Uber Elevate is Uber’s program to support development of electric powered flying taxis that take off and land vertically. The second Uber Elevate Summit was held this week in Los Angeles and companies from around the world presented the status and plans for the vehicles. Infrastructure, regulatory issues, battery technology, electric power supply, and other issues surrounding such services were discussed.
Here are videos of the presentations on the first day. See the schedule for a list of the session.
Here is a video from Uber showing a generic version of the service they would like to provide to urban customers:
** Here is a video of the talk given by Aurora Flight Sciences Founder & CEO John Langford on how “Aurora is building the certifiable autonomous systems that will enable all of tomorrow’s intelligent aircraft – of any shape”:
** Bell Helicopter presented their concept for an air taxi, though their video shows only the interior of their design:
SpotMini autonomously navigates a specified route through an office and lab facility. Before the test, the robot is manually driven through the space so it can build a map of the space using visual data from cameras mounted on the front, back and sides of the robot. During the autonomous run, SpotMini uses data from the cameras to localize itself in the map and to detect and avoid obstacles. Once the operator presses ‘GO’ at the beginning of the video, the robot is on its own. Total walk time for this route is just over 6 minutes. (The QR codes visible in the video are used to measure performance, not for navigation.)
** General Fusion – “Inside a General Fusion Power Plant”
General Fusion’s magnetized target fusion (MTF) approach uses compression to heat hydrogen plasma fuel to the 150 million degree Celsius temperatures required to release energy from fusion. This energy is then captured in the liquid metal lining the walls of the chamber, allowing it to be converted to electricity. This approach draws on new technologies such as additive manufacturing and high speed electronics to remove the traditional barriers to commercial fusion energy, opening a pathway to clean energy, everywhere, forever.
** EHang – “EHang Egret’s 1374 drones dancing over the City Wall of Xi’an, achieving the Guinness World Records”
an annual global competition for students to inspire creative thinking about science. Students ages 13 to 18 from countries across the globe are invited to create and submit original videos (3 minutes in length maximum) that bring to life a concept or theory in the life sciences, physics or mathematics. The submissions are judged on the student’s ability to communicate complex scientific ideas in engaging, illuminating, and imaginative ways. The Challenge is organized by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
If your video is selected as the winner, you will receive a $250,000 college scholarship, $50,000 prize for your teacher, and $100,000 for your school’s laboratory facilities. In addition, a get a free trip for you and a parent or guardian to receive your award at the live televised Breakthrough Prize Ceremony in November of 2018 (date to be announced).
Here is a video about the competition:
The competition began on April 1, 2018 and will end on July 1, 2018 at 11:59 pm PDT. This video describes the registration process:
The space telescope TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) is set to be launched on April 16th on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. TESS will continue the hunt for planets orbiting other stars as the Kepler exoplanet hunter‘s mission comes to an end.
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is undergoing final preparations in Florida for its April 16 launch to find undiscovered worlds around nearby stars, providing targets where future studies will assess their capacity to harbor life.
“One of the biggest questions in exoplanet exploration is: If an astronomer finds a planet in a star’s habitable zone, will it be interesting from a biologist’s point of view?” said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in Cambridge, which is leading the mission. “We expect TESS will discover a number of planets whose atmospheric compositions, which hold potential clues to the presence of life, could be precisely measured by future observers.”
On March 15, the spacecraft passed a review that confirmed it was ready for launch. For final launch preparations, the spacecraft will be fueled and encapsulated within the payload fairing of its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
TESS will launch from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth. Sixty days after launch, and following tests of its instruments, the satellite will begin its initial two-year mission.
At a press conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., astrophysics experts discussed the upcoming launch of NASA’s next planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
Four wide-field cameras will give TESS a field-of-view that covers 85 percent of our entire sky. Within this vast visual perspective, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors that TESS will observe one by one. The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky.
The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft used the same method to spot more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most of them orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light-years away
“We learned from Kepler that there are more planets than stars in our sky, and now TESS will open our eyes to the variety of planets around some of the closest stars,” said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters. “TESS will cast a wider net than ever before for enigmatic worlds whose properties can be probed by NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope and other missions.”
TESS will concentrate on stars less than 300 light-years away and 30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler’s targets. The brightness of these target stars will allow researchers to use spectroscopy, the study of the absorption and emission of light, to determine a planet’s mass, density and atmospheric composition. Water, and other key molecules, in its atmosphere can give us hints about a planets’ capacity to harbor life.
“TESS is opening a door for a whole new kind of study,” said Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, which manages the mission. “We’re going to be able study individual planets and start talking about the differences between planets. The targets TESS finds are going to be fantastic subjects for research for decades to come. It’s the beginning of a new era of exoplanet research.”
Through the TESS Guest Investigator Program, the worldwide scientific community will be able to participate in investigations outside of TESS’s core mission, enhancing and maximizing the science return from the mission in areas ranging from exoplanet characterization to stellar astrophysics and solar system science.
“I don’t think we know everything TESS is going to accomplish,” Rinehart said. “To me, the most exciting part of any mission is the unexpected result, the one that nobody saw coming.”
TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT and managed by Goddard. George Ricker, of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, serves as principal investigator for the mission. TESS’s four wide-field cameras were developed by MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. Additional partners include Orbital ATK, NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.
Chris Shallue of Google and Dr. Jeffrey Smith of the SETI Institute discuss using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for locating and analyzing exoplanets:
From the caption:
To uncover the mysteries of the universe, astronomers are becoming greedy, making more observations than they can possibly analyze manually. Large photometric surveys from space telescopes like Kepler and the future TESS are no exception and today modern astronomers use artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to help them reveal the existence of exoplanets hidden in many years of observations of hundreds of thousands of stars.
For this SETI Talk, we invited two researchers involved in the Kepler mission and AI to discuss the potential of neural networks to transform astronomy.
Jeff Smith, Data scientist at the SETI Institute, has developed data processing and planet detection algorithms for Kepler since 2010 and is now involved in developing the pipeline for the future TESS mission.
Chris Shallue, a senior software engineer at Google AI has used a neural network to analyze archival data from the Kepler Space Telescope to reveal the existence of two unknown exoplanets, named Kepler-90i and Kepler-80g. After presenting their recent work, we will discuss the impact of this new mode of scientific discovery, where artificial intelligence can assist humans in mapping out parts of the galaxy that have not yet been fully revealed.
The Space Studies Institute (SSI) recently posted videos of talks given at a workshop last fall co-hosted by The Aerospace Corp on topics related to exotic propulsion concepts and experiments such as those involved with the Mach Effect and EM Drive:
** Heidi Fearn, Professor of Physics at The California State University Fullerton, Space Studies Institute NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Team Principle Investigator and SSI Senior Associate presents “The Mach Effect Gravitational Assist Drive ”
Update: Saw this video this evening. Fun to watch Jansson’s enthusiasm and openness about an usual experimental phenomena they have seen repeatedly. I expect, though, they will turn out to be an instrumentation error of some sort.
** Dr. Peter M. Jansson – Associate Professor of Engineering at Bucknell University, President of Integrated Systems – “An Empirical Pursuit of Mach’s Principle: Experimental Results Indicating a ‘Machian’ Inertial Reaction Force is Detectable and Electromagnetic.”
