competitors.

Consumer Reports is gathering signatures for a petition “urging pay TV providers to provide honest pricing that includes the full cost of service and doesn’t hide fees in the small print.”

Consumer Reports says:

Broadcast fees. Regional sports fees. HD technology fees.

Chances are you never expected to pay surcharges like these on top of the advertised price of cable TV. After all, broadcast stations and sports seem like essential pieces of what you bought.

To make matters worse, these surprise fees are rising in size—in some cases by 50 percent per year—and, taken together, can really add up. The upshot: The cost of cable keeps rising, but it’s almost impossible to comparison shop for a good deal.

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

November 26, 2018 at 12:16PM

LG’s Dreaming Big in Its Patent for a 16-Camera Device

https://gizmodo.com/lgs-dreaming-big-in-its-patent-for-a-16-camera-device-1830656810


Phones with two or more rear cameras are already quite widespread, but with its recently granted patent, LG is dreaming of something much more ambitious. That’s because even though LG already has a five-camera phone in the V40, the company may be looking to more than triple that number up to 16.

A phone with 16 cameras draws immediate comparisons to Light’s L16 camera. Similar to what’s described in LG’s patent, the L16’s multiple lenses with various focal lengths enable you to do things like adjust a photo’s depth of field during post-processing, create composite shots comprised of multiple exposures, and capture images with varying levels of zoom without the need for add-on lenses.

Sadly, in the case of Light’s L16, the specialized software needed to edit its pictures along with its $2,000 price tag made it a tough sell for pros who often found the device to be still too limited, and it pushed away regular folk who didn’t want to be bogged down with a second device that’s hard to use and doesn’t offer enough of an upgrade in image quality.

One thing LG’s 16-camera device could be used for is capturing different angles of a subject without actually needing to reposition its cameras.
Image: LG (USPTO)

However, Light’s ability to put that many cameras in a device not much bigger than a typical smartphone, and actually make it work, is something that has paved the way for smartphone companies as they continue to add more cameras onto the back of their handsets.

As for LG’s patent, its 16 lens matrix would allow a device to capture a photo from multiple perspectives in order to gather additional depth and 3D info. A 16-camera smartphone could use the data from multiple cameras to fill in gaps in a photo that a single camera may have missed.

LG’s patent also hints that a device with this sort of camera arrangement could be used to create super-detailed HDR images, or even to help cut and paste subjects from one part of the frame into another like a sort of face-swap feature on steroids.

And for those lamenting the ability to shoot selfies with that many cameras, LG’s patent also describes the possibility of adding a mirror and a speaker to the back of the device to help facilitate a wider range of possible use cases.

For now though, a lot of this is purely hypothetical, as it would be a massive leap to go from the three rear cameras on the LG V40 all the way to 16. But with Nokia’s rumored 5-rear camera phone in the works, phones with 16-rear cameras probably aren’t that far off.

[via Let’s Go Digital]

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

November 26, 2018 at 11:51AM

Visions Of The Future: Robotic Hotel Rooms On Wheels That Can Shuttle You Around As You Sleep Or Shower, Deliver Room Service Via Drone

https://geekologie.com/2018/11/visions-of-the-future-robotic-hotel-room.php


These are Aprilli Design Studio’s conceptual ‘Autonomous Travel Suites.’ They’re electric-powered autonomous vehicles with the equivalent of a very small hotel room inside that can drive a person to their destination while they sleep, shower or work, and have room service delivered through the sunroof via drone. “So it’s a tiny autonomous RV.” Well when you put it that way…

The vehicle’s designers note that travellers would simply specify the route they wanted to take via an app.

They could program stops along the way, or just journey straight through to their final destination.

So that travellers wouldn’t miss out on the usual perks of staying in a hotel, Aprilli says it plans to install dozens of hotel facilities across road networks.

These stop-off points would house ‘public amenities such as food and beverage, meeting room, spa, pool, and gym along with housekeeping, maintenance, and charging services for the travel suites’.

But does it have privacy windows for joining the *tape measuring height from road to top of bed* three and a half feet high club? Asking for a friend who’s never had sex in a moving vehicle before. “Is that friend you, GW?” What? No — my girlfriend and I were on the back of the bus in Speed and thought we were goners. “Oh wow.” We did it twice.

Keep going for several more shots and a video.

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hotel-room-on-wheels-4.jpg

Thanks to Thaylor H, who agrees that, while the future is clearly on its way, it isn’t moving nearly fast enough to get here before the end of the world (March at the latest).

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via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome https://geekologie.com/

November 26, 2018 at 11:41AM

Volvo’s self-driving trucks will haul limestone from a mine

https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/26/volvo-self-driving-truck-mine-hauling/



Volvo

Sometimes, it’s the least glamorous uses of self-driving tech that can be the most important. Volvo has struck a deal that will have six of its autonomous trucks carrying limestone from a Brønnøy Kalk mine in Norway to a port roughly 3 miles away. That might not sound exciting on the surface, but the company isn’t just selling the trucks and moving on. This is Volvo Trucks’ very first end-to-end autonomous offering — the mining company is paying for every metric tonne Volvo delivers. In other words, Volvo has a strong incentive to make sure its driverless tech works as promised, as it won’t be paid otherwise.

Volvo and Brønnøy Kalk have already been testing their solution and expect it to be in full service before the end of 2019.

This isn’t the most complicated operation. The Volvo trucks will drive along a preset route with very little chance for something to go wrong. However, it will help Volvo fine-tune its self-driving model for future customers. It’s also a hint at how vehicle makers could operate in the long run — they might shift away from selling individual cars and trucks, and toward offering whole services where autonomous vehicles are just part of a larger puzzle.