Servo technology turns press design upside down
A view inside the press showing two of the connecting rods that pull down the press slide
The Strange Case of Mexican Emigration
Don’t always agree with VDH (though mostly I do) but he’s always got something thoughtful to say. There is a huge dichotomy in how the US and Mexico treat our borders in the general sense and a near infinite chasm in how we view our joint borders. Essentially Mexico promotes illegal emigration to the US, and treats illegal immigration as a serious crime….how is it they protest when the US gets fed up?
An artist’s rendering of the proposed telescope on the Malapert crater on the moon. Moon Express/ILOA
Read more at: Wired: The Private Plan to Put a Telescope on the Moon
So yes you need an Earth link but I think Earth would be below the local horizon and a mast with a laser or smaller high frequency antenna would provide that link. I imagine the picture was marketing/art departments idea and it is cool.
The whole mission concept is cool and seems to make a lot of sense.
One thing we forget in this ‘later’ more ‘modern’ age is that historically science and scientific instruments were private, and they were not inexpensive it was a rich man’s game and often rich patron’s egos that got us to to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Looks like a great application of a ‘striped down’ mod of a SpaceX Dragon vertical lander…
AWST Staff: Source: Aerospace Daily & Defense Report : NASA Calls For Private Lunar Lander Partners
Piggybacking on the Google Lunar X Prize and various commercial endeavors, NASA has offered its expertise and test facilities to potential lunar-lander partners who might be able to help mount scientific missions to the Moon’s surface as early as 2018.
A request for information published July 2 seeks concepts for “an industry-developed robotic lander that can be integrated with a launch vehicle for the purposes of supporting commercial (and potentially future NASA) missions.”
The U.S. space agency is interested in landers that can put two classes of payload on the lunar surface — 30-100 kg. (70-220 lb.) and 250-450 kg. Potential missions “of interest to NASA” include prospecting for volatiles at the Moon’s poles, sample return and setting up geophysical networks.
“U.S. industry is flourishing with innovative ideas based on NASA’s pioneering work to explore space, including low-Earth orbit and the Moon,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations (HEO) in Washington. He suggested that, data from commercial lunar landers, like space station research, could aid the agency’s plans to explore an asteroid and Mars.
“New robotic commercial capabilities on the Moon could extend that research in important ways, just as NASA expertise could help advance commercial endeavors to reach the Moon.”
The HEO directorate is proposing no-exchange-of-funds partnerships under Space Act agreements or other mechanisms, offering its technical expertise, unique test facilities, and some hardware and software to private companies willing to put up funding for lander development.
“NASA envisions that an integrated team comprised of NASA civil servants and the industry partner personnel could work together to design, develop and test landers,” the RFI says.
Responses to the RFI are due Aug. 2. Interest in private lunar landers has soared over the past three years after Google offered $30 million in prizes through the X Prize Foundation to teams that can land a robotic spacecraft on the lunar surface, have it move at least 500 meters, and send back video, images and data. Presently 22 teams worldwide are in the running, working against a deadline of Dec. 31, 2015.
‘Nuff said, really cool stuff
MIT TR: Kickstarter Campaign Wants to Send Tiny Satellites out of Earth Orbit
Space loaf: This artist’s rendering shows a three-unit CubeSat with a propulsion unit.
A mini-satellite, no bigger than a loaf of bread, could push itself out of Earth’s orbit as soon as next year if a crowdfunding campaign to support development of a diminutive propulsion system succeeds. If such small spacecraft can be made to operate far from Earth, they could one day make inexpensive expeditions to asteroids, Mars, and beyond.
Now that’s neat, the ion thruster is pretty crude and tech leaders doubt it will work, but things ‘scale’ oddly, a honeybee can only fly because at it’s scale air is much more viscous…sticky…than we experience it. So it’s possible this simple small relatively short lived little exploring skiff will sail. And just think, if we can flip out these tiny surveyors to asteroids and comets for this sort of investment the haul of new knowledge will be huge.
The American Interest: Missionary Creep in Egypt by Adam Garfinkle
Simply stunning, a revelatory blog on the why the US struggles to make head or tails of what is going on in Egypt and the Middle East. It’s long and has a couple of longer links but it’s well worth it because it explains our bias so clearly, explains the Muslim middle eastern ‘socio-political-theological’ context and then shows the incompatibility of means and ends that have made such a mess of the last decade or more. If you are interested/frustrated by the unfolding mess read this article it’ll give you new context, though it won’t solve the frustration.
@ TechRadar:IN DEPTH Will pliable displays ever take off? :Want to know when your phone will become your flexible friend?
Good survey of the oncoming tech…
Read more at: FPGAs, LEDs, tools and wearables, new products in the Maker Shed
…FPGAs are intimidating beasts to most makers, including myself. Thankfully, Justin Rajewski’s insanely popular Kickstarter project caught our eye. The entire goal of the Mojo is to make getting started with FPGA and digital design as easy as possible. An FPGA allows you to design digital circuits (basically a bunch of logic gates connected together to perform a specific task). The designs that you create can range from something as simple as a counter to blink an LED to something as complex as a multi-core processor (or an Audio Visualizer).
With a microcontroller (like an Arduino), you write software that gives you control of the the built-in peripherals but is limiting in that you can often only complete one action at a time. With FPGAs you are not creating software; you’re designing the hardware. Instead of writing code to run on a fixed processor with fixed peripherals, you get to design your own circuit.
Justin’s done a fantastic job of releasing new tutorials for getting started with Electronics, Logic and the Mojo on the Embedded Micro website. He’s also began work on an IDE specifically for the board, to make it even easier to develop for. Read more about this flexible, powerful board and pick one up from the product page. …
…and the other stuff they highlight is cool to!
The Atlantic: The Great Wall of Texas: How the U.S. Is Repeating One of History’s Great Blunders
Great little piece, good use of references to Rome, China and Great Britain’s Empire. The title is a bit ExcelaCorridor sneering but that’s the editors fault. I am proud to have been born in Britain and be a Naturalized US citizen. I’m also a wonk-geek-nerd-intellectual-libertarian I think the sealing of the border is fantasy/pandering/bunk, a channel for more neo graft cronyism.
We need immigration reform and border security but in a nation the size of the US, physical barriers are a boondoggle. Reform immigration and border security becomes easier since the vast huge immense majority of folks coming will want to come through the check points and follow the rules. The guys out in the desert, at sea or in the booneys looking to cross without being checked will be much easier to spot.
Too complex an issue you say? Not so say I:
What about quotas, dumping, the hoards who will flood in, all those aliens? You wail…and let’s get this right this what helps give zombie flicks their grist these days….
Read more: It Is Now Common Knowledge That US Drones Bomb Civilian Rescuers
The title’s misleading, actually what it’s reporting is the supposed common tactic of striking first responders to a missile strike with a second strike. This tactic called the Double Tap after the Assassins supposed rule of always putting two bullets in the kill zone to ensure the ‘client’ is ‘terminated’ is/was supposed to be a preferred TERRORIST tactic.
From a very cold metric it does many ‘good’ things from the view of the ‘operator.’
The use of drones in general outside of the battlefield to me becomes more and more problematic the further it moves from an area of active combat. However, with strict targeting it may just be necessary if distasteful tactic. And, If Double Tap is used in a combat zone then I’d see it as acceptable, little or no different from artillery. But if used for covert assassination strikes the DT used indiscriminately without specific targets may be a crime, it certainly is antithetical to our ( or what should be our ) moral standing in the world.
So I see DT as a real problem, but I have to point out that the trembling mention/implication that drone strikes are some how more indiscriminately lethal than manned aircraft strikes is laughable. The issue is that there are vastly more drone strikes these days and while drones are used in close battle, manned aircraft are more frequently tasked for that support. The weapons used are the same except that manned aircraft can and do carry larger more indiscriminate weapons, but generally in combat situations were the civilians are under cover or absent. The drones far from the battlefield are bound to get more ‘collaterals’ and as the enemy avoid all out battle and the effort is mainly about interdiction/suppression we are going to get this disturbing apparent trend.
Once more showing that it is easy for activists to use statistics to make an ugly truth worse than it is. It also points out why the broad drone campaign is problematic as it draws on and why DT beyond the battlefield may be as stupid as as it is abhorrent.
This World and Others 