Month: August 2023

For the first time ever, India’s space agency has landed on the Moon. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) confirmed on Wednesday that its Chandrayaan-3 Mission has succeeded in its bid to land an uncrewed craft on the Moon.

The craft landed on the unexplored south pole of the Moon, and the timing is significant. Just days ago, a Russian lander trying to land in a similar spot crashed on the way down.

“This moment is unforgettable. It is phenomenal. This is a victory cry of a new India,” Indi Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, as reported by Reuters.

You can see the moment that the craft landed on the Moon in the video below, at around 44:45. It’s a nice moment to see all the engineers and workers launch into jubilation as the ship touches down.

No nation or private company has ever landed a human or a craft on the south pole of the moon. It’s believed there is ice on this part of the moon that could be used for drinking water and to create oxygen, which is part of the reason why countries like Russia and India wanted to get there first.

Before this, only the US, China, and the Soviet Union had landed on the Moon. India’s successful Moon landing is expected to help further legitimize the country’s space agency and to help accelerate interest and funding for it. The country has a crewed mission in the works.

In other space news, four astronauts are headed to the International Space Station on a SpaceX spacecraft for a mission set to take off on August 25.

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AMD has announced the next-generation of FidelityFX Super Resolution, or FSR, with the GPU manufacturer adding its own version of frame generation to the suite of optimization tools.

FSR 3 introduces a frame-generation technique similar to that found in Nvidia’s DLSS 3, but without the requirement to own the latest AMD GPU (or even an AMD GPU at all). Unlike Nvidia’s method, which uses motion vector data from individual frames and utilizes specific optical flow hardware on RTX 40-series cards, AMD leverages software to make up for the missing hardware. The process for injecting synthetic frames in between ones rendered by the game remains the same, but its effectiveness now more heavily relies on how well the underlying game is running.

Since FSR 3 will use software to perform the optical flow calculations, attempting to use frame generation on games already struggling to maintain a relatively high frame rate won’t produce great results, introducing stutter and latency. AMD recommends that a game be running at around 60fps already before trying to apply frame generation on top of that, meaning that it’s gear more towards boosting already good frame rates into much higher territory for high-refresh rate display and not a silver bullet for getting poorly running ones more smoothly. This is also the case with Nvidia’s own frame generation technique, despite its use of dedicated hardware, so it shouldn’t be too surprising.

In addition to frame generation, FSR 3 comes with the same upscaling techniques found in FSR 2, but now with the addition of Native AA. This setting doesn’t render your game at a lower resolution, but instead just applies the same anti-aliasing methods to your native resolution to help overcome games with poorly performing anti-aliasing options. This won’t improve performance alone (it might actually hamper it slightly), but AMD says that in combination with frame generation you can enjoy a much higher quality image with a higher framerate overall.

FSR 3 support will gradually roll out, with Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum being the first titles to feature the suite of options later this year. AMD has announced 10 games that will support FSR 3 in the near future, including Cyberpunk 2077, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Black Myth: Wokong, Starship Troopers: Extermination, and more. Despite being an AMD-promoted title, Bethesda’s Starfield was not on the list. Several developers have also partnered with AMD to support FSR 3 in future titles, including Square Enix, Ubisoft Massive, CD Projekt Red, SEGA, RGG Studio, and others. AMD is also working with Epic Games to incorporate FSR 3 into Unreal Engine 5 for seamless integration with existing projects.

AMD says that frame generation and the entirety of the FSR 3 suite is supported on its latest generation of GPUs, which now includes two mid-range options in the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT. It’s also supported on AMD Radeon cards from the RX 5700 and above. Nvidia’s RTX cards from the 20-series and up are also all supported. For simple super resolution support, AMD says older cards from the Radeon RX 590 and better will be supported, while Nvidia support goes further back to the GTX 10-series of cards.

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The world’s corporations produce so much climate change pollution, it could eat up about 44% of their profits if they had to pay damages for it, according to a study by economists of nearly 15,000 public companies.

The “corporate carbon damages” from those publicly owned companies analyzed — a fraction of all the corporations — probably runs in the trillions of dollars globally and in the hundreds of billions for American firms, one of the study authors estimated in figures that were not part of the published research. That’s based on the cost of carbon dioxide pollution that the United States government has proposed.

Nearly 90% of that calculated damage comes from four industries: energy, utilities, transportation and manufacturing of materials such as steel. The study in Thursday’s journal Science by a team of economists and finance professors looks at what new government efforts to get companies to report their emissions of heat-trapping gases would mean, both to the firm’s bottom lines and the world’s ecological health.

Earlier this year, the European Union enacted rules that would eventually require firms to disclose carbon emissions and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and the state of California are looking at similar regulations.

Study co-author Christian Leuz, a finance and accounting professor at the University of Chicago, said the idea “of shining the light on corporate activities that have costs to society is very powerful, but it is not enough to save the planet.” An earlier study of his found that after fracking firms disclosed their pollution rates, those contamination levels dropped 10% to 15%, he said.

The idea is consumers and stockholders would see the damage and pressure firms to be cleaner, Leuz said.

Outside economists agreed.

Leuz and his colleagues used a private analysis firm that finds or estimates carbon emissions of some publicly owned companies and analyzed the carbon pollution from 14,879 firms. Then they compared them to company revenues and profits.

That calculation shows “which activities are particularly costly to society from a climate perspective,” Leuz said. Still, he cautioned that “it would not be correct to just blame the companies. It is not possible to divide responsibility for these damages between the firms that make the products and consumers who buy them.”

The calculations are for only a fraction of the world’s corporations, with many public companies not included and private firms not listed at all, Leuz said.

The economists didn’t identify or tease out single companies but instead grouped firms by industry and by country. And they only used direct emissions, not what happens downstream. So the gas in a person’s car does not count toward an oil company’s emissions or corporate carbon damages.

The calculations use the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s $190 cost per ton for carbon dioxide emissions and the study doesn’t give a bottom line number in dollars, just in percent of profit and revenues. Only when asked by The Associated Press did Leuz estimate it in the trillions of dollars.

At $190 a ton, the utility industry averaged damages more than twice its profits. Materials manufacturing, energy and transportation industries all had average damages that exceeded their profits.

On the opposite end, the banking and insurance industries averaged climate damages that were less than 1% of their profits.

When looking at companies based on countries, Russia and Indonesia were the top for corporate climate damages, while the United Kingdom and the United States were the lowest. Leuz said that reflects the age and efficiency of the companies and which type of industries were based in countries.

Several outside experts said the study made sense within certain limits, while a few found faults with some of the choices of what to count, saying not counting downstream emissions is a problem. Because it doesn’t count those it “does not provide an incentive to reduce these to the level needed,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, which studies global emissions and reduction efforts.

“The results are important but perhaps not that surprising,” said Stanford University economist Marshall Burke. “The bigger take-home is the number of caveats that are needed to do this analysis, indicating what a mess our emissions accounting systems currently are.”

Appalachian State University’s Gregg Marland, who helps track global emissions by country, said “good numbers do allow us to know who is producing the products that consumers want with the least contribution to climate change.”

Nobel prize winning economist Paul Romer, formerly of the World Bank and now at Boston College, said the damage estimates are useful but need to be interpreted accurately, “without the moralistic framing and induced urge to punish.”

Romer used the example of his move from New York to Boston. The initial move would go under the moving company’s corporate carbon damage, but when he took some books from his home they would not. Misusing corporate carbon damage figures could put the moving company out of business and he’d drive his stuff instead, so total carbon emissions would not be changed. Shifting to zero carbon fuel makes more sense, he said.

SEATTLE — With the International Space Station (ISS) scheduled to retire in 2030, NASA is placing a huge emphasis on a seamless shift to future private space stations in low-Earth orbit. Many details of that transition are still being worked out, agency officials say.

“The reason this is so important is because we do believe that the impact of a gap will be disruptive,” said ISS director, Robyn Gatens, during a panel discussion at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference earlier this month.

A few key players who could be impacted by that “gap” include scientists looking to send research experiments to space as well as crew and cargo transportation providers. Given NASA’s expected two-year transition period, a commercial successor must be operating by 2028 to prevent any such complications.

To plan for a smooth shift of research and operations to private space stations by 2030, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a strategy in March of this year that outlines a plan of action. The policy’s overlying objective is for the U.S. to lead in “an emerging marketplace run by commercial and private enterprises engaged in LEO,” ultimately allowing NASA to maintain an “uninterrupted U.S. presence” in low-Earth orbit.

Related: NASA looks to private outposts to build on International Space Station’s legacy

“The reason we at the White House level released a policy on this topic this year is to prepare seven years in advance, so that we do not have to plan for a scenario where there’s a gap,” Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, an assistant director for space policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at the conference.

Because commercial space station services is still an unproven market, however, carrying out such a seamless transition will not be without its challenges. For instance, experts will need to worry about things like technical costs and scheduling risks in terms of design and development of the space station platforms, John Mulholland, the Boeing program manager for the ISS program, said at the conference. “They will get there but it will not be easy.”

Mulholland also underscored the need for increasing the budget for the United States Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), a spacecraft expected to dock on the ISS before performing a safe deorbit and re-entry sequence back to Earth. (NASA is expected to award the contract for the design and production of this vehicle in March 2024).

The new funds are also likely to be used for an upgrade that significantly improves the science capability of a physics instrument on the ISS that hunts for dark matter, cosmic rays and antimatter galaxies. The detector, known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), was installed as an external module on the ISS in 2011. Its upgrade is expected to take an entire cargo flight, which “deserves a plus-up in the budget ahead,” Mulholland said.

With a majority of the research on the ISS funded by the federal government, and the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 suspending the debt ceiling until the end of 2024, “we will be faced with difficult budget cycles in the near future,” he said.

Angela Hart, manager for NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations (CLD) program, said the space agency will pass on its expertise in technology to private space station providers, but such responsibility and involvement will decrease as the latter finds surer footing. Over the next year, NASA will focus on working with partners and the science community to avoid cost overruns and schedule issues, she explained during a talk on Aug. 3.

After the ISS retires in 2030, NASA is likely to operate a national laboratory that would support various commercial platforms. Although details are few, the LEO National Lab, which is still a working name referring to “low-Earth orbit,” is expected to represent all government-sponsored research to be carried out on a combination of available private space stations.

“The idea is that it would be platform agnostic. So it’s not a single place, it’s not a single laboratory,” said Gatens. “One really important tenet that we’re looking at is it needs to support but not compete with commercial platforms and service providers.”

Currently, ISS partners including Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency (ESA) have committed to support the ISS until its phased retirement operation planned for 2030. Russia has confirmed its support only until 2028, however, after which it will focus on building its own orbital space station, whose first module is expected to launch in 2027.