Day: August 5, 2018

Is That A Mosquito? Or Maybe A Drone?

It is still Sunday……

A few years back I watched an episode of “Elementary” about a murder committed by drone…..and Sherlock was spied on by a drone the size of a mosquito……an excellent show but what are the chances that the drones will get that small?

I had to go to Google…..will drones get that small and could they be used against our own population for whatever reason?

The DARPA Robotics Challenge was a showcase for how very large, very expensive robots could potentially be useful in disaster recovery and high-risk environments. Humanoids are particularly capable in some very specific situations, but the rest of the time, they’re probably overkill, and using smaller, cheaper, more specialized robots is much more efficient. This is especially true when you’re concerned with data collection as opposed to manipulation—for the “search” part of “search and rescue,” for example, you’re better off with lots of very small robots covering as much ground as possible.

Yesterday, DARPA announced a new program called SHRIMP: SHort-Range Independent Microrobotic Platforms. The goal is “to develop and demonstrate multi-functional micro-to-milli robotic platforms for use in natural and critical disaster scenarios.” To enable robots that are both tiny and useful, SHRIMP will support fundamental research in the component parts that are the most difficult to engineer, including actuators, mobility systems, and power storage.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/darpa-wants-your-insect-scale-robots-for-a-micro-olympics

There is much more on this situation….it will start with the military and move to the private sector….where would this stop?

Further reading:

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-tiny-drone-the-us-military-is-testing-2015-6

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2013802/U-S-military-drones-small-look-like-insects.html

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2578439/u-s-military-unleashes-swarm-of-tiny-intelligent-micro-drones/

Waters Of Mars

Always good to see life imitating art……As a Doctor Who fan I found it interesting that an episode of the 11th Doctor (David Tennet) (Waters Of Mars) is about a massive reservoir of water found on Mars…..and presto chango…..news from scientific world……

Italian scientists searching for evidence of water on Mars—even signs that it was there billions of years ago—believe they’ve found a lake filled with the liquid just a mile beneath the Red Planet’s southern polar ice cap. Though outside experts have yet to confirm the finding, the body is thought to be 12 miles wide and potentially saturated with salts like sodium, magnesium, and calcium that would lower the water’s melting point and allow it to stay in liquid form despite the cold temperatures, Popular Mechanics reports via the study published in Science. Per CNN, it’s based on 29 observations of Mars’ Planum Australe region during a 3.5-year radar survey, completed in 2015 by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft.

A mile below the ice-covered surface, variations in radar signals revealed what appeared to be a lake similar to those found beneath Earth’s ice sheets. The AP notes the researchers weren’t able to establish the depth of the lake, which it reports prevents them from specifying “whether it’s an underground pool, an aquifer-like body, or just a layer of sludge.” Still, the scientists say they “interpret this feature as a stable body of liquid water on Mars,” and they’re already imagining a connecting system of waterways. There’s a major caveat, though: Subsequent radar scans, including by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, have failed to find the same signs. They remained elusive “even when we recently summed together [thousands] of observations to create CATSCAN-like 3D views of both polar caps,” a scientist tells CNN. That said, the research team claims it, too, had difficulty establishing the lake’s presence until it fixed a data processing issue.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/underground-lake-liquid-salt-water-mars-180725154222214.html

There is more news from Mars…..water was a great find….and then there was news that other efforts might have been sabotaged…..

Don’t you hate it when you travel millions of miles from Earth, only to accidentally destroy the thing you were looking for?

That’s what may have happened with NASA’s Viking landers on Mars in 1976, which were looking for life. While this theory has been touted before, a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets adds more evidence to the idea.

http://www.iflscience.com/space/nasa-may-have-accidentally-destroyed-previous-evidence-for-life-on-mars/

Let’s hope that the discovery does not have the disastrous results as the Doctor Who episode…….and let’s hope that they, NASA, will be more careful with the finds and the analysis.