MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--While I'm sure that many of the people in the room were familiar with prediction markets, I wonder how many of them had ever seen an active one up close and personal before.
Providing that sense of deep immersion, of course, was exactly the point of an exercise run Monday during a session of Singularity University's executive program by Melanie Swan, a Silicon Valley hedge fund manager. Swan, the principal of MS Futures Group, had tasked small groups of students with coming up with world-changing product ideas and then simultaneously had the students vote in an online prediction market looking at which product and team would be rewarded with the most faux-venture capital.
Despite the fact that some technical problems got in the way, the point was made: prediction markets, given enough active participation, are increasingly seen as an excellent way to arrive at the answers to any number of questions, whether it's sales figures, who will win presidential elections, or who will get the most VC funding. Indeed, the winning technology concept--a pill that could cure cancer--and team were accurately prognosticated by the market.
For the group of superstar achievers like the students in the executive program, this was but one piece of a meticulously constructed nine-day education that many hope will supplement and enhance already successful careers in a wide range of disciplines.
Other sessions included looks at the state-of-the-art in medical research from Daniel Kraft, an instructor in Stanford's cancer/stem cell biology institute, and Chris deCharms, the founder of Omneuron, a company working on new MRI technologies; future forecasting from Peter Bishop, the coordinator of the futures studies program at the University of Houston; a workshop in the future of medicine and biomedical technology from Stanford developmental biotechnology professor, Stuart Kim; and a talk by Harvard Law School professor and Internet law expert Johnathan Zittrain.
And that was all just on Monday.
Four start-ups emerged
Earlier this year, Singularity University (SU) ran its inaugural summer session, a nine-week program based at NASA's Ames Research Center here in the heart of Silicon Valley, aimed at giving the best 40 of more than 1,200 applicants a highly concentrated education in a series of exponentially growing technologies like biotechnology and bioinformatics; nanotechnology; AI, robotics, and cognitive computing.
For those students, who were chosen based on having demonstrated top-level academic rigor, entrepreneurial and leadership skills, an interest in global issues and who were seen as already being at the top of their chosen fields, the nine weeks were a marathon of long days and nights of lectures from world-leading thinkers, workshops in the technologies that could shape the future and group projects centered on coming up with ways to positively impact a billion people. Already, four start-ups have emerged from the summer session.
But now the first of SU's nine-day executive program is in full swing, and according to co-founder, X Prize Chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, the goal now is to distill the best parts of the nine-week SU version and present them to the new students in a way that will be of the most use to them.
"The executive program is really focused on providing the information in a much more organized and digestible fashion for executives, addressing the issue of what's in the lab today and where is this going in five years," said Diamandis (see video below). "What is the key terminology that (the students) should know about these fields, what are the top ten breakthrough milestones that you should be watching out for, and, ultimately, how are these breakthroughs going to affect you, your company and your industry."
That's obviously a very ambitious mission statement, but for many of the 20 people lucky enough to be taking part in the executive program, Diamandis and his fellow organizers have succeeded in pulling together something very worthwhile, even as it is one of the most intense experiences of their lives.
"It's like taking medical school and boiling down four years into about four days," said Michael Gillam, a physician who runs the health care innovation lab at Microsoft. "That will give you a sense of the sort of depth of the material" covered during the executive session.
From the beginning, SU's founders--futurist and "The Singuality is Near" author Ray Kurzweil; Diamandis; and ex-Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail--had planned on the institution offering both the longer summer sessions and shorter, three- and nine-day executive programs. In the process of actually putting them together, though, Ismail said, the three-day version got scrapped for simply being too short.
Instead, the executive program's first group of students--20 people of varying ages and professions, half of whom are American and half international--arrived at Ames on Friday having paid the $15,000 fee, each in search of something a little bit different.
Sole focus is on tomorrow
For Gillam, the rationale for taking nine days off from work--he said he'd come on vacation from Microsoft since it would have been impossible to take part in the summer session--was crystal clear: to get a deep dive in the technologies that are coming screaming down the line at us.
"You can go almost anywhere today and hear about historical trends (or a) deep analysis of today," Gillam said. "But there's virtually no place where the sole focus is on tomorrow, and where we are going. That was extremely intriguing and what captured my attention."
For Peter Platzer, a currencies and commodities trader from New York, attending SU was all about having meaningful interactions with the diverse and accomplished group of faculty and staff and to get a better understanding of the kinds of exponential technologies that are being discussed there.
And according to organizers, some of the students, whose numbers include venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and government representatives, even came solely for the chance to meet, and potentially invest with, members of the start-ups that came out of the summer session.
Alumni network
Those potential relationships are possible because one of the things that's already developing at SU is a strong alumni network. That's evident at the executive program in the group of summer session graduates who have returned as faculty assistants--who also happen to be able to sit in on all the deliberations and discussions--and in the number of faculty who themselves have come back for more.
Diamandis said that there's no doubt that SU is fostering an ongoing network that is sure to benefit all who join. For example, he suggested that if, in the future, a graduate wanted to find someone who was a European robotics expert, they would likely be able to find such a person in the SU program. Because the executive program will be repeated in February and again in April, and the nine-week program next summer, there will only be more members of the network as time passes.
And as proof that SU graduates take their membership in that network seriously, Ismail pointed out that though it's only been two months since the summer students graduated, they'd already had a reunion.
To faculty member Dan Barry, a former NASA astronaut--and cast member of CNET News parent company CBS' "Survivor"--the main difference between the summer session students and those in the executive program is that while the former tended to be very smart people at crossroads in their lives and careers, the latter are very established in their respective businesses and are seeing how they can become aware of, and perhaps utilize, the future technologies being discussed.
Still, Barry said he sees more similarities than differences between the two groups. Both, he said, are "interested in technology and the future and are concerned about the state of the planet and the people on it."
For Barry, taking part as part of the faculty has been a refreshing change of course that, thanks to the "potential and excitement (I see) reflected in their eyes," has re-energized him professionally.
"When I talk with other astronauts...about space, we tend to talk about technical things," Barry said. "When I talk (to the students) it helps me to remember...what's spectacular about going to space."
At NASA Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, Calif., two K10 rovers navigate a lunar-like landscape. The K10 program is designed to help NASA do more advanced surveys and surveillance of the moon, and for the time being, the robots are being deployed in a series of similar environments across the planet.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--For a few minutes Thursday, as I steered one of NASA's K10 intelligent robots across a small field of rocky, sandy terrain, I could almost imagine myself piloting the rover across the surface of Mars or the moon.
Until, that is, I realized I had pretty much no idea what I was doing, and saw that my struggles to steer the rover forward were actually sending it backward. Given that this little robot is worth at least as much as a mid-range Mercedes, I was relieved to see the eagle-eyed scientist standing a few feet away from it as it approached a group of large rocks that could send it sprawling, a switch in his hand capable of stopping it dead in its tracks.
I was spending the afternoon at NASA's Ames Research Center here, talking with Terry Fong, the director of the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG), about the K10 rover program--an initiative designed for remote scouting operations on the moon or Mars. To be sure, the program has been around for a few years, but Fong and his team are constantly tweaking the robots, and so what I got my hands on Thursday (remotely, at least) was a great deal more sophisticated than would have been the case just a few years ago.
We had driven out to Ames' faux lunar/Martian landscape, a 40-meters by 80-meters field of rocks and dirt tucked away in a quiet corner on the western side of the giant NASA facility. I've been to Ames many times, but this was by far the most peaceful part of the grounds I've visited: the shriek of a red-tailed hawk as it soared high overhead was the only real sound besides a gentle wind.
Fong took us into a small shed just outside a small trailer, and sitting inside was K10 "Red," one of the two rovers his team has here. It's called red because it has a big patch of red on its body. Its twin, K10 "Black" was nearby, already prowling around, lost in its own lunar fantasy, different from K10 Red only in that its body is black.
The two rovers (see video below, but be prepared for substantial wind noise) are built to travel at "human walking speed," Fong explained, and can handle between 90 percent to 95 percent of the terrain here. That includes some softball-size rocks, plenty of loose sand and dirt and even a few steep inclines. Fong allowed that some of the bigger rocks, maybe soccer ball-sized, might be a problem, and the steepest part of the incline might cause the rovers to lose traction. But in general, these are sturdy little robots built to withstand some truly out-of-this-world conditions.
According to NASA, the K10 robots are crucial elements of the space program's directive to achieve more complete investigation of the moon than was possible during the Apollo program.
"Human missions to the moon will provide numerous opportunities to advance the scientific exploration of the lunar surface," a NASA brochure about the K10 robots reads. "Initially, human exploration of the moon will be for short periods of time--no more than a few weeks per year. To make use of the time between human missions, robots can be used to perform highly repetitive and long-duration tasks, such as site-mapping and science reconnaissance.
"NASA's K10 robots are designed to be remotely operated on planetary surfaces and act as scouts for human explorers. Scouting is an essential phase of fieldwork, particularly for geology, to help establish priorities and scientific objectives. Robotic scouting can improve human exploration of the moon by providing mission planners with detailed ground-level information to supplement and complement data collected by orbiting satellites."
Imagine, in the future, the Constellation program kicks in and NASA begins sending manned missions to the moon. Fong explained that the K10s would be essential to maximizing the research that could be done in between visits by astronauts. Indeed, they could be left behind after one mission and then be deployed to gather intelligence for the next manned mission, data that could complement what NASA can see with instruments in lunar orbit.
And while the K10s I saw ran off of Lithium-Ion laptop batteries with a life of about four hours, Fong said K10s that stay on the moon could run on an ongoing basis on solar, or on power cells.
Continuous navigation
To look at them, today's K10s are unchanged since their introduction eight years ago. But pop the hood, as it were, and what you find is an ever-changing Red Hat Linux-based brain. Every few months, Fong said, he and his team replace the standard PC laptops that serve as the K10s nerve centers with newer and more powerful ones. Even considering what a top-of-the-line laptop costs, a couple new computers are pretty cheap compared to the tens of thousands of dollars' worth of lidar, navigational equipment, sun trackers--which allow the robots to figure out precisely where they are, an advantage over compasses when they're being used for field tests in far northern parts of the world--3D surveying instruments and more.
Fong said that while much about K10s remains the same today as in the past, one recent innovation has been building in the ability to process data on the go, rather than what was possible in early missions on Mars, where rovers had to stop, calculate, move, stop, calculate, move and so on. That means, he said, that now, K10s can make real-time navigation decisions, progress that means they can cover ground much faster than their predecessors.
A K10 mini, a one-fifth scale robot NASA's intelligent robots group has built.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)All told, explained Fong, a K10 robot is smart enough to figure out a path between point A and point B and determine which parts of the terrain it encounters it needs to skirt due to big rocks or other dangerous conditions.
In some cases, the IRG scientists will test the limits of what the K10 can do. Fong said that during trials last summer at the lunar-like Black Point Lava Flow, in Arizona, he and his team tweaked the K10s' algorithms so that the rovers would push on, despite confronting bush clusters that compute as rocks to be avoided.
"The robot says, 'Hey, it's rocks,' so we make it a lot more aggressive," said Fong.
Five football fields
One reason the K10s are so important to NASA is that they feature 3D laser scanners capable of surveying as much as 500 yards ahead and identifying and analyzing objects as small as pencil erasers. Similarly, the rovers carry downward pointing cameras that take very high-resolution pictures every few feet, images that can then be used to help the mission planners decide where and how to explore in the future.
Back in a lab at Ames, Fong reached into a large suitcase and pulled out what he called a K10 mini (see video below). This is a one-fifth size model rover that is an experiment to see what's possible on a much smaller scale.
The idea behind the mini rover, Fong said, was to try to understand what's possible with a robot that small. And while it's only the size of a small dog, he explained that its basic software was the same as its larger cousins, and was actually built up around the smallest Thinkpad laptop the IRG scientists could find.
And now, the IRG team is looking toward what's next for the K10s. And that, said Fong, is to determine how best to marry the rovers with human teams so that they can be used to support explorers instead of being autonomous. The Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers were built to do everything on their own, the K10s can be employed for wide ranges of tasks that aren't efficient or productive for the folks in space suits. And not only that, but because the K10s can be mounted on the lunar exploration vehicles NASA expects to send its personnel around on the moon in, they can be used for research, surveying and exploration wherever the astronauts go.
But at the same time, NASA knows they have a great deal of utility as autonomous explorers, and on the moon, which is within reasonable striking distance of the Earth, there's even less risk involved than there would be on Mars with putting the K10s through rigorous paces since, even if one got damaged, the next manned lunar mission could come and fix them.
Of course, if you're part of the IRG team, or you're an astronaut trained in operating, or working with, a rover, you probably have a lot of confidence about what the robot's limits are. Why else would anyone trust you with such an expensive toy?
For me, however, clutching that joystick back at Ames, trying to get my K10 to go right, or hop over that little rock, every wrong move seems like potential catastrophe. I think it's going to be a while before anyone lets me play with one of those thing without having a guy watching every move I make with it, ready to push his big red button to keep me from sending it sprawling and costing taxpayers a Mercedes' worth of cash. And I'm OK with that.
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for iPhone.
OK, that's probably a little overly dramatic, but the new NASA iPhone app, which was released Friday, is pretty cool.
With NASA's iPhone app, space geeks can access all kinds of information about their favorite missions.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)Designed to provide information, updates, and images on all current and scheduled NASA missions, the app--which can be found in Apple's App Store under the name "NASA app for iPhone--nicely allows you to search for any specific mission, say, Constellation, and then find information and images just for that project.
"Users can access NASA countdown clocks, the NASA Image of the Day, Astronomy Image of the Day, online videos, NASA's many Twitter feeds," and more, the space agency said in a press release about the app. It also allows users to track where the International Space Station is at any moment, as well as other spacecraft orbiting the planet, in three different views: maps with labels and borders, available visible imagery of satellites, and satellite positions overlaid on maps with country labels and borders.
Already, NASA nuts--you know who you are--have had access to much of this information online. But now, having it all available in a free iPhone app is going to keep these people happily staring down at the screen of their devices no matter where they are.
And for NASA, anything it can do to get more people excited about its various missions and projects is a good thing as it struggles for public resources and attention in an era where the economy is in trouble and people are increasingly distracted by other things.
The rear section of the first-ever completed Ares I solid rocket booster, which will be test-fired on Aug. 25. This signifies a major milestone for NASA's Constellation program, which will replace the Space Shuttle program, and which is intended to send humans back to the moon.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)PROMONTORY, Utah--"This is the world's biggest solid rocket motor."
Those eight words, with which Kevin Rees described the Ares 1 rocket to me on Monday, are at once entirely understated, and hugely consequential. Rees is the director of test services for ATK, the primary rocket contractor on NASA's Constellation program.
Since 1981, the Space Shuttle has been NASA's main program. But now, with just a few more Shuttle launches left, the space agency--and the huge ecosystem of contractors who support it--are seriously turning their attention to Constellation, the next program. Constellation is expected to take Americans back to the moon, and may someday take them to Mars. And like the Apollo and Mercury programs in the 1960s and '70s, Constellation is designed with a crew capsule that will be placed on top of a giant rocket--in this case, the Ares I.
And here before me, in what can be described as essentially a huge shed at ATK's massive complex about two hours north of Salt Lake City, the first of those rockets is resting on its side, awaiting its first moment of glory, a planned August 25 test-firing.
Though the Ares I has been on the drawing board for some time, and many people have seen imagery of it, no reporter has ever seen one fully assembled. As part of my Road Trip 2009 project, I had the honor of being the first, and of sharing the first pictures with you.
The Ares I rocket is a five-segment behemoth, fully 154 feet long. By comparison, the Space Shuttle used two four-segment rockets, each of which was 126 feet long. But lest you think that an entirely new program means entirely new equipment, think again.
I was told throughout my visit to ATK that every effort is being made to reuse components from the Space Shuttle program. And that's why every single 12.2-foot-wide cylinder used to make this first Ares rocket--known as DM 1, or developmental motor 1--has been recycled from previous Shuttle missions. Indeed, the various components that make up DM 1 have been used in 48 different Shuttle launches.
Still, it's not as if the pieces are just picked up out of the ocean and thrown back into the rotation. Rather, they are painstakingly reconditioned and made ready for reuse, as they have been throughout the Shuttle program. That's one way NASA has kept costs down during the program, and how it intends to do so going forward into Constellation.
The reason it's possible for ATK to reuse segments from Shuttle launches in the Ares program is that Ares rockets have a lot in common with those used in the Shuttle program. To be sure, the Shuttle used two boosters, and didn't have a capsule installed on top, while Constellation will comprise a single booster with an Orion crew capsule on top. But the boosters will be very similar, beginning with their exact same width and segment dimensions.
There will be some differences, however.
For example, the insulation on the interior of the cylinders is different on the Ares segments than it was with the Shuttle, and one big reason is an effort to be better stewards of the environment than in the past. For instance, the insulation of the Shuttle segments used asbestos, while the Ares segments have done away with that poisonous material.
'A little bit of melancholy'
But as demonstrated by the fact that the segments in DM 1 have been into space so many times as part of the Shuttle program, there is a heavy emphasis on reuse. Even the ATK professionals couldn't always tell right away whether a segment that was being worked on was for the Shuttle or for Ares.
At one point in my visit, we passed by a spot where sections were being put together to make segments for what, apparently, will be the very last Shuttle mission. While nothing around the work there signaled this momentous detail, it's clear that the folks at ATK are well aware of it.
Artist's rendering of the Ares I crew launch vehicle during ascent.
(Credit: NASA/MSFC)"There's a little bit of melancholy" about it, said one of my hosts, Gregg Kotter, program director for the Ares I First Stage Five-step motor program. Still, whatever sadness the people here feel seems more than offset by the excitement at being part of what NASA clearly hopes will be its standard-bearing program for another 30 years or so.
Yet the Shuttle work is still very much in evidence. One stop on my ATK tour was to the propellant mixing facilities where it was explained to me how the crews here make the solid fuel that is used to light the Shuttle--and soon, the Ares--rockets.
We weren't able to go inside the facility to see the systems because it was a Monday, and on Mondays they are mixing propellant. From a safety standpoint, I can see why they don't want visitors in a facility where someone is actively mixing a fuel that can launch a Space Shuttle.
But again, given that ATK here is working simultaneously on both Shuttle and Ares, my hosts had no way to know which program was getting the propellant being worked on while we were there.
And when asked which program the fuel was for, a technician gave about as simple an answer as he could: "Shuttle."
We did get to talk a fair bit about how the propellant mixing is done, and one thing was clear: It takes a whole lot of fuel to get a giant rocket off the ground. Each segment of the rocket requires 40 giant (600-gallon) mixing bowls full of propellant, which is made up of a binding agent polymer; iron oxide, a burn catalyst; aluminum powder, the fuel source; an epoxy bonding and curing agent; and ammonium perchlorate.
When mixed, it becomes a true solid. I'd heard the term "solid fuel" before, but had never really understood what it meant. In fact, it's just what it sounds like: A fuel that, as I saw inside a small device called an igniter--which is placed at the top of the rocket--looks like plastic, and which is very much a solid. In fact, it's brown, flexible and cool to the touch.
Once mixed, the propellant is cured for 44 hours, and then applied to the interior surface of the rocket segments, where it is then cured for another 52 hours.
After the rocket segments are fully assembled and filled with propellant, they are then put through an X-ray and ultrasonic inspection to make sure they don't have any bubbles in them. If they do, Kotter told me, they can either be rejected altogether--which is an extremely unpopular option--or technicians can try to assess the problem and see if it can be fixed. It wasn't clear how often this happens.
Gentlemen, start your engine
For the teams getting ready for the August 25 Ares I test-fire, it has been a long time coming. Some members, Rees said, have been working on this for more than two years.
Once everything is in place, the ignition of the rocket--which will be laid flat on its side and will shoot its massive blasts of fire back into a giant pit of sand and rock--is an extremely fast process. First, a pellet is dropped into the igniter--a small device that is larger than the tactical motor on a lot of rockets, and which has 300 pounds of propellant inside--which will then set off the main rocket bore. From zero to full thrust takes 600 milliseconds.
Assuming the test goes well, it will only be a matter of time before ATK starts shipping rocket segments, one at a time, to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where they will eventually be assembled into a rocket that the space agency will launch into space. Those segments will be put on trains that will take ten days or so to cross the country before they reach Kennedy.
And if you were to see one of them on the road, you wouldn't be able to tell if they were for the Shuttle or for Ares. But if you happened to have a chance to ask someone in the know which they were for, there's a good possibility they'd give you a one-word answer: "Shuttle" or "Ares."
For the next several weeks, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be writing about and photographing the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota and Colorado. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.--If you're in the planning stages of sending people back to the moon, as NASA is, you'd better know as much as possible about it.
That's one of the reasons NASA launched, in late 2007, the Lunar Science Institute (LSI), an organization with an annual budget of $10 million for the study and research of the moon, as well as the role of supporting and inspiring new generations of lunar scientists.
According to Greg Schmidt, LSI's deputy director, it is a "virtual" institute with a staff of just eight or nine people at any given moment. LSI is focused on collecting and sharing Web data and communications, chiefly among the scientists doing research on behalf of the institute, and who work in teams around and outside the country that are competitively selected.
This robot, called K-10, is part of the Lunar Science Institute, and NASA's, efforts to research the conditions that lunar rovers will encounter on the moon. Here, it traverses the Arizona desert.
(Credit: NASA)While lunar science has been around for more than 40 years as a formal discipline, LSI is focusing on a different set of problems than the researchers were in the 1960s. Yet, the institute also benefits from the work done decades ago. "We have a tremendous amount of data that we can pull together to answer the questions our scientists have," Schmidt said.
LSI is built around studying three main areas. The first is looking at the lunar science of the moon itself: the hard rock geology or the moon; lunar minerology and researching the moon as a planetary object, Schmidt explained. The second is studying the science on the moon, science that involves human exploration. And the last is science from the moon, which Schmidt said means thinking of the moon as an observational platform.
To Schmidt, that is one of the most exciting scientific areas imaginable. And part of that involves a proposal from one of LSI's principle investigators, University of Colorado astrophysicist Jack Burns, who is interested in putting a radio telescope on the far side of the moon.
"The far side of the moon is the quietest radio area in the inner solar system, and would make a perfect place for such a telescope, a very long wave telescope," Schmidt said. "We can peer further into the universe's history than with anything else if we had such a telescope. And I'm very confident that there's at least one Nobel Prize in this work. Totally confident."
He acknowledged that it will be years before any such telescope is put in place. After all, it will take a huge amount of research into the most efficient and cost-effective methods of undertaking such a project.
"I just can't wait until we do that," he said. "But, man, what an interesting question for humanity to be able to answer something like that."
Encouraging the next generation
One problem facing the lunar science community, Schmidt argued, is that the scientists who have been prominent in the field are aging. And that means that in order to keep the field fresh and growing, new blood has to be brought in.
With that in mind, another part of LSI's mission is to help find and encourage young people to join the field. LSI hosts an annual lunar science conference, timed to the anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the moon, and it happens that this summer's edition of the conference will go on just as we reach the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's pioneering July 1969 trip to the moon.
Last year, he said, one of the best parts of the conference was seeing the innovative ideas that current lunar science graduate students are coming up with and nurturing those students and their ideas.
And while LSI is primarily a NASA organization, it couldn't achieve its goals without partnerships with research teams in many other countries. Among them are teams that are deeply involved with lunar research in India, China, and Japan, as well as England, where there are 14 different different academic and industry members, Schmidt said.
"We're getting the best lunar science from the UK as part of the Lunar Science Institute," he added. "And they have an equal seat at the table as our principal investigators."
At next month's LSI conference, meanwhile, the researchers will finally get a chance to see the first data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as from the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which NASA plans to launch next week.
"Both of those together are just incredibly exciting, so...we're hoping to get the first mission results from LRO," he said. "We won't see a lot yet, but there is a lot of data that is going to be collected, in multiple wavelengths with LRO...What we're expecting to see in July are the first images from the LRO camera. And so, that I think is exciting in itself. These are going to be the highest-resolution images that have been taken since the Apollo era."
Schmidt explained that one of the most exciting elements of this project is that the lunar researchers have a chance, for the first, time, to compare high-res images taken today by the LRO to the images taken more than 40 years ago by the Lunar Orbiter, and which have recently been reconstructed at NASA.
"Our idea is taking those (older images) and comparing those to the LRO pictures that are going to be taken and seeing what we find that has changed," Schmidt said. "And we expect to find quite a lot. The moon, it's not a static body. I like to think about it as our cosmic companion for 4 billion years. And so, it is what we think of as a witness plate for what has happened in the Earth's neighborhood. It records not just the early bombardment that happened in the Earth's system, but also the bombardment that's happening now."
With its $10 million annual budget, LSI is giving grants to teams throughout the United States and in other countries that are doing the next rounds of lunar research. And to Schmidt, that is crucial as the world stands ready for the next stage of lunar exploration. Within years, it is expected that we'll be visiting the moon again, and now is the time, he clearly believes, to encourage the kind of research that will best prepare us for those visits.
"I can still remember when Apollo 11 landed, and I can still feel those emotions," he said. "We want to bring (the moon) within our sphere and what (LSI is) about is bringing it within our scientific sphere...It's just really important for us to do this right now, and to bring in a new generation to do it."
On June 21, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
On Thursday, NASA announced it has released a set of 3D photo collections of the International Space Station and its Mars rover. The photos were created using Microsoft's Photosynth technology, which automatically stitches together hundreds of images from standard digital cameras.
(Credit: NASA)NASA said on Thursday that it has released a collection of 3D photographs of the International Space Station and its Mars rover.
The photos, which were created using Microsoft's Photosynth tool, show both internal and external views of the space station, as well as a model of the rover.
Because the images were prepared using Photosynth, users can zoom in or out of any of the images, allowing them to see "details of the space station's modules and solar arrays or...a more global view of the complex."
At the same time, the Mars rover images depict the latest iteration of the hardware being crafted at NASA's Mars Science Laboratory. The rover, NASA said, is expected to be launched to Mars in 2011.
Both collections are made up of hundreds of photos taken with standard digital cameras that have been stitched together automatically using Photosynth.
And this isn't the first time NASA has used Photosynth to present images of its various projects. In 2007, it employed the Microsoft Live Labs technology to showcase a 3D view of the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
Co-founded by noted futurist Ray Kurzweil and X Prize CEO and chairman Peter Diamandis, Singularity University will begin offering a 10-week interdisciplinary course in exponentially growing technologies this summer.
(Credit: Singularity University)Starting this summer, some of the world's leading thinkers in exponentially growing technologies will be gathering annually at NASA Ames Research Center, in the heart of Silicon Valley, for 10 weeks of discussions on how to change the future. And you could join them.
The gatherings will be part of what is known as Singularity University, a brand-new academic institution co-founded by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, X Prize chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, and former Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail, and anyone can apply.
Singularity University is less a traditional university and more an institution that will feature intensive 10-week, 10-day, or 3-day programs examining a set of 10 technologies and disciplines, such as future studies and forecasting; biotechnology and bioinformatics; nanotechnology; AI, robotics, and cognitive computing; and finance and entrepreneurship.
The founders anticipate that students will come from all over the world, and they hope the program results in the founding of new companies, the evolution of scientific and technological thinking, and the solidifying of professional and personal networks among the highly-accomplished students and faculty.
To Kurzweil, Singularity University is a place to problem-solve and talk about the results of the most recent iterations of the exponentially growing technologies that have shaped modern life. Among them, he said, are vacuum tubes, integrated circuits, chips and microprocessors.
Now, he said, we are on the threshold of an explosion of the newest such technology, including 3D and self-organizing molecular circuits. And to Kurzweil, the ability to bring together the leaders in this wide range of fields is a rare opportunity to jump-start the future. (The program's name is based on the theories Kurzweil popularized in his best-selling book The Singularity is Near.)
For Diamandis, who previously co-founded the International Space University (a space studies program on which Singularity University will be modeled), the idea of building an interdisciplinary academic institution around the concepts of exponentially growing trends seemed natural--and powerful.
So, after bringing together 50 leading thinkers for a founding conference at NASA Ames, Kurzweil, Diamandis, and Ismail got the backing of Ames' director, Pete Worden, and a commitment of space at the center--a highly visual Silicon Valley landmark along highway 101--for the annual summer programs.
In addition to the core 10-week course, which will be open to graduate and post-graduate students, Singularity University will also offer 3-day and 10-day executive programs. The shorter version will be targeted at CEOs and CTOs, while the 10-day program will be aimed at rising-star executives who want to add to their knowledge and networks.
"These programs are there to give executives a look at what's in the lab today," said Diamandis, "and what is likely to hit the marketplace in the next 5 to 10 years."
This summer, Singularity University will kick off with just 30 or so students and will piggyback on the International Space University, which will host 120 students at NASA Ames. But in following years, the new institution is expected to expand to about 120 students, each of whom could be the next Larry Page or Sergey Brin.
"If we do our job correctly," Diamandis said, students "will meet, (discover their) common visions, and start companies together. They'll have a chance to match a nanotech expert from Russia with an AI expert from Silicon Valley and see what magic happens at the boundaries."
A stellar faculty
As evidence of how seriously many people in the fields of focus take Singularity University, it has pulled together what can only be described as a very impressive roster of faculty.
Among them are The Sims and Spore creator Will Wright; George Smoot, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics; Dan Kammen, co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change team that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore; Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist; and Stephanie Langhoff, NASA Ames' chief scientist.
Befitting the serious nature of the program, its curriculum is not for the faint of heart. The first phase, said Diamandis, is a series of plenary lectures in which all students take the same coursework and learn together about each of the 10 disciplines.
"It's about learning the vocabulary" of the disciplines, Diamandis said, "the basic principles, so they can communicate better between themselves."
In the second phase, students will take deep dives into one of the 10 tracks, typically not one in which they already specialize, learning together in 10-person classes.
And in the final phase, the entire student body will come together to work on a team project.
"This is where the student body will focus as a group in taking on one of the world's grand challenges," said Diamandis, dealing "with global hunger, pandemics, climate change," or something similar.
And while the program's students can expect to work very hard and be deeply immersed in their studies, the faculty will be equally challenged.
"It caused all of us who were invited to be faculty to pause and think about it," said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley-based forecaster who is teaching in the Singularity University program. "We're expected to be there for the full nine weeks, which is a breathtaking commitment of time."
But for Saffo, who is helping to organize the future studies and forecasting track with Kurzweil, being intimately involved with the program at every level is precisely the point.
"The real benefit of teaching is being able to participate," Saffo said. "It would be a waste of time to just show up, give a couple of lectures, and leave."
And while their involvement at any level would bring Singularity University the prestige it needs to recruit talented students and faculty, both Kurzweil and Diamandis said they would be teaching each summer.
For Kurzweil, that means teaching some of the future studies and forecasting classes, and for Diamandis, it means helping to build the curriculum and teaching where he is needed.
The students, meanwhile, will need to pony up some serious money to take part in Singularity University. The base fee for the 10-week program is $25,000, though Diamandis said that there will be a significant number of full and partial scholarships available, funded by private companies, and other contributors.
Ultimately, the results of Singularity University won't be known for some time. But given the people behind it and the likelihood of a steady stream of highly talented students, the odds of it producing the kind of deep thinking and world-changing technology the founders hope for are good.
"I have no doubt that society gets ever more complex, and the consequences of ever-growing technology become ever more difficult to anticipate and respond to," said Saffo. "So having a 10-week program of smart, committed people looking at the challenges from an interdisciplinary point of view can only be a good thing."
With Google Earth 5.0, users can now journey to the planet Mars, where they can see 3D views of the Red Planet and dive deep into its canyons.
(Credit: Google/NASA/USGS)While you might never become an astronaut and have the chance to ride a Mars Rover on the Red Planet, Google has now rolled out an Earth-bound alternative for the masses.
With Google Earth 5.0, which was unveiled Monday, users can now explore Mars in the same way they've been able to instantly view 3D images of much of our own home planet for several years in previous versions of the software.
The Mars project, which was implemented in conjunction with NASA, is intended both for casual investigation of our planetary next-door neighbor, as well as serious research. NASA and Google hope scientists and other researchers will use the new Google Earth Mars feature to share data about the fourth rock from the sun.
"The mode enables users to fly virtually through enormous canyons and scale huge mountains on Mars that are much larger than any found on Earth," NASA said in a statement. "Users also can explore the Red Planet through the eyes of the Mars rovers and other Mars missions, providing a unique perspective of the entire planet."
The Mars feature of Google Earth 5.0 lets users see the Red Planet from the perspective of rovers like the NASA Mars Pathfinder Rover.
(Credit: NASA/Google/JPL/University of Arizona)Additionally, the new Mars features allows Google Earth users to view much of the most recent satellite imagery from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as other craft circling the planet. And users are able to add their own generally sharable 3D content to the larger map of Mars.
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NASA said Thursday that it has tested a balloon that ultimately will be able to carry one ton of research equipment to more than 100,000 feet.
(Credit: NASA)
NASA said Thursday it has performed a test of a prototype super pressure balloon that could carry as much as a ton of research equipment to heights of 110,000 feet or more for up to 100 days.
The balloon, which was launched on December 28, 2008, from McMurdo Station in Antarctica, is 7 million cubic feet and is said to be the largest single-cell, super-pressure, fully sealed balloon ever flown. When the project--which NASA is conducting in coordination with the National Science Foundation--is completed, the space agency should have a 22 million cubic foot balloon to work with.
NASA said that long-duration high-altitude balloon missions are far more cost-effective than satellites and that a chief benefit is that the instruments used can be easily retrieved and re-used.
The test flight made it to an altitude of 111,000 feet and has been at or near that height for 11 days so far.
"The flight tested the durability and functionality of the scientific balloon's unique pumpkin-shaped design and novel material," NASA said in a statement. "The material is a special lightweight polyethylene film, about the thickness of ordinary plastic food wrap."
The space shuttle Discovery touching down at Kennedy Space Center on June 14, 2008. NASA now says it is going to solicit proposals for how to display the shuttles once the program ends in 2010.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)Want your very own authentic space shuttle?
Well, if you're part of the community of "educational institutions, science museums and other appropriate organizations," NASA just might have something for you after the shuttle program ends in 2010.
On Wednesday, the space agency issued a request for information (RFI) soliciting ideas for what to do with the shuttle orbiters and main engines once the program ends.
Sponsored by NASA's Office of Infrastructure, the RFI seeks input from appropriate officials and decision makers from museums, science centers, institutions, and other organizations dedicated to education or educational outreach with experience in public display of space hardware and nationally-recognized historical artifacts," NASA said in a release. NASA will use information gained from this RFI to develop strategies for eventual placement of two space shuttle orbiters and a minimum of six unassembled space shuttle main engine display "kits."
The agency said the purpose of the initiative is to decide whether institutions or other members of the community have the appropriate wherewithal to display a shuttle or engines, including the ability to fund such efforts.
Interested applicants have until March 17, 2009 to respond.
It's probably safe to say, however, that NASA doesn't intend for the recipients of the shuttles to fly them, and as such, probably won't be providing astronauts with the delivery of the spacecraft.
