GPS and Snow Depth: When Mother Nature Got Stingy, this Ski Area Got Creative

Groomer and snow maker JP Silva utilizes GPS technology to measure snow depth while working through the night at Diamond Peak Ski Resort near Incline Village on March 6, 2015.  (Photo: Jason Bean/RGJ)

As reported by RGJ:After more than five years grooming runs and making snow at Diamond Peak Ski Resort it's obvious JP Silva has an innate feel for the terrain.

He can navigate the snowcat with ease even during a casual conversation with a rider, operating stick controls and monitoring screens and gauges to keep the diesel powered, roughly eight-ton vehicle level and grooming a smooth, corduroy pattern into the snow.

To hear Silva describe it he's got a near-spiritual connection to the mountain when he's operating the snowcat during one of his overnight shifts.

"It's like my Zen place," Silva, 32, said during a recent shift. "I'm out here practicing in my garden."

But even Silva's close relationship with the terrain isn't enough to effectively manage the snow at Diamond Peak which, like much of the Sierra Nevada, has been ravaged by a four-year drought that's shown no sign of abating. In fact, scientific evidence suggests climate change will contribute to even sparser snow conditions in the future.

That's why Diamond Peak is turning to satellite technology to help Silva and the other groomers and snowmakers at the ski area maximize the snow they get from Mother Nature and the stuff they make themselves.

It's the first ski area in North America to install SNOWsat technology on the terrain, in snowcats and in resort headquarters to actively manage snow depth as the groomers are running.

"It is like a video game," Silva said. "If I need a four-degree pitch I can instantly level and move the snow just right to get a four-degree pitch."

The system integrates satellites, software, wireless communication and mapping technology to give grooomers like Silva and others at Diamond Peak a live look at snow depth anywhere on the mountain. It also includes software for managing the fleet of snowcats by tracking location, idle time and other statistics.

But when it comes to managing ski conditions during an era of low snow it's the snow depth data that's critical to operators.

Grooming Supervisor Russ Mitchell, in cab, talks with fellow groomer JP Silva while working through the night at Diamond
Peak Ski Resort near Incline Village on March 6, 2015. (Photo: Jason Bean/RGJ)

"There are always pockets that accumulate snow," said John Glockhamer, marketing director for PistenBully, the company that makes the snowcats used at Diamond Peak and the SNOWsat technology. It's North American headquarters are in Reno.

"You may have a puddle of eight-feet of snow and 30 yards up on the ridge you have three inches," Glockhamer said.

The SNOWsat helps by measuring snow depth and displaying it on monitors where snowcat operators and resort managers can see it. It's a high tech version of the previous measuring system, which involved ski patrollers working throughout the day to use sticks to measure and record snow data.

It works by using a computerized, three dimensional map of the mountain without snow as a baseline. Then sensors mounted on snowcats allow satellites and a base on the ground to pinpoint the location of each vehicle that's outfitted with the technology.

Grooming Supervisor Russ Mitchell shows off the tiller on his snowcat while working at
Diamond Peak Ski Resort near Incline Village on March 6, 2015. (Photo: Jason Bean/RGJ)

By measuring how far the snowcat is above bare ground the system can tell operators the snow depth with an accuracy of less than two inches.

Glockhamer said previous attempts to use technology to measure snow depth were often sonar-based. But the inconsistency of snow within the snowpack undermined the usefulness of that technology, which sends out pulses of sound and reads the echo to determine distance. Layers of ice and other inconsistencies in the snow could lead to inaccurate readings, Glockhamer said.

Satellite technology also had problems, he said. The big one is that most satellite location systems only track objects with an accuracy of a couple feet or meters.

When it comes to maintain snow conditions for resort skiing, "if you are accurate within two feet that doesn't mean anything," he said. "Especially this year when there is no snow, you need to know right down to inches."

By combining the ground-based unit and computer model of the mountain with the satellites SNOWsat improves three-dimensional location accuracy enough to be useful to groomers, Glockhamer said.

It's already in use in more than 100 locations in Europe, he said. And there's an expectation more North American ski areas will try SNOWsat or something like it, especially given how susceptible the winter resort industry is to disruption from climate change.

A spokeswoman for Diamond Peak, which is operated by the Incline Village General Improvement District, said the system cost about $100,000. The snow depth technology is on two of Diamond Peak's five snowcats. The fleet management system is on all five.

A groomer stands in front of his snowcat at
Diamond Peak Ski Resort near Incline
Village on March 6, 2015. (Photo: Jason Bean/RGJ)

Brad Wilson, general manager of Diamond Peak, said the technology allows workers to better anticipate thin spots in order to prevent them before they turn to bare spots and ruin a run. That's especially critical in the Sierra Nevada where springtime sunshine can make a bare spot grow exponentially in a matter of hours.

"You don't want to wait until you see a thin spot," Wilson said. "The last thing you want to do is have a thin spot open up, it just absorbs heat."

That's not much of a problem when the Sierra Nevada is having a traditional, at least for the 20th century, winter with a massive snowpack. But when conditions are thin, as they have been in recent years, better snow management is needed to extend the number of weeks and days skiers can play on the slopes.

"If you have a 12-foot base you could make a lot of mistakes and not have to worry about it," Wilson said. "When you are dealing with one, two, three, four-foot bases it makes a huge difference."

Drone Vs. Volcano: How Robotic Flyers are Changing Exploration

As reported by Wired: It’s early morning on my second day at Marum Crater, and as I drift in and out of sleep, I try to place the incongruous buzzing that seems to have awoken me. I unzip the tent’s vestibule and peer outside, where a small drone hovers in the distance, four blades whirring in synchrony and small camera pointed back toward camp. “Let’s get going,” urges Simon Jardine, the man behind the joystick, punctuating his flyover with a well-intentioned cackle. “There’s a fiery pit of lava to go explore!”

For all his joie de vivre, Jardine is a master drone builder and pilot whose skills have produced remarkable footage for shows like Australian Top Gear, the BBC’s Into the Volcano, and a range of music videos. His company Aerobot sells camera-outfitted drones, including custom jobs that require unique specifications like, say, the capacity to lift an IMAX camera. From a sprawling patch of coastline real estate in Queensland, Australia, Jardine builds, tests, and tweaks his creations; the rural tranquility is conducive to a process that may occasionally lead to unidentified falling objects.

Simply put, if you’ve got a drone flying challenge, Jardine is your first call.

Sam Cossman, the adventurer who put this expedition together, got Jardine on board early in the planning process. “I met Simon on my first expedition to Vanuatu,” he recalls, “one morning when we had both awoken early to catch first light.” After leaving their respective trips and following each other’s work, the mutual admiration grew. “When I decided to return to the volcano,” says Cossman, “I knew Simon would be an integral part of the expedition because of his familiarity with the terrain, the extreme flying conditions, and his level of expertise.”

I take a final sip of tea, revealing a gravelly deposit of the pervasive volcanic sand at the bottom of the mug, and join Cossman and Jardine on the crater’s edge. We’re plotting an ambitious drone flight across the crater, one that will capture footage of the full scene with unprecedented detail. Plugging the resulting imagery into 3-D rendering software from Pix4D will generate a model of the tiered crater system, providing a key resource for geologists and hazard assessment teams who are working to understand more about the volcano’s fiery temperament.

“I have flown in some really crazy places,” says Jardine, recalling his past work in caves, around big waves, and underneath the Sydney bridge. But the vast scale, whirling winds, corrosive fumes, and intense temperatures of Marum Crater presented new challenges. The previous day, Jardine had taken the plunge into the crater itself in order to get footage of the lava lake at closer range than would be practical for human participants. “The bottom of Marum Crater was definitely the most insane place to fly a copter, especially a plastic one,” he says. “The hardest part of flying was the hot air rushing out and cold air getting pulled into the lake. The machine would surge forwards and I would pull back on the stick. Then the hot air would blow in my face 10 times hotter than a hairdryer, and I could see the copter blasting back at me, so I’d push forwards on the stick, and so on. It was like playing tug-of-war with a drunk drone.”

As a scientist, I was particularly encouraged by the idea of having additional vantage points. From the aerial perspective, it’s possible to quantify the thicknesses of past eruptive layers – the iron-rich red bands, the columnar basalts, the cobble conglomerate – to reconstruct the events that formed the crater. Filming my own sampling efforts was critical in assigning metadata to particular rocks. When a lava lake is gurgling a few meters away, time is of the essence, and making simple measurements is not practical. Information like the size and spatial distributions of recently erupted rocks, the precise distance from the eruption, and the relationship between rock color and age are all discernible from the drone and GoPro footage.

Looking forward, Cossman is also eager to use drones in a more exploratory sense. “We were initially on the hunt for a new vent and potential lava lake that we believed existed in a neighboring crater,” he recalls. “I believed the drones would carry a great sense of utility for our exploration by serving as our eyes in the sky for this unfamiliar terrain, helping to identify the new volcanic feature and to inform the safest and most direct descent route.” For now, that descent will have to wait, but when it does happen, it will likely be faster and more efficient – and thus potentially less hazardous – than previous efforts.

Jardine’s flight around, over, and through the crater was ultimately successful, though not without robotic casualties. One drone fell out of the sky and clattered down the rock wall, shedding propellers along the way. Many of the cameras and other electronics suffered from the pervasive acidic vapor, corroding over the course of hours. But after several flights that push the batteries, the navigation system, and Jardine’s skills to the limit, we’ve covered the entire kilometer-wide crater. The resulting 3-D imagery, shown below, represents the highest resolution map of the crater to date, and offers an alluring vision of the future of technology-assisted exploration.

Another fully immersive model – in which you can walk around the crater, leap down its vertical faces, and stand on the shore of the lava lake – is currently in the works. Says Cossman: “we’ve imported the high definition model it into a virtual environment, so I can literally invite people in and give them a virtual tour in real time.”

BeiDou Day Numbering Creates Leap-Second Issue

As reported by GPS World: During preparation of playback scenarios for the upcoming leap-second event taking place in June, engineers at Racelogic identified a potential pitfall for GNSS engineers.

The difficulty arises from the fact that BeiDou uses a different “day number” for the date to apply the leap second, compared with GPS and Galileo. GPS and Galileo use 1-7 as week day numbers, and BeiDou uses 0-6.

If this fact has been missed during development, then the result is that the leap second may be implemented a day early on GNSS engines that are tracking the BeiDou constellation, said Mark Sampson, product manager for Racelogic.

“We tested four different Beidou enabled receivers, from four leading GNSS companies, and none of them appeared to handle the Beidou leap second correctly. This included an engine which originates from China!” Sampson said. “We have since been in contact with two of these companies, who have confirmed that their hardware does have a bug in the leap-second code due to the numbering of the days.”

The error presents itself when the receiver is running on the BeiDou constellation alone, and when the date is June 29 of this year. In some cases, the BeiDou leap second will be adjusted from 2 to 3 seconds from midnight on June 29, which should in fact occur on midnight of June 30. This will result in an error for the reported UTC time of 1 second for the period of this day. In other cases, the leap second was not implemented at all when running on BeiDou alone.

“We have also checked the output of a BeiDou signal generator from a different simulator company, and this too uses the 1-7 range for the BeiDou leap-second date instead of the correct 0-6 range,” Sampson said. “This may explain why a number of commercial receivers appear to have been caught out by this issue.”

In order to help companies test for this problem, Racelogic has generated simulated RF data for June 29 and 30, starting 15 minutes before midnight. “We have two sets of files. One set contains BeiDou only signals and the other contains a combination of BeiDou and GPS signals,” Sampson said. “Note that on some of the receivers we have tested, when GPS is being tracked as well, the GPS leap-second message overrides the one coming from BeiDou and applies the leap second correctly.”

The scenarios are compatible with Racelogic’s LabSat3 triple constellation simulator, which is available on a free 15-day loan or can be purchased from Racelogic.

Connect to Your Car with the Apple Watch

As reported by SlashGear: When Apple Watch lands in April, droves of people will be trying to snap one up. As lines diminish, users will start to discover all the neat things they can do with their watch. While Apple has plenty of use-cases listed on their website, there are also an endless number of iOS Developers hard at work, finalizing their Apple Watch-ready apps for distribution or update. Does Apple Watch make sense for the connected car, though? Automatic says it will.

The result of a ‘hack day’ project the team holds internally, Automatic’s Apple Watch features will respect Apple’s wishes of quick-glance features instead of scrolling and reading. That’s especially important in a car, where distractions can lead to catastrophic results.

Set for launch right around the time Apple Watch is a reality for all, Automatic’s app will have two features available for Apple’s wearable. First, you’ll be able to find your parking space with ease, without needing to look at your phone. Automatic’s app can already tag your car’s location, and Automatic tells us their Apple Watch feature will feed that info to you on your wrist.

Second, when you’re done with a trip, Automatic may ask if you want to log it as a business trip. This feature is only for those who enable it, so those who don’t use their car for business as well as pleasure won’t be bombarded with notifications every time they turn the car off.

If you do use your car for business, affirming the trip you just took was for for work will automatically cobble together info about the trip like mileage or time spent in the car. However you’ve chosen to save that info (it can be fed to a spreadsheet or linked to another app, for instance) will remain stable. Your Apple Watch simply lets you tag the trip as one for work with a tap.

Though they tell us more features will likely come as users provide feedback on what they want, Automatic wants to keep their interaction with you via wearables brief. While you shouldn’t expect to see a readout of your diagnostics on the small screen, a quick buzz when you accelerate too quickly might happen.

BMW was also briefly featured during the Apple Watch event with the BMW iRemote App. The popular app for the new BMW i3 and i8 is available today on the iPhone, but it will soon transition to the Apple Watch as the first car app.

Just like the iPhone version, the iRemote watch app will give insight into the car charging status, as well as performing functions like pre-conditioning the car and battery, locking the doors, flashing the headlights, honking the horn, setting pre-defined departure times and finding nearby charging stations.

And it even tracks your car on a map.

The BMW iRemote App for Apple Watch is free of charge and it’s expected to be available soon in the App Store.

World's Largest Solid Rocket Booster Fired in Ground Test for NASA

As reported by Space.com: The world's largest solid rocket motor roared to life in Utah Wednesday (March 11), but instead of lifting off the ground, the massive booster, laying on its side, remained in place as data was collected to qualify its use on NASA's new heavy-lift launch vehicle.

Orbital ATK, Inc., the primary contractor building the twin side-mounted boosters for NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), conducted the test fire at its facility in Promontory, Utah. The motor ignited at 11:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT) as scheduled and burned for a full two minutes.

"It looked really clean, we are really excited," said Charles Precourt, the general manager for Orbital ATK's propulsion systems and a former astronaut. "Really nice result."

An advanced, more powerful version of the solid rockets that launched the space shuttle, the first SLS qualification motor (QM-1) put out 3.6 million pounds of thrust, greater than the force of 14 four-engine Boeing 747 jetliners at full take-off power.

"It is a big day for us, the culmination of many years of experience work during the space shuttle program that will transition now tothe SLS," Precourt said at a pre-test briefing on Tuesday. "The real success is collecting the information that we need to go further to be able to put [a] crew on the vehicle in a few years."

NASA is building the SLS to fly missions into deep space, with the ultimate goal of sending astronauts to Mars by the 2030s. The first SLS flight, targeted for 2018, will carry an uncrewed Orion spacecraft out beyond low-Earth orbit to test the performance of the integrated system. The first crewed launch is expected to follow in 2021.

When completed, two solid rocket boosters and four main engines (also reused from the shuttle program) will power the SLS's first stage. The boosters will provide more than 75 percent of the thrust needed for the rocket to escape Earth's gravitational pull.

The QM-1 booster, which was assembled from case parts previously flown on 23 space shuttle missions and an aft skirt used on the firs shuttle flight, STS-1, in 1981, differs from those used during the earlier program in a number of ways.

The avionics (flight control) systems, have been upgraded for SLS to be more reliable and capable. In addition, the rubber-based ablative insulation used to shield the motor's metal skin from the temperatures generated by the burning propellant has been reformulated to lighten the rocket by a couple of thousand pounds.

"The biggest change is that we added a segment, which is 25 percent more propellant for way more performance," Precourt said. "The typical shuttle booster would give you about three million pounds, this is a little over 3.5 million pounds of thrust, so it's the kind of performance we need to get our exploration journey to Mars off the ground."

The booster's additional segment, bringing the total to five, extends the length of the motor to 177 feet (54 meters). The SLS, in its initial 70-metric-ton (77 ton) configuration, will stand 321 feet (98 m) tall.

For Wednesday's test, the five-segment booster was pre-heated to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) to test the rocket's design at the highest end of its accepted propellant temperature range. A second qualification test (QM-2), planned for early 2016, will be a cold test, where the booster will be conditioned to 40 degrees F (4 degrees C), the low-end temperature for the motor.

"These two qualification tests are major steps in getting the booster certified for the first two flights of SLS and another step closer on the journey to Mars," Alex Priskos, NASA's manager for the SLS boosters office, said.

With Wednesday's firing complete, Orbital ATK engineers will begin analyzing the data and dissecting the booster to measure its performance.

"What we are looking for in success is in the 700 channels of data that we are collecting — pressures, temperatures, vibrations, loads, ability of the nozzle to move where we command, that the avionics run correctly," Precourt said.

QM-1 marked the 57th ground firing of a space shuttle or SLS booster since 1977. It was Orbital ATK's fifth test of a five-segment solid, including three demonstration motors fired after the final shuttle mission in 2011.

Smartphones Will Soon Learn to Recognize Faces and More

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Smartphone camera apps could soon do more than just capture images. Software integrated with a new line of smartphone chips will be capable of recognizing, say, a cat or city skyline in a photo, and tagging pictures of your friends with their names.

The chip maker Qualcomm announced last week that it will bundle the software with its next major chip for mobile devices. The technology, which Qualcomm calls Zeroth, could make sophisticated machine learning more common on mobile devices. As well as processing images, the Zeroth software is designed to allow phones to recognize speech or other sounds, and to learn to spot patterns of activity from a device’s sensors.

The technology uses an approach to machine learning known as deep learning that has led to recent advances in speech and object recognition, as well as software able to play Atari games with superhuman skill (see “Google’s Intelligence Designer”). Deep learning software is loosely modeled on some features of brains. It can be trained to recognize certain objects in images by processing many example photos through a network of artificial “neurons” arranged into hierarchical layers.

Tim Leland, a vice president of product management with Qualcomm, says the company plans to work with partners to build apps to make use of the new capabilities. He wouldn’t say exactly what those apps might do, but Qualcomm’s demonstrations of the technology have so far focused mostly on enhancing the features of camera apps. Last week at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, where Zeroth was announced, Qualcomm showed it powering a camera app that could recognize faces it had seen before, and detect different types of photo scenes.

The Zeroth software is being developed to launch with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 processor, which will enter production later this year. The chip and the Zeroth software are also aimed at manufacturers of drones and robots.

Normally an app has to send data out over the Internet to a powerful server in order to perform such tricks (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning”). By doing such computation on the phone itself, the software should be better at interpreting data from location and motion sensors on a device, Leland says. He predicts that one of the first applications of Zeroth will be extending the battery life of devices by tracking the way a person uses a phone and learning when it could power down to save energy without affecting the user experience.

Qualcomm is also experimenting with chips that have physical networks of “neurons” made from silicon that communicate with spiking electrical signals (see “Qualcomm to Build Neuro-Inspired Chips”). That might give devices more powerful learning abilities, but it would mean they’d work much differently than today’s devices do.

Solar-Powered Plane Takes off for Round-The-World Flight

As reported by GigaOM: Two pilots aboard a solar-powered aircraft took off at 7:12 a.m. local time from Abu Dhabi for the first leg of what they hope will be the first complete solar-powered circumnavigation flight.

If all goes well, Solar Impulse-2 should take about 12 hours to reach Oman (a flight that would take about an hour on a commercial airliner) where it will land before continuing on to India, Myanmar, China and the U.S. The total 22,000-mile trip is expected to take five months. You can follow the flight’s progress at SolarImpulse.com.

The aircraft has a 236-foot wingspan but weighs just 5,070 pounds, according to Gizmag, and is powered by more than 17,000 solar panels. One of the main materials used to build the plane was lightweight carbon fiber composites. One problem was fashioning long wings that were both extremely lightweight and strong enough to withstand multi-day flights without failing.

This plane’s predecessor, piloted by the same team of André Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard, flew from California to New York in 2013. That trip took three months.