For most of human history, our experience with asteroids has been limited to the chunks of rock and metal that survive passage through the atmosphere before striking the surface — sometimes with disastrous results. It wasn’t until the last few years that we’ve been able to examine these space rocks up close before they smack into us. We are increasingly discovering that asteroids aren’t the monolithic objects we expected. New research from the NASA OSIRIS-REx team demonstrates that. According to the latest research, collecting a sample from the asteroid Bennu was like “punching a ball pit.”
NASA launched OSIRIS-REx in 2016, partnering with the University of Arizona for science operations. Two years later, the spacecraft arrived in orbit of the 500-meter-wide asteroid known as Bennu. The mission’s goal was to descend to the surface and scoop up a few bits of rock, but the team was immediately surprised to find a landscape strewn with debris when they were expecting something smooth. There were also small particles being flung from the surface. Following the sample run in October 2020, scientists saw a large cloud of regolith launched into space from the kiss of the sampling arm.
The surprises didn’t stop there — the new research, led by Dante Lauretta and Kevin Walsh from the University of Arizona, says that OSIRIS-REx could have been swallowed up by the loosely packed surface if it hadn’t been designed to back away so quickly. Before OSIRIS-REx got to Bennu, the team expected something like a gravel-covered road, but what they got was more like a ball pit, says the team. In just a few seconds, OSIRIS-REx’s arm sunk into the surface by about 1.5 feet (half a meter). The divot left in the surface was an astonishing 26 feet (8 meters) wide.
The team ran hundreds of simulations using data from the probe, eventually coming up with a model that matches reality. The surface of Bennu is most like “desert pavement” on Earth, which forms when fine dust is blown or washed away, leaving a bed of similarly sized pebbles. “It turns out that the particles making up Bennu’s exterior are so loosely packed and lightly bound to each other that they act more like a fluid than a solid,” Lauretta said. This might help explain how the probe ended up with much more material than expected — engineers hoped to collect at least 60 grams of material with the sampling mechanism, which used a burst of nitrogen gas to launch debris into the canister. NASA believes it got closer to two pounds, which will be a real boon once it gets back to Earth.
Knowing more about the surface of Bennu will help scientists interpret remote observations of other asteroids. That could change the way future asteroid missions are designed. If similar asteroids are little more than rubble piles, we might need to reevaluate how to address a killer asteroid on a collision course for Earth.
Hello and welcome back to This Week in Space. Unlike the temperature, this week the news has some major ups and downs. Ingenuity is experiencing some wear and tear on the surface of Mars, but this week we’ll hear that a team of engineers is looking to bio-inspired designs that could sidestep Mars’ two greatest hazards. After a brief dropout, NASA has regained radio contact with its CAPSTONE lunar probe. However, tensions are rising in low-Earth orbit, as the Ukraine war finally creeps aboard the International Space Station. Finally, NASA night-sky expert Preston Dyches tells us to look for a teapot in the sky.
NASA Blasts Russia’s Space-Based Invasion Propaganda
Space exploration is one of the few areas where cooperation between the United States and Russia remains not just cordial but actively collaborative. We praised astronaut and cosmonaut for working hand in hand to keep the ISS aloft, and for studiously avoiding political commentary or conflict. Even after Putin invaded Ukraine, journalists heaved a sigh of relief that the conflict had not reached the International Space Station. However, that changed this week, when Roscosmos published several anti-Ukraine propaganda photos taken from the ISS.
Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev, and Sergey Korsakov hold a flag of the “Luhansk People’s Republic,” also known as “Territory illegally stolen from Ukraine.”
The photos show Russian cosmonauts aboard the ISS, posing with flags representing the illegitimate Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics. These quasi-states exist solely because Russia has waged an illegitimate war against Ukraine for the past eight years, culminating in a full-scale invasion of the country back in February.
NASA has condemned the propaganda effort, writing: “NASA strongly rebukes Russia using the International Space Station for political purposes to support its war against Ukraine, which is fundamentally inconsistent with the station’s primary function among the 15 international participating countries to advance science and develop technology for peaceful purposes.”
Up until this point, NASA has tried to emphasize ongoing peaceful cooperation with the Russians, despite tensions in Ukraine. Such cooperation between our two nations has a long, proud history. The first joint mission between the United States and the then-Soviet Union occurred in 1975, with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The Space Shuttle visited the Russian space station Mir on 11 occasions before the ISS had even come online. It is unfortunate that Rogozin and Roscosmos continue to jeopardize a decades-long relationship with lies and propaganda.
New Wing Designs Could Fly the Martian Skies
To NASA’s collective delight, Ingenuity has demonstrated the potential for powered helicopter flight on Mars. The space helicopter can cope with the thin Martian atmosphere by spinning its rotor at unearthly speeds. However, as Ingenuity enters its second year on the Red Planet, mission scientists believe that the Martian regolith is getting into its moving parts. It’s not great news for the space copter that could. But flight on Mars might not even require a gearbox, or any moving parts at all. A team of engineers has built a sailplane whose bio-inspired wing design mimics the albatross, a seabird that can soar for weeks at a time.
These sailplanes would only weigh about 11 lbs each, with a 10-11 foot wingspan. Like the albatross, they could remain aloft in the Martian atmosphere for weeks at a time, gathering data across vast swathes of the planet at much higher fidelity than is currently available from orbital satellites. The sailplanes would stay aloft on Mars by taking advantage of static and dynamic soaring. Here’s how the press release describes the process: “The planes fly at a slight upward angle into the slow-moving, low-altitude wind. When they reach the faster, high-altitude wind, they turn 180 degrees and let the high-speed wind power them forward at a slight downward angle. When they start to run out of energy from the high-speed wind, they repeat the process, weaving their way forward. With this nimble maneuvering, the sailplanes can continually harvest energy from the atmosphere, flying for hours or even days at a time. This is flying for free.”
Sailplanes could be dispatched in cubesats attached as a secondary payload for a larger mission. Once they arrived, the planes would either inflate or unfold. They might be carried into the atmosphere via a balloon before deploying at optimal height. Like seabirds, presumably the sailplanes would eventually land, but they could theoretically carry low-power sensors allowing them to serve as fixed weather stations even after grounding.
The idea of a fleet of low-cost, lightweight gliders gathering data across the planet has caught NASA’s attention. The entire point of the project is that it could piggyback on an already-planned Mars mission. But it’ll be interesting to see if anything comes of this project. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
PEBCAK*: NASA Regains Contact With CAPSTONE
NASA had a bit of a scare this week when the CAPSTONE mission went radio silent. The diminutive cubesat lost contact with Earth shortly after it split from its Photon spacecraft and began its long, looping orbit past the Moon. It wasn’t initially clear if engineers would be able to re-establish communication with the satellite. However, NASA regained contact with CAPSTONE within a day.
Ultimately, NASA experts believe that user error caused the loss of contact. According to NASA, “the spacecraft operations team attempted to access diagnostic data on the spacecraft’s radio and sent an improperly formatted command that made the radio inoperable.” While this should’ve been grounds for an immediate radio reboot, a flaw in CAPSTONE’s flight control software prevented that from happening. The flight software did eventually clear the error, however, which allowed the cubesat to resume communication with ground control.
CAPSTONE has already performed one engine burn and will perform another on July 9. The satellite won’t actually enter orbit around the Moon for another four months. However, when it does, the spacecraft is set to take up an unusual Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) around our nearest neighbor. Why? NASA chose a NRHO for the Gateway lunar station it wants to build in the future. CAPSTONE is designed to fly the same orbital path the space agency hopes to use for the lunar station. One of CAPSTONE’s goals is to test new navigation technology that can measure the position of spacecraft relative to the Moon via the currently in-orbit Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter rather than relying on Earth-based tracking.
* Problem Exists Between CAPSTONE And Keyboard
New Plan For Space Station Trash: Literally Throw It Out The Airlock
At the end of June, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft successfully boosted the ISS into a higher orbit. Station personnel had packed the spacecraft with trash, debris and other assorted jetsam. Not long after the orbit-raising engine burn, Cygnus cast off from the ISS and burned up in a controlled destructive descent.
This is the way we’ve done waste management on the ISS for years and years. Space garbage builds up until Cygnus arrives, whereupon more space garbage builds up inside Cygnus until we send it home. But we might be done relying on Cygnus to take out the trash. Nanoracks, a Houston-based space company who operates the space station’s Bishop Airlock, has another idea. Surprise: it involves their airlock.
Skywatchers Corner
It’s July. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, this means that summer is beginning to heat up in earnest. But do you know where the phrase “the dog days of summer” comes from?
It’s actually an old, old saying. In classical antiquity, the Greeks and Romans had both noticed that at the height of summer, the sun lies in the same part of the sky as the dog-shaped constellation Canis major. Sirius, the constellation’s most prominent star, is also the brightest star in the night sky. According to NASA skywatching expert Preston Dyches, “In Ancient Greek, Sirius means “the scorcher,” and both the Greeks and Romans believed the blazing bright star’s proximity in the sky added to the Sun’s heat during that time of the year making it even more oppressive.”
For some reason, this makes me want to celebrate the dog days of summer by putting an ice cube in my dog’s water bowl. And I don’t even have a dog. But, I digress.
Looking southward at this time of year, you’re facing the Milky Way. If you’re out in the country or otherwise fortunate enough to live in a dark-skies region, you can see the core of the galaxy as soon as it’s fully dark outside. And you won’t need a telescope or binoculars to check it out! (Maybe consider some bug dope, because this year, the mosquitoes are big enough to pick you up and carry you away.)
Dark skies are a true delight for skywatching. But even in places with too much light pollution to see the ‘backbone of night,’ there’s a celestial landmark that should be bright enough to let you find where the Milky Way is in the sky. It’s a teapot! No, really. And it’s not a philosophy joke. There’s an asterism called the Teapot, a group of bright stars that lies within the constellation of Sagittarius. If you can pick out Sagittarius and Scorpio, you can find the Teapot.
Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will remain standouts in the morning sky for the month of July. On the 20th, the last-quarter moon will appear between Mars and Jupiter. The next morning, you’ll find the waning crescent right next to Mars.
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That’s all for this week. But if you’re interested in the James Webb Space Telescope, you might like to know that next Tuesday, July 12th, Webb officially opens its doors (shutters?) for science. To celebrate, NASA plans to release a whole portfolio of the telescope’s very first science images. We’ll make sure you see them as soon as we do, but we’ll also give you a breakdown in next Friday’s edition of This Week in Space. If these beauty shots are anything like the first jaw-dropping images from Webb, prepare to be amazed.
The video game industry’s pandemic-induced heyday might soon be over—or at the very least, taking a break. New research reveals that the global gaming industry is set to contract this year by up to 1.2 percent.
An analysis by market data firm Ampere Analysis suggests that gaming-related software and hardware sales will dip to about $188 billion. In the US specifically, consumer spending is expected to drop to $55.5 billion, marking a nearly 9 percent decrease from last year. According to Ampere, 2022 will be the first year video game sales have dropped since 2015.
Before anyone begins to freak out—on behalf of the gaming industry or the economy overall—it’s important to note that this downturn is actually made up of slowed growth. That means there’s quite a bit of a buffer in which sales can fall while still remaining healthy. The pandemic drove up video game-related software and hardware sales by more than 29 percent between 2019 and 2020 alone, according to global market analysis firm NPD. A decline in sales from that point doesn’t necessarily mean the industry is suffering; it could very well be returning to a “normal” state, if that still exists. (General consumer spending in the US is going the same way: while the Bureau of Economic Analysis says spending has decreased month over month, they mean it only rose by 0.2 percent in May, while April brought an increase of 0.9 percent.)
Some have given up on finding an Xbox Series S or X. (Photo: Louis-Philippe Poitras/Unsplash)
That isn’t to say there’s no reason to worry at all. Major players in the gaming industry are gearing up for a recession by laying off workers and slimming down operations. Meanwhile, the industry is continuing to feel the effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which prompted many companies to halt operations in and with Russia. According to Ampere, Russia made up the world’s 10th largest video games market pre-invasion. Now it’s expected to drop to number 14 following a projected $1.2 billion loss. And here in the US, rapid economic inflation continues to upend individuals’ and families’ budgets, likely leaving little room for luxuries like gaming.
That being said, quarantine orders are largely nonexistent these days, resulting in fewer people turning desperately to video games for entertainment. There’s also the chance that the novelty of newer consoles, like the Xbox Series S and X and the PlayStation 5, has started to die off (especially as people give up on ever finding one in stores.) All things considered, it seems likely the dip in sales stems from a number of phenomena with positive and negative implications.
One bit of good news, though, is that the dip is expected to be temporary. Ampere’s analysis suggests the industry will return to growth in 2023, when sales hit an expected $195 billion.
If you’re looking for an excuse to rave about Fluffy, this might be your chance. Scientists are looking for cat owners for a new study focused on feline body language.
Researchers at the University of California Davis’ Animal Welfare Epidemiology Lab are looking for ways to help humans build positive relationships with cats. One way they hope to do that is by studying humans’ understanding of their cats’ behavior. Specifically, the researchers hope to investigate how cat owners perceive feline socialization, as well as how much weight owners tend to give their cats’ body language.
Part of the challenge in understanding feline socializing is a relative lack of opportunity to do so. While dog owners often take their furry friends to dog parks, on family trips, or even to brunch on a restaurant patio, cats’ outside-the-home social experiences aren’t so dynamic. Most cat owners agree that cats tend to avoid change; taking them outside of their home environment (I’ll be the first to say) can be jarring for everyone involved, especially when the secondary location is as unpleasant as a vet or a groomer. As a result, cat owners typically only get to see their beloved kitties interact with humans or other cats in a couple of environments. (I take my cat for walks on a regular basis) – Ed
I’m no expert, but these two kitties don’t look very happy. (Photo: Mevrouw Hatseflats/Unsplash)
This makes it difficult to intentionally raise kittens with positive social “skills,” according to project researcher Jennifer Link, who spoke with Gizmodo about the study. “In short: a well-socialized kitten becomes a well-adjusted adult, and we’d like to do whatever we can to ensure the creation of more well-socialized kittens,” Link said. “We hope that our study will be a good first step in that process.”
The Animal Welfare Epidemiology Lab previously conducted a study that appears to focus on casual feline infighting. The study asked volunteers who owned exactly two cats to watch cat videos online—the dream, as far as research participation goes—and provide commentary on the animals’ body language. The researchers were particularly interested in determining whether owners could tell when cats were about to lash out at one another. The lab is still wrapping up that study while kicking off the new one.
Those who are interested in volunteering for the study can fill out an introductory questionnaire here. The lab hopes to obtain about 2,500 volunteer responses and to have reached a conclusion within the next 12 to 18 months.
You have countless options for storing large amounts of data these days, but that wasn’t the case in the early 2000s. That’s when Drobo released its first home storage appliances, which proved very popular at the time. It’s been chugging along all these years until now. According to a court filing in California, Drobo has entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It’s not shutting down, but there could be a lot of changes on the way.
Drobo was among the first to offer scalable storage devices aimed at home and small business users. Its Drobo enclosures allowed users to load up various hard drives and merge them into a single large storage pool. It was far ahead of the competition in those days — several ET staffers either had Drobos or desperately wanted one.
You might be thinking the conceit of Drobo doesn’t sound very impressive. After all, network attached storage (NAS) boxes are incredibly common today, but that’s probably why Drobo is in this mess. Companies like Synology have surpassed the capabilities of Drobo for high-volume on-site storage, and cloud services like Dropbox and iCloud take care of backups for more casual users.
By filing Chapter 11, Drobo will have a chance to restructure after discharging some of its debt. The first creditor meeting is on July 19th. Parties making claims against Drobo’s assets have until October 17th to file them with the court. So, Drobo is at least trying to make a go of things. Otherwise, it would have filed Chapter 7 to liquidate the company. Still, this situation looks grim.
Drobo can use several different RAID configurations to merge multiple drives together.
Drobo was severely impacted by the pandemic, with CEO Mihir Shah noting in early 2020 that it expected production delays due to problems with its supply chain. According to Apple Insider, customers are being told that Drobo’s sales and support will continue operating. However, the company’s online store shows all its signature drive enclosures are currently sold out. It’s going to have trouble meeting any creditor obligations without a product to sell, and suppliers won’t be anxious to cut a bankrupt company any slack to restart production.
Drobo has not laid out its future plans or even publicly acknowledged the bankruptcy filing. However, it’s hard to see how the company will move forward without major changes. Its current offerings, were they even available to purchase, cost around the same as comparable Synology DiskStations, but they lack the app support and features of Synology. And then there’s a whole world of NAS devices from brands like QNAP and TerraMaster that cost even less.
The basic design of the toothbrush hasn’t changed in a thousand years — sure, there are motors, different materials, and funky shapes, but they’re all still sticks with bristles attached. A team from the University of Pennsylvania believes it’s time to shake things up. In a new study, the researchers have shown that shapeshifting nanoparticles can successfully clean teeth, replacing all the manual labor with a nano-scale robotic dance. Not only can these particles be transformed into tooth-cleaning shapes, but their action can have antimicrobial effects that destroy plaque-causing bacteria.
This project came together quite by accident. A group from the Penn School of Dental Medicine under professor Hyun (Michel) Koo was interested in leveraging the catalytic activity of nanoparticles to release free radicals that could kill microbes on the teeth. Meanwhile, senior engineering researcher Edward Steagar was spearheading work at the Penn School of Engineering and Applied Sciences on assembling nanoparticles into robots. Bringing these projects together gave us the sci-fi gray goo toothbrush.
The combined team used magnetic fields to manipulate iron oxide nanoparticles, testing them first on a slab of tooth-like material. Next, the team moved to 3D-printed copies of teeth. Finally, they tested the nanoparticle brushes on real teeth that were mounted in a realistic way to simulate a human mouth. The tests show these nanoparticles can form brush-like shapes capable of scrubbing off the biofilms that lead to tooth decay. They can also flow between teeth like floss. All the while, the nanoparticles promote the production of free radicals that further eliminate bacteria.
While the gray goo brush has not been tested in a real human mouth, the researchers are excited by the possibilities. The laboratory tests demonstrate that the nanoparticles can be programmed to do almost anything. They can simulate longer or shorter bristles, as well as varying degrees of stiffness. So, it may be possible to customize the system for each person’s individual oral health needs. This could help those who are just neglectful of oral hygiene, as well as those who lack the strength or manual dexterity to handle their own brushing.
Currently, the team is still studying ways to optimize the motion of the nanoparticles, as well as ways they could be delivered to and retrieved from a patient’s mouth. The university’s press release does not mention what a slurry of iron oxide nanoparticles might taste like. Our guess is “not great.” Hopefully, that problem is on the team’s radar as well.
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about Intel’s 14th generation architecture, Meteor Lake. It’s due to arrive in the second half of 2023 following Raptor Lake. It’ll be the company’s first tile-based architecture, and it will be built on the Intel 4 process. The mobile version should debut first, and German overclocking site Igor’s Lab has received some juicy details about what it will offer. The site has posted full specs for the U, P, and H variants of the mobile architecture. The slides reveal some interesting details that haven’t been mentioned before, assuming these rumors are true. As always, rumors about pre-release products that won’t see the light of day for over a year should be treated cautiously.
To begin, the MTL-H and MTL-P variants are for high performance. The MTL-U version is low-power, high efficiency. That bracketing is unchanged from Alder Lake. The more powerful H-and-P series will max out at 14 cores, with the U-series gaining two more cores over Alder Lake for a maximum of 12. One thing that seems new is the addition of LP-E cores. On Alder Lake there were just “big” P-cores and “little” E-cores. Now there appears to be a new version of E-cores, with increased efficiency.
It’s not clear if these different types of E-core share the same design, with the LP-E type being binned or not. However, our guess is that they are just binned versions of the regular E-cores. Also, Igor says Intel will put the GPU on top of the CPU with its Foveros stacking technology. However, the diagrams Intel has published previously shows them side-by-side, so we’re not sure where Igor is getting that from.
Stacking the GPU on top of the CPU may be possible, but it depends on the specifics of the circuit layout. While AMD’s 5800X3D stacks a large vertical L3 cache, AMD has positioned the cache so it doesn’t sit directly over any CPU hot spots. Intel would need to do the same, while accounting for the fact that an on-die GPU can be a significant source of heat in its own right. This isn’t impossible, but if true, it’s a change compared to what Intel has previously disclosed.
Another notable item is the lack of support for DDR4 memory. It was previously leaked that Intel’s 13th generation Raptor Lake will support both DDR4 and DDR5. It would appear that will be the final stop for the aging memory standard, with Meteor Lake being DDR5 only. Along those lines, it says it supports LPDDR5X-7467, which is faster than the DDR5-5600 it will offer with Raptor Lake. The diagram notes it will also support that slower memory type too. When using LPDDR5 it supports up to 64GB of RAM. That’s bumped up to 96GB when using DDR5-5600.
Igor’s Lab also posted some spec sheets as well as the block diagram. They show the GPU will feature up to 128 execution units, probably using Intel’s Battlemage architecture. That’s quite a lot of EUs, but it will be going up against AMD’s Dragon Range. AMD claims its upcoming mobile platform will allow it to achieve “gaming dominance” over Intel, so that will be a cage match for sure. The GPU connects to the SoC with a single x8 PCIe 5.0 channel, which is interesting. Intel is probably not using a x16 channel to conserve energy. For storage it’s using 12 lanes of PCIe 4.0. Again, that could be a power-saving move. WiFi 7 hardware might be available by 2023, but Intel is sticking with WiFi 6E with Raptor Lake (assuming these slides are true).
There’s also mention of an Extended Gaming Mode,but no particular mention of what it might be. This could be a new iteration of power-shifting technology between the CPU and GPU, or another type of power consumption optimization intended to distribute resources more efficiently.
Under the section labeled ‘AI’, there’s mention of an onboard VPU. This is a term Intel currently uses to refer to Movidius-branded AI processors. It is not clear if the VPU mentioned here would be a further iteration of the company’s further Movidius products, or an altogether new processor. Intel hasn’t had much to say about Movidius for several years, and it’s not entirely clear if the “Keem Bay” third generation Movidius architecture ever actually shipped.
Meteor Lake is due to arrive in the second half of 2023. Given that we’ve already seen pictures of it (top of article) and that these slides exist, we can surmise it’s quite far along in development. Also, Intel insiders recently confirmed the company is on track with its Intel 4 process. This is what it’s using for Meteor Lake, and which is supposed to go into high volume production later this year.
Another notable item is the lack of support for DDR4 memory. It was 
