China Launches New-Generation BeiDou Satellite

As reported by Inside GNSS: China’s Xinhua news agency has announced the launch a new-generation BeiDou satellite at 9:52 p.m. Beijing time March 30, 2015.  This is the first of five next-generation BeiDou that China will launch this year, Jianyun Chen, a deputy director of the China Satellite Navigation Office (CSNO), told a Munich Satellite Navigation Summit last week.

Launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the southwestern province of Sichuan, the satellite was boosted by a Long March-3C carrier rocket developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

The 17th satellite for the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) marks the beginning of expanding the regional BDS to global coverage, according to Xinhua. Although China has not said which type of spacecraft was launched Monday, Spaceflight Now reported that the flight path taken by the Long March rocket indicates the satellite was destined for one of the BeiDou system’s inclined geosynchronous orbits.

The latest satellite will test new Phase III BDS navigation signals and inter-satellite links, among other innovations.

Xinhua reported that the new satellite was developed by the Shanghai Engineering Center for Microsatellites, a non-profit organization established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Shanghai Municipal Government.

The BeiDou launch was the fourth such GNSS acheivement during the past week, following the March 25 GPS Block IIF satellite launch, a March 27 dual Galileo launch, and  deployment on March 28 of a new Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System spacecraft. 

An Autonomous Car Just Drove Across the USA

As reported by Wired: An autonomous car just drove across the country.

Nine days after leaving San Francisco, a blue car packed with tech from a company you’ve probably never heard of rolled into New York City after crossing 15 states and 3,400 miles to make history. The car did 99 percent of the driving on its own, yielding to the carbon-based life form behind the wheel only when it was time to leave the highway and hit city streets.

This amazing feat, by the automotive supplier Delphi, underscores the great leaps this technology has taken in recent years, and just how close it is to becoming a part of our lives. Yes, many regulatory and legislative questions must be answered, and it remains to be seen whether consumers are ready to cede control of their cars, but the hardware is, without doubt, up to the task.

What’s remarkable isn’t the fact Delphi completed this trip, but the fact several companies could have done it. Google, Audi, or Mercedes would have had little trouble handling this level of autonomous highway driving. The news here isn’t that this was possible, but that it was so easy.

“The technology is not what is most notable from this trip,” says Jeff Miller, an associate professor at the University of Southern California who works on autonomous driving. “The fact that they drove as far as they did and had a lot of publicity will help the technology more than any programming or hardware on that vehicle.”

The speed with which the technology has reached this point is stunning. Just 11 years ago at the 2004 Darpa Grand Challenge, the most advanced autonomous vehicles of the day attempted to complete a 150-mile course. The best any of them could do was 7.32 miles—and that vehicle got stuck and caught fire. The next year, five vehicles completed a 132-mile course, but took seven hours to do it. Autonomous vehicles have made enormous strides since then, which is especially remarkable when you realize the auto industry typically spends five to seven years developing a new car.  

Today, most of the world’s major automakers are working on autonomous technology, with Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volvo leading the pack. Google may be more advanced than anyone: The tech giant says its self-driving cars are so far along, they can recognize and respond to hand signals from a cop directing traffic.

Most automakers are taking a slow and steady approach to the technology and plan to roll it out over time. Most expect to have cars capable of handling themselves in stop and go traffic and on the highway within three to five years. Cars capable of navigating more complex urban environments will follow in the years beyond that, while fully autonomous vehicles are expected to be commonplace by 2040.

Propelling Us Toward the Day Humans No Longer Hold the Wheel

Companies like Google, which has racked up more than 700,000 miles with its autonomous vehicles, and Audi, which recently completed a road trip from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas, get all the love when it comes to robo-cars. But Delphi is doing just as much work behind the scenes, propelling us toward the day when humans no longer hold the wheel.

One of the auto industry’s biggest suppliers, Delphi has a solid record of innovation, from the first electric starter (1911), to the first in-dash car radio (1936), to the first integrated radio-navigation system (1994). For the past 15 years, it’s been working on active safety features (think active lane keeping and blind spot monitoring). Lately, it has been consolidating all this hardware into a holistic system that lets the car handle itself.

Delphi installed it all in a 2014 Audi SQ5, which Delphi engineers chose simply because they think it’s cool. Seriously. It has windshield-mounted camera spot lane lines, road signs, and traffic lights (in color). Midrange radars that see 80 meters sit on each corner. There’s another radar at the front, and a sixth at the back, plus two long-range units on the front and back. The front corners have built-in LIDaR.

The cross-country trip was meant to generate some publicity, yes, but Delphi also wanted to expose the system to variable real-world conditions and collect terabytes of data to further refine the technology. This car was built within the past year, but it takes advantage of tools that have been in the works for at least 15 years.


“It was time to put it on the road and see how it performed,” says Delphi CTO Jeff Owens. “It was just tremendous.”

The Delphi caravan (the self-driving car, a follow car with more personnel, and a Winnebago full of PR, photo, and video folks) followed a southern route, largely to avoid snow. Apart from the shock of realizing just how long it takes to drive across Texas, the biggest scare of the trip came while crossing a double-decker steel bridge on the drive from Philadelphia to New York. “I saw that bridge coming, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is gonna be a grab the wheel moment,'” says Katherine Winter, a Delphi software engineer. That’s because being surrounded by metal plays hell on radar by making it difficult to discern what’s a threat and what isn’t. But Delphi’s refined how its software understands the radar data and uses the other sensors to augment it. “It actually outperformed what we thought it would do,” Winter says.

Building the car helped Delphi hone the hardware and software automakers will want and need as they begin producing autonomous vehicles, and test it in a variety of situations. That included rain, hot weather, construction zones, and tunnels. “It didn’t miss a lick,” Owens says.

The team celebrated the arrival in New York with high-fives, but Delphi’s not surprised by the accomplishment. It knew before setting out it could handle the miles. It just needed to show us it could.   

The six engineers who cycled through the driver’s seat only took control of the car when it encountered a situation they weren’t confident of handling safely, like a construction zone with zig-zagging lane lines, or to make an aggressive lane change to get around a cop car on the shoulder. They obeyed the speed limit and avoided night driving.

There’s no indication that it’s capable of handling the road with far more skill than a human. You’d have to look twice to spot the cameras and LIDaR around the car; the radars are hidden behind plastic body panels. Even the trunk looks ordinary, which is quite a feat—Delphi packed all the necessary computers in the spare tire compartment. That was intentional, Owens says. “We were kind of going for the remarkably unremarkable look.” The reason for this modesty is any tech Delphi pitches to automakers has to be unobtrusive and production-ready.

That is the ultimate goal here. This car won’t be in showrooms. But the stuff that makes it work certainly will be. Delphi makes all the stuff automakers don’t (or can’t) make themselves. The plan is to offer everything an automaker might need to make a fully autonomous car. It’s an off-the-shelf solution anyone can use.

“This drive is one more marker on the exciting road toward automated vehicles,” says Bryant Walker Smith, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society. He studies autonomous vehicles and says Delphi’s accomplishment raises public awareness “by previewing what will someday be possible.” That’s a good thing, as long as the conversation includes “what was required, what was hard, and what remains to be done.”

Delphi will take a few weeks to dissect and digest all the data it gathered and everything the engineers noticed, like the car’s skittishness around tractor trailers, and adjust the system as needed. Then it might be time for a trip through Europe, where Delphi does a lot of business and automakers are keen on both active safety and autonomous features. 

For now, though, the company is pleased with the progress it’s made, and it confident it will play a significant role in the coming shift to self-driving cars, Owens says. “Delphi can march at the same speed as Silicon Valley.”

Electric Propulsion Gives Cube-Sats Mobility in Space

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Natalya Brikner, CEO of the startup Accion Systems, holds an impossibly small spacecraft thruster in the palm of her hand. It looks more like a computer chip than a rocket—a gold-coated square of silicon the size of a dime.

Accion’s thruster has 480 barely visible nozzles etched into the surface of that silicon. It relies on a type of electronic propulsion that to date has only been used on a few space missions. An electric field is used to accelerate charged particles, normally using ions generated from a gas propellant, to create thrust.

Accion’s thruster has 480 barely visible nozzles etched into the surface of that silicon. It relies on a type of electronic propulsion that to date has only been used on a few space missions. An electric field is used to accelerate charged particles, normally using ions generated from a gas propellant, to create thrust.

Dozens of Accion’s thrusters can be packaged, along with a fuel tank, into a space propulsion system about the size of a deck of cards. Brikner says the technology, which will be launched into space on its first satellite in July, will make it practical to add propulsion to low-cost satellites that are as small as a tissue box, making them considerably more useful.

Microsatellites have largely been used for research, but commercial applications are gaining traction (see “Startup Plans Constellation of Tiny Monitoring Satellites”). The commercial potential of the technology was highlighted last year by Google’s $500 million acquisition of Skybox, whose small imaging satellites weigh 5 percent as much as conventional ones.

The capabilities of such satellites have been limited in part because they typically cannot maneuver themselves. Propulsion systems have proved difficult to shrink. Conventional thrusters tend to lose efficiency and power at small sizes, and they can double the size of a small satellite, making it too expensive to launch into space.

The systems normally used to ionize gases for electronic propulsion are also typically bulky. But Accion eliminated some of this bulk by using an ionic liquid (a salt that’s liquid at room temperature). “We don’t have to do any ionization in space; it’s done already on the ground,” Brikner says.

Adding propulsion to microsatellites could allow clusters of them to fly in formation, allowing them to mimic the performance of much larger and more expensive satellites for applications such as imaging. Propulsion could also help microsatellites maintain orbit instead of slowly deorbiting, allowing them to last up to 10 times longer.

Other companies, including Aerojet Rocketdyne and Busek, are also developing miniaturized thrusters for small satellites. “It’s a micro space race to see who will launch these things into space first,” says Paulo Lazano, director of MIT’s Space Propulsion Lab, where the basic technology behind Accion was developed.

Drive from Europe to the U.S.? Russia Proposes World's Greatest Superhighway

As reported by CNN: London to New York City by car?  It could happen if the head of Russian Railways has his way.

According to a March 23 report in The Siberian Times, Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin has proposed a plan for a massive trans-Siberian highway that would link his country's eastern border with the U.S. state of Alaska, crossing a narrow stretch of the Bering Sea that separates Asia and North America.

The scheme was unveiled at a meeting of the Moscow-based Russian Academy of Science.

Dubbed the Trans-Eurasian Belt Development (TEPR), the project calls for a major roadway to be constructed alongside the existing Trans-Siberian Railway, along with a new train network and oil and gas pipelines.

"This is an inter-state, inter-civilization, project," the Siberian Times quoted Yakunin. "The project should be turned into a world 'future zone,' and it must be based on leading, not catching, technologies."

"Are we there yet?"
The road would run across the entirety of Russia, linking with existing road systems in Western Europe and Asia.

The distance between Russia's western and eastern borders is roughly 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles).

Yakunin said the road would connect Russia with North America via Russia's far eastern Chukotka region, across the Bering Strait and into Alaska's Seward Peninsula.

The road would likely enter Alaska some distance north of the town of Nome, where the famed Iditarod sled dog race ends.

How would drivers span the ocean gap between Siberia and Alaska? Ferry? Tunnel? Bridges?

The report didn't offer specifics on the route across the sea.

The main route of the Trans-Siberian railway runs from Moscow
to Vladivostok and covers 9,258 kilometers.

The shortest distance between mainland Russia and mainland Alaska is approximately 88 kilometers (55 miles), according to the Alaska Public Lands Information Centers.

A theoretical drive (as fancifully calculated by CNN) from London to Alaska via Moscow might cover about 12,978 kilometers (8,064 miles).

Relatively isolated even by Alaska standards, no road connects Nome with the rest of the state's road system.

About 836 road-less kilometers (520 miles) across desolate terrain separates Nome from the closest major city and road network in Fairbanks, the unofficial northern terminus of the Alaska Highway.

From Fairbanks, Canada and the 48 contiguous U.S. states can be reached by road.

Assuming a road to Nome were ever built (the idea has been studied by the state of Alaska), a fantasy road trip from London to New York might cover a grueling but presumably photo-op-laden 20,777 kilometers (12,910 miles).

Facebook posts from forlorn Siberian rest stops might alone make the trip worthwhile, though the journey would also easily establish irritating new records for "Are we there yet?" gripes from the kids.

Who's gonna pay for this thing?

Yakunin has been described as a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Some sources have speculated that he could be Putin's likely successor as president.

TEPR would reportedly cost "trillions of dollars."

According to Yakunin, however, massive economic returns would more than make up for the massive cash outlay -- about which the report also included no details. 

Watch SpaceX Test its Amazing SuperDraco Rockets from a Few Feet Away

As reported by The Verge: The Space Shuttle was cool in action, but on paper it sounded like a particularly capacious way to get to work in the mornings. Spaceships should really have cooler names. Elon Musk's SpaceX understands this — the private company's newest Dragon craft is equipped with four SuperDraco pods, each with two engines that belch vast plumes of fire that could help the manned module separate in the case of emergency. Were it up to NASA, I bet they'd have called SpaceX's upcoming craft "the Big Flying Bus," or "Sky Subway."



It's those SuperDraco engines being tested in the video above. SpaceX captured its abort procedure in a Vine, showing both engines firing up with a movie-esque woomph, before flaring out in a puff of fire. NASA — which plans to use the SpaceX Dragon craft to ferry its astronauts into space from 2018 — says the successful performance of the engines will ensure the safety of the craft and the precious human cargo it contains.

NASA is Giving the Moon its Own Moon

As reported by the Independent: NASA will use a robotic arm to grab a boulder and send it into orbit around the moon, giving it its own moon, allowing astronauts to study the rock as it flies around the Earth.

The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) will also allow NASA to demonstrate many of the technologies that will carry humans to Mars. "The option to retrieve a boulder from an asteroid will have a direct impact on planning for future human missions to deep space and begin a new era of spaceflight," said NASA associate administrator Robert Lightfoot.

The technology used could also help NASA defend the planet from future asteroid impacts. During the mission, the agency will try out the techniques that it could use to throw an asteroid off course if it were coming towards Earth.

NASA refers to the robotic arm plan as “option B”, and was selected over another plan that would see an entire asteroid redirected. In the successful plan, a robotic arm will land on an asteroid big enough to have suitable boulders on it, and then throw one of those into orbit around the moon.

NASA said that it will pick an asteroid no earlier than 2019, and will launch the spacecraft carrying the throwing robot about a year later. NASA has identified three candidates already — and expects to find one or two more per year — all of which will be examined for their shape, size, orbit and other characteristics before they are chosen.

When the asteroid is chosen, and the craft landed on it, robot arms will be deployed to grab a boulder. The unmanned ship will then send the boulder into orbit over a number of years.

The same technology could be used in future to save us from asteroids that are headed towards the earth. The robot could eventually defend the planet by using a technique called a “gravity tractor” — if it heads towards the asteroid, the robot’s gravity can throw off the course of an asteroid without touching it. That will work even better if the robot can successfully grab a boulder, giving it more mass and more gravitational pull.

The mission will also be testing out technologies for future missions into deep space.

The plan will make use of Solar Electric Propulsion, for instance, which allows spacecraft to convert sunlight into electric power and use that to move through space. Using that technique is less efficient than burning fuel, but means that space missions will need much less fuel and fewer launches, bringing down costs.

That technology could eventually be used to send out cargo or vehicles to be picked up by astronauts on their way to Mars. Objects could be sent out into space to work as a waypoint, or be ready for humans when they arrive on the red planet.

It will also give a chance to use new systems, as astronauts head out to the asteroid to study it. They will be able to jump out of the Orion space capsule, wearing new space suits designed for deep space missions, and collect samples that could then be returned to Earth for study.

"Asteroids are a hot topic," said Jim Green, director of NASA Planetary Science. "Not just because they could pose a threat to Earth, but also for their scientific value and NASA's planned mission to one as a stepping stone to Mars." 

NASA has been receiving more and more money from the US Congress to fund its asteroid observations work, known as the Near-Earth Object Observations Program. It has been finding an increasing number of near-Earth objects, helping find rocks that could pose a threat to life on Earth.

Recently, the program spotted asteroid 2014-YB35, which will skim past the Earth this Friday.

Delta IV launches with GPS IIF-9

As reported by NASA Spaceflight: United Launch Alliance (ULA) has launched the ninth Block IIF Global Positioning System navigation satellite Wednesday in an afternoon launch from Cape Canaveral. Liftoff, atop a Delta IV rocket, was on schedule at 14:36 EDT (18:36 UTC), at the opening of what was an 18-minute window at  Space Launch Complex 37B.

Delta IV Launch:

The GPS IIF-9 satellite is the ninth of twelve Block IIF satellites intended to replenish and modernise the US Air Force’s Global Positioning System.

A fleet of spacecraft in Medium Earth Orbit dedicated to providing precise navigation data for military and civilian users, the GPS system was developed in the 1970s and 1980s, with deployment of the first operational satellite occurring on 14 February 1989 following a series of eleven test spacecraft.

Those test spacecraft, which were significantly smaller and lighter than their operational successors, have become known as GPS Block I and were carried into orbit by Atlas E/F rockets with SGS upper stages.

Operational flights from 1989 to 2009 made use of the Delta II rocket, with deployed nine Block II and nineteen Block IIA satellites to take the constellation to operational capacity in the mid-1990s. Twenty one Block IIR and IIRM replenishment satellites were launched between 1997 and 2009 to maintain the operational status of the network.

The Block IIF series, which began launching in 2010, are an interim batch of 12 spacecraft designed to replenish the constellation and provide new capabilities, such as the L5 navigation frequency, ahead of the introduction of third-generation Block IIIA satellites – now planned for early 2017.

Block IIF satellites are manufactured by Boeing, in contrast to earlier satellites that were built by Lockheed Martin or Rockwell.
With a mass of 1,630 kilograms (3,590 lb), the new spacecraft are slightly lighter than their predecessors, however this is accounted for by their omission of an apogee motor – instead relying on the more powerful Atlas V and Delta IV rockets to deliver them directly into their operational orbits. Each Block IIF satellite is designed to operate for 12 years.

Each satellite in the IIF series has been named after a star. Previous missions have been named Polaris, Sirius, Arcturus, Vega, Canopus, Rigel, Capella and Spica; the GPS IIF-9 mission is Deneb after the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus.

Wednesday’s mission made use of a Delta IV rocket, flying in the Medium+(4,2) configuration. Consisting of a single Common Booster Core (CBC) first stage, a four-metre Delta Cryogenic Second Stage (DCSS) and a pair of GEM-60 solid rocket motors to augment the CBC’s thrust at liftoff, the Medium+(4,2) is the most-flown version of the rocket with liftoff marking its thirteenth flight. Across all configurations it was the twenty-ninth Delta IV to fly.

The rocket was number D371, indicating it as the 371st Delta series rocket to fly. This number is somewhat spurious, however, as the count includes rockets with little relation to the original Thor-Delta series, such as the Delta IV, while excluding closer relatives that were not named Delta, such as the N-I and N-II vehicles produced under licence in Japan.

First launched in 2002, the Delta IV was developed by Boeing, alongside Lockheed Martin’s Atlas V, to compete for contracts under the US Air Force’s Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program. Both rockets, along with Boeing’s older Delta II, were transferred to United Launch Alliance (ULA) upon its formation in 2006.

ULA has recently announced plans to retire the Delta IV in favour of the cheaper Atlas and its proposed next-generation vehicle intended eventually to replace both rockets.
ULA currently envisages the Medium and Medium+ configurations being phased out in the next four years, with Delta IV Heavy launches continuing until a new vehicle is certified to carry equivalent payloads.

Despite its plans to retire the Delta, ULA announced last week that it had been awarded a contract for deployment of NASA’s Solar Probe Plus (SPP) mission using a Delta IV in July 2018. Due to SPP’s required target orbit, the Delta IV Heavy is the only qualified rocket in the US fleet capable of launching it, and only with the aid of a Star 48B upper stage.

The GPS launch took place from Space Launch Complex 37B at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Constructed for unmanned tests of the Saturn I rocket during the Apollo program, Launch Complex 37 supported several Saturn I and IB flights in the mid-1960s, ending with the Apollo 5 flight that tested the Lunar Module in Earth orbit.

The old pad was demolished in the 1970s, with Boeing constructing a new facility close to the site when it began the Delta IV program in the late 1990s.

Wednesday’s launch began with ignition of the Delta IV’s RS-68 main engine. At the zero mark in the countdown the two GEM-60 solid rocket motors ignited and the vehicle will begin its ascent towards orbit.

Executing a series of pitch and yaw manoeuvres beginning eight seconds into the flight, Delta 371 flew out over the Atlantic on an azimuth of 46.16 degrees. The rocket reached Mach 1, the speed of sound, 48.4 seconds after liftoff, passing through the area of maximum dynamic pressure (max-Q) thirteen seconds later.

Burnout of the solid rocket motors occurred one minute and thirty five seconds after liftoff, the spent motors remaining attached for 5.1 seconds before separating. Four minutes and 28.1 seconds after launch Main Engine Cutoff, or MECO, occurred with the RS-68 shutting down to conclude its burn.

Seven seconds after MECO the spent first stage was jettisoned, with second stage ignition taking place fourteen and a half seconds after staging, once the upper stage engine nozzle had been extended.

The Delta Cryogenic Second Stage (DCSS) is powered by a single RL10B-2 engine which, like the first stage, burns liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

Wednesday’s mission calls for it to make two burns, the first to establish a transfer orbit and the second at apogee to circularise the payload’s deployment orbit. Unlike earlier-generation spacecraft, Block IIF GPS satellites are deployed directly into their operational orbits.
The second stage’s first burn lasted eleven minutes and 1.3 seconds, with separation of the rocket’s payload fairing occurring ten and a half seconds after ignition. At the burn’s conclusion, the flight entered a coast phase, with the upper stage and spacecraft drifting towards apogee for the next two hours, 46 minutes and 29.2 seconds.

A one minute, 46.1-second burn at the end of the coast phase will raise the orbit’s perigee. At spacecraft separation, which will take place ten minutes and 41.4 seconds after the end of the second burn, the vehicle will be in a circular orbit at an altitude of 20,459 kilometres (12,712 miles, 11,047 nautical miles) and an inclination of 55 degrees.

The first Delta IV launch of the year, Wednesday’s mission was the seventh US launch of 2015 and the fourth for ULA – who have already flown three missions since January with their Atlas V and Delta II vehicles.

The next mission for United Launch Alliance will occur in May, with an Atlas deploying the AFSPC-5 mission while the Delta IV’s next flight is slated for July with a Wideband Global Satcom spacecraft. A further Delta launch is expected in September with the NROL-45 mission – expected to be a Topaz radar imaging satellite – from Vandenberg.

Following the launch of the GPS IIF-9 satellite, three Block IIF spacecraft will remain to fly. These are scheduled for Atlas V launches in June, September and next January. The next GPS launch atop a Delta rocket is scheduled for early 2017 when the vehicle will boost the first GPS IIIA spacecraft into orbit.