NASA looks at humanoid robots to explore the world. NASA hopes that humanoid robots can help us explore the moon and Mars.

NASA looks at humanoid robots to explore the world

According to Space, the space agency NASA is eyeing a privately built space robot named “Apollo” to continue investing in future space missions.

NASA has partnered with a small robotics company in Texas to continue the space agency’s decades of work developing humanoid robots. Soon, such robots may be sent into orbit or even to other planets to assist astronauts in their work.

Texas-based Apptronik has long partnered with NASA under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract program to develop the capabilities of Apollo, a humanoid robot that the company is developing to perform ground-based tasks such as logistics, manufacturing and healthcare in The house is to improve. Meanwhile, NASA has shown strong interest in adapting Apollo and robots like it to become assistants to astronauts living and working in orbit, as well as on the moon and even Mars.

They may even one day act as remote-controlled “avatars” on other worlds, with Earth-based human operators as their pilots.

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Optronics has placed special emphasis on the modularity of the Apollo design, especially its adaptability for logistical tasks. This humanoid robot with a height of 5.8 inches and a weight of 160 pounds (73 kg), will work for about four hours with each battery pack, and the load capacity of it will be 55 pounds (25 kg). Although its primary market is currently more dependent on terrestrial customers, NASA’s interest in it should not be surprising.

The flexibility that the Apollo robot promises means it should have some degree of physical reprogrammability and personalization. This robot currently has different skill levels, autonomous functions and various tools that can be equipped with them, but it will probably evolve more capabilities as it progresses and develops.

To that end, NASA has applied decades of robotics expertise to help develop Apollo in areas such as robotic mobility and software design principles for safe human-robot interactions.

Shaun Azimi, head of the Dexterous Robotics Team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said in a statement: “Together we can expand this innovation in this important area by leveraging NASA’s expertise in safe mobile robots for commercial projects.” We are proud to see the result of our efforts in robotics technology that will benefit the American economy and help humans work safely and productively on Earth and potentially in space exploration. This robot will help astronauts and operators on Earth to focus more on science and ground activities and other more important tasks than building shelters or digging rock samples.

In addition, these robots can be useful in the operation and maintenance of drilling and production facilities in other worlds. This would dramatically reduce the cost to NASA of maintaining these missions. After all, building a concrete human habitat from moon rock would be much cheaper and more practical than shipping one from Earth around the world.

Therefore, the presence of robots in future missions of NASA’s Artemis program may be critical to establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon and someday on Mars.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is running the CoSTAR project, similar to the Apollo robotic robot. An initiative that focuses on designing commercially available robots for autonomous navigation on the Moon and the Martian subsurface.

We also can’t forget NASA’s Dragonfly mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2027 and land an autonomous rover on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in 2034.

While NASA’s current humanoid robot, Valkyrie, could be effective in assisting astronauts, adapting existing or developing commercial robots for space operations is too promising for the space agency to ignore.

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program contracts to use private company vehicles (such as SpaceX’s Dragon capsule) on space flights. Proponents say it makes sense to apply the same strategy to space robots, especially given the level of maturity in the private sector robotics industry.

However, it’s not all in NASA’s favor. Just as the Apollo program was one of the main drivers of semiconductor development in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, NASA’s collaboration and funding of advanced robotics development will almost unpredictably benefit the macro economy. This almost guarantees that technology developed for future NASA missions will eventually serve the needs of consumers and other sectors of society, such as academic researchers and non-governmental organization operations.

The development of advanced robotics for space will have far-reaching effects on autonomous vehicles, manufacturing, and many other areas, and their impact will be felt strongly by society.

Evacuation of a Russian city due to the risk of falling missile debris. Luna-25 is Russia’s first lunar lander mission in nearly 50 years, and Russian authorities must temporarily evacuate the entire city below the flight path of the Soyuz rocket.

Evacuation of a Russian city due to the risk of falling missile debris

Russia’s long-delayed Luna-25 robotic mission is on track for launch on August 11, according to a report from the state-run TASS newspaper.

The Luna-25 probe is designed to make a soft landing on the moon’s south pole as the world’s major space players turn their attention to extracting ice from the moon’s south pole region, which can be turned into water, oxygen, and rocket propellants.

Luna-25 is Russia’s first lunar lander since 1976 and will be launched atop a Soyuz 2.1a rocket at the Vostochny space base in eastern Russia.

First, Russian authorities must temporarily evacuate the entire city below the Soyuz rocket’s flight path because of the risk of its propellants falling on the city.

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The first Russian moon lander since 1976

Russian Aerospace Corporation NPO Lavochkina, manufacturer of the Luna-25 lander, announced in a statement that work on the Luna-25 spacecraft has been completed.

According to the plan, this spacecraft is supposed to be the first spacecraft in the world to make a soft landing on the surface of the moon in the South Pole region.

The European Space Agency had planned to test a navigation camera, called Pilot-D, on Luna-25, but canceled its participation in the project after the start of the Russia-Ukraine war last year.

According to TASS, Luna-25 is the first domestically built lunar probe in modern Russian history. The statement of NPO Lavochkina adds that the lunar lander will use complete Russian elements and the latest achievements in the field of space instrumentation.

The statement also explained that the main objective of the mission is to develop basic technologies for a soft landing in the circumpolar region and conduct surface impact studies at the South Pole of the Moon.

The lander will study the upper surface layer around its landing area as well as the lunar exosphere for approximately one Earth year. The purpose of this mission is to help develop lunar soil landing and sampling technologies.

According to Reuters, the Russian government will evacuate the entire city of Shakhtinsky on August 11 before the launch of Luna-25.

This city is located in the Khabarovsk region of Russia and to the southeast of the launch site, which will be evacuated early in the morning since it is below the projected launch path and there is a possibility that the Soyuz rocket boosters will hit it after separating from the spacecraft.

Residents will leave their homes at 7:30 a.m. and then be escorted to a location where they can watch the launch and eat a free breakfast. They could be back home in three and a half hours, and a local Russian official was quoted as saying that there was a one-in-a-million chance that any missile debris would actually land on the city.

Russia competes with India to reach the south pole of the moon

Landers of the former Soviet Union sits on the surface of the Moon’s equatorial region. Luna-25, on the other hand, will land on a rough and difficult surface at the south pole of the moon, near Bogoslavsky Crater.

It was originally expected to be the first lunar lander to land in the region as it was scheduled to land in October 2021. However, a delay of almost two years means that India may reach this uncharted territory sooner.

India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission has reached the moon’s orbit and if everything goes according to plan, it will land on the moon’s south pole around August 23.

According to a separate article from Reuters, Luna-25 is expected to be five to seven days on its way to the moon and spend roughly five days in lunar orbit before its soft landing. This means that contact with the lunar surface will be imminent, but Luna-25 has a chance to reach the lunar surface before Chandrayaan-3.

The last Russian lunar lander mission, Luna-24, was carried out by the former Soviet Union in 1976. This mission collected approximately 170 grams of lunar soil and returned it to Earth.

The first images of the “Dark World” telescope were published. The first images of the “Dark World” telescope were published.

The first images of the “Dark World” telescope were published

The European Space Agency’s Euclid Space Telescope is on its way to deciphering the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy in the universe.

This telescope sent its first images to Earth on Monday (July 31). While these portraits are mesmerizing, they also confirm that the space observatory’s instruments are working just fine.

Euclid’s success is really exciting because, simply put, the probe aims to map the dark half of our universe by analyzing billions of galaxies up to about 10 billion light-years away.

Better yet, the European Space Agency also says the ambitious map will be drawn in “3D” as it includes an element of time to show how these realms have evolved alongside the maturing cosmos.

Yannick Mellier, an astronomer at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics and the Euclid Consortium, said in a statement: “The first remarkable images obtained using the Euclid visible and near-infrared instrument open a new era for observational cosmology and statistical astronomy.” . They represent the beginning of the search for the nature of dark energy.

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Euclid was launched from the Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida on July 1.

The telescope, now about a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, joined the James Webb Space Telescope on July 28 at what is known as the second Lagrange point. Over the next few months, scientists will continue to test the device until it officially begins development on its epic space probe. The images you see above were taken with an instrument on Euclid called VIS, which stands for “Visible Instrument”.

As its name suggests, the VIS records the universe through the part of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to the human eye, with wavelengths between 550 and 900 nanometers.

On the left, you can see the full field of view of the visible tool, and on the right, a zoomed-in version of it. The European Space Agency equates the area of the magnified image to about a quarter of the width and height of the full moon as seen from Earth.

Some of the most striking visual instrument images include cosmic rays shooting straight across the field, masses of unmistakable bright stars and, most importantly, a few fuzzy bubbles.

The European Space Agency explains that these bubbles are the galaxies that Euclid will examine as it makes a very detailed map of the universe, dark energy and all.

“Ground-based experiments don’t give you images of galaxies or star clusters, but here they are all in one field,” visible instrument scientist Reiko Nakajima said in a statement. Looking at them is beautiful and enjoyable.

Next, we come to NISP, the Euclid Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer. As the European Space Agency says, NISP has two roles. First, it can image galaxies in infrared light, or light invisible to the human eye that ranges from 950 to 2000 nm in the electromagnetic spectrum. The James Webb Space Telescope also uses such infrared wavelengths, which is why scientists often say it is unveiling an invisible universe.

Second, NISP can measure exactly how much light each galaxy emits, which can tell us how far away those galaxies are. The NISP images you see above are almost identical to the visible toolkit, with the left containing the full image while the right is a zoomed-in section.

The light from deep space also passes through several filters before reaching the NISP detector, and this provides very surprising results. These filters can do things like measure brightness at a specific infrared wavelength, which helps NISP’s galactic distance measurements.

Knud Jahnke, from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, who works on the telescope, says: “Although these first test images are not yet usable for scientific purposes, I am happy that the telescope and its two instruments are now They work well in space.

In this image, which looks like a computer screensaver from the early 2000s, each streak represents a separate light spectrum from a galaxy or star.

Euclid has a device called grism that can split cosmic light into a full spectrum of wavelengths before sending the data to NISP.

With this process, scientists can determine, for example, how far away a particular galaxy is, as well as what the galaxy is chemically made of.

“We’ve seen simulated images, experimental images,” NISP instrument scientist William Gillard said in a statement. I still find it hard to believe that these images are from the real world. Very accurate and amazing.

What is Euclid’s next work?

Dark energy and dark matter pose some of the biggest and most fascinating questions in astronomy today.

None of these phenomena can be seen with the human eye, yet they seem to hold our universe together.

For starters, space is constantly expanding outward in every direction like an unburstable balloon. But the strange thing is that this expansion seems to be happening at a rate that scientists can’t explain by taking into account all the observable things in our universe.

Therefore, there must be something else accelerating cosmic expansion, which scientists call “dark energy.”

Meanwhile, in this expanding universe, there seems to be some kind of glue that makes sure the galaxies stay in place and determines how they are arranged. For example, scientists calculate that intergalactic gas and stars often move as if some kind of extra gravity is pulling them along. This is probably because some kind of invisible matter surrounds the galaxies in which these objects live, and therefore exerts gravitational forces on them. That invisible “glue” is known as dark matter.

Dark matter and dark energy are not necessarily made up of one or even two things. They can consist of a bunch of different components. Scientists just use these as expressions to describe gaps in our understanding of the universe.

The only thing we know for sure right now is that the dark universe exists.

But if Euclid’s mission to accurately map the universe is completed within the next six years or so, scientists may have some clues about what the dark universe is.

General Josef Aschbacher, director of the European Space Agency, said in a statement: “I have every confidence that the team behind this mission will succeed in asking Euclid to reveal a lot about the 95 percent of the universe that we currently know little about.”