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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).

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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As Musk manages his growing family: WSJ

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Elon Musk says his duty is to “make new people.” Now Investigation of WSJ He suggests that he could start greater than 14 known children, and the sources claim that the actual number will be much higher. The report also describes how Musk keeps these details within the package.

In the middle of all this, based on the report, there may be a longtime Fixer Jared Birchall, which runs the Muska’s family office, but additionally supports the logistics of the developing Muska family, including by developing Hush contracts and serving as a board for moms of some children.

For example, Musk reportedly asked the conservative influence of Ashley St. Clair for signing a restrictive agreement after she gave birth to their son last autumn. Agreement: $ 15 million plus an extra $ 100,000 per 30 days, so long as the kid is 21 in exchange for her silence. She refused; He says that the contract worsens with every treason perceived. (She told the journal that the Muska team sent her only $ 20,000 after they bowed to Musk to comment on his article).

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As for Birchall, which can also be CEO Press-IMPLANTU-IMPLANTU VENTURE NEURALK IA partner In AI Venture XAI in Musk, Muska’s private life management can simply be the third full -time job. According to the journal, in a single two -hour conversation with St. Clair, Birchall told her that the transition “legal path” with musk “always, always leads to a worse result for this woman than otherwise.”

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Lime scooter and Ebike batteries will be recycled by Redwood Materials

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The joint company Micromobility Lime has reached an agreement on sending batteries utilized in scooters and electronic bikes to Sewoi materials that extract and recycle critical minerals, comparable to lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper.

The agreement announced on Monday makes Redwood Materials the only real battery recycling partner for common scooters and e-bike bikes situated in cities within the United States, Germany and the Netherlands. The contract doesn’t cover every region where lime worksAn inventory covering cities throughout Europe, Asia and Australia.

In Lime up to now he had other recycling partnerships, especially with Sprout through his suppliers. However, for the primary time, the joint company Micromobility had direct relations with battery recycling in North America, which might directly process the fabric for recovery and returns it to the availability chain.

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Redwood Materials, The Carson City, Startup from Nevada founded by the previous CFO Tesla JB Straubel, will get better battery materials when they can’t be used. After recovering and recycling, the materials will be re -introduced within the battery production process. This production system of a closed loop-which can reduce the demand for extraction and refining of minerals-is on the Redwood Materials business center.

The effort can also be consistent with its own goals of limestone sustainable development. Lime is geared toward decarbonization of operations by 2030. The company has made progress in reducing the range 1, 2 and 3 of emissions by 59.5% in five years of basic years 2019. Wapno plans to report the outcomes of carbon dioxide emissions 2024 in May.

“This cooperation means significant progress in the establishment of a more round supply chain, helping our batteries not only to recycled responsibly after reaching the end of their lives, but that their materials are returned to the battery supply chain,” said Andrew Savage, vice chairman for balanced development in Lime.

Lime also has partnerships from Gomi in Great Britain and Voltr in France and other European countries to gather these live battery cells for “Second Life” applications, including, amongst others, in the sphere of consumer electronics, comparable to portable speakers and battery packages.

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Redwood Materials has contracts with other micromobility corporations, including Lyft, RAD Power Bikes and bicycle batteries and scooters specialized in recycling. Redwood, which collected over $ 2 billion in private funds, announced at first of this month, opened the research and development center in San Francisco.

(Tagstranslat) ebikes

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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The Legal Defense Fund withdraws from the META civil law advisory group over Dei Rolback

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Legal Defense Fund,, Meta, dei,


On April 11, the Legal Defense Fund announced that he was leaving the external advisory council for civil rights regarding the fear that the changes in technology company introduced diversity, own capital, inclusion and availability in January.

According to those changes that some perceived as the capitulation of meta against the upcoming Trump administration, contributed to their decision To leave the advisory council of the technology company.

In January, LDF, along with several other organizations of civil rights, which were a part of the board, sent a letter to Marek Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, outlining their fears As for a way changes would negatively affect users.

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“We are shocked and disappointed that the finish has not consulted with this group or its members, considering these significant changes in its content policy. Non -compliance with even its own advisory group of experts on external civil rights shows a cynical disregard for its diverse users base and undermines the commitment of the meta in the field of freedom of speech with which he claims to” return “.

They closed the letter, hoping that the finish would recommend the ideals of freedom of speech: “If the finish really wants to recommend freedom of speech, he must commit to freedom of speech for all his services. As an advisory group from external civil rights, we offer our advice and knowledge in creating a better path.”

These fears increased only in the next months, culminating in one other list, which from the LDF director, Todd A. Cox, who indicated that the organization withdraws its membership from the META civil law advisory council.

“I am deeply disturbed and disappointed with the announcement of Medical on January 7, 2025, with irresponsible changes in content moderation policies on platforms, which are a serious risk for the health and safety of black communities and risk that they destabilize our republic,” Cox wrote.

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He continued: “For almost a decade, the NACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) has invested a lot of time and resources, working with META as part of the informal committee advising the company in matters of civil rights. However, the finish introduced these changes in the policy of the content modification without consulting this group, and many changes directly with the guidelines from the guidelines from LDF and partners. LD can no longer participate in the scope. ” Advisory Committee for Rights “

In a separate but related LDF list, it clearly resembled a finish about the actual obligations of the Citizens’ Rights Act of 1964 and other provisions regarding discrimination in the workplace, versus the false statements of the Trump administration, that diversity, justice and initiative to incorporate discriminates against white Americans.

“While the finish has modified its policy, its obligations arising from federal regulations regarding civil rights remain unchanged. The title of VII of the Act on civic rights of 1964 and other regulations on civil rights prohibit discrimination in the workplace, including disconnecting treatment, principles in the workplace which have unfair disproportionate effects, and the hostile work environment. Also when it comes to inclusion, and access programs.

In the LDF press release, announcing each letters, Cox He called attention Metal insert into growing violence and division in the country’s social climate.

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“LDF worked hard and in good faith with meta leadership and its consulting group for civil rights to ensure that the company’s workforce reflects the values ​​and racial warehouses of the United States and to increase the security priorities of many different communities that use meta platforms,” ​​said Cox. “Now we cannot support a company in good conscience that consciously takes steps in order to introduce changes in politics that supply further division and violence in the United States. We call the meta to reverse the course with these dangerous changes.”

(Tagstranslate) TODD A. COX (T) Legal Defense Fund (T) META (T) Diversity (T) Equality (T) inclusion

This article was originally published on : www.blackenterprise.com
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