Google Mercury: New NASA Images

New false-color pictures of the heavily-cratered surface of Mercury taken by NASA's Messenger spacecraft. Messenger aims to map the entire surface of Mercury over the next decade.

NASA Images

The most comprehensive compilation of NASA stills, film and video, created in partnership with Internet Archive.

NASA - Axel NEW ROVER

STS-119 Crew Presents Montage to President Obama

NASA's STS-119 space shuttle crew (from left: Joseph Acaba, Tony Antonelli, Lee Archambault, John Phillips, Richard Arnold and Steve Swanson) present...

Latest UFO Sightings: UFO NASA

Latest UFO Sightings: UFO NASA:

Space Shuttle Mission: STS-125

STS-125 Astronauts Prepare for Hubble Servicing Mission

Image above: Astronauts Andrew Feustel (bottom), John Grunsfeld (center left), Mike Massimino and Michael Good (center, right), all STS-125 mission specialists, work with a Hubble Space Telescope mock-up during a spacewalk training session in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory near NASA's Johnson Space Center. Image credit: NASA

STS-125: Mission to Service NASA's Hubble Space Telescope



Veteran astronaut Scott Altman will command the final space shuttle mission to service NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and retired Navy Capt. Gregory C. Johnson will serve as pilot. Mission specialists rounding out the crew are: veteran spacewalkers John Grunsfeld and Mike Massimino, and first-time space fliers Andrew Feustel, Michael Good and Megan McArthur. During the 11-day mission's five spacewalks, astronauts will install two new instruments, repair two inactive ones and perform the component replacements that will keep the telescope functioning into at least 2014. In addition to the originally scheduled work, Atlantis also will carry a replacement Science Instrument Command and Data Handling Unit for Hubble. Astronauts will install the unit on the telescope, removing the one that stopped working on Sept. 27, 2008, delaying the servicing mission until the replacement was ready.

Atlantis and Crew Move Closer to Launch Day

This weekend, technicians at Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A will finish stowing the Orbiter Boom Sensor System in space shuttle Atlantis. In addition, they'll repair minor damage to a radiator faceplate on Atlantis' left payload bay door. The damage occurred last week when a wrench socket hit the radiator during payload installation. Launch countdown preparations began at Kennedy on Friday following Thursday's executive-level Flight Readiness Review that cleared the way for a May 11 liftoff for the mission to service NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The panel determined the shuttle's equipment, support systems and procedures are ready for flight. Launch is set for 2:01 p.m. EDT.At NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, the STS-125 astronauts completed medical checkups Friday prior to entering the standard prelaunch quarantine Monday. They are set to arrive for launch at Kennedy next Friday.

Meeting the Increased Demand for Military Robots: An Interview With Foster -Miller’s Bob Quinn

What’s next for military unmanned ground vehicles? According to Bob Quinn, General Manager, TALON Operations, Foster-Miller, a variety of form factors, increased autonomy and a single point of control for multiple robots. Oh, and one other thing - there will be many, many more of them.
Foster-Miller, a QinetiQ North America company, produces the TALON robots for the U.S. military and first responders. The company is soon scheduled to ship its 2,000th TALON robot into Iraq or Afghanistan. Founded in 1956 by three graduates of MIT and located in the Boston area, Talon offers robotic systems and engineering designs among its product lines. Among its distinctions, the company has attained the SW-CMM Level 3 software certification from the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.
Bob Quinn has been leading the TALON division for the past four years. Prior to joining Foster-Miller, he was president and CEO of Starmet Corp., producers of advanced metallurgical products for defense, aerospace and medical devices. He earned an MBA from Babson College and a BA from Tufts University. He is a widely-quoted subject matter expert on unmanned ground vehicles used by the military.

Robotics Trends (RT): Can you describe the current robot product line at Foster-Miller?

Bob Quinn (BQ): We have four families of unmanned ground vehicle robots: TALON, Dragon Runner, MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System), and the largest size is TAGS, which weigh about 6,000 pounds. So we go from the 15-lb Dragon Runner, a throwable robot, to the medium size robot family of TALON, to the larger class called MAARS, weighing about 350 lbs. More recently we introduced the TAGS large vehicle class, which is a diesel-powered off-road vehicle, funded by the U.S. Army’s Tank Automation R&D command in Detroit.
So our unmanned ground vehicle business will have small, medium, large and jumbo sizes. We serve the military predominantly, followed by domestic and international police forces that are looking for bomb squad robots, SWAT team support and some hazardous material applications.

RT: How did the TALON line come about?

BQ: Here is a little history: Foster-Miller (FM) has been working with unmanned ground systems since the 1970s. We began working on coal mining equipment and other very large, robots that by today’s standards would be considered difficult to control and move. In the late 1990s, FM got a DARPA contract to produce a man-portable robot that became TALON. The idea was to produce a much smaller robot that could be used frequently and easily on the battlefield, and able to be carried by a man rather than requiring a trailer or a truck.
So from the 1970s to 2000, robots went from being big and lumbering to being small and fast. We continue to see the trend towards smaller robots, so even though the 125 TALON robot is medium size, there is a family of small robots weighing 15 to 50 pounds that represent the small robot class.
Robots in the military have been used for explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) because of the situation in Iraq with roadside bombs. Over the last four to five years, EOD robots have come plentiful and higher growth is anticipated as the infantry is expected to make increased use of smaller robots for military applications.
Robots have proved their worth in Iraq and Afghanistan by saving many lives. The future seems to be one of not having just one robot size but a family of small, medium, large and jumbo robots. Customers would like to see common controls, such as one controller that can operate any one of these robots. The size class will be determined by the mission. Customers would also like to be able to operate multiple robots from one control station. Today we offer direct tele-operations, one control station operating one robot. But the robotics world is quickly going to a multi-robot world operationally.

Welcome to Botball!

Get ready for a high-tech, high-energy approach to education! The Botball Educational Robotics Program integrates science, technology, engineering, and math with robotics to keep your students on the cutting edge of technology!

All the information you need to start a team!

The Professional Development Workshop
The Botball Program begins with a 2-day professional development workshop where educators and team leaders learn about current robotics technology and how to implement it into their classroom or community. Through the course of the workshop, participants receive all the information about the current Botball game and the reusable robotics kit and components - They even construct a working demo bot!

The Building Period and Tournament

Following the workshop, students are given about seven weeks to design, build and program a team of mobile, autonomous robots as well as document the engineering process online. Participants compete against each other on a playing field in a fast paced, non-destructive regional tournament. The robots are student built and programmed to maneuver on the game board without the need for remote control.
Botball events are currently held in 13 regions across the nation as well as 2 international events in the Middle East:

Egypt
Florida
Georgia
Greater DC
Greater St. Louis
Hawaii
Michigan
New England
New York/New Jersey
Northern California
Oklahoma
Pennsylvania/Ohio
Southern California
Texas
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The Global Conference on Educational Robotics™

The learning doesn’t end after the regional tournaments. Each year students, teachers, robotics enthusiasts, and professionals from across the world gather for the annual Global Conference on Educational Robotics. Teachers and students lead the way in sharing ideas from curriculum integration to technical aspects of robotics by presenting papers during breakout sessions.
Highlights of the conference include nationally recognized professionals from organizations such as NASA and the Naval Research Laboratory giving fascinating presentations on their topics of expertise. Of course the most anticipated events are the International Botball Tournament, the Beyond Botball Tournament (Botball for grown-up kids!), and the Autonomous Robotics Showcase.

Botball is Open-Ended

Like many of life’s challenges, the Botball Program presents an open-ended problem with a variety of solutions. The many different scoring methods offer teams challenges at different levels - requiring them to make decisions about strategy, design, and construction. This gives teams experience in evaluating options and working towards a solution.
Many teams find that keeping with the KISS philosophy of “keep it simple stupid” is often the best solution for a complex problem.

Where is the Driver?

There is no driver! Botball robots are completely autonomous and rely on their computer programming to start, stop, and maneuver on the game board. Each robot uses sensors to detect changes in light, sound, distance, and color. The robot’s actions are based on the feedback from the sensors combined with the computer programming written and implemented by the students in advance.

Why Robots?

In order for students to apply the subjects they learn in school, they must be able to use those subjects in a way that is meaningful. By designing, building, programming, and documenting robots, students use science, engineering, technology, math, and writing skills in a hands-on project that reinforces their learning.

Exclusive: Sony PSP Go! Storage Tech Revealed

Sources close to Sony PSP development have hinted to Game On what Sony's planning to stick in its rumored smaller,sleeker PSP Go!. Remember this CES 2009 press release back in January? The one where SanDisk revealed a panoply of tinier, higher-speed memory products? Think those. Think specifically the trailing bullet point, the one where Sony and SanDisk "have co-developed two expanded Memory Stick formats." Think something like the Memory Stick HG-Micro, with a 60MB/s transfer rate, approximately 40MB/s faster than original Memory Stick Duo.
As for all the folks reporting the PSP Go!'s will include dedicated internal flash memory, they may want to think again.
Ask yourself this: Why would Sony bother?
Think about pricing. Think about forcing consumers to eat the extra memory cost when Sony needs to be price-competitive with Nintendo. Think about obsolescence if memory card speeds and capacities increase in the near term. 16GB of internal memory? That's pretty much nothing at all once you've pulled down a handful of movies and games and loaded up most of your music collection. Look at Apple's iPod Classic. It's sporting 120GB of storage these days.

Old Japaness maps on Google Earth univeil secrets

TOKYO - When Google Earth added historical maps of Japan to its online collection last year, the search giant didn't expect a backlash. The finely detailed woodblock prints have been around for centuries, they were already posted on another Web site, and a historical map of Tokyo put up in 2006 hadn't caused any problems.