Month: October 2023

After struggling to land its first in-space manufacturing capsule in the U.S., Varda Space is now looking down under for future batches of space drugs to reenter through Earth’s atmosphere.

California-based Varda Space Industries announced an agreement with Southern Launch, an end-to-end launch service provider based in Australia, to land a future mission at the company’s Kooniba Test Range in the far west of South Australia. Varda’s upcoming mission could launch as early as mid 2024, according to the company.

Meanwhile, Varda’s first in-space manufacturing capsule, which launched in June, is still stuck in orbit after the company was denied reentry to Earth. The U.S. Air Force denied a request from Varda Space Industries to land its capsule at a Utah training area, while the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) did not grant the company permission to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, leaving its first test mission stranded in space.

The capsule was scheduled to land at the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) in September, but it is designed to last for up to a year in orbit. The startup continues to confirm the spacecraft’s health and is working with UTTR for a landing site to return its capsule to Earth.

The 264-pound (120-kilogram) capsule is designed to manufacture products in a microgravity environment (to avoid gravity-induced defects) and transport them back to Earth. For its first mission, the first drug-manufacturing experiment succeeded in growing crystals of the drug ritonavir, which is used for the treatment of HIV, in orbit. Protein crystals made in space form larger and more perfect crystals than those created on Earth, according to NASA.

Although the mission succeeded in producing the crystals in space, it missed a crucial part of in-space manufacturing: actually bringing the products back to Earth. A spokesperson from the FAA told TechCrunch at the time that the company’s request was not granted “due to the overall safety, risk and impact analysis.”

Delian Asparouhov, Varda’s president and co-founder, suggested to the media that the issue stemmed from a coordination lapse among parties involved in the company’s first mission. “If you look at some of the initial challenges with our first mission, it ultimately just comes down to the fact that Varda, FAA, and UTTR have never attempted something like this,” Asparouhov told Ars Technica. “It’s pretty complicated to align all these organizations that have a variety of different regulatory approvals and safety officers.”

The Koonibba test range stretches across 8,880 square miles (23,000 square kilometers) of uninhabited land where the in-space manufacturing capsules can reenter. It seems that targeting a different continent altogether might be easier than navigating regulatory frameworks within the United States.

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The conventional wisdom is that technology and stricter emissions laws have made cars ever cleaner. In theory, a new car purchased today should emit less harmful emissions than one sold 10 years ago. However, a new study has found the opposite is true, due to the increased appetite for SUVs.

Published by the climate action group Possible, and reported on by The Guardian, the study finds that the average new internal combustion car in 2023 is a worse polluter than the average new car sold 10 years ago. That’s because consumers have been increasingly buying SUVs instead of cars. Those vehicles are heavier and burn more fuel. As a result, they are less efficient and emit more CO2 than cars. 

That may not be surprising in itself, but the fact that the market shift is so drastic that it has caused average emissions from ICE vehicles to increase is. Furthermore, the study, which was U.K.-based, found that the wealthiest fifth of consumers bought the heaviest polluters. 

SUVs were more prevalent in affluent areas such as Chelsea and Kensington, both urban areas where off-road utility isn’t much of an issue. Range Rovers and such are jokingly called “Chelsea tractors” in Britain. Possible argues that such buyers would be able to afford electrified cars, and is thus calling for lawmakers to institute a vehicle tax based on emissions.

Of course, the legal landscape is much different in the U.S., where SUVs and crossover are classified as “light trucks,” which means automakers are not subject to the same emissions rules when building them as they would be with cars. It’s why so many companies have abandoned sedans altogether. Until this legal loophole is closed, automakers will continue to push taller-than-necessary vehicles onto the public.

Add to that the threat of increasing pedestrian injury, frontover deaths, a higher risk of rollover, hampered visibility for other drivers, and more tire particulates being shed from heavy vehicles, and there are many reasons SUVs make less sense than cars. For what it’s worth, Possible found that, on average, the least polluting ICE car you can buy in the U.K. in 2023 is a seven-year-old used car.

LONDON/DETROIT — A race is on to certify battery health and performance in used electric vehicles, with a clutch of startups scrambling to help buyers figure out how much a secondhand EV is really worth.

With traditional combustion-engine cars, mileage and years racked up can quickly tell prospective buyers how much they should fork out. That formula does not work with EVs — whose value depends largely on their battery’s driving range and ability to hold a charge.

Until recently, there was no way to measure battery health, hampering used EV sales. But that is changing as companies rush to scale up EV battery tests — some of which take just minutes.

One of them is Altelium, a UK startup that has a developed an EV battery state-of-health test and certificate launching this year in more than 7,000 U.S. car dealers and over 5,000 UK dealers through dealer service providers including Assurant and GardX.

“If the second-hand car market doesn’t work properly, the new car market doesn’t work properly and the electric transition won’t happen,” said Alex Johns, business development manager at Altelium, which says it has received interest from other markets including China. “We’re in an implementation race.”

A battery typically makes up around 40% of a new EV’s price. How that battery is treated is key. Charging an EV rapidly too often, constantly charging when the battery is nearly full or leaving it for long periods fully charged can degrade its battery more quickly.

Austrian startup Aviloo, which has developed a test for dealers and private individuals, has found that after 100,000 kilometres (62,140 miles) EV battery health can vary by up to 30%.

A consumer who wants a used EV with 90% of its range when new could end up buying one with just 70% because of the previous owner’s bad charging habits — which should potentially shave thousands of euros off its value, said Marcus Berger, CEO of Aviloo, whose investors include Volkswagen.

“With an EV, mileage and age don’t tell you anything,” said Berger. “It’s all about the battery.”

CRITICAL INFORMATION

Automakers provide in-vehicle EV range information that critics say is often excessively rosy, making independent tests vital. A lack of visibility has hurt the EV market.

According to EV battery tracking startup Recurrent, U.S. used EV prices in September were down 32% year-on-year, versus a 7% drop for fossil-fuel models. UK used EV prices were down 23% year-on-year in August while those of fossil-fuel models were up at least 4%, according to AutoTrader, which cited “consumer concerns around battery life in used EVs” as cause for concern.

A price war started by Tesla has also weighed on used EV prices.

AutoTrader and Deutsche Automobil Treuhand data show residual values for three-year old EVs in the UK and Germany are over 10 percentage points lower than fossil-fuel equivalents.

“Knowing the capacity of that (EV) battery is going to be critical,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of Mobility R&D at Atlanta-based Cox Automotive, which owns Manheim, the world’s largest used-vehicle auction house.

Driverama, which buys around 100,000 used cars in Germany annually for sale across central Europe, uses Aviloo to weed out EVs below 80% battery capacity or with battery defects, said Chief Operating Officer Eldar Vagabov.

‘RELIABLE NOT RUBBISH’

For Michael Willvonseder, 38, an independent battery test was essential before spending 31,000 euros ($32,820) on a 2014 seven-seater Tesla Model S with 240,000 km on it.

The resident of Wiener Neustadt, south of Vienna, used Aviloo and found the battery had 90% of its original capacity — with a range of 412 km versus 456 km when new.

“I want a car that’s reliable, not rubbish, and I need it to last a long time,” Willvonseder said.

The race to properly value used EVs is becoming urgent because of a looming influx of vehicles.

In Europe, for instance, more than 1.2 million new fully-electric cars were sold in 2021 — and many will hit the used market in 2024 when their lease contracts end.

If used prices remain low, that could hurt new EV prices.

“You need a high functioning used-car market for residuals on new cars to be good,” said Scott Case, CEO of Seattle-based Recurrent, which has signed up 20,000 EV owners to track battery data, and is also working with Black Book and dealers.

Owners who care for their batteries could earn a “potential premium of thousands of dollars” when selling, Case said.

Startups face competition from German certification agency TUV Rheinland, which operates in 60 countries. It has launched Battery Quick Check — jointly developed with startup Twaice — in car workshops across Germany and expects to launch in other markets next year.

“People just want less risk,” when buying a used EV, said Battery Quick Check managing director Katharina Alamo Alonso.

Nothing can travel faster than light, or 299,792,458 meters per second. But a certain group of particles acts as if it can, a team of physicists recently concluded, potentially paving the way for a powerful light source that could reveal new kinds of science.

When electrons are excited and pushed around, they produce light of various energies that can be used to study phenomena far beyond the limits of the naked eye or typical microscopes. Scientists have learned how to generate and corral electrons in machines, to get the particles to produce light of high energies. These light sources—from synchrotrons and cyclotrons to linear accelerators—allow scientists to see incredibly tiny things, like the structure of a molecule. The insights gleaned from this technology have enabled the development of new drugs, the creation of better computer chips, and non-destructive research into fossils. The waves emitted by electrons literally shed light on what would otherwise be invisible.

But these light sources are not common. They’re expensive to build, require large amounts of land, and can be booked up by scientists months in advance. Now, a team of physicists posit that quasiparticles—groups of electrons that behave as if they were one particle—can be used as light sources in smaller lab and industry settings, making it easier for scientists to make discoveries wherever they are. The team’s research describing their findings is published today in Nature Photonics.

“No individual particles are moving faster than the speed of light, but features in the collection of particles can, and do,” said John Palastro, a physicist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester and co-author of the new study, in a video call with Gizmodo. “This does not violate any rules or laws of physics.”

“I think relaxing those requirements on the electron beam and getting away from this idea that every electron has to be moving in unison to produce this very coherent radiation, really democratizes these sources—it makes them more widely accessible,” Palastro added.

In their paper, the team explores the possibility of making plasma accelerator-based light sources as bright as larger free electron lasers by making their light more coherent, vis-a-vis quasiparticles. The team ran simulations of quasiparticles’ properties in a plasma using supercomputers made available by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), according to a University of Rochester release.

Large linear accelerators are some of the most powerful light sources on Earth. Consider the $1 billion upgrade to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Linac Coherent Light Source—simply dubbed LCLS-II—which achieved first light last month. LCLS-II can generate one million X-ray pulses per second, up from the original LCLS’ minuscule 120 pulses per second. The new X-ray pulses are 10,000 times brighter than those produced by LCLS, paving the way for scientists to peer at previously unseeable phenomena, from molecules in plant cells to how materials change phase. All those X-rays are produced by intentionally wobbling (or ‘undulating’) groups of fast-moving electrons, using large magnets. You can read a full breakdown on how linear accelerators like LCLS-II work here.

In a linear accelerator, “every electron is doing the same thing as the collective thing,” said Bernardo Malaca, a physicist at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal and the study’s lead author, in a video call with Gizmodo. “There is no electron that’s undulating in our case, but we’re still making an undulator-like spectrum.”

The researchers liken quasiparticles to the Mexican wave, a popular collective behavior in which sports fans stand up and sit down in sequence. A stadium full of people can give the illusion of a wave rippling around the venue, though no one person is moving laterally.

“One is clearly able to see that the wave could in principle travel faster than any human could, provided the audience collaborates. Quasiparticles are very similar, but the dynamics can be more extreme,” said co-author Jorge Vieira, also a physicist at the Instituto Superior Técnico, in an email to Gizmodo. “For example, single particles cannot travel faster than the speed of light, but quasiparticles can travel at any velocity, including superluminal.”

“Because quasiparticles are a result of a collective behavior, there are no limits for its acceleration,” Vieira added. “In principle, this acceleration could be as strong as in the vicinity of a black-hole, for example.”

To be clear: the electrons in the bunch composing the quasiparticle are not moving faster than light. But the quasiparticle can effectively travel faster than light, the researchers say, if the wavelengths involved are larger than the quasiparticle itself.

The difference between what is perceptually happening and actually happening regarding traveling faster than light is an “unneeded distinction,” Malaca said. “There are actual things that travel faster than light, which are not individual particles, but are waves or current profiles. Those travel faster than light and can produce real faster-than-light-ish effects. So you measure things that you only associate with superluminal particles.”

The group found that the electrons’ collective quality doesn’t have to be as pristine as the beams produced by large facilities, and could practically be implemented in more “table-top” settings, Palastro said. In other words, scientists could run experiments using very bright light sources on-site, instead of having to wait for an opening at an in-demand linear accelerator.

More: I Walked Inside America’s Newest Particle Accelerator

Low-Earth orbit is teeming with space junk. This increasingly cluttered area of space could benefit from a network of lasers that nudge objects at risk of colliding with satellites or spacecraft into safer orbits, according to new research.

While space debris has been a concern for decades, efforts to address this junk have only recently started receiving serious investment. The latest early-stage idea is to mount artificial intelligence-powered lasers on satellites or other dedicated platforms and have them monitor space debris objects. When an object is suspected to be on a collision course with a valuable space asset like the International Space Station (ISS) or a satellite, the lasers could, in theory, nudge that object into a safer orbit.

“Our goal is to develop a network of reconfigurable space-based lasers, along with a suite of algorithms,” Hang Woon Lee, the director of Space Systems Operations Research Laboratory at West Virginia University who is leading the new project, said in a statement. “Those algorithms will be the enabling technology that make such a network possible and maximize its benefits.”

Related: Orbiting debris trackers could be a game changer in space junk monitoring

NASA is funding Lee’s idea with $200,000 across three years. Although the plan is still in its infancy, its ultimate goal is to develop a system capable of making real-time decisions about which space objects to target and to ensure the new orbits are actually safe from further collisions. Using multiple lasers is crucial to efficiently alter the object’s trajectory “in a way that would be impossible with a single laser,” Lee said in the same statement.

Measuring the amount of risk from space debris is quite difficult, as not every object in orbit is capable of being tracked. Humans have flown over 15,000 satellites since the 1950s, of which only about 4,000 are operational satellites, according to 2022 estimates. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), around 34,600 space debris fragments are currently tracked by radar systems on Earth, but another 130 million pieces could be in orbit that are too small to be accurately detected or tracked.

So unlike other space debris removal ideas, a coordinated network of lasers in space could be particularly useful in tackling a space object of any size, researchers say. In March, a NASA report found space-based lasers are advantageous compared to ground-based ones because they don’t need to pass through Earth’s atmosphere, which could deform the beams. Being in space, the beam can more easily pulse the target object into favored orbits, according to the report.

Such AI-powered systems are also beneficial in terms of cost and could eventually be used to track space objects ahead of launches, for example. Last week, Amazon delayed the launch of its first two prototype internet satellites by six minutes to avoid colliding with a space object. Back in July, India had delayed launching its historic Chandrayaan-3 moon mission by three seconds for the same reason. 

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Tesla is now attempting to gauge the tiredness of its drivers through a new feature rolling out called “Driver Drowsiness Warning.” It uses the cabin-facing camera — built to ensure the driver was watching the road and not their phone — to gauge facial characteristics of drowsiness, such as the frequency of yawns and blinks. Rumors of the new feature first circulated in May when a Tesla hacker, known as Green, found indications of drowsiness tracking in Tesla’s software. 

In action, the Driver Drowsiness Warning tool looks at both facial characteristics and driving behavior. An alert will appear on the touchscreen in the cards area, and an internal alarm will sound if the system records indications of tiredness. Drivers can choose to disable the feature by navigating to Controls and then Safety. Though, unless it’s constantly beeping anytime the car moves from the direct center of a lane, there is little reason to do so. 

In any case, the Driver Drowsiness Warning should automatically turn back on during a new drive. However, the feature only activates when the car goes over 40 miles per hour and if Autopilot is not switched on. Even if an alert occurs, the warning system will deactivate if the car drops below that minimum speed. Tesla includes the usual disclaimer in its announcement, cautioning drivers that it’s their “responsibility” to stay alert and focused on the road ahead.