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Atomos Space’s first orbital mission is a trial by fire

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Few missions more vividly embody the maxim “space is hard” than Atomos Space’s first demonstration mission, which the corporate managed to drag back from the brink of disaster – greater than once.

This demonstration mission, called Mission-1, was launched into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 4. The mission’s goals are extremely ambitious: the 2 spacecraft – an orbital transfer vehicle called Quark-LITE and a goal vehicle called Gluon – will ultimately reveal extremely complex maneuvers, including rendezvous, docking, orbital transfer and in-orbit refueling.

The company faced two major problems related to communication and the rotation rate of the spacecraft – and (largely) solved each problems despite massive limitations, sparse data packets, and very limited bandwidth. (So ​​limited, in reality, that the team needed to limit flight software updates to a text string of just 145 characters).

“It was relentless,” Atomos CEO and co-founder Vanessa Clark told TechCrunch.

William Kowalski, COO and co-founder of the corporate, agreed. “What makes it so difficult is that even in our situation, we’re trying to extrapolate the status of a very complicated system from maybe 100 bytes of data,” he said. “That’s a lot. You guess what’s causing it, knowing that a few of those guesses could lead on you down a path from which you may never get well.”

Problems began just hours after the 2 interconnected spacecraft were launched from the Falcon 9 upper stage. The deployment was nominal, and Atomos received the first signal from the spacecraft seven minutes after deployment. The mood was solemn.

But 40 minutes passed before the corporate received one other signal. Then eight hours.

Atomos expected data packets every jiffy.

“The worst (day) was Monday, when we took off, that evening,” Kowalski said. “It was 11 p.m. at night, it was me and the chief engineer… and we didn’t hear anything and we just think: Have we failed? Did they die? We gave it a shot, but it just didn’t work. It was really a punch in the gut.”

Mission controllers didn’t discover the basis cause until 24 to 48 hours after deployment, and did so with the assistance of one other company with on-orbit assets. After pulling some strings, they managed to speak on the phone to the chief systems engineer of the satellite communications company Iridium. The spacecraft used third-party modems that used the Iridium intersatellite link network and likewise used the Iridium constellation as relay satellites. The Atomos spacecraft was moving too fast and in direct contrast, it couldn’t perform a data “handshake” with the Iridium satellites to truly transmit the knowledge back to Earth.

Atomos engineers implemented a series of software updates that reduced duty cycles and ensured that the radios would all the time be on, even when the spacecraft was in a low-power state.

When engineers tried to resolve the communication problem, nevertheless, they encountered one other problem: the spacecraft was rolling at an especially high rate of 55 degrees per second (they were designed to deal with roll rates of as much as 5 degrees per second). In addition, the spacecraft slowly rotated in order that the solar panels not faced the sun. This meant it was a race against time and the spacecraft’s batteries completely depleted.

“We had two charts,” Kowalski said. “We plotted our power trend for when we predict we will probably be facing away from the sun and have (at) zero power, in addition to the sink rate. The removal rate needed to be delivered to zero before the ability dropped to zero.

The problem was exacerbated by limited communication; teams weren’t in a position to definitively confirm that anything was mistaken until the fourth day after deployment, and the spacecraft could only process recent commands between long periods of what were essentially communications blackouts.

Slowly, over the course of several days, they managed to slow the spacecraft down. The team achieved one other major victory after they were able to ascertain high-bandwidth communications, a space-to-space link on a Quark-LITE device communicating via the Inmarsat network. On Thursday, the corporate made its first attempt at establishing broadband connectivity and successfully maintained communication with the spacecraft for six minutes.

During this era, mission controllers received 17 times more data than since launch. As a result, mission controllers received enormous amounts of information on the state of the spacecraft. The news wasn’t all positive – certainly one of the OTV batteries was badly damaged by aggressive cycling and it appears the GPS aboard certainly one of the spacecraft needed to be reset – but these are easy fixes, Clark said.

The company plans to begin commissioning the drive system on Tuesday or Wednesday. If all goes in response to plan and engineers determine that the support system provides accuracy and aiming control, they are going to test operation without torque bars and response wheels. The company intends to deploy the spacecraft inside about a month, with all mission objectives expected to be achieved by the top of June.

Kowalski and Clark attribute a part of the startup’s success to the incontrovertible fact that it is highly vertically integrated. The team, which worked 100 hours per week within the first week after deployment, was in a position to use their in-depth knowledge of spacecraft design to resolve emerging problems.

“It was obviously very painful, but it is reminiscent of the words of the CEO of Nvidia: ‘I wish you great suffering.’ We went through it and it wasn’t great at the moment, but now that we’ve gotten there, we’re definitely better,” Clark said.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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US medical device giant Artivion says hackers stole files during a cybersecurity incident

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Artivion, a medical device company that produces implantable tissue for heart and vascular transplants, says its services have been “disrupted” resulting from a cybersecurity incident.

In 8-K filing In an interview with the SEC on Monday, Georgia-based Artivion, formerly CryoLife, said it became aware of a “cybersecurity incident” that involved the “compromise and encryption” of information on November 21. This suggests that the corporate was attacked by ransomware, but Artivion has not yet confirmed the character of the incident and didn’t immediately reply to TechCrunch’s questions. No major ransomware group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.

Artivion said it took some systems offline in response to the cyberattack, which the corporate said caused “disruptions to certain ordering and shipping processes.”

Artivion, which reported third-quarter revenue of $95.8 million, said it didn’t expect the incident to have a material impact on the corporate’s funds.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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It’s a Raspberry Pi 5 in a keyboard and it’s called Raspberry Pi 500

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Manufacturer of single-board computers Raspberry Pi is updating its cute little computer keyboard device with higher specs. Named Raspberry Pi500This successor to the Raspberry Pi 400 is just as powerful as the present Raspberry Pi flagship, the Raspberry Pi 5. It is on the market for purchase now from Raspberry Pi resellers.

The Raspberry Pi 500 is the simplest method to start with the Raspberry Pi because it’s not as intimidating because the Raspberry Pi 5. When you take a look at the Raspberry Pi 500, you do not see any chipsets or PCBs (printed circuit boards). The Raspberry Pi is totally hidden in the familiar housing, the keyboard.

The idea with the Raspberry Pi 500 is you could connect a mouse and a display and you are able to go. If, for instance, you’ve got a relative who uses a very outdated computer with an outdated version of Windows, the Raspberry Pi 500 can easily replace the old PC tower for many computing tasks.

More importantly, this device brings us back to the roots of the Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi computers were originally intended for educational applications. Over time, technology enthusiasts and industrial customers began using single-board computers all over the place. (For example, when you’ve ever been to London Heathrow Airport, all of the departures and arrivals boards are there powered by Raspberry Pi.)

Raspberry Pi 500 draws inspiration from the roots of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a non-profit organization. It’s the right first computer for college. In some ways, it’s a lot better than a Chromebook or iPad because it’s low cost and highly customizable, which inspires creative pondering.

The Raspberry Pi 500 comes with a 32GB SD card that comes pre-installed with Raspberry Pi OS, a Debian-based Linux distribution. It costs $90, which is a slight ($20) price increase over the Raspberry Pi 400.

Only UK and US keyboard variants will probably be available at launch. But versions with French, German, Italian, Japanese, Nordic and Spanish keyboard layouts will probably be available soon. And when you’re in search of a bundle that features all the things you would like, Raspberry Pi also offers a $120 desktop kit that features the Raspberry Pi 500, a mouse, a 27W USB-C power adapter, and a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable.

In other news, Raspberry Pi has announced one other recent thing: the Raspberry Pi monitor. It is a 15.6-inch 1080p monitor that’s priced at $100. Since there are quite a few 1080p portable monitors available on the market, this launch is not as noteworthy because the Pi 500. However, for die-hard Pi fans, there’s now also a Raspberry Pi-branded monitor option available.

Image credits:Raspberry Pi

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Apple Vision Pro may add support for PlayStation VR controllers

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Vision Pro headset

According to Apple, Apple desires to make its Vision Pro mixed reality device more attractive for gamers and game developers latest report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

The Vision Pro was presented more as a productivity and media consumption device than a tool geared toward gamers, due partly to its reliance on visual and hand controls moderately than a separate controller.

However, Apple may need gamers if it desires to expand the Vision Pro’s audience, especially since Gurman reports that lower than half one million units have been sold to this point. As such, the corporate has reportedly been in talks with Sony about adding support for PlayStation VR2 handheld controllers, and has also talked to developers about whether they may support the controllers of their games.

Offering more precise control, Apple may also make other forms of software available in Vision Pro, reminiscent of Final Cut Pro or Adobe Photoshop.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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