satellites

MENLO PARK, Calif.--If you've seen the Oscar-winning film "The Hurt Locker," you know how dangerous bomb dismantling can be. But researchers have developed a system that they say can allow military and police to disarm explosives without risking anyone's life.

The system, developed by scientists at SRI International, is known as Taurus, and it is a miniature robot that can allow a trained dismantler to remotely do the work that used to require getting up close and personal, often too close for comfort, to a bomb.

According to Tom Low, SRI's director of medical systems and telerobotics, Taurus will be in field trials this summer and is expected to be commercially available by early 2012. While he would not say specifically what the 14-inch wide robot would cost, SRI's goal is to sell it for "less than the price of a squad car," meaning that many police departments, as well as military agencies, could conceivably buy it.

I got a presentation on Taurus from Low yesterday during a visit to SRI as part of my Road Trip at Home series. I've been to SRI before and seen things like wall-climbing robots, but seeing the way that Taurus could potentially help save lives was a much starker reminder of the ways that robots can make a real difference.

Taurus is a cousin of some of SRI's previous efforts into remote-controlled telemanipulation robotics. For years, the institution has worked on systems designed to allow remote surgical procedures, such as a military doctor being able to operate from afar on a wounded soldier. Low explained that this work began in the mid-to-late 1980s, and was intended to allow highly-trained surgeons to work on such soldiers within minutes of them sustaining injuries.

Over the years, this technology led to the creation of more general-purpose robots, such as the M7 system, which could allow security personnel to remotely explore, say, an abandoned bag at an airport. Low explained that it was crucial that the system be easy to use and quick to learn. … Read more

Some satellite radio subscribers woke up this morning wondering where their favorite stations went. Today, Sirius XM completed its network unification, combining all satellite radio stations into a single channel lineup. All cars equipped with satellite radio now have access to the same stations and in the same order, but it also means that some stations have been combined, renamed, or have changed places on the dial.

For the most part, the station unification involves a simple reordering of channels. For example, in cars equipped with XM satellite radio, listeners will now find Hair Nation on channel 39 instead of … Read more

Sirius XM will release Satellite Radio 2.0 this fall, according to a source close to the company. The next generation of the satellite radio subscription service will feature time-shift recording capabilities, increased storage for portable hardware devices, and on-demand content channels.

Because of licensing limitations, you can't record and store Sirius programming in your car. If you miss Howard Stern on the way to work, you're out of luck. But new satellite channels will host popular programs, and make them available for on-demand playback, according to a Sirius insider. That's means the big game will be … Read more

Don't you hate it when you drop $10 million on a new private jet, and you don't have any cash left over to afford the $500,000 in-flight mobile phone system?

A new Android app is out to bridge that gap between those who can go anywhere, anytime and those who can go anywhere, anytime and call their other wealthy friends while they're doing it.

SafeCell, developed by ASiQ Limited Australia, enables users to make in-flight calls with their Android smartphone. At $12,500 for a single license--add $5,000 for multi-channel--it is likely the most expensive Android app yet, but that's still a big savings over conventional half-mil in-flight systems.

"The development of the Android app follows on from our initial Blackberry and Symbian versions...We now see why Android has gained such a high consumer acceptance," ASiQ CEO Ron Chapman said in a press release. "The app is very fast, which means that making a call at 30,000 feet or sending a message is just as simple as if you were using your mobile on the ground."… Read more

A growing number of people are willing to ditch their cable or satellite subscriptions in favor of online, over-the-air, and streaming television options, a new study from the Convergence Consulting Group has found.

According to the researchers, 2.07 million U.S. television subscribers will have "cut the cord" between 2008 and the end of 2011. Between 2008 and 2009 alone, the firm said that 550,000 households cut the cord. Last year, it estimates 1 million households did the same.

Of course, that still represents a tiny fraction of the overall viewership. Convergence Consulting says that at … Read more

It's a startling picture of how dramatic and destructive Friday's massive earthquake actually was.

The quake, which was upgraded today to a magnitude 9.0 by the Japan Meteorological Agency, may have shifted the position of Earth's axis about 6.5 inches, Richard Gross, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the Los Angeles Times. The quake likely sped up the Earth's rotation, shortening the day by 1.8 microseconds, Gross said. Also, the main island of Japan appears to have moved 8 feet, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey told CNN.

To … Read more

So, this is real--and maybe a little too realistic. Penthouse magazine is launching a new HD satellite TV channel in Europe that will broadcast original content in 3D. The new channel will join three HD channels already operated by Penthouse, which has a history of being ahead of the curve when it comes to digital distribution.

According to FriendFinder Network, Penthouse's parent company, the channel will air original content from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. every day. It will also feature 30 hours of new content each month during those times, including soft core and hard core. … Read more

You have probably become used to dropped calls. It is a fact of life, like sofas that won't stay clean and bankers who won't be reasonable.

I would, however, like to warn you that there might soon be a new reason for your conversations about bars, cars, and Mars to be rudely curtailed. Yes, even if you have a Verizon iPhone 4.

You see, space debris might have simply smacked into your Verizon satellite, rendering it just another exploding piece of metal.

I am passing this along from the Telegraph, which passed it along from the Pentagon.

This … Read more

British researchers plan to launch an android into orbit--not the C-3PO and R2-D2 kind, but an Android smartphone. It's not the first attempt to launch an Android phone into space, but it's the first that's aiming to make a smartphone the brain for an orbital satellite.

The STRaND-1 (Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator) is being made from advanced and off-the-shelf components by Surrey Satellite Technology, a spinoff of the University of Surrey, and the university's Surrey Space Centre. The project has a few stated goals.

The first is to see if a smartphone can function in the hostile environment that is space. It will live in a protective case, and a computer on the satellite will put the phone through a number of tests to determine which components (sensors, video cameras, GPS systems, Wi-Fi radios, and so on) do and don't work in orbit.

If enough parts of the handset pass muster, the custom software will be tested next. If that works as planned, the smartphone will be used to operate parts of the satellite. The phone's cellular radio won't be used, as there are no cell towers in space (yet). Instead, the team will communicate with the phone using the satellite radio technology already in place. That said, some of the phone's other systems--processor, RAM, storage, and camera, just to name a few--will be used.

A camera will likely be outfitted so the controllers on the ground can see the screen. This will allow the scienticians to control the phone with their own custom software packages. The ability to load custom software payloads and its open-source nature is the reason why Android was chosen as the first phone OS for the stars.

The satellite will rely on its own GPS, guidance, and thrusters, but will use the phone as a backup to the main computer. Then, if all goes well, it will take over as the main "brain" and control the satellite's functions. … Read more