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MIT Plans to Use Asteroids As Mars Colonization Stepping Stones

October 31, 2014 By Janet Vasquez Leave a Comment

mars

According to a planetary scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asteroids could aid NASA greatly in helping colonize Mars in the future.

Richard Binzel believes that asteroids could be used as stepping stones in reaching the Red Planet, which has been tagged by NASA as the “ultimate human destination”. Although the agency is continuously developing plans to make flyby’s, many scientists hope that we will finally be able to make a landing on Mars by 2030.

In hopes of preparing such a mission, NASA announced its intent to implement an Asteroid Redirect Mission by approximately 2025, where robotic probes would be used to drag an asteroid, or at least boulder-sized rocks from larger asteroids into the lunar orbit. After succeeding, NASA aims to send astronauts to the asteroid by using the Orion crew capsule.

The ARM (Asteroid Redirect Mission) represents, therefore, a preliminary goal for NASA’s Space Launch System rockets, in their attempt at bringing astronauts to Mars.

There are, however, voices harshly criticizing NASA’s ARM mission.

“There’s nothing about sending humans to Mars that requires us to capture an asteroid in a baggie. That’s a multibillion dollar expenditure that has nothing to do with getting humans to Mars,”

Richard Binzel, professor of Planetary Sciences said about the ARM mission.

As he views it, developing complex operations and hardware necessary to contain asteroids and place them in lunar orbit represents no value to NASA’s mission of sending a crew of astronauts to Mars. Instead, Binzel suggests scrapping ARM altogether and attempt another approach.

NASA could, in Binzel’s opinion, begin mapping all space rocks over 33 feet that are in orbit between Earth and the Red Planet. These are not documented by ground-based telescopes, however, after being mapped by NASA, a series of missions could be prepared that would send astronaut crews to soe of them.

The missions could progressively become longer, until the confidence and experience is built to undertake the years-long travel that would bring astronauts to Mars.

“We have to leave the cradle of Earth sometime. Asteroid missions could be a win-win for exploration and for safety.”

Binzel said.

As NASA currently has a budget of $17,8 billion, the agency could invest in a dedicated space telescope costing no more than $800 million, Binzel believes, which could then be used to map the space bodies in question. The mapping project could also have the added benefit of also detecting asteroids on collision courses with Earth.

Filed Under: Science Tagged With: ARM, Asteroid Redirect Mission, asteroids into orbit, astronauts, colonizing mars, lunar orbit, Mars, mars asteroids, mars colonization, mars landing, NASA, orbit

Windows RT Failure Hurting Chip Makers As Well

December 6, 2013 By Jack M. Robinson Leave a Comment

Windows RT not too long ago was being heralded as the OS that would bridge the tablet and PC divide though that obviously did not happen. And there seem no respite in sight either as all signals point out to the particular Windows version being headed to the gallows. This has also been echoed by Julie Larson-Green the Executive Vice President at Microsoft while speaking at the UBS Global Tech Conference. What he said in explicit terms is that Microsoft is not going to have all three OS, that is Windows Phone, Windows RT and the full scale Windows in future. Windows RT started off well enough and made its debut with the Microsoft Surface device. This was followed by tablets from Samsung, Lenovo, ASUS and Dell also running the Windows RT though all of that has since come to a halt, leaving just Microsoft and Nokia yet using Windows RT. As further proof of things not being well enough with the RT version, it has caused Microsoft to write off a staggering $900 million to account for unsold first gen Surface tablets.

microsoft surface tablet

However, the RT has not proved to be a bane for just Microsoft who made the tablets but for the chip makers as well whose processors had made up the core of the tablet devices running Windows RT. This includes Qualcomm, ARM and NVIDIA. Their chips are made to run specifically on the ARM architecture which is what the Windows RT version is compliant with. The Surface 2 tablets for example are made by NVIDIA using the Tegra 4 ARM based chips. Qualcomm have their Snapdragon 800 chip which is also ARM based and has been used to power the Nokia 2520 tablet.

It is not just the one or two tablet projects that the RT and its supporting chipmakers had been banking on for their business. They had plans to take on the PC market piggybacking the OS, thereby making serious inroads into the turn now ruled by the Intel x86 series of chips. There is also the issue of Intel having come up with the Haswell series of chips that are more efficient in performance and battery consumption, making them favored by tablet makers such as Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba and such who have naturally not taken to the ARM chips for their tablet devices.

That RT is not doing well was felt when ARM CEO Warren East had mentioned at the Mobile World Congress in February that RT was not doing as good as it had been hoped to do. Luis Pineda, the senior VP of product management at Qualcomm had spoken positively about RT in May when they were making chips to be used on the Dell tablets that were running on RT.

NVIDIA however had accepted the failure of RT at the very first stages. Jen-Hsun Huang its CEO stated the company had suffered loss to the tune of $300 million due the poor sales of the RT based devices. The NVIDIA Tegra chip is used on the Surface 2 tablets and the company he mentioned did not expect good returns from that investment.

With the end of RT close at hand not only Microsoft but these associated chip making companies face the consequences of their investment not returning results they had hoped.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: ARM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Snapdragon, Windows RT

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