NASA’s Parker solar probe started its journey by setting a record — the fastest rocket launch in history. It’s gone on to set several other records as it studied the sun in unprecedented detail. NASA now reports that Parker has broken two of its own records during its latest trip past the sun. Setting records is all well and good, but NASA also says the probe is working splendidly and collecting valuable data.
Studying the sun up close is a complicated endeavor. As you’d expect, the surface of the sun is extremely hot, but the corona around it is 300 times hotter at more than 1 million Kelvin. Spacecraft can’t linger in the corona too long, so Parker travels on long elliptical orbits that pass through the corona every few weeks. NASA designed a new type of heat shield to keep the probe safe during these transits through the super-heated plasma. It has a 4.5-inch layer of carbon composite foam between two sheets of carbon fiber. NASA noted the heat shield performed above expectations after Parker’s first trip through the corona.
Parker completed its fourth close pass of the sun late last week (known as perihelion), and NASA got the all-clear from the probe over the weekend. The spacecraft reported “Status A,” which is the best of four possible status conditions. That means all the probe’s systems are in working order and it succeeded in collecting the requested science data.
During that trip through the corona, Parker reached a speed of 244,255 miles per hour (about 393,044 kph). That breaks the previous record of 153,454 miles per hour (247,000 kph), which was also held by Parker following its November 2018 transit. Parker also smashed its previous record for the closest manmade object to the sun at a distance of just 11.6 million miles (18.6 million kilometers). Previously, it set the record at 26.55 million miles (42.7 million kilometers).
We can expect the Parker Solar Probe to continue setting records through 2024. With each pass, Parker will increase its speed and move closer to the surface of the sun. By the end of the mission, NASA expects Parker to reach 430,000 miles per hour (690,000 kph), which is 0.064 percent the speed of light. At that point, it will pass within just 3.8 million miles (6.2 million kilometers) of the sun. Parker has already revealed tantalizing details of the solar winds and magnetic fields. No one knows what it might discover in the coming years.
Robotic hands on steering wheel while driving autonomous car. 3D illustration.
Whatever your thoughts about how quickly autonomous vehicle technology will move forward, there is little doubt that it will need to rely on better and less expensive sensor technology than we have available today. Current test vehicles often have sensor suites costing over $100,000, and still can’t deal with all types of road and weather conditions.
To help provide some background context and assess the future potential of various sensor technologies, we assembled a panel of industry experts at Electronic Imaging 2020. They represented the major sensor modalities in automotive use today: lidar, radar, cameras, and thermal imaging. Everyone learned a lot, and there were some great takeaways that we’ll share with you in this writeup of the session.
To kick off the panel we set the stage with some background and goals for the session. For context, it is clear that there is a continuum of applications. It ranges from today’s “Level 2/2+” ADAS deployments all the way to the Holy Grail of Level 5 pursued by Waymo, with dozens of companies aimed at Level 4 shared-vehicle fleet deployments that are somewhere in between.
As goals for the session, we set out 1) understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each technology, 2) how those will change going forward, and 3) how they will compete with and also complement each other as parts of an overall solution.
Dr. Nikhil Naikal, Velodyne Lidar
It was fitting that the granddaddy of automotive sensor companies, Velodyne, kicked off the panel. Its involvement dates back to the original DARPA Challenge, and the now-infamous “KFC Bucket” style of roof-mounted scanning lidar. While Velodyne is still the acknowledged market leader, it now faces literally dozens of competitors.
Velodyne’s analysis of lidar strengths and weakness in multiple lighting conditions.
To face down competition, Velodyne has broadened its array of lidar to include units down to the diminutive Velobit that it expects to price at around $100 when it is available. The company is also anxious to live down its original rooftop design, as Naikall showed us photos of the Tesla that Velodyne retrofitted with a suite of nearly invisible Velarray lidar. While many of its new competitors tout adding more intelligence to the lidar itself, Velodyne is moving carefully to only add those elements of processing that they think are best distributed.
Evaluating Cameras for Automotive, Nicolas Touchard, DXOMARK
Between mandatory backup cameras and over 50 million front-facing cameras in vehicle ADAS systems, visible-light imaging is — along perhaps with parking sensors — the predominant form of sensor technology currently found in vehicles. For now, those systems are only provided to help human drivers, so if a lane-keeping camera loses the lines when the vehicle heads into the sun, the driver is in charge. But as ADAS and eventually self-driving systems become more advanced, it will be essential for vehicle cameras to perform well in all situations.
Camera benchmarking firm DXOMARK has done a lot of work in accurately characterizing camera image quality challenges that are unique to automotive, which its VP of marketing Nicolas Touchard shared with us. Quickly adapting exposure to sudden changes in light levels, like entering or leaving a tunnel, is an important requirement that requires careful measurement — of both the adaptation time and any resulting overshoot before the exposure settles to its new value. The ability to accurately sense LEDs that flicker at various frequencies is another important feature. DXOMARK has built custom hardware to allow automakers and suppliers to measure that for proposed camera designs.
Thermal Imaging in Automotive, Mike Walters, FLIR
Along with the difficulty of sensing distance, the other big knock on traditional cameras is that they don’t work well in bad light — deep shade, back light, or night time, for example. Thermal cameras avoid those issues by directly sensing the longer-wave radiation that emanates from anything that gives off heat. That makes them particularly effective in detecting cars, people, and animals. Mike Walters, from thermal industry leader FLIR, took us through a tour of some of the current use case for thermal cameras in vehicles with a series of compelling videos about their use in low-light, direct sunlight, and poor weather.
Thermal cameras are particularly effective at night, although they need help telling the color of stoplights.
While deploying thermal cameras comes with its own unique challenges — traditional automotive glass is opaque to infrared so they can’t go inside windshields for example — they offer a lot of promise as a complement to other modes of sensing.
Automotive Radar, Greg Stanley, NXP Semiconductor
While lidar gets most of the press because of its impressive functionality, its lower-cost sibling radar is far more ubiquitous in automotive applications. Essentially all adaptive cruise control systems — even Tesla’s — use at least one radar. Most typical blind-spot monitoring systems also rely on radar. Some test vehicles, like the Cruise model shown below, have more than 20 of them, including three that swivel. Waymo’s minivans have six. Greg Stanley, from chip giant NXP, took us through some basics of how radar works, what it is capable of, and where it is heading.
Cruise’s test vehicles have as many as 20 radar, five lidar, and 16 cameras.
In particular, Stanley said that makers of radar units are looking to improve functionality, including by adding more object classification and vehicle localization capabilities. Like the other panelists, he stressed that vehicles need a complementary suite of sensors. For example, radar isn’t going to be helpful in reading speed limit signs or stoplights.
Sanjai Kohli, Visible Sensors
One casualty of the cold water thrown on visions of driverless vehicles being just around the corner has been startups with innovative technologies hoping to sell into that market. Sanjai Kohli was the founder of one of those — Visible Sensors. After raising $10 million in venture capital for a highly-effective version of a radar sensor technology, they were unable to find car companies or major suppliers willing to commit to purchasing them in production volumes any time soon. So, in a move that is quite unusual for Silicon Valley, they returned the money to their investors and went on to other endeavors.
While we can speculate on which of the hundreds of startups in the autonomous vehicle industry will be wildly successful, there is no doubt that many, and probably most, will ultimately meet a less-than-happy ending, so it was helpful for the audience members — many of whom are looking at getting into the field — to understand some of the practical realities of creating a business out of a great invention.
Radical New Sensor Architecture for Driverless Cars, Alberto Stochino, Perceptive
Looking at current automotive sensor architectures, sensing industry veteran Stochino came to the conclusion that truly advanced driverless technology — the kind required for L4 and L5 — would require a radically new approach. He founded Perceptive based on a vision of an all-digital platform with relatively-low-cost but high-performance sensors — antennas and cameras — around the periphery of a car, connected with optical fiber to a central processing core.
Perceptive is developing a flexible vehicle sensor architecture with low-cost but high-performance sensors coupled to a central processing core.
The biggest takeaway from the panel is that none of them believe that a single sensor modality will be sufficient for a true driverless vehicle. When asked about the argument that “people can drive with two eyes, why can’t cars?” their responses ranged from needing to be better than human drivers to a desire for true redundancy for safety. All of the panelists also agreed that it would be years before the advanced technology needed for L4 and above would be close to affordable for retail car buyers. So they are all determined to buckle up for the long, slow, adoption curve they expect as costs gradually come down with increased volume and innovation.
The impact of the Chinese coronavirus continues to ricochet around the world, with an increasing chance of hitting the global economy. Multiple Chinese industry segments have warned that earnings might be impacted by the illness.
Now, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said he expects the coronavirus to hit Apple iPhone shipments by as much as 10 percent due to decreased production caused by illness in China.
″Our latest survey indicates that the iPhone supply is being affected by the coronavirus and, therefore, we cut the iPhone shipment forecasts by 10 percent to 36-40 mn units in 1Q20,” Kuo said in a note on Sunday. Apple no longer reports how many iPhones it sells per quarter, but Kuo figures Q1 2019 shipments were about 38 million devices.
Apple had a massive Q4 to end out 2019, so it’ll head into 2020 in good shape no matter what. Tim Cook has already warned on the impact of coronavirus and he gave a fairly broad range for earnings, between $63B and $67B.
The impact of coronavirus on the world economy isn’t theoretical — it’s already happening. Axios reports that Starbucks, Levi Strauss, Disney, Apple, JP Morgan, and Google have taken various steps to shut down operations, halt production, or banning employee travel. China took steps to shut down stock market trading for certain companies on Monday after early opens were sharply negative, according to ForeignPolicy.com. The BBC writes that China will pump $16B into its economy to help stabilize the situation and to ease investor fears about the long-term impact of coronavirus.
A coronavirus cross-section. Credit: Scientific Animations/CC BY-SA 4.0
Right now, thinking is split as far as how large the long-term risk is. Coronavirus is not particularly deadly, but it’s expected to have a larger impact on the Chinese economy than SARS did, partly because the economy is significantly larger now than it was then. MarketWatch says that compared with SARS:
‘[T]he Wuhan virus has hit ten years into a bull market for equities. With valuations no longer cheap, and in some cases a little stretched, investors are more likely to be looking for an excuse to sell rather than buy,’ Shearing wrote. ‘The potential for the virus to trigger a significant market correction is much greater now than it was back then.’
There have also been reports that existing antivirals and HIV drugs may be effective against this coronavirus, however, and the situation is still in the early days. Right now, it’s impossible to estimate how large or small the worldwide impact of the virus will be.
There is free energy raining down on Earth in the form of sunlight, but harnessing all of that energy has proven difficult. The sun only shines during the day, and those solar panels are useless at night, or at least they are right now. Researchers from the University of California Davis suggest you could generate power at night using “anti-solar panels.” Of course, it’s all so obvious when you think about it.
Researchers around the world are working to improve the efficiency of solar panels, which currently only capture a fraction of the total solar energy falling on them. Even high-efficiency solar panels are at a disadvantage compared with non-renewable energy because you can’t generate solar power at night. So, you need to capture enough during the day to store for usage when the sun isn’t shining. However, battery technology has been similarly slow to improve. The anti-solar panels described in the journal ACS Photonicscould fill the gap to supplement power generation at night when solar panels and batteries aren’t good enough.
Solar panels work because they’re cold compared with the sun, so they can absorb sunlight and convert it to energy. Space, and therefore the night sky, is cold. Therefore, you can point a warmer panel on Earth toward the sky to radiate energy outward as infrared light. That’s what the University of California team is proposing—it’s essentially a heat engine.
These devices don’t use the same technology as solar panels, although they’d probably look similar. Solar panels rely on photovoltaic cells that absorb photons to create electron-hole pairs across the semiconductor, generating a working voltage. A nighttime panel would use a thermoradiative cell to emit infrared radiation from the Earth into space to create electron-hole pairs.
The team estimates that thermoradiative cells would only be able to generate about a quarter as much power as a solar panel of the same area. That’s mainly a consequence of the lower energy of infrared light. Silicon is the current material of choice for solar panels as it’s good at capturing light in the visible wavelengths. It may be possible to boost the efficiency of thermoradiative cells by using materials that can better interact with longer wavelengths of light, for example, mercury alloys.
The University of California study is just an initial proposal for nighttime energy generation. The next step is to start building the devices to see how well they perform.
The Thwaites Glacier, in West Antarctica, is one of the glaciers considered most at-risk for collapse over the next century, earning it the nickname “doomsday glacier.” Scientists have been studying the glacier with increasing concern over the past decade and they’ve learned a great deal about the interaction between the glacier and the bedrock it sits on as a result. Unfortunately, most of what they’ve learned has been ominous — and today’s news is no exception.
In January, for the first time, scientists bored a hole in the Thwaites Glacier more than 600 meters deep. The goal was to measure what’s happening underneath the glacier at the grounding line — the point where the glacier shifts from resting on bedrock to resting on / in the water. Ice that’s already in the water doesn’t have much impact on sea level when it melts because the only thing that’s happening is a phase change from solid to liquid. Ice that’s formerly been landlocked, on the other hand, is a net addition to the system and has a corresponding impact on sea-level rise.
The rate of glacier melt isn’t just impacted by ambient air temperature or solar radiation. The interaction between warmer seawater and colder sea ice at the grounding line has a major impact. As warmer water pools underneath the glacier, it can hollow it out from beneath. Researchers found exactly this situation at Thwaites last year, when they discovered a cavern two-thirds the size of Manhattan and nearly a thousand feet tall underneath the glacier. Now they discovered that the water making contact with the glacier at the grounding line is more than two degrees warmer than the glacier itself. You’d expect the water to be a little warmer — after all, it’s in a liquid state — but this is a larger variance than expected.
The problem with this kind of melt is that it can drastically exacerbate how much of the glacier is exposed to warm water, as the image below illustrates:
When the glacier was thicker, the grounding line sat just below the bedrock hump shown. As the ice thinned, water flowed past it, penetrating much farther inland than it had previously. Finding warm water at the junction between ground and ice implies that this kind of change could be occurring underneath the glacier.
“The fact that such warm water was just now recorded by our team along a section of Thwaites grounding zone where we have known the glacier is melting suggests that it may be undergoing an unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea-level rise,” notes David Holland, director of New York University’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and a professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
To measure this information, the team deployed Icefin, a submersible drone designed to gather information where no human could venture. The vehicle swam nearly two kilometers from the drill site, directly up to the iceberg’s grounding zone, to take its readings.
None of the gathered data indicates that the Thwaites Glacier has reached some critical melt point where the decline will suddenly begin to accelerate. But the terrain under glaciers is notoriously difficult to examine, given hundreds of meters of ice stacked on top of it. The Thwaites Glacier is already considered to have contributed about four percent of total sea-level rise since the beginning of the industrial era, but it’s not the most-vulnerable or fastest-melting glacier in Antarctica. That honor goes to the Pine Island glacier, which shows evidence of being in an even more precarious position, with the base of the glacier sitting on bedrock below sea level. This implies that there is no geological feature to prevent water from penetrating under the glacier and reaching to the depths of its base.
If you’re wondering how bedrock could be below sea level, I’d like to introduce you to a new cool thing our planet does: isostatic rebound. Ice is incredibly heavy, and the weight of carrying ice sheets can depress even a continent-sized slab of rock. As the ice sheets melt and it gets therapy, the continental craton becomes less depressed. You can see evidence for this effect at Bathurst Inlet in Nunavut:
Much of Antarctica’s rock is currently below sea level thanks to the weight of its glaciers, including apparently, Pine Island. We know that there are streams and rivers of water underneath glaciers, as well as subglacial lakes, like Lake Vostok. I doubt any of the scientists on the expedition were surprised to find such warm water underneath the glacier. But it’s an unwelcome sign of how fragile the Western Antarctic ice sheet could prove to be in the decades to come.
Top image: Cavity Camp on Thwaites Glacier. Credit: Ted Scambos
If you’re a fan of Apple products, today is your lucky day. There are deals currently available on several of Apple’s most popular products, including its laptop computers, iPads, and smartwatches.
Apple designed its high-end Macbook Pro with both a high-performance Intel Core i7 processor and a fast AMD GPU. This gives the system the power it needs to accelerate image processing and to run modern games. The system also has a 16-inch Retina display and an aluminum shell, giving it a premium look and feel. Right now you can get this system from Amazon marked down from $2,399.00 to $2,099.00.
Apple’s newest smartwatch will be the company’s first to feature an always-on display, which will remain illuminated and provide on-screen information for the entire time the watch remains on. Apple said that like last year’s model, the new Watch Series 5 will continue to offer up to 18 hours of battery life on a single charge. For a limited time, you can get one from Amazon marked down from $399.99 to $354.99 with a clickable coupon from Amazon.
If you’re looking for a small tablet for travel, Apple’s compact iPad Mini may be the right choice for you. This tablet measures just 7.9 inches diagonally, and it has plenty of performance for gaming and multitasking curtsy of the A12 Bionic processor embedded inside. Usually priced at $399.00, you can get this tablet now for $349.99 from Amazon.
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Amazon-owned Ring has come under fire in recent years for its lax approach to privacy and cooperation with police departments around the US. As 2020 dawns, the company has promised to re-emphasize its commitment to privacy, and it appears to be following through. The newest version of the Ring mobile app includes a “control center” that offers more control over what happens to your data, including the option to disable police video requests.
Ring got its start with doorbell cameras but has since expanded into other types of cameras and home security. Following the Amazon acquisition in 2018, Ring forged its first partnerships with police departments. Ring offers a “Neighbors” app where users can share video footage in the spirit of a neighborhood watch, but police departments working with Ring can also request video from community members. While Ring has said that police don’t get precise location information or user data, it has occasionally gone so far as to give police maps of active cameras.
The new Ring app doesn’t fundamentally change the way the company’s cameras work, but it should put some people’s minds at ease. The Control Center offers a quick overview of your security and privacy settings. For example, whether you have two-factor authentication enabled, how many devices are logged into your account, and the number of shared users. You can also un-share your camera feeds or log-out all devices from this interface. This should give people some recourse if they suspect someone may have hacked their camera.
The police controls are available under the “Community Control” section of the new settings. Up at the top, you can disable the video requests. Naturally, Ring suggests you leave them enabled. When police request video from an area, you still have the option of refusing. Disabling the requests altogether ensures you’ll never get those notifications.
Technically, disabling police requests won’t matter if you don’t live in a jurisdiction that works with Ring. There are somewhere north of 400 police departments that do, though. You can see nearby police departments that have access to Ring in the video requests section of the app. That’ll tell you whether disabling requests will do you any good.
The new Ring app is now available on Android and iOS. Ring also promises future improvements to the Control Center with more fine-tuned privacy options.
