Technology
One faulty valve led to failure of Astrobotic’s $108 million Peregrine lunar lander mission

Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander failed to reach the Moon due to an issue with a single valve within the propulsion system, according to a mission report released on Tuesday. Company executives said at a news conference that engineers had redesigned the valve and added redundancy to the propulsion system of the subsequent lander, Griffin, to make sure the problem wouldn’t repeat itself.
The report comes from a review board that met shortly after the tip of the Peregrine mission in January. That mission bumped into problems just hours after its Jan. 8 launch, when engineers fired up the spacecraft’s propulsion system for the primary time in orbit.
At that time, the fuel and oxidizer tanks must have been full of helium after opening two pressure control valves, or PCVs. But helium began to flow “uncontrollably” through the second valve into the oxidizer tank, Astrobotic CEO John Thornton explained during a news conference.
“This caused a significant and rapid overpressure of the tank,” he said. “Unfortunately, the tank ruptured and as a result, oxidizer leaked, which continued to leak for the rest of the mission.”
The PCV was unable to reseal, likely due to a mechanical failure attributable to “vibration-induced loosening” between some of the threaded components contained in the valve, said review board chairman John Horack. Telemetry data was able to pinpoint the placement and time of the anomaly, and the information was consistent with the PCV’s autonomous opening and shutting sequence and the valve’s position within the propulsion system. Engineers were also able to recreate the failure during ground testing.
While the oxidizer leak continued, the Astrobotic team managed to stabilize the spacecraft, charge the batteries, and power the payloads. However, the issue ultimately proved fatal to the mission, and after 10.5 days, the spacecraft returned to Earth and burned up within the atmosphere.
The 34-person review board included 26 company insiders and eight outsiders. The board analyzed not only the information collected throughout the mission, but additionally all the information from the flight qualification campaign and component tests. Ultimately, it was determined that the probable cause of the failure was the failure of a single helium PCV within the propulsion system.
Management also laid out a timeline of events leading up to the failure, starting in 2019, when Astrobotic signed a contract with an unnamed supplier to develop a drive power system. When that supplier began experiencing technical and provide chain issues due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Astrobotic made the choice in early 2022 to terminate the contract and complete the partially assembled power system itself.
“At this point, we had already made the decision to do the Griffin propulsion system in-house to do more vertical integration,” said Astrobotic mission director Sharad Bhaskaran. “We had already developed a lot of capabilities to do that propulsion integration. … That also reduced some of the risk in the Griffin program, which is much more complex than Peregrine.”
However, Astrobotic engineers began to encounter problems with the unique supplier’s propulsion components—specifically, the PCVs. In August 2022, they switched to one other, unnamed PCV supplier, and people valves were installed on the lander.
The final set of propulsion system tests showed leaks in a single of the 2 PCVs—but not the one which ultimately leaked in orbit. That one performed well; the one which leaked was repaired. While Bhaskaran acknowledged that the second PCV had been identified “as a risk in our risk register” because the primary one leaked during testing, engineers ultimately deemed the failure minor, because the lander passed final acceptance testing.
The rationale for not replacing the second PCV was that it was situated much further back within the spacecraft and would require “extensive surgery” on the lander, invalidate final testing, and involve the extra risk of disassembly and reassembly.
Horack reiterated that the team’s decision-making was sound throughout: “I really found that when I looked at the team and what happened… I don’t see any decisions made in the lead-up to launch where I could say, ‘Hey, I think you should have done this differently.’”
These findings have already begun to inform development of the much larger Griffin lander, which is currently scheduled to launch to the moon before the tip of 2025. In addition to redesigning the valve, engineers have added a regulator to the propulsion system to control the flow of helium to the fuel and oxidizer tanks, in addition to backup latching valves as additional redundancy in case the PCV problem occurs again.
Technology
The latest model AI Google Gemma can work on phones

It grows “open” AI Google, Gemma, grows.
While Google I/O 2025 On Tuesday, Google removed Gemma 3N compresses, a model designed for “liquid” on phones, laptops and tablets. According to Google, available in a preview starting on Tuesday, Gemma 3N can support sound, text, paintings and flicks.
Models efficient enough to operate in offline mode and without the necessity to calculate within the cloud have gained popularity within the AI community lately. They will not be only cheaper to make use of than large models, but they keep privacy, eliminating the necessity to send data to a distant data center.
During the speech to I/O product manager, Gemma Gus Martins said that GEMMA 3N can work on devices with lower than 2 GB of RAM. “Gemma 3N shares the same architecture as Gemini Nano, and is also designed for incredible performance,” he added.
In addition to Gemma 3N, Google releases Medgemma through the AI developer foundation program. According to Medgemma, it’s essentially the most talented model to research text and health -related images.
“Medgemma (IS) OUR (…) A collection of open models to understand the text and multimodal image (health),” said Martins. “Medgemma works great in various imaging and text applications, thanks to which developers (…) could adapt the models to their own health applications.”
Also on the horizon there may be SignGEMMA, an open model for signaling sign language right into a spoken language. Google claims that Signgemma will allow programmers to create recent applications and integration for users of deaf and hard.
“SIGNGEMMA is a new family of models trained to translate sign language into a spoken text, but preferably in the American sign and English,” said Martins. “This is the most talented model of understanding sign language in history and we are looking forward to you-programmers, deaf and hard communities-to take this base and build with it.”
It is value noting that Gemma has been criticized for non -standard, non -standard license conditions, which in accordance with some developers adopted models with a dangerous proposal. However, this didn’t discourage programmers from downloading Gemma models tens of tens of millions of times.
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(Tagstransate) gemma
Technology
Trump to sign a criminalizing account of porn revenge and clear deep cabinets

President Donald Trump is predicted to sign the act on Take It Down, a bilateral law that introduces more severe punishments for distributing clear images, including deep wardrobes and pornography of revenge.
The Act criminalizes the publication of such photos, regardless of whether or not they are authentic or generated AI. Whoever publishes photos or videos can face penalty, including a advantageous, deprivation of liberty and restitution.
According to the brand new law, media firms and web platforms must remove such materials inside 48 hours of termination of the victim. Platforms must also take steps to remove the duplicate content.
Many states have already banned clear sexual desems and pornography of revenge, but for the primary time federal regulatory authorities will enter to impose restrictions on web firms.
The first lady Melania Trump lobbyed for the law, which was sponsored by the senators Ted Cruz (R-TEXAS) and Amy Klobuchar (d-minn.). Cruz said he inspired him to act after hearing that Snapchat for nearly a 12 months refused to remove a deep displacement of a 14-year-old girl.
Proponents of freedom of speech and a group of digital rights aroused concerns, saying that the law is Too wide And it will probably lead to censorship of legal photos, similar to legal pornography, in addition to government critics.
(Tagstransate) AI
Technology
Microsoft Nadella sata chooses chatbots on the podcasts

While the general director of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, says that he likes podcasts, perhaps he didn’t take heed to them anymore.
That the treat is approaching at the end longer profile Bloomberg NadellaFocusing on the strategy of artificial intelligence Microsoft and its complicated relations with Opeli. To illustrate how much she uses Copilot’s AI assistant in her day by day life, Nadella said that as a substitute of listening to podcasts, she now sends transcription to Copilot, after which talks to Copilot with the content when driving to the office.
In addition, Nadella – who jokingly described her work as a “E -Mail driver” – said that it consists of a minimum of 10 custom agents developed in Copilot Studio to sum up E -Mailes and news, preparing for meetings and performing other tasks in the office.
It seems that AI is already transforming Microsoft in a more significant way, and programmers supposedly the most difficult hit in the company’s last dismissals, shortly after Nadella stated that the 30% of the company’s code was written by AI.
(Tagstotransate) microsoft
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