Filed under: Networking

We knew the US military was looking to hook up space with a WLAN router, and lo and behold, WiFi has finally launched well above the stratosphere. According to a status log from the International Space Station over the weekend, the Joint Station LAN network was transitioned to “new Netgear wireless APs, which provide the ISS with WiFi connectivity.” The official report details the crew using it for very official and politically correct things (you know, testing and whatnot), but we’re pretty darn sure a deathmatch or two went down as well. Or maybe those guys we saw yesterday just had some sort of gravity hack going on…

[Via Slashdot, image courtesy of LowPings]

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Filed under: Transportation

Wipe those tears away, budding astronaut. SpaceX’s latest failure wasn’t completely in vain. According to head honcho Elon Musk, the problem came just after a “picture perfect first stage flight” when a longer than expected thrust decay transient of the new Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine became “just enough to overcome the stage separation pusher impulse.” You honestly may need to be a rocket scientist to digest all of that, but here’s something even the layman can understand: Musk wants flight 4 in the air as early as next month. We’re told that the long gap between flights 2 and 3 was simply due to all that engine engineering, but technologically speaking, nothing will change for the next attempt. Godspeed, Falcon 1 (v4).

[Thanks, Kenneth]

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Filed under: Robots

Let’s face it — we owe a great deal of gratitude to the robots that get up each and every morning to explore far reaches of the universe that we humans are just incapable of landing on. But there’s still the problem of we humans having to tell these things what to do from our humble laboratories here on Earth. The brilliantly named Wolfgang Fink, a physicist and senior researcher at the California Institute of Technology, has plans to remedy said quandary by creating autonomous spacecrafts “that will be able to analyze data about points of interest as it passes and then make quick decisions about what needs to be investigated.” In essence, he’s looking to remove the Earthlings from the equation, which would enable smart robots to explore on their own and possibly discover new pools of purified water, REEM-B’s long lost siblings or the real most innovative NES-in-a-whatever mod. 2020 folks, mark it down.

[Image courtesy of NASA]

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Filed under: GPS

GPS on the moon may seem a bit far-fetched… that is, until you remember the US military’s plans to launch a WiFi router into space. The same Ohio State University researcher who developed software for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity is now developing a GPS-like system that would enable astronauts to navigate terrain as if they were simply routing themselves through a plot of land on Earth. Because of the moon’s location (we’re simplifying things here), Ron Li is having to create a similar system (read: not bona fide GPS) that relies on “signals from a set of sensors including lunar beacons, stereo cameras, and orbital imaging devices” in order to provide navigational output. Everyone involved is hoping to have it operational by 2020 (the next planned trip to the moon), but the team will be stuck testing in the Mojave Desert. Bummer.

[Via Physorg]

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Filed under: GPS

GPS on the moon may seem a bit far-fetched… that is, until you remember the US military’s plans to launch a WiFi router into space. The same Ohio State University researcher who developed software for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity is now developing a GPS-like system that would enable astronauts to navigate terrain as if they were simply routing themselves through a plot of land on Earth. Because of the moon’s location (we’re simplifying things here), Ron Li is having to create a similar system (read: not bona fide GPS) that relies on “signals from a set of sensors including lunar beacons, stereo cameras, and orbital imaging devices” in order to provide navigational output. Everyone involved is hoping to have it operational by 2020 (the next planned trip to the moon), but the team will be stuck testing in the Mojave Desert. Bummer.

[Via Physorg]

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Hey France, we’ve got one more for your sophisticated UFO archive. Dreamed up by artist Peter Coffin and crafted in conjunction with London-based Cinimod Studio, this 7-meter structure was built from aluminum and covered with 3,000 shockingly bright programmable LEDs. Furthermore, there’s an on board 6kW generator to provide power, and the overall UFO can be remotely controlled via SMS. There are even assertions that this thing flew along the coast of Sopot, Poland on July 4th (and even a video to “prove it,” posted after the jump), but we all know how dubious such proclamations can be.

[Via Hack N Mod]

Continue reading 3,000 LEDs used to build glitzy SMS-controlled UFO

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Filed under: Wearables

It’s true. Any decent mother would wonder what on Earth her child was thinking rocking that thing you see above, and even though all those wonderful ladies of the world would be entirely entitled to that curiosity, we can understand the obsession. On its surface, this timepiece and its cryptic display is unquestionably ugly — even the “stainless steel” band reeks of cereal box quality. But there’s just something about those flashy lights that stirs the soul of nerds everywhere, making it seem quite the bargain at $132.85. It’s okay, we won’t tell mommy.

[Via BoingBoing]

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Filed under: Networking

We’ll admit, we were admittedly metagrabolised after hearing that the US military wanted to launch a router into space, but now clarity is upon us. According to Vinton Cerf and a team of diligent engineers at the California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, standards for space communications could be established in just three short years, meaning that an “interplanetary internet” could be just around the bend. Cerf reckons that such a system would allow Earthlings to “access information and to control experiments taking place far away” from our planet, and in the distant future, there could even be an “interplanetary backbone [erected] to assist robotic and manned missions with robust communication.” And while there’s no mention of setting up galactic ISPs, we’re pretty certain that lonely Martians would pay a pretty penny for quasi-reliable broadband access.

[Via TGDaily]

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