Tag: space
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NASA to Test Hand-Held DNA Sequencer in Space Station
30 September 2015. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will take part in experiments testing the feasibility of a portable DNA sequencing device in space. The proof-of-concept test of the hand-held MinIon DNA sequencing device is a project of National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The MinIon, made by Oxford Nanopore Technologies in the U.K., is…
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Allied Minds Forming Space Signaling Company
17 September 2015. Allied Minds, a research commercialization company in Boston, is forming a new enterprise harnessing space satellites to detect wireless signals from earth for maritime, emergency, and commercial applications. The company, HawkEye 360 Inc., is licensing research on radio-frequency communications from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, designed initially for U.S. defense and…
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Astronauts to Eat Space-Grown Vegetables
10 August 2015. Astronauts in Expedition 44 on the International Space Station plan to eat fresh leafy vegetables today grown in their own lab. The red romaine lettuce on their menus is grown in a plant system, nicknamed Veggie — officially known as Veg-01 — and marks the first crops both grown and consumed in…
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Commercial Space Launch Site Slated for New Zealand
2 July 2015. Rocket Lab Ltd, a company aiming to make orbital space launches frequent and less costly, says it plans to build a launch site in New Zealand, with completion scheduled by the end of 2015. The company says test flights will begin soon after completing construction of the site, with commercial operations planned…
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Space Object Taxonomy Sought in $50K Challenge
22 May 2015. A new challenge on InnoCentive seeks a scientifically-based method for describing orbiting space objects with the fewest characteristics possible, but still predicts the objects’ behavior. The competition has a total purse of $50,000 and a deadline for submissions of 20 July 2015. InnoCentive in Waltham, Massachusetts conducts open-innovation, crowdsourcing competitions for corporate…
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NASA Challenge Seeks Elements for Human Presence on Mars
8 May 2015. NASA is asking the public for ideas on ways to establish a long-term presence of Mars in a new challenge offered by InnoCentive. The competition has a total purse of $15,000 and a deadline for submissions of 6 July 2015. InnoCentive in Waltham, Massachusetts conducts open-innovation, crowdsourcing competitions for corporate and organization…
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New Company Founded to Develop Centimeter-Accurate GPS
Video: Centimeter-level GPS used in a virtual reality headset (University of Texas, Austin) 6 May 2015. An engineering lab at University of Texas in Austin designed a low-cost portable global positioning system with precision to a few centimeters, and started a company to take the technology to market. A team from UT-Austin’s Radionavigation Laboratory, led…
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Robotics Designed for Laundry and Other Uncertain Tasks
6 February 2015. Computer scientists designed and tested decision-making models using artificial intelligence for robots to plan and perform unstructured and ill-defined tasks, from doing household laundry to conducting search-and-rescue operations. The team led by Siddharth Srivastava, now with United Technologies in Berkeley, California and Shlomo Zilberstein from University of Massachusetts in Amherst described their…
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XPrize Awards $5.25M for Lunar Technologies
26 January 2015. A competition to develop new technologies for landing and robotic exploration of the moon awarded $5.25 million in 9 prizes to 5 private companies, as part of the Google Lunar XPrize challenge. The companies — from the U.S., Germany, Japan, and India — received the prizes for their design and development of…
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SpaceX Mission to Carry University Pathogen Research
12 December 2014. The next launch of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station will carry a set of specially-configured petri dishes testing the effect of microgravity on the virulence of salmonella bacteria. The research is the work of microbiologists at Arizona State University and engineers at University of Colorado in Boulder. Salmonella…