This is a video from this year’s ‘Mountain Of Hell’ bike race in Les Deux Alpes, France that "starts with a terrifying descent down a glacier" and apparently ends for a lot of racers with bruises and broken bones, wondering what the hell they were thinking ever signing up for this race in the first place. You know sometimes you really need to dig deep and ask yourself just how important another purple participation ribbon is to you. Keep going for the video, but the crash chain-reaction begins at 0:40 and just keeps going.
Thanks to Jody, who agrees at least France has a good healthcare system.
via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome https://geekologie.com/
At 7am ET on Tuesday morning, a Peacekeeper missile launched a boilerplate Orion spacecraft.
The refurbished missile only had to get Orion to an altitude of about 9.5km.
Trevor Mahlmann
This is Cold War solid rocket motor technology at its finest.
Trevor Mahlmann
The launch escape system is the tower at the top of Orion.
Trevor Mahlmann
The rocket launched as the day brightened in Florida.
Trevor Mahlmann
This triple shot captures the moment when Orion’s launch escape system fired to pull the spacecraft away from the booster.
Trevor Mahlmann
The Ascent Abort-2 test vehicle is seen on the pad at Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida before Tuesday’s launch.
NASA
It went fast. Early on Tuesday morning, a former Peacekeeper missile lofted a boilerplate Orion spacecraft to an altitude just shy of 10km before a powerful escape motor fired. Amid the smoke, the escape system pulled the NASA spacecraft rapidly away from the Peacekeeper booster. The entire test lasted 3 minutes and 13 seconds.
“Everything we’ve seen so far looks great,” said Orion program manager Mark Kirasich, about two hours after the test following a very preliminary review of data.
In many ways, this was an odd-looking test. The stubby Peacekeeper missile looked nothing like a tall, brawny rocket—such as the Space Launch System or the Delta IV Heavy—capable of launching Orion into space. After the escape system fired and Orion was released, the vehicle tumbled and plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean in what was less than a heartwarming scene.
However, it was a successful test. At the time of maximum dynamic pressure during a launch, when a rocket is still accelerating but the atmosphere is remains relatively thick, the launch abort system proved capable of pulling Orion away from its booster, reorienting the spacecraft, and then releasing it. This was the sole purpose of the test on Tuesday.
Why didn’t the agency add parachutes to ensure that Orion could make a safe and soft landing in the ocean? Because the goal was to conduct a specific test, according to Kirasich. “We simplified the test article,” he said. “We wanted to get this test done as early and as quickly as possible. It was all about the launch abort system today. By all accounts, it was magnificent.” NASA has, in fact, conducted nearly four dozen tests of Orion’s parachute system already.
Mass and schedule
In truth, the problem with Orion has never really been its technical performance—by all accounts, NASA and Lockheed Martin are building a capable, robust, safe vehicle for humans to return to deep space in the early to mid-2020s. Rather, the issue is one of mass, budget, time, and mission. In terms of mass, Orion is a very heavy vehicle with its launch escape system, about 26 tons. This requires a very large rocket to launch it even into low-Earth orbit, let alone lunar orbit.
Then there is the lack of a mission. Since NASA first solicited contracts for deep space capsule in 2005 and awarded the contract to Lockheed a year later, the space agency has spent $16 billion on Orion. It seems unlikely that the spacecraft will fulfill its intended purpose, carrying humans into deep space and back, before 2022 or 2023. If that plays out, the development process will have stretched across nearly two decades.
This is not because NASA or Lockheed Martin are bad at building spacecraft—they’re not. This is mainly because NASA has lacked a clear, sustained purpose to actually use Orion. That may be changing with the Artemis program to return humans to the Moon, but so far Congress has yet to acquiesce to the Trump Administration’s desire for more funding to accelerate a human lunar return by 2024. And so Orion tests, and waits, and tests some more.
The team hopes that the ease of use of an app will bring mobile robots to organizations that have up to now lacked the necessary resources and knowledge.
“Smaller companies can’t afford software programmers or expensive mobile robots,” said Karthik Ramani, Purdue’s Donald W. Feddersen Professor of Mechanical Engineering. “We’ve made it to where they can do the programming themselves, dramatically bringing down the costs of building and programming mobile robots,” he said.
To “do the programming themselves,” users walk the route of a robot’s tasks in real space, scanning QR codes at the starting point and the destination – say, a machine or a storage container.
The user then places the phone into a dock attached to the robot and wirelessly connected to the machine’s basic controls and motor. When docked, the phone acts as the robot’s eyes and brain, using information from the QR codes to follow the specified route and work with the objects.
Once in proximity to an Internet-connected machine, the augmented-reality app displays a set of pre-defined tasks to initiate, like having the robot pick up a 3D-printed part or navigate to the charging station.
“All you must do is act out the process with the help of your smartphone, verify the preview, and place the phone on your robot,” Prof. Ramani told Tech Briefs.
The mobile device mediates the interactions between the user, robot, and the Internet of Things (IoT)-oriented tasks, and guides the path planning execution with the embedded capability of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) – the same algorithms currently used in self-driving cars and drones.
The app, known as VRa, also provides an option to automatically record video when the phone is docked, so that the user can play it back and evaluate a workflow.
The team used their technology to command robots to water a plant, vacuum a designated area, and transport objects.
Purdue researchers presented their research on the embedded app on June 23 at DIS 2019 in San Diego. The platform is patented through the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization, with plans to make it available for commercial use.
Prof. Ramani told Tech Briefs what’s possible when you make robot programming easy.
Prof. Karthik Ramani: There are many things that we as humans do that are not enjoyable or worthy for humans to do. These can be simply carrying objects, delivering things, waiting for something to be done and then doing something else, and infinitely many other tasks that we could substitute with other better and more creative things to do.
Executing many of these tasks can take a long time, be tedious, and sometimes even harmful for the human body to do. But creating programs for them used to be difficult. We have simplified the programming for the mobile types of motion and particular tasks that the robot does while interacting with the machines.
Tech Briefs: Can you take us through an example of how it works, from the perspective of, say, a manufacturing worker? How do you get a robot to, say, pick and place something?
Prof. Ramani: You just take the phone to where you want to pick something up. Then, you tap on the camera view of a QR code of the smart machine, you walk along the path you want the robot to go until you reach the destination, and then you tap on the QR code of the destination machine.
Now the phone is ready to be put into the docking station of the robot. You put it on the robot base and execute the program by tapping on “Execute.” The robot will do the first ask on the first starting point (say, pick up an object) and then go on the same path you did with the phone to deliver it at the destination station.
That opens up robotics to a large user base. The costs of programming come down since the person can be anyone. Larger accessibility coupled with lower cost changes things.
Tech Briefs: Why is this kind of capability — the ability to program a robot this way — so important, do you think?
Prof. Ramani: In general, programming robots becomes the barrier to using them. If we make things easy to access and use, and intuitive for a novice user, then anyone can program robots.
Tech Briefs: How does the phone “know” the kind of robot that it’s becoming?
Prof. Ramani: For this we have an initialization process for the user to tell the phone what type of robot it is put on (or programmed for). Then, the corresponding interface is made ready. The programming for a vacuuming robot or a pick-and-deliver robot will be different, and the phone understands this.
Tech Briefs: How does the robot understand its environment?
Long-held theories about how materials melt, freeze and evaporate may need to be tweaked thanks to some breakthrough research. A UCLA-led team of scientists have captured the 4D movement of atoms through time and 3D space as they changed states, reportedly for the first time. The results were surprising and contradicted classical theories about "nucleation," when atoms start to change from one form to another. The research may prove valuable for the creation and study of new materials, chemicals and biological processes.
Building on past research, the team used Berkeley Lab’s latest 3D electron microscope to examine an iron-platinum alloy sliced into nanoparticles 1/10,000th the width of a human hair. Those were heated to 968 degrees Fahrenheit, causing them to pass from one solid state to another. 3D images were grabbed at 9, 16 and 26 minutes after heating while the sample was rotated in the microscope.
Using special algorithms, the team tracked the same 33 nuclei, just 13 atoms wide, located in a single nanoparticle. "People think it’s difficult to find a needle in a haystack," said UCLA physics and astonomy professor Jianwei "John" Miao in a statement. "How difficult would it be to find the same atom in more than a trillion atoms at three different times?"
As expected, the allow changed from a slightly random state to one where the platinum and iron atoms were more neatly aligned. However, the scientists noted that the nuclei formed irregular shapes rather than perfectly round ones predicted by long-existing theories. Furthermore, rather than having sharp borders as expected, the arrangement of atoms was more jumbled near the surface.
While those results might not sound exciting, it’s the first that nucleation has been seen in action. "Nucleation is basically an unsolved problem in many fields," said co-author Peter Ercius. "Once you can image something, you can start to think about how to control it." That could lead to better, stronger materials and a deeper understanding of crucial chemical and biological reactions.
Orion and its solid rocket on the launch pad Monday morning at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base.
Trevor Mahlmann
The test version of Orion attached to the Launch Abort System for the Ascent Abort-2 (AA-2) flight test is hoisted up by crane at Space Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
NASA, Air Force, and industry partners pause for a team photo in front of the stacked Abort Test Booster and Orion.
NGIS
Orion, with its Launch Abort System, is lifted for mating to a decommissioned Peacekeeper ICBM for the Ascent Abort test.
NGIS
Nearly five years have passed since NASA first launched its Orion spacecraft to an apogee of 5,800km above the Earth, completing a successful test flight of the capsule intended to carry astronauts to lunar orbit in the 2020s.
Now, NASA is preparing for its second Orion launch, although this flight will be considerably shorter. On Tuesday morning, NASA intends to launch a boilerplate version of Orion—essentially a well instrumented vehicle without any life-support equipment or many other critical systems—on top of a solid rocket booster built by Northrop Grumman.
The rocket is actually an old Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile, now refurbished for commercial purposes. It will launch the Orion to an altitude of nearly 9.5km above the Florida coast in order to test Orion’s launch abort system at the point of maximum dynamic pressure. This will occur about 55 seconds after launch.
“This will simulate a really bad day for Orion, where there’s a problem with the launch vehicle at the worst possible moment,” said Orion Program Deputy Manager Charlie Lundquist in an interview with Ars.
A violent shock
The capsule’s escape from an exploding launch vehicle involves three steps. When Orion reaches its test altitude, the spacecraft’s launch abort system—which resides in a tower above the capsule—will first fire its powerful abort motor to rapidly pull the spacecraft away from the rocket. This will be a violent shock for the vehicle, and NASA engineers are keen to understand the forces the abort motor firing will generate inside Orion—and also to understand how robust engineers will need to build critical components used during crew flights.
A few seconds later, an attitude control motor at the top of the launch abort system will fire to stabilize Orion and orient it properly so that the spacecraft can be released. Finally, a jettison motor will fire to release Orion so that its drogue parachutes can open, followed by its main parachutes, before the spacecraft splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean.
This gallery highlights the phases of the three-minute test of Orion’s launch abort system.
NASA
The launch abort system is the tower at the top of the capsule.
NASA
The launch will be slow, as the rocket motor is pushing a lot of weight.
NASA
At 55 seconds the excitement begins.
Then the capsule must be reoriented for a safe return to Earth.
NASA
Then the capsule is released from the launch abort system.
NASA
First the drogue chutes, then the mains come out. NASA will not seek to recover this capsule.
NASA
The whole test will last only about 3 minutes. “I wouldn’t blink,” Lundquist said. “When the launch window opens, I wouldn’t take a bathroom break.”
The test’s four-hour launch window opens at 7:00am ET (11:00 UTC) on Tuesday, July 2. From a hardware perspective, Lundquist said NASA has checked out all of the systems after integrating Orion with its rocket and that everything looks good. The primary concern is weather, with the potential for rainfall. However, NASA just needs a few minutes of good visibility to obtain good video data during the test.
“We need to fly”
Back in 2010, NASA conducted another test of the launch abort system—a pad abort test that simulated a failure of the rocket on the ground. During this test, Orion could not escape high enough into the atmosphere to have time to deploy its drogue parachutes, so it went right into main parachute deployment.
Since that time the launch abort system has evolved due to the changing nature of Orion’s rocket. In 2010, NASA had planned to launch Orion on an Ares I rocket, which was powered by a solid rocket motor that would ascend more rapidly than the larger Space Launch System, which itself has a combination of liquid fueled rocket engines and solid motor propulsion.
NASA has now been developing Orion in various configurations for nearly 15 years and has spent about $16 billion on the program. At various times the capsule has been tagged as a Mars transit vehicle, a Moon vehicle, a lifeboat from the International Space Station, and more. Now, NASA hopes to use the large and capable spacecraft as a means of getting crews safely to a small station near the Moon, called the Lunar Gateway, which the space agency hopes to build in the early 2020s.
Lundquist acknowledged that it will be good to get Orion flying again, even if its next spaceflight probably won’t occur for another couple of years—likely in 2021 during a test flight of the Space Launch System rocket. “We need to fly,” he said. “We need to show progress. This is a big morale boost to the team to demonstrate the human rated capability of the Orion spacecraft.”
