China's Jade Rabbit (玉兔 Yu Tu) Lands On The Moon, But Will It Play Nice There?

A picture of the Chang'e 3 (嫦娥三号) lunar lander deploying
the Yu Tu lunar rover.

As reported by the Christian Science Monitor: China landed its rover, Jade Rabbit, on the moon over the weekend, becoming the third country to make a soft landing on lunar real estate and the first state to visit the lunar surface in almost 40 years. The landing, in highlighting both China’s technological capabilities and its lofty ambitions in the cosmos, now raises questions about what China will do next as it flexes its wings in the final frontier.  

Chang’e-3, the lunar lander, and Jade Rabbit, its rover, landed on the moon’s Bay of Rainbows on Saturday, after about 13 days of space travel. State television showed the refrigerator-sized package – shiny and gold, like a wrapped candy – hovering over a blue plume as it beamed itself down. Back on Earth, China’s control room staff were shown applauding as the craft came to a gentle rest on the moon. 

“Now as Jade Rabbit has made its touchdown on the moon surface, the whole world again marvels at China's remarkable space capabilities,” said Xinhua, China’s state news agency, in an article following the landing.

A picture of Yu Tu (玉兔) the Chinese
lunar rover deployed on the surface of
the Moon.

It’s been almost four decades since a state has made a soft landing on the moon (in a soft landing, the lander or rover alights intact on the ground). The last state to visit the lunar surface was the Soviet Union, in 1976. The US, the second country to make a soft moon landing, has not done so since 1972.

As the Soviet Union was leaving the moon for the last time, China’s space program was just a fledgling one, limited to satellite and missile development. Its space exploration program was nonexistent: the anxious, repeated attempts of Mao Zedong (who would die just a month later) to match the US and the Soviet Union in achievement and cobble together a crude space program had disintegrated amidst political unrest. For years to follow, China was much too mired in economic duress to compete with space-faring powers on the cosmic scale.

It was not until 2004, following China’s successful launch of a manned Earth orbiter, that the state announced its long-term series of lunar missions, all to be titled “Chang’e.” Chang'e, in Chinese myth, was an archer’s wife who swallowed a magic elixir that lifted her to the moon. She took with her a pet rabbit, "Yu Tu,” or Jade Rabbit. There, the pair has stayed, a lunar goddess and her rabbit.

The Jura Mountains outline the edge of the Bay or Rainbows
the landing area of the Jade Rabbit Moon rover.

It’s a romantic myth, and its dreamy tropes have burnished Chang’e lunar missions since the launch of the first mission, orbiter Chang’e-1, six years ago: “Flying to the moon is the nation's long cherished dream,” said Xinhua, after the launch of Chang’e-1.

Following Chang’e-3’s landing, China state media reiterated that the mission is a preamble to the state’s even grander, national ambitions, including a manned mission to Earth’s natural satellite and, in the long term, a trip to Mars. In the meantime, Chang’e-3, along with its companion “rabbit,” is charged with exploring a basaltic lava plain on the moon, as well as with setting up the first telescope there.

“It’s an impressive achievement,” says John M. Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, of Chang’e-3. “With this mission, China is demonstrating a high level of space technology and operational capability.”

Though China is still decades behind the US and Russia in space-faring capabilities, the state could “within 10-20 years be one of the top three space powers,” surpassing the European Union, Japan, and India, says Dr. Logsdon.

“It is close to that level now,” he says.

But while there is little doubt that China has developed advanced space technologies, there is some doubt if it will be “a responsible steward of space,” as it exercises its capabilities there, says Michael Krepon, director of South Asia and Space Security programs at The Stimson Center in Washington, D.C.

A picture of Chang'e Flying to the Moon.

China, along with Russia and India, which recently launched a probe to Mars, has yet to endorse the European Union’s international code of conduct for the use of space. The code is designed to set standards for managing the congestion in Earth’s skies, in hopes of avoiding scenarios like the one in 2007, in which China, in a booming display of its missile might, shot down its own weather satellite and sent space debris coursing through the cosmos.

The latest version of the EU’s code, now in its third iteration, was released in September.

“We are still waiting to see how China will behave in global commons,” says Dr. Krepon. “Will China cooperate to protect the commons, or will it throw its weight around and act in a way that’s troubling to other stakeholders?”

"Space exploration is a common benefit for all human kind, but space weapons are a very different story," he says. 

How Yu Tu (玉兔) is visualized on the Moon's surface.

China and Russia have signed their own bilateral version of a code of conduct, but the document uses language that appears to exempt missile use from the ban on space weapons, says Krepon. The treaty, called the “Treaty on Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space” (PPWT), was signed in 2008.

“Their treaty is not serious. The European Union code of conduct is serious,” he says. “China will need to decide whether it is serious about developing rules of the road in space.”

Under a 2011 law, NASA is banned from using its funds to collaborate with China on bilateral space activities. The US executive branch and state department, though, are not prohibited from engaging with Beijing, nor is NASA prohibited from engaging in multilateral collaboration with the Chinese space program.

Twitter Testing Location Feature That Shows Tweets Nearby

As reported by the LA Times: Twitter is reportedly testing a timeline that shows tweets that were sent from a nearby location.

The short messaging service may be experimenting with the feature, dubbed "Nearby," as a way to get more Twitter users to share their geo-location database.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Nearby timeline has appeared on various users' Twitter smartphone apps in recent days. The test feature has only shown up for users who have previously given Twitter permission to see and display their location.

With the feature, users see a map on the top half of the smartphone screen. That map shows icons for tweets that have been posted publicly nearby. Tapping on an icon will show the tweet in the bottom of users' screens.

The Journal speculates that knowing users' location would benefit Twitter by giving it more data that advertisers could use to target their marketing campaigns.

For users, the feature could be useful when it comes to seeing what's happening around them. For example, if users see a protest happening, they could check the Nearby timeline to see what the protesters are tweeting -- giving them immediate information about the protest.

Twitter has not commented on the Nearby feature, but like other tech companies, it frequently tests new features on small pockets of users before expanding to all users.

To share your location with Twitter using an iPhone, go to the Settings app followed by "Privacy," "Location Services" and turn the toggle next to Twitter on. Android users can top the three dot icon at the top left of the Twitter app followed by "Settings." There, users simply check the box next to the "Location" option.

Location Technology for Paddlers and Mountaineers

As reported by Stoke: Around 2004ish, I was on a multi day sea kayaking trip in the Broughton Archipelago north of Vancouver BC with friend Steve Worchester.  On our last day, we woke up to pea soup fog.

Our paddle back to Telegraph Cove would be through a section of many tiny islets and small islands with a few knots of current flowing past. Luckily Steve, a former Air Force F-15 pilot and Alaska Air captain knew what to do. He spread out our marine chart, and using a compass and GPS plotted our route.  Once underway, we hit every islet, rock and island right on the money per Steve's route.

While mariners and paddlers still use those and even simpler techniques for navigation, since then there are technologies developed to make life easier, providing your batteries are fresh.

Marine Traffic
This online site uses boat's AIS data to mark their positions. You can use the site to track shipping if you're planning a crossing. Track ship departure and arrival times and by clicking on the boat symbol, you can get info on the boat itself - what kind, speed, destination, a photo, etc. We use it to track freighters and tugs for surfing near Seattle.  Like anything, it's not always 100% accurate.  So have a backup even it's your own eyes.

Boat Beacon 
An app that works with Marine Traffic, Ship Finder and other sites which  allows you to track yourself or have others track you. A great tool for paddling in fog, at night or for loved ones to see how you're doing.

It also provides your location to other vessels in the area so that they can avoid you as well.  This can be a lifesaver if the area is heavily congested, and visually impaired.  There are collision avoidance features with alerts and alarms, as well as Man Overboard alerts, and boat-to-boat messaging.  It's also a good way to keep track of paddling companions, or competitors in nautical races.

A wireless communication signal must be available for the application to work, but this is generally true in many coastal areas, up to about 15 miles away.

The application is not an AIS transponder, and will not be visible to other ships on their VHF AIS systems.


Spot
These nifty devices allow for satellites to track you whether on-water or in the mountains in most places in the world.

You can send regular and emergency messages to friends, mark waypoints etc so folks can track your every move.  The devices are water resistant and float.

Unlike smartphone applications like Boat Beacon, these devices do not require a terrestrial wireless network to be available; they instead use a set of commercial satellites for communicating your location - though not all areas of the world have coverage.  A current coverage map for the Spot transponder  is shown below:

For skiers Spot does not take the place of an avalanche beacon, but used properly it can help guide or direct avalanche rescue teams to the correct back-country or in-bounds location in an emergency.

Driving Costs Down for Small Business using Vehicle Tracking

A taxi service in Gibraltar had a problem some time ago. The territory is small and the drivers realized that there was a lot more money to be made taking tourists around and showing them the sights than in driving to the airport to take people to their hotels.

So that's what many of them did. Realizing this, the Gibraltar taxi association revised their licenses, precluding them from competing with licensed tour operators.

They did what most enterprising small business would do – they ignored the edict and continued with the more lucrative work. That is, until their taxis were fitted with GPS vehicle location equipment that could tell the association where they'd been and how frequently they'd turned up at the airport.

Vehicle tracking is a type of telematics and is often associated, like a lot of advanced technology, with larger businesses. It doesn't have to be, though – and it's useful for more than just keeping a few drivers in line.

Matt Farrall of family business Farrall's Transport installed a vehicle tracking system, almost two years ago and confirms that benefits started to materialize immediately, by installing 48 tracker devices onto 60 trailers. The business problem that prompted it was increasing fuel prices. "Fuel is one of the major costs for a transport company so we wanted to tighten down on that and which drivers, routes, and which weights were costing us the most," he explained.

The information a good vehicle tracking system can offer can be a help in this. It will look at driving styles, how heavily someone leans on the accelerator, braking, how often they use cruise control and a number of other indicators. As the user, Farrall was able to set parameters of acceptability and encourage the right drivers to retrain where necessary; the company was able to reduce one driver's fuel consumption by about $6,500 per year.

The hardest part, said Farrall, was getting the drivers on-board and keeping on top of them, but once they were financially incentivised to drive better, most of them caught on that this wasn't just Big Brother in the cabin. He said: "We have a series of indicators and when drivers hit five green lights they take home more money." When the whole team is pulling in the right signals, the company looks again and works out new incentives for further improvements. Only a small minority want to continue as they are – it's a positive means of cutting expenditure without human cost. With only about 40 vehicles reaping benefits in Farrall's case vehicle tracking is clearly not just for the massive enterprise.

As with any technologies, there can be pitfalls. Jane White, head of fleet operations at an independent fleet management group, points to planning:

"A lot of work needs to go into the implementation phase with clear direction on the outputs required before any contracts are signed," she said. "In any event, and in our experience, much of the data manipulation is manual in order to achieve beneficial levels of analysis to truly measure how effective the system is in driving down costs and improving driver behavior and, in turn, safety."

"Fleets are most successful when they take the time to develop an internal deployment plan for telematics." "In this plan, they identify what to focus on first and what they expect to master in the first few weeks, months and years in order to realize the greatest ROI.

"Fleets are also successful when they communicate clearly with drivers on the business reasons and planned use of a vehicle tracking system. The best results happen when fleets use the data to coach drivers and provide an incentive to improve their behavior rather than to punish them. Fleet managers need to describe how the data will benefit the business, and as a result, benefit the driver. In addition, fleets can also use the system to exonerate drivers in the case of false blame. All companies receive complaints, but in most cases, it is not the driver's fault. Exoneration in these instances will also increase driver buy-in."

William Park, managing director of a property maintenance company City Response, has used a vehicle tracking system for about three years on their 200-strong fleet and sees many benefits. "In the first six months alone, we saw a 25% reduction in fuel consumption through improved job scheduling and fleet efficiency," he explained.

"When we receive a customer call-out we are able to identify the nearest driver to the job, and instantly deploy this driver. We've been able to significantly cut down on unnecessary driving time while improving customer service. Customer satisfaction is at an all-time high of 97%. As well as near real-time fleet visibility, vehicle tracking technology delivers comprehensive reporting which allows us to control unauthorized vehicle usage, while delivering strategic insights to allow ground level improvements in performance."

He firmly believes this won't apply only to companies with hundreds of vehicles in their fleet: "Whatever the size of the organisation, the same fleet regulations and business pressures still apply and we've seen first hand how vehicle tracking can not only improve operational efficiency and compliance, but have a direct, tangible impact on our bottom line."

Done right, benefits can multiply in unforeseen ways. Farrall's, for example, is using the data gathered to reassign different vehicles to different routes and to plan its next vehicle purchases so that it spends less on doing the same work with the same amount of people.

So, costs driven down, nobody losing their job and many actually getting paid more. That sounds like some sort of business nirvana, doesn't it?

Internet of Things (IoT) Devices Will Dwarf Number of PCs, Tablets and Smartphones

As reported by ZDNET: The Internet of Things (IoT) — or machine-to-machine (M2M) technology, as it is also known — is set to boom over this decade and will form a $300 billion industry by 2020, if the analysts at Gartner are to be believed.

According to the company’s latest research, the IoT will grow to 26 billion units by 2020, which represents an almost 30-fold increase from 0.9 billion units today. It will result in $1.9 trillion in global value Gartner believes, from sales into what they say will be an ever-more diverse market.

The IoT is the internet beyond PCs, tablets and smartphones: the internet of devices that have embedded technology to sense either their internal states or the external environment.

Over the past few years, the number of devices that have some computing capability from security systems through sensors that monitor traffic, railways, car parks and so forth have grown enormously. Now, Gartner believes the growth in these devices will be much faster than the growth in PCs and phones.

“By 2020, the number of smartphones, tablets and PCs in use will reach about 7.3 billion units," said Peter Middleton, research director at Gartner. "In contrast, the IoT will have expanded at a much faster rate, resulting in a population of about 26 billion units at that time."

Part of this will be because of the low cost of adding IoT capability to consumer products, Gartner said, and it expects that "ghost" devices with unused connectivity will be common. This will be a combination of products that have the capability built in but require software to "activate" it and products with IoT functionality that customers do not actively leverage, according to Gartner.

Big areas of growth will be advanced intelligent home systems, medical devices, factory automation sensors and applications in industrial robotics, sensor motes for increased agricultural yield and automotive sensors and infrastructure integrity monitoring systems for areas like road and rail transport, water distribution and electrical transmission.

Also, Middleton reckoned that by 2020 component costs will have come down to the point that connectivity will become a standard feature, "even for processors costing less than $1".  Devices this cheap would allow the connecting of just about anything, from the very simple to the very complex, he said.

"As product designers dream up ways to exploit the inherent connectivity that will be offered in intelligent products, we expect the variety of devices offered to explode," Middleton said. 

Gartner analyst Jim Tully believes that there are a lot of misconception about the IoT, but also a lot of curiosity. "We are getting asked about it all the time," he said, "and that is from the customer's side and from the vendors side."

While there is a lot of confusion over the IoT, Tully said it was not too difficult to differentiate between that and straightforward, technological advance.

"A smart vending machine is not the IoT," he said. "But when that vending machine is smart enough to check if it is empty, place and order to be replenished, deliver the order, complete the order and get the finished order to the customer and all without needing an operator, then that is the IoT in action."

The IoT covers hardware, embedded software, communications services and information services associated with devices. Gartner believes that the incremental IoT supplier revenue contribution from IoT in 2020 is estimated at $309bn.

Department of Defense Awards $201 Million for GPS Satellite Contract

As reported by the Motley Fool: The Department of Defense announced nine new defense contracts on Thursday worth $1.31 billion. Lockheed Martin didn't win the biggest of these contracts. That honor went to Boeing. But Lockheed did win the second-largest award -- a $200.7 million contract modification to a contract to build GPS III space vehicles 05 and 06.

The contract being modified was originally awarded to Lockheed Martin on May 15, 2008, being then described as "a new contract for the first increment, of the next generation of Global Positioning System (GPS Base IIIA) ... a satellite-based radio navigation system that serves military and civil users worldwide... [using] existing capabilities [to] introduce a new L1C civil signal, increase earth coverage M-Code power for authorized military users, provide a graceful growth path to achieve full capabilities development document threshold requirements, and continue support for the Nuclear Detonation Detection System mission."

This original contract was valued in excess of $1.46 billion, and has subsequently been modified  -- and had dollars added to its value. The modification announced today covers work that should be completed by Dec. 14, 2017.

Proliferation of GPS-enabled Smartphones Spurs Growth of Global Location-based Applications Market

As reported by Directions Magazine:  The global market for location-based applications is poised for rapid growth, as the mass adoption of global positioning system (GPS)-enabled smartphones is encouraging developers to introduce numerous advanced applications.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (http://www.wireless.frost.com), Moving in Smart Spaces, finds that indoor connectivity, augmented reality, big data and wearable devices are the key technology trends likely to fuel the uptake of location-based applications. Location-based technology and data can then be combined to facilitate the development of smart spaces in every city and community.

"Location-based application developers have so far focused on the development of outdoor applications due to the adoption of GPS positioning in smartphones," noted Frost & Sullivan Information & Communication Technologies Research Analyst Shuba Ramkumar. "However, as individuals spend more time indoors, there is a need to roll out indoor location-based applications that capitalize on various functionalities such as mapping, navigation and geo-fencing."

Augmented reality technology could also be used to make location-based applications more interactive. Further, the widening ecosystem of wearable devices such as Google Glass and Samsung Galaxy Gear infuses technology into the daily lives of individuals, widening the scope of context-aware applications.

However there are several challenges restricting the growth of the location-based applications market. The lack of standardization in indoor positioning technologies such as Wi-Fi, sensors and Bluetooth is complicating the development of indoor applications. Location-based application providers will need to wait until wearable device manufacturers address the issues of limited battery life and dependence on smartphones for outdoor connectivity.

Market participants also find it difficult to monetize applications due to the absence of a clear business model. In this scenario, application developers should seek to identify new sources of revenue. They can expedite market expansion by establishing contracts with indoor venues to provide customized applications, and by working with wearable device manufacturers to create related applications.

"Stakeholders should work together to identify the most reliable and accurate indoor positioning technologies that can steer the indoor connectivity market forward," said Ramkumar. "The In-Location Alliance is one such initiative formed by market participants to discuss and resolve issues concerning indoor positioning technologies."