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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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One of the last AI Google models is worse in terms of safety

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The Google Gemini generative AI logo on a smartphone.

The recently released Google AI model is worse in some security tests than its predecessor, in line with the company’s internal comparative test.

IN Technical report Google, published this week, reveals that his Flash Gemini 2.5 model is more likely that he generates a text that violates its security guidelines than Gemini 2.0 Flash. In two indicators “text security for text” and “image security to the text”, Flash Gemini 2.5 will withdraw 4.1% and 9.6% respectively.

Text safety for the text measures how often the model violates Google guidelines, making an allowance for the prompt, while image security to the text assesses how close the model adheres to those boundaries after displaying the monitors using the image. Both tests are automated, not supervised by man.

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In an e-mail, Google spokesman confirmed that Gemini 2.5 Flash “performs worse in terms of text safety for text and image.”

These surprising comparative results appear when AI is passing in order that their models are more acceptable – in other words, less often refuse to answer controversial or sensitive. In the case of the latest Llam Meta models, he said that he fought models in order to not support “some views on others” and answers to more “debated” political hints. Opeli said at the starting of this yr that he would improve future models, in order to not adopt an editorial attitude and offers many prospects on controversial topics.

Sometimes these efforts were refundable. TechCrunch announced on Monday that the default CHATGPT OPENAI power supply model allowed juvenile to generate erotic conversations. Opeli blamed his behavior for a “mistake”.

According to Google Technical Report, Gemini 2.5 Flash, which is still in view, follows instructions more faithfully than Gemini 2.0 Flash, including instructions exceeding problematic lines. The company claims that regression might be partially attributed to false positives, but in addition admits that Gemini 2.5 Flash sometimes generates “content of violation” when it is clearly asked.

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“Of course, there is a tension between (after instructions) on sensitive topics and violations of security policy, which is reflected in our assessment,” we read in the report.

The results from Meepmap, reference, which can examine how models react to sensitive and controversial hints, also suggest that Flash Gemini 2.5 is much less willing to refuse to reply controversial questions than Flash Gemini 2.0. Testing the TechCrunch model through the AI ​​OpenRoutter platform has shown that he unsuccessfully writes essays to support human artificial intelligence judges, weakening the protection of due protection in the US and the implementation of universal government supervisory programs.

Thomas Woodside, co -founder of the Secure AI Project, said that the limited details given by Google in their technical report show the need for greater transparency in testing models.

“There is a compromise between the instruction support and the observation of politics, because some users may ask for content that would violate the rules,” said Woodside Techcrunch. “In this case, the latest Flash model Google warns the instructions more, while breaking more. Google does not present many details about specific cases in which the rules have been violated, although they claim that they are not serious. Not knowing more, independent analysts are difficult to know if there is a problem.”

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Google was already under fire for his models of security reporting practices.

The company took weeks to publish a technical report for the most talented model, Gemini 2.5 Pro. When the report was finally published, it initially omitted the key details of the security tests.

On Monday, Google published a more detailed report with additional security information.

(Tagstotransate) Gemini

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Aurora launches a commercial self -propelled truck service in Texas

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The autonomous startup of the Aurora Innovation vehicle technology claims that it has successfully launched a self -propelled truck service in Texas, which makes it the primary company that she implemented without drivers, heavy trucks for commercial use on public roads in the USA

The premiere appears when Aurora gets the term: In October, the corporate delayed the planned debut 2024 to April 2025. The debut also appears five months after the rival Kodiak Robotics provided its first autonomous trucks to clients commercial for operations without a driver in field environments.

Aurora claims that this week she began to freight between Dallas and Houston with Hirschbach Motor Lines and Uber Freight starters, and that she has finished 1200 miles without a driver to this point. The company plans to expand to El Paso and Phoenix until the top of 2025.

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TechCrunch contacted for more detailed information concerning the premiere, for instance, the variety of vehicles implemented Aurora and whether the system needed to implement the Pullover maneuver or the required distant human assistance.

The commercial premiere of Aurora takes place in a difficult time. Self -propelled trucks have long been related to the necessity for his or her technology attributable to labor deficiencies in the chairman’s transport and the expected increase in freigh shipping. Trump’s tariffs modified this attitude, not less than in a short period. According to the April analytical company report from the commercial vehicle industry ACT researchThe freight is predicted to fall this yr in the USA with a decrease in volume and consumer expenditure.

Aurora will report its results in the primary quarter next week, i.e. when he shares how he expects the present trade war will affect his future activity. TechCrunch contacted to learn more about how tariffs affect Auror’s activities.

For now, Aurora will probably concentrate on further proving his safety case without a driver and cooperation with state and federal legislators to just accept favorable politicians to assist her develop.

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At the start of 2025, Aurora filed a lawsuit against federal regulatory bodies after the court refused to release the appliance for release from the protection requirement, which consists in placing warning triangles on the road, when the truck must stop on the highway – something that’s difficult to do when there isn’t a driver in the vehicle. To maintain compliance with this principle and proceed to totally implement without service drivers, Aurora probably has a man -driven automotive trail after they are working.

(Tagstranslate) Aurora Innovation

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Sarah Tavel, the first woman of the Benchmark GP, goes to the Venture partner

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Eight years after joining Benchmark as the company’s first partner, Sarah Tavel announced that she was going to a more limited role at Hapeure Venture.

In his latest position as a partner Venture Tavel will proceed to invest and serve existing company boards, but may have more time to examine “AI tools on the edge” and fascinated with the direction of artificial intelligence, she wrote.

Tavel joined Benchmark in 2017 after spending a half years as a partner in Greylock and three years as a product manager at Pinterest. Before Pinterest, Tavel was an investor in Bessemer Venture Partners, where she helped Source Pinterest and Github.

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Since its foundation in 1995, the benchmark intentionally maintained a small team of six or fewer general partners. Unlike most VC corporations, wherein older partners normally receive most of the management and profits fees, the benchmark acts as an equal partnership, and all partners share fees and returns equally.

During his term as a general partner of Benchmark, Tavel invested in Hipcamp on the campsite, chains of cryptocurrency intelligence startups and the Supergreaty cosmetic platform, which was purchased by Whatnot in 2023. Tavel also supported the application for sharing photos of Paparazhi, which closed two years ago, and the AI ​​11x sales platform, about which TechCrunch wrote.

(Tagstotransate) benchmark

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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