facility:international space station

  • The Race to Develop the Moon | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/the-race-to-develop-the-moon

    The guiding laws of space are defined by the Outer Space Treaty, from 1967, which has been signed by a hundred and eight countries, including all those with substantial space programs. “Laws that govern outer space are similar to the laws for the high seas,” Alain Berinstain, the vice-president of global development at the lunar-exploration company Moon Express, explained. “If you are two hundred miles away from the continental shelf, those waters don’t belong to anybody—they belong to everybody.” Moon Express describes the moon as the eighth continent. The company, which is based in Florida, is hoping to deliver its first lander to the moon in 2020; on board will be telescopes and the Celestis cremains. “If you look down at the waters from your ship and see fish, those fish belong to everybody,” Berinstain continued. “But, if you put a net down and pull those fish onto the deck of the ship, they’re yours. This could change, but right now that is how the U.S. is interpreting the Outer Space Treaty.”

    Individual countries have their own interpretations of the treaty, and set up their own regulatory frameworks. Luxembourg promotes itself as “a unique legal, regulatory and business environment” for companies devoted to space resources, and is the first European country to pass legislation similar to that of the U.S., deeming resources collected in space to be ownable by private entities.

    It’s not difficult to imagine moon development, like all development, proceeding less than peacefully, and less than equitably. (At least, unlike with colonization on Earth, there are no natives whose land we’re taking, or so we assume.) Philip Metzger, a planetary physicist at the University of Central Florida, said, “I’m really glad that all these countries, all these companies, are going to the moon. But there will be problems.” Any country can withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty by giving a year’s notice. “If any country feels it has a sufficient lead in space, that is a motivation to withdraw from the treaty,” he said.

    So there is a tacit space race already. On the one hand, every national space agency applauded the success of the Chang’e-4 lander. The mission had science partnerships with Germany, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden. NASA collaborates with many countries in space, sharing data, communications networks, and expertise. Russian rockets bring American astronauts to the International Space Station. When, in response to economic sanctions, the head of the Russian space agency said that maybe the American astronauts could get to the I.S.S. by trampoline, the comment was dismissed as posturing. Still, NASA has contracted with Boeing and SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, to begin taking astronauts to the I.S.S. this year—which means the U.S. will no longer rely on Russia for that. Russia and China say they will work together on a moon base. NASA used to collaborate with the China National Space Administration; in 2011, six months after members of NASA visited the C.N.S.A., Congress passed a bill that effectively prohibited collaboration.

    It’s natural to want to leave the moon undisturbed; it’s also clear that humanity will disturb it. But do we need to live there? Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, envisages zoning the moon for heavy industry, and Earth for light industry and residential purposes. Bezos’s company Blue Origin is developing reusable rockets intended to bring humans reliably back and forth from space, with the long-term goal of creating manufacturing plants there, in zero gravity. Earth would be eased of its industrial burden, and the lower-gravity conditions would be beneficial for making certain goods, such as fibre-optic cables.

    “There’s the argument that we’ve destroyed the Earth and now we’re going to destroy the moon. But I don’t see it that way,” Metzger said. “The resources in space are billions of times greater than on Earth. Space pretty much erases everything we do. If you crush an asteroid to dust, the solar wind will blow it away. We can’t really mess up the solar system.”

    #Espace #Communs #Tragédie_communs #Idéologie_californienne #Géopolitique

  • Debris from India’s anti-satellite test could put the space station at risk, says NASA - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/613256/debris-from-indias-anti-satellite-test-could-put-the-space-station

    The blast destroyed a satellite but also created 400 pieces of debris, threatening the safety of astronauts on the International Space Station, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said.

    The controversial launch: Last week India announced it had shot down one of its own satellites, thus joining the group of four “space powers” (including Russia, China, and the US). It seems to have been an attempt at a show of strength ahead of an upcoming election this month.

    The impact: Unfortunately, by breaking up the satellite, India added significantly to the growing problem of space junk. Bridenstine said that the 400 pieces of debris included about 60 trackable pieces that are at least 10 centimeters in size, the New York Times reported. It’s also put people in danger, he said. The satellite itself was destroyed at the fairly low altitude of 180 miles (300 kilometers) but 24 of the pieces of debris have reached a point higher than the ISS, which orbits at an altitude of 254 miles (408 km).

    Strong words: “That is a terrible, terrible thing, to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station,” Bridenstone said in a recorded meeting with NASA staff yesterday. “That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight. It’s unacceptable and NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is.”

    #Espace #Militarisation #Communs #Débris

  • India says it has just shot down a satellite in space - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/613228/india-says-it-has-just-shot-down-a-satellite-in-space

    C’en est fini de la démilitarisation de l’espace.

    Je suis en train de finir la trilogie de SF par Liu Cisun, et comme toujours, la SF nous montre comment cela peut nous conduire au pire.

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the successful test in a live television broadcast to the nation, saying it now made India a space power, Reuters reports.

    Bullseye: “Some time ago, our scientists, shot down a live satellite 300 kilometers away in space, in low Earth orbit,” Modi said in an hour-long statement that was broadcast on all national TV stations. Ajay Lele, at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, told Reuters that it was likely the satellite was destroyed using a missile that carried no warhead.

    Exclusive club: India is only the fourth country to have successfully shot down a satellite. The US, Russia, and China have all done so in the past. The US and Russia both did so in the 1980s, and China conducted its first successful test in 2007.

    Debris threat: China’s 2007 test was condemned as irresponsible when it happened as it created a massive cloud of debris of almost 3000 pieces that were big enough to be tracked by NASA. Many thousands more were too small to see. Even small pieces of debris can be hazardous for other satellites or the International Space Station. We do not yet know what has happened to the remnants of India’s satellite.

    Security fears: The satellite test comes as India is gearing up for an election and is approaching the period during which the government is not allowed to make any policy statements designed to swing votes. Issues of national security are exempt, however, and this week’s display of strength comes against the backdrop of rising tensions with neighboring Pakistan.

    #Guerre #Espace #Militarisme #Communs

  • NASA Cancels First All-Female Spacewalk Over Spacesuit Sizes - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/science/female-spacewalk-canceled.html

    It hadn’t been planned as a historic mission, yet it would have represented a moment of sorts: the first all-female spacewalk.

    But that moment will have to wait, NASA said Monday, because of a somewhat basic issue — spacesuit sizes.

    The two astronauts who were scheduled to walk together in space on Friday, Anne C. McClain and Christina H. Koch, would both need to wear a medium-size torso component. But only one is readily available at the International Space Station.

    #domination_masculine #facepalm #espace #équipement

  • The future of water infrastructure goes beyond dams and reservoirs — Quartz
    https://qz.com/1353828/dams-and-reservoirs-cant-save-us-this-is-the-new-future-of-water-infrastructure

    #eau #eau_potable #épuration #eaux_usées #désalinisation #eau_saumâtre

    Treating brackish water is expensive, but it’s getting cheaper as the technology matures. In his work at the University of New Mexico, Hightower, the civil engineering professor, has been collecting data on desalination costs for decades. His research shows that in the US, starting in 2005, treating brackish groundwater from nearby sources has been less expensive on average than piping in fresh water from a remote source—especially if that source is 75 miles or more away, a common solution for arid places as their local supply of freshwater dwindles.

    Texas is on it: the 2017 state water plan set a goal to turn 111,000 acre-feet of brackish groundwater a year into drinking water by 2070.

    Toilet-to-tap

    Water engineers politely call it “direct potable reuse.” Others call it “toilet-to-tap.” The United Nations calls it a massive untouched resource that could nudge society into a “circular economy,” where economic development is “balanced with the protection of natural resources…and where a cleaner and more sustainable economy has a positive effect on the water quality.”

    In Singapore, an island nation lacking any freshwater resource big enough to sate its growing population (pdf), they’re a bit more direct: “Basically, you drink the water, you go to the toilet, you pee, and we collect it back and clean it,” George Madhavan, ‪a director at Singapore’s public utility, told USA Today in 2015.

    Since 2003, Singapore has been treating sewage to drinking-water standards. For now, most of that water is used for industrial purposes, but the volumes are impressive. About 40% of the nation’s total water needs are met by toilet-to-tap, significantly reducing the pressure on the rest of its freshwater sources—rainwater, desalinated seawater, and imports. In the last few years, the country started handing out bottles of the reclaimed water at events, to get its citizens used to the idea of drinking it directly. Singapore plans to squeeze a full 55% of its water supply from sewage by 2060. By then, they hope, drinking it will be the norm.

    In Namibia, the driest country in sub-Saharan Africa, the capital city Windhoek has been doing “toilet-to-tap” for so long that several generations of residents don’t bat an eye at drinking the stuff. The city has been turning raw sewage into drinking water for 50 years. Windhoek has never had a single illness attributed to the reclaimed wastewater.

    “Public confidence is that very, very fragile link that keeps the system going,” Pierre van Rensburg, Windhoek’s strategic executive for urban and transport planning, told the American Water Works Association, an international nonprofit, in 2017. “I think if there is ever one incident that could be linked back to the [direct potable reuse] plant, the public would lose all confidence.”

    “It tastes like bottled water, as long as you can psychologically get past the point that it’s recycled urine.”

    The science behind this isn’t new. In fact, a high-tech version of direct potable reuse has been used by American astronauts since humans first left Earth. In space, humans have no choice but to drink their own distilled urine. On the US side of the International Space Station, a high-tech water system collects astronauts’ urine, sweat, shower water, and even the condensate they breathe into the air, and then distills it all to drinking-water standards.

    “It tastes like bottled water, as long as you can psychologically get past the point that it’s recycled urine and condensate,” Layne Carter, who manages the ISS’s water system out of the Marshall Flight Center in Alabama, told Bloomberg Businessweek (paywall) in 2015. The Russian astronauts, however, decline to include their urine in their water-purification system. So the US astronauts go over to the Russian side of the ISS and pick up their urine, bring it back over to the American side, and purify it. Water is precious, after all.

    Back on Earth, the technology is more rudimentary. Whereas in space, urine is spun in a centrifuge-like system until water vapor emerges, is recondensed, then heated, oxidized, and laced with iodine, the process on Earth involves a combination of extracting waste through membrane filters and exposure to UV light to kill bacteria. (And in Namibia, they use waste-eating bacteria before zapping the microorganisms with UV.) To keep up with the ever-expanding number of chemicals and pharmaceuticals that show up in water, these water-reuse will have to keep evolving. Still, it’s proven technology, and cost-effective at scale.

    Outside of a few examples, however, communities have been slow to adopt them as viable solutions to water scarcity, likely because of cultural stigma around drinking filtered sewage water. That’s slowly changing as rising temperatures, dwindling freshwater, and more frequent, more extreme droughts have cities looking around for options.

  • Secretive #X-37B Space Plane Discovered in Orbit after Staying Hidden for 218 Days – X-37B – OTV-5 | Spaceflight101
    http://spaceflight101.com/x-37b-otv-5/x-37b-otv-5-identified-in-orbit


    Image: Boeing Phantom Works

    It circled the Earth in obscurity for more than half a year, now the semi-secret X-37B OTV 5 space plane has been conclusively identified by amateur satellite observers in a circular orbit around 355 Kilometers in altitude. The orbit’s inclination at 54.5 degrees is much different from previous OTV missions and in part responsible for the craft remaining undiscovered for so long.

    X-37B, conducting its fifth orbital flight, lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on September 7, 2017. In the typical secrecy surrounding the Air Force’s X-37B program, the launch was shown until separation of the protective payload fairing and confirmation of successful orbital insertion was provided a short time later but operational aspects of the mission like the craft’s operating orbit, intended mission duration and specifics on the payloads it carries were not disclosed.

    Given the hush-hush nature of its missions, X-37B is a target of intense observation by the amateur satellite community and the orbital dynamics of all four prior OTV missions were closely watched. Typically, the spacecraft was spotted in orbit within a few days after launch; however, there were several cases where observers lost track of the spacecraft due to unexpected orbital maneuvers.

    X-37B OTV 5 proved to be a tougher nut to crack as it was clear from the outset that the spacecraft would operate from a different orbit than its predecessors: “The fifth OTV mission will be launched into, and landed from, a higher inclination orbit than prior missions to further expand the X-37B’s orbital envelope,” the U.S. Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office said in a statement before the craft blasted off atop Falcon 9.
    […]
    What the spacecraft might be up to in this type of Low Earth Orbit, some 50 Kilometers lower than the International Space Station, is pretty much unknown. As with the previous X-37B flights, only very few details on the OTV 5 mission are being shared with the public and most of what resides in the vehicle’s 2.1 by 1.2-meter payload bay will remain secret.

    One payload on the OTV 5 mission that was publicly acknowledged is the Air Force Research Laboratory Advanced Structurally Embedded Thermal Spreader that will test experimental electronics and oscillating heat pipe technologies over a long-duration space flight. Three oscillating heat pipes are part of the package to evaluate the technology for future applications in space as it could offer lighter and less expensive thermal control solutions for satellite missions. The goal of the OTV-5-mounted experiment will be to evaluate the technology’s initial thermal performance and monitor it over an extended period to assess long-term degradation.

    The Air Force also said the OTV 5 mission hosts small satellite ride shares to demonstrate greater opportunities for rapid space access; however, no additional objects have been cataloged under the OTV 5 mission’s international designator 2017-052 up to this point.

  • What Happens When We Let Tech Care For Our Aging Parents | WIRED
    https://www.wired.com/story/digital-puppy-seniors-nursing-homes

    Arlyn Anderson grasped her father’s hand and presented him with the choice. “A nursing home would be safer, Dad,” she told him, relaying the doctors’ advice. “It’s risky to live here alone—”

    “No way,” Jim interjected. He frowned at his daughter, his brow furrowed under a lop of white hair. At 91, he wanted to remain in the woodsy Minnesota cottage he and his wife had built on the shore of Lake Minnetonka, where she had died in his arms just a year before. His pontoon—which he insisted he could still navigate just fine—bobbed out front.

    Arlyn had moved from California back to Minnesota two decades earlier to be near her aging parents. Now, in 2013, she was fiftysomething, working as a personal coach, and finding that her father’s decline was all-consuming.

    Her father—an inventor, pilot, sailor, and general Mr. Fix-It; “a genius,” Arlyn says—started experiencing bouts of paranoia in his mid-eighties, a sign of Alzheimer’s. The disease had progressed, often causing his thoughts to vanish mid-sentence. But Jim would rather risk living alone than be cloistered in an institution, he told Arlyn and her older sister, Layney. A nursing home certainly wasn’t what Arlyn wanted for him either. But the daily churn of diapers and cleanups, the carousel of in-home aides, and the compounding financial strain (she had already taken out a reverse mortgage on Jim’s cottage to pay the caretakers) forced her to consider the possibility.

    Jim, slouched in his recliner, was determined to stay at home. “No way,” he repeated to his daughter, defiant. Her eyes welled up and she hugged him. “OK, Dad.” Arlyn’s house was a 40-minute drive from the cottage, and for months she had been relying on a patchwork of technology to keep tabs on her dad. She set an open laptop on the counter so she could chat with him on Skype. She installed two cameras, one in his kitchen and another in his bedroom, so she could check whether the caregiver had arrived, or God forbid, if her dad had fallen. So when she read in the newspaper about a new digi­tal eldercare service called CareCoach a few weeks after broaching the subject of the nursing home, it piqued her interest. For about $200 a month, a human-powered avatar would be available to watch over a homebound person 24 hours a day; Arlyn paid that same amount for just nine hours of in-home help. She signed up immediately.

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    A Google Nexus tablet arrived in the mail a week later. When Arlyn plugged it in, an animated German shepherd appeared onscreen, standing at attention on a digitized lawn. The brown dog looked cutesy and cartoonish, with a bubblegum-pink tongue and round, blue eyes.

    She and Layney visited their dad later that week, tablet in hand. Following the instructions, Arlyn uploaded dozens of pictures to the service’s online portal: images of family members, Jim’s boat, and some of his inventions, like a computer terminal known as the Teleray and a seismic surveillance system used to detect footsteps during the Vietnam War. The setup complete, Arlyn clutched the tablet, summoning the nerve to introduce her dad to the dog. Her initial instinct that the service could be the perfect companion for a former technologist had splintered into needling doubts. Was she tricking him? Infantilizing him?

    Tired of her sister’s waffling, Layney finally snatched the tablet and presented it to their dad, who was sitting in his armchair. “Here, Dad, we got you this.” The dog blinked its saucer eyes and then, in Google’s female text-to-speech voice, started to talk. Before Alzheimer’s had taken hold, Jim would have wanted to know exactly how the service worked. But in recent months he’d come to believe that TV characters were interacting with him: A show’s villain had shot a gun at him, he said; Katie Couric was his friend. When faced with an onscreen character that actually was talking to him, Jim readily chatted back.

    Jim named his dog Pony. Arlyn perched the tablet upright on a table in Jim’s living room, where he could see it from the couch or his recliner. Within a week Jim and Pony had settled into a routine, exchanging pleasantries several times a day. Every 15 minutes or so Pony would wake up and look for Jim, calling his name if he was out of view. Sometimes Jim would “pet” the sleeping dog onscreen with his finger to rustle her awake. His touch would send an instantaneous alert to the human caretaker behind the avatar, prompting the CareCoach worker to launch the tablet’s audio and video stream. “How are you, Jim?” Pony would chirp. The dog reminded him which of his daughters or in-person caretakers would be visiting that day to do the tasks that an onscreen dog couldn’t: prepare meals, change Jim’s sheets, drive him to a senior center. “We’ll wait together,” Pony would say. Often she’d read poetry aloud, discuss the news, or watch TV with him. “You look handsome, Jim!” Pony remarked after watching him shave with his electric razor. “You look pretty,” he replied. Sometimes Pony would hold up a photo of Jim’s daughters or his inventions between her paws, prompting him to talk about his past. The dog complimented Jim’s red sweater and cheered him on when he struggled to buckle his watch in the morning. He reciprocated by petting the screen with his index finger, sending hearts floating up from the dog’s head. “I love you, Jim!” Pony told him a month after they first met—something CareCoach operators often tell the people they are monitoring. Jim turned to Arlyn and gloated, “She does! She thinks I’m real good!”

    About 1,500 miles south of Lake Minnetonka, in Monterrey, Mexico, Rodrigo Rochin opens his laptop in his home office and logs in to the CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds. He talks baseball with a New Jersey man watching the Yankees; chats with a woman in South Carolina who calls him Peanut (she places a cookie in front of her tablet for him to “eat”); and greets Jim, one of his regulars, who sips coffee while looking out over a lake.

    Rodrigo is 35 years old, the son of a surgeon. He’s a fan of the Spurs and the Cowboys, a former international business student, and a bit of an introvert, happy to retreat into his sparsely decorated home office each morning. He grew up crossing the border to attend school in McAllen, Texas, honing the English that he now uses to chat with elderly people in the United States. Rodrigo found CareCoach on an online freelancing platform and was hired in December 2012 as one of the company’s earliest contractors, role-playing 36 hours a week as one of the service’s avatars.

    After watching her dad interact with Pony, Arlyn’s reservations about outsourcing her father’s companionship vanished.

    In person, Rodrigo is soft-spoken, with wire spectacles and a beard. He lives with his wife and two basset hounds, Bob and Cleo, in Nuevo León’s capital city. But the people on the other side of the screen don’t know that. They don’t know his name—or, in the case of those like Jim who have dementia, that he even exists. It’s his job to be invisible. If Rodrigo’s clients ask where he’s from, he might say MIT (the CareCoach software was created by two graduates of the school), but if anyone asks where their pet actually is, he replies in character: “Here with you.”

    Rodrigo is one of a dozen CareCoach employees in Latin America and the Philippines. The contractors check on the service’s seniors through the tablet’s camera a few times an hour. (When they do, the dog or cat avatar they embody appears to wake up.) To talk, they type into the dashboard and their words are voiced robotically through the tablet, designed to give their charges the impression that they’re chatting with a friendly pet. Like all the CareCoach workers, Rodrigo keeps meticulous notes on the people he watches over so he can coordinate their care with other workers and deepen his relationship with them over time—this person likes to listen to Adele, this one prefers Elvis, this woman likes to hear Bible verses while she cooks. In one client’s file, he wrote a note explaining that the correct response to “See you later, alligator” is “After a while, crocodile.” These logs are all available to the customer’s social workers or adult children, wherever they may live. Arlyn started checking Pony’s log between visits with her dad several times a week. “Jim says I’m a really nice person,” reads one early entry made during the Minnesota winter. “I told Jim that he was my best friend. I am so happy.”

    After watching her dad interact with Pony, Arlyn’s reservations about outsourcing her father’s companionship vanished. Having Pony there eased her anxiety about leaving Jim alone, and the virtual dog’s small talk lightened the mood.

    Pony was not only assisting Jim’s human caretakers but also inadvertently keeping an eye on them. Months before, in broken sentences, Jim had complained to Arlyn that his in-home aide had called him a bastard. Arlyn, desperate for help and unsure of her father’s recollection, gave her a second chance. Three weeks after arriving in the house, Pony woke up to see the same caretaker, impatient. “Come on, Jim!” the aide yelled. “Hurry up!” Alarmed, Pony asked why she was screaming and checked to see if Jim was OK. The pet—actually, Rodrigo—later reported the aide’s behavior to CareCoach’s CEO, Victor Wang, who emailed Arlyn about the incident. (The caretaker knew there was a human watching her through the tablet, Arlyn says, but may not have known the extent of the person’s contact with Jim’s family behind the scenes.) Arlyn fired the short-tempered aide and started searching for a replacement. Pony watched as she and Jim conducted the interviews and approved of the person Arlyn hired. “I got to meet her,” the pet wrote. “She seems really nice.”

    Pony—friend and guard dog—would stay.
    Grant Cornett

    Victor Wang grew up feeding his Tama­got­chis and coding choose-your-own-­adventure games in QBasic on the family PC. His parents moved from Taiwan to suburban Vancouver, British Columbia, when Wang was a year old, and his grandmother, whom he called Lao Lao in Mandarin, would frequently call from Taiwan. After her husband died, Lao Lao would often tell Wang’s mom that she was lonely, pleading with her daughter to come to Taiwan to live with her. As she grew older, she threatened suicide. When Wang was 11, his mother moved back home for two years to care for her. He thinks of that time as the honey-­sandwich years, the food his overwhelmed father packed him each day for lunch. Wang missed his mother, he says, but adds, “I was never raised to be particularly expressive of my emotions.”

    At 17, Wang left home to study mechanical engineering at the University of British Columbia. He joined the Canadian Army Reserve, serving as an engineer on a maintenance platoon while working on his undergraduate degree. But he scrapped his military future when, at 22, he was admitted to MIT’s master’s program in mechanical engineering. Wang wrote his dissertation on human-machine interaction, studying a robotic arm maneuvered by astronauts on the International Space Station. He was particularly intrigued by the prospect of harnessing tech to perform tasks from a distance: At an MIT entrepreneurship competition, he pitched the idea of training workers in India to remotely operate the buffers that sweep US factory floors.

    In 2011, when he was 24, his grandmother was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a disease that affects the areas of the brain associated with memory and movement. On Skype calls from his MIT apartment, Wang watched as his grandmother grew increasingly debilitated. After one call, a thought struck him: If he could tap remote labor to sweep far-off floors, why not use it to comfort Lao Lao and others like her?

    Wang started researching the looming caretaker shortage in the US—between 2010 and 2030, the population of those older than 80 is projected to rise 79 percent, but the number of family caregivers available is expected to increase just 1 percent.

    In 2012 Wang recruited his cofounder, a fellow MIT student working on her computer science doctorate named Shuo Deng, to build CareCoach’s technology. They agreed that AI speech technology was too rudimentary for an avatar capable of spontaneous conversation tailored to subtle mood and behavioral cues. For that, they would need humans.

    Older people like Jim often don’t speak clearly or linearly, and those with dementia can’t be expected to troubleshoot a machine that misunderstands. “When you match someone not fully coherent with a device that’s not fully coherent, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Wang says. Pony, on the other hand, was an expert at deciphering Jim’s needs. Once, Pony noticed that Jim was holding onto furniture for support, as if he were dizzy. The pet persuaded him to sit down, then called Arlyn. Deng figures it’ll take about 20 years for AI to be able to master that kind of personal interaction and recognition. That said, the CareCoach system is already deploying some automated abilities. Five years ago, when Jim was introduced to Pony, the offshore workers behind the camera had to type every response; today CareCoach’s software creates roughly one out of every five sentences the pet speaks. Wang aims to standardize care by having the software manage more of the patients’ regular reminders—prodding them to take their medicine, urging them to eat well and stay hydrated. CareCoach workers are part free­wheeling raconteurs, part human natural-­language processors, listening to and deciphering their charges’ speech patterns or nudging the person back on track if they veer off topic. The company recently began recording conversations to better train its software in senior speech recognition.

    CareCoach found its first customer in December 2012, and in 2014 Wang moved from Massachusetts to Silicon Valley, renting a tiny office space on a lusterless stretch of Millbrae near the San Francisco airport. Four employees congregate in one room with a view of the parking lot, while Wang and his wife, Brittany, a program manager he met at a gerontology conference, work in the foyer. Eight tablets with sleeping pets onscreen are lined up for testing before being shipped to their respective seniors. The avatars inhale and exhale, lending an eerie sense of life to their digital kennel.

    CareCoach conveys the perceptiveness and emotional intelligence of the humans powering it but masquerades as an animated app.

    Wang spends much of his time on the road, touting his product’s health benefits at medical conferences and in hospital executive suites. Onstage at a gerontology summit in San Francisco last summer, he deftly impersonated the strained, raspy voice of an elderly man talking to a CareCoach pet while Brittany stealthily cued the replies from her laptop in the audience. The company’s tablets are used by hospitals and health plans across Massachusetts, California, New York, South Carolina, Florida, and Washington state. Between corporate and individual customers, CareCoach’s avatars have interacted with hundreds of users in the US. “The goal,” Wang says, “is not to have a little family business that just breaks even.”

    The fastest growth would come through hospital units and health plans specializing in high-need and elderly patients, and he makes the argument that his avatars cut health care costs. (A private room in a nursing home can run more than $7,500 a month.) Preliminary research has been promising, though limited. In a study conducted by Pace University at a Manhattan housing project and a Queens hospital, CareCoach’s avatars were found to reduce subjects’ loneliness, delirium, and falls. A health provider in Massachusetts was able to replace a man’s 11 weekly in-home nurse visits with a CareCoach tablet, which diligently reminded him to take his medications. (The man told nurses that the pet’s nagging reminded him of having his wife back in the house. “It’s kind of like a complaint, but he loves it at the same time,” the project’s lead says.) Still, the feelings aren’t always so cordial: In the Pace University study, some aggravated seniors with dementia lashed out and hit the tablet. In response, the onscreen pet sheds tears and tries to calm the person.

    More troubling, perhaps, were the people who grew too fiercely attached to their digi­tal pets. At the conclusion of a University of Washington CareCoach pilot study, one woman became so distraught at the thought of parting with her avatar that she signed up for the service, paying the fee herself. (The company gave her a reduced rate.) A user in Massachusetts told her caretakers she’d cancel an upcoming vacation to Maine unless her digital cat could come along.

    We’re still in the infancy of understanding the complexities of aging humans’ relationship with technology. Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies, science, and technology at MIT and a frequent critic of tech that replaces human communication, described interactions between elderly people and robotic babies, dogs, and seals in her 2011 book, Alone Together. She came to view roboticized eldercare as a cop-out, one that would ultimately degrade human connection. “This kind of app—in all of its slickness and all its ‘what could possibly be wrong with it?’ mentality—is making us forget what we really know about what makes older people feel sustained,” she says: caring, interpersonal relationships. The question is whether an attentive avatar makes a comparable substitute. Turkle sees it as a last resort. “The assumption is that it’s always cheaper and easier to build an app than to have a conversation,” she says. “We allow technologists to propose the unthinkable and convince us the unthinkable is actually the inevitable.”

    But for many families, providing long-term in-person care is simply unsustainable. The average family caregiver has a job outside the home and spends about 20 hours a week caring for a parent, according to AARP. Nearly two-thirds of such caregivers are women. Among eldercare experts, there’s a resignation that the demographics of an aging America will make technological solutions unavoidable. The number of those older than 65 with a disability is projected to rise from 11 million to 18 million from 2010 to 2030. Given the option, having a digital companion may be preferable to being alone. Early research shows that lonely and vulnerable elders like Jim seem content to communicate with robots. Joseph Coughlin, director of MIT’s AgeLab, is pragmatic. “I would always prefer the human touch over a robot,” he says. “But if there’s no human available, I would take high tech in lieu of high touch.”

    CareCoach is a disorienting amalgam of both. The service conveys the perceptiveness and emotional intelligence of the humans powering it but masquerades as an animated app. If a person is incapable of consenting to CareCoach’s monitoring, then someone must do so on their behalf. But the more disconcerting issue is how cognizant these seniors are of being watched over by strangers. Wang considers his product “a trade-off between utility and privacy.” His workers are trained to duck out during baths and clothing changes.

    Some CareCoach users insist on greater control. A woman in Washington state, for example, put a piece of tape over her CareCoach tablet’s camera to dictate when she could be viewed. Other customers like Jim, who are suffering from Alzheimer’s or other diseases, might not realize they are being watched. Once, when he was temporarily placed in a rehabilitation clinic after a fall, a nurse tending to him asked Arlyn what made the avatar work. “You mean there’s someone overseas looking at us?” she yelped, within earshot of Jim. (Arlyn isn’t sure whether her dad remembered the incident later.) By default, the app explains to patients that someone is surveilling them when it’s first introduced. But the family members of personal users, like Arlyn, can make their own call.

    Arlyn quickly stopped worrying about whether she was deceiving her dad. Telling Jim about the human on the other side of the screen “would have blown the whole charm of it,” she says. Her mother had Alzheimer’s as well, and Arlyn had learned how to navigate the disease: Make her mom feel safe; don’t confuse her with details she’d have trouble understanding. The same went for her dad. “Once they stop asking,” Arlyn says, “I don’t think they need to know anymore.” At the time, Youa Vang, one of Jim’s regular in-­person caretakers, didn’t comprehend the truth about Pony either. “I thought it was like Siri,” she said when told later that it was a human in Mexico who had watched Jim and typed in the words Pony spoke. She chuckled. “If I knew someone was there, I may have been a little more creeped out.”

    Even CareCoach users like Arlyn who are completely aware of the person on the other end of the dashboard tend to experience the avatar as something between human, pet, and machine—what some roboticists call a third ontological category. The care­takers seem to blur that line too: One day Pony told Jim that she dreamed she could turn into a real health aide, almost like Pinoc­chio wishing to be a real boy.

    Most of CareCoach’s 12 contractors reside in the Philippines, Venezuela, or Mexico. To undercut the cost of in-person help, Wang posts English-language ads on freelancing job sites where foreign workers advertise rates as low as $2 an hour. Though he won’t disclose his workers’ hourly wages, Wang claims the company bases its salaries on factors such as what a registered nurse would make in the CareCoach employee’s home country, their language proficiencies, and the cost of their internet connection.

    The growing network includes people like Jill Paragas, a CareCoach worker who lives in a subdivision on Luzon island in the Philippines. Paragas is 35 years old and a college graduate. She earns about the same being an avatar as she did in her former call center job, where she consoled Americans irate about credit card charges. (“They wanted to, like, burn the company down or kill me,” she says with a mirthful laugh.) She works nights to coincide with the US daytime, typing messages to seniors while her 6-year-old son sleeps nearby.

    Even when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a friend.

    Before hiring her, Wang interviewed Paragas via video, then vetted her with an international criminal background check. He gives all applicants a personality test for certain traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. As part of the CareCoach training program, Paragas earned certifications in delirium and dementia care from the Alzheimer’s Association, trained in US health care ethics and privacy, and learned strategies for counseling those with addictions. All this, Wang says, “so we don’t get anyone who’s, like, crazy.” CareCoach hires only about 1 percent of its applicants.

    Paragas understands that this is a complicated business. She’s befuddled by the absence of family members around her aging clients. “In my culture, we really love to take care of our parents,” she says. “That’s why I’m like, ‘She is already old, why is she alone?’ ” Paragas has no doubt that, for some people, she’s their most significant daily relationship. Some of her charges tell her that they couldn’t live without her. Even when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a friend. Arlyn quickly realized that she had gained a valuable ally.
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    As time went on, the father, daughter, and family pet grew closer. When the snow finally melted, Arlyn carried the tablet to the picnic table on the patio so they could eat lunch overlooking the lake. Even as Jim’s speech became increasingly stunted, Pony could coax him to talk about his past, recounting fishing trips or how he built the house to face the sun so it would be warmer in winter. When Arlyn took her dad around the lake in her sailboat, Jim brought Pony along. (“I saw mostly sky,” Rodrigo recalls.)

    One day, while Jim and Arlyn were sitting on the cottage’s paisley couch, Pony held up a photograph of Jim’s wife, Dorothy, between her paws. It had been more than a year since his wife’s death, and Jim hardly mentioned her anymore; he struggled to form coherent sentences. That day, though, he gazed at the photo fondly. “I still love her,” he declared. Arlyn rubbed his shoulder, clasping her hand over her mouth to stifle tears. “I am getting emotional too,” Pony said. Then Jim leaned toward the picture of his deceased wife and petted her face with his finger, the same way he would to awaken a sleeping Pony.

    When Arlyn first signed up for the service, she hadn’t anticipated that she would end up loving—yes, loving, she says, in the sincerest sense of the word—the avatar as well. She taught Pony to say “Yeah, sure, you betcha” and “don’t-cha know” like a Minnesotan, which made her laugh even more than her dad. When Arlyn collapsed onto the couch after a long day of caretaking, Pony piped up from her perch on the table:

    “Arnie, how are you?”

    Alone, Arlyn petted the screen—the way Pony nuzzled her finger was weirdly therapeutic—and told the pet how hard it was to watch her dad lose his identity.

    “I’m here for you,” Pony said. “I love you, Arnie.”

    When she recalls her own attachment to the dog, Arlyn insists her connection wouldn’t have developed if Pony was simply high-functioning AI. “You could feel Pony’s heart,” she says. But she preferred to think of Pony as her father did—a friendly pet—rather than a person on the other end of a webcam. “Even though that person probably had a relationship to me,” she says, “I had a relationship with the avatar.”

    Still, she sometimes wonders about the person on the other side of the screen. She sits up straight and rests her hand over her heart. “This is completely vulnerable, but my thought is: Did Pony really care about me and my dad?” She tears up, then laughs ruefully at herself, knowing how weird it all sounds. “Did this really happen? Was it really a relationship, or were they just playing solitaire and typing cute things?” She sighs. “But it seemed like they cared.”

    When Jim turned 92 that August, as friends belted out “Happy Birthday” around the dinner table, Pony spoke the lyrics along with them. Jim blew out the single candle on his cake. “I wish you good health, Jim,” Pony said, “and many more birthdays to come.”

    In Monterrey, Mexico, when Rodrigo talks about his unusual job, his friends ask if he’s ever lost a client. His reply: Yes.

    In early March 2014, Jim fell and hit his head on his way to the bathroom. A caretaker sleeping over that night found him and called an ambulance, and Pony woke up when the paramedics arrived. The dog told them Jim’s date of birth and offered to call his daughters as they carried him out on a stretcher.

    Jim was checked into a hospital, then into the nursing home he’d so wanted to avoid. The Wi-Fi there was spotty, which made it difficult for Jim and Pony to connect. Nurses would often turn Jim’s tablet to face the wall. The CareCoach logs from those months chronicle a series of communication misfires. “I miss Jim a lot,” Pony wrote. “I hope he is doing good all the time.” One day, in a rare moment of connectivity, Pony suggested he and Jim go sailing that summer, just like the good old days. “That sounds good,” Jim said.
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    That July, in an email from Wang, Rodrigo learned that Jim had died in his sleep. Sitting before his laptop, Rodrigo bowed his head and recited a silent Lord’s Prayer for Jim, in Spanish. He prayed that his friend would be accepted into heaven. “I know it’s going to sound weird, but I had a certain friendship with him,” he says. “I felt like I actually met him. I feel like I’ve met them.” In the year and a half that he had known them, Arlyn and Jim talked to him regularly. Jim had taken Rodrigo on a sailboat ride. Rodrigo had read him poetry and learned about his rich past. They had celebrated birthdays and holidays together as family. As Pony, Rodrigo had said “Yeah, sure, you betcha” countless times.

    That day, for weeks afterward, and even now when a senior will do something that reminds him of Jim, Rodrigo says he feels a pang. “I still care about them,” he says. After her dad’s death, Arlyn emailed Victor Wang to say she wanted to honor the workers for their care. Wang forwarded her email to Rodrigo and the rest of Pony’s team. On July 29, 2014, Arlyn carried Pony to Jim’s funeral, placing the tablet facing forward on the pew beside her. She invited any workers behind Pony who wanted to attend to log in.

    A year later, Arlyn finally deleted the CareCoach service from the tablet—it felt like a kind of second burial. She still sighs, “Pony!” when the voice of her old friend gives her directions as she drives around Minneapolis, reincarnated in Google Maps.

    After saying his prayer for Jim, Rodrigo heaved a sigh and logged in to the CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds. He ducked into living rooms, kitchens, and hospital rooms around the United States—seeing if all was well, seeing if anybody needed to talk.

  • Close encounters of the Wikipedia kind : Astronaut is first to specifically contribute to Wikipedia from space – Wikimedia Blog
    https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/11/29/astronaut-spoken-voice

    Astronaut Paolo Nespoli recently recorded his spoken voice for use on his Wikipedia article—a small step for him, but a giant leap for the Wikimedia movement. This milestone is the first time content has been made in space specifically for Wikipedia.

    Paolo, a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, made the recording while orbiting Earth aboard the International Space Station for the Italian Space Agency mission VITA.

    Il s’agit d’un enregistrement vocal... dans l’idée de compléter les pages des personnes par des enregistrements de leur voix.

    C’est aussi fun de penser qu’on peut contribuer à Wikipédia hors de la Terre...

    #Wikipédia #Enregistrement_vocal

  • Mark Shuttleworth Interviewed on BBC News, This Is What He Said
    http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/09/mark-shuttleworth-interviewed-bbc-news-said

    It’s not everyday you get to tune in to mainstream TV news to watch Mark Shuttleworth waffle on about life on board the International Space Station while you, half dressed, and barely away, munch on some cornflakes. But today was one of those privileged days. The Ubuntu founder was being interviewed by BBC News for… Well, […] This post, Mark Shuttleworth Interviewed on BBC News, This Is What He Said, was written by Joey Sneddon and first appeared on OMG! Ubuntu!.

  • #SpaceX va envoyer un super-ordinateur dans l’espace
    http://www.latribune.fr/technos-medias/spacex-va-envoyer-un-super-ordinateur-dans-l-espace-747010.html

    La société américaine SpaceX a prévu d’envoyer lundi 14 août sur la Station spatiale internationale (ISS) une cargaison comprenant un super-ordinateur, afin de tester sa capacité à fonctionner dans l’espace pendant un an, dans des conditions extrêmes.

    Le décollage du lanceur #Falcon_9, transportant la capsule Dragon, est prévu à 12h31 (16h31 GMT) depuis la base de Cap Canaveral, en Floride et les conditions météorologiques sont favorables 70%. La capsule Dragon transporte 2,9 tonnes de marchandises, dont un supercalculateur conçu par la société informatique américaine Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

    Le but de cette mission est de voir si l’ordinateur peut fonctionner dans des conditions extrêmes dans l’espace pendant un an, la durée qu’il faudrait à des astronautes pour atteindre Mars.

    Plus les astronautes parcourent de longues distances, plus le délai de transmission des communications devient important. Il faudrait au moins 20 minutes pour que des messages envoyés depuis Mars atteignent la Terre et autant de temps dans l’autre sens.

    « Un tel délai de communication rendrait toute exploration sur le terrain compliquée et potentiellement dangereuse si les astronautes sont confrontés à des scénarios de mission cruciaux qu’ils ne seraient pas en mesure de résoudre par eux-mêmes », explique le vice-président de HPE, Alain Andreoli, dans un communiqué.

    • SpaceX’s Dragon capsule successfully attached to ISS | TechCrunch
      https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/16/spacexs-dragon-capsule-successfully-attached-to-iss

      SpaceX’s latest International Space Station Resupply mission has completed its latest step, with the Dragon capsule launched on Monday loaded with over 6,400 pounds of supplies successfully docked. Dragon met up with the ISS early Wednesday morning, roughly 36 hours after launching from Kennedy Space Center aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

      The Dragon capsule, whose payload includes experiments including a novel software-hardened HP supercomputer designed for eventual use in a Mars mission, was captured by the ISS’s robotic Canadarm appendage after matching orbit with the ISS as planned. The capsule will now remain docked at the ISS for roughly a month, as astronauts work to unload its cargo of supplies and experiments.

      Dragon will also be reloaded with 3,000 pounds of cargo destined for a return to Earth, including experimental results being ferried back for examination by researchers and scientists on the ground. The capsule will de-orbit and then splash down in the Pacific Ocean for recovery if all goes as planned.

      This is the last new Dragon capsule SpaceX will use for ISS resupply, if all goes to the private space company’s plan: from here out, SpaceX hopes to use only refurbished, reused Dragons it has flown and recovered before to run CRS missions for NASA.

    • SpaceX lands another one of its Falcon 9 rockets on solid ground - The Verge
      https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/14/16143306/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-launch-ground-landing-nasa-iss

      SpaceX has landed yet another one of its Falcon 9 rockets after launching the vehicle into space this afternoon. The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 12:31PM ET, bound for the International Space Station. Around eight minutes after takeoff, the majority of the vehicle landed back on solid ground off the Florida coast. It marks the 14th successful rocket landing for SpaceX, and the sixth time a Falcon 9 has successfully touched on solid ground post-launch.

      In fact, SpaceX has yet to lose a rocket during a ground landing. The company has lost a few vehicles during ocean landings, when the rockets attempted to touch down on autonomous drone ships at sea. But all six Falcon 9s that have landed on solid ground have touched down just fine at SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1 — a ground-based landing site at Cape Canaveral.

  • See Images of International Borders Taken From Space

    International borders are often delineated by far more than lines on a map. In the most extreme cases, these differences between countries or the borders themselves are so distinct they are distinguishable from space. From imbalances in development to the construction of new walls or the lasting effects of old ones. Below are a few instances where astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) have been able to point their cameras toward earth and create striking images of the world’s borders that, at times, say much about the countries they separate.

    http://time.com/4780003/international-borders-from-space

    #frontières #paysages #images_satellitaires #images #ressources_pédagogiques

  • SpaceX demonstrates rocket reusability with SES-10 launch and booster landing
    http://spacenews.com/spacex-demonstrates-rocket-reusability-with-ses-10-launch-and-booster-lan

    #SpaceX has completed the first reusable orbital launch since the retirement of the U.S. space shuttle, delivering the SES-10 telecommunications satellite into geostationary transfer orbit with a rocket that first flew last April for NASA.

    [...] SpaceX spent four months evaluating, testing and refurbishing the rocket, which previously launched with a Dragon spacecraft carrying supplies to the International Space Station on April 8, 2016, before clearing the rocket for this mission. Shotwell said the goal is to reduce that time from four months down to the same day.

    Shotwell said SpaceX is working on a final iteration of the Falcon 9 that will debut later this year that can re-launch multiple times.

    “The final vehicle design spin that we are doing on Falcon 9 — that we will be flying later this year — that should be capable of up to 10 or even more [launches],” she said.

    [...] Musk declined to give an exact price reduction for flight proven Falcon 9s, but said he is “highly confident that is it possible to achieve a 100-fold reduction in the cost of space transport.”

    #espace

  • Images of Earth From a Year in Space - The Atlantic
    http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/02/images-of-earth-from-a-year-in-space/471456

    On February 29, the NASA astronaut Scott Kelly will turn over command of the International Space Station to astronaut Tim Kopra, then prepare to return to Earth after spending nearly a year in space. Last March, Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko launched into low Earth orbit aboard the ISS, and have since participated in hundreds of experiments while the effects of long-term microgravity on the human body were studied. Kelly also took hundreds of photographs during his year abroad, posting many to his Twitter account. As we await the return of Kelly and Kornienko tomorrow, here are some of his photographs from the past year.

    #terre #photos #espace

  • This Used To Be the Future - Issue 28: 2050
    http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/this-used-to-be-the-future

    NASA Ames is filled with the exotic technologies of a future that didn’t quite come to pass. Ancient computers still operate equipment in the machine shop. A decommissioned nuclear missile sits in a parking lot, and the twin of the International Space Station sits out in the open air, under a tarp. Originally dedicated as the Sunnyvale Naval Air Station in 1933, the site was to serve as a home base for the Navy dirigible, the U.S.S. Macon, which crashed in 1935. The Aeronautical Laboratory was founded in 1939, and in 1958 became a part of the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. In its earliest days, Ames broke new ground in aerodynamics and high-speed flight. Today it is still an active participant in various NASA missions, including leading the Kepler (...)

  • Astronauts are about to eat the first food grown in space - Quartz
    http://qz.com/475471/astronauts-are-about-to-eat-the-first-food-grown-in-space
    https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/mars_food_production_1.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=1600

    The first food grown and harvested in space—a crop of red lettuce—is about to be eaten by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The lettuce was grown for 15 months with a system called Veg-01, which uses red, blue, and green LED lights to grow plants in a small space.

    https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/iss044e033362-veggie1_1.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=640

    https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/mars_food_production_bisected-jpg.jpeg?quality=80&strip=all&

    #agrospace #alimentation #espace

  • NASA Renews Contract With Russia To Transport U.S. Astronauts
    http://www.rferl.org/content/nasa-renews-russia-contract-transport-us-astronauts/27173213.html

    NASA notified Congress August 5 that it is renewing a contract with Russia to fly astronauts to the International Space Station for the next two years, at a cost of nearly a half billion dollars to the United States.

    The U.S. space agency’s chief Charles Bolden said he was forced to extend the contract because of budget cuts that delayed efforts to revive a U.S. human flight program.

    The deal to pay Moscow more than $80 million per Soyuz rocket seat, up from $71 million per seat under the previous contract,comes at a time when Washington is ratcheting up sanctions against Russia in response to its aggressive moves in Ukraine.

    U.S. reliance on Russia for transporting crew to the station contrasts sharply with Congress’ ban on imports of Russian rocket engines for U.S. military satellite launches.

    NASA expects that eventually, private U.S. companies like Space X and Boeing will develop rockets and capsules that are able to carry astronauts from the United States into space.

    Les sanctions, ça commence à bien faire…

  • Space Kombucha in the search for life and its origin / Research / Human Spaceflight / Our Activities / ESA
    http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Human_Spaceflight/Research/Space_Kombucha_in_the_search_for_life_and_its_origin


    Kombucha biofilm
    © ESA–J. Harrod CC BY SA IGO 3.0

    You might know it as a drink for hipsters or as an ancient brew drunk for centuries in Eurasia, but the culture that ferments sugary tea into Kombucha is going around the world. Bolted to the outside of the International Space Station are the same bacteria and yeasts that are used in making Kombucha.

    Tests on Earth have shown that these multicellular biofilms are tough and will most probably survive an unprotected trip through space. But there is only one way to tell for sure and that is why the Kombucha-making organisms and other biological specimens are now circling Earth exposed to space.

    Previous ‘Expose’ studies run by ESA have shown that a surprising number of organisms can survive the harsh conditions of space, including tardigrades – also known as water bears – and lichens.

    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kombucha

  • Une nouvelle image de la Terre entière
    An EPIC New View of Earth : Image of the Day
    http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=86257&src=ve

    On February 11, 2015, DSCOVR was finally lofted into space by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. After journey of about 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) to the L1 Lagrange Point, the satellite and its Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) has returned its first view of the entire sunlit side of Earth. At L1—four times farther than the orbit of the Moon—the gravitational pull of the Sun and Earth cancel out, providing a stable orbit and a continuous view of Earth. The image above was made by combining information from EPIC’s red, green, and blue bands. (Bands are narrow regions of the electromagnetic spectrum to which a remote sensing instrument responds. When EPIC collects data, it takes a series of 10 images at different bands—from ultraviolet to near infrared.)

    A New Blue Marble
    https://medium.com/@WhiteHouse/a-new-blue-marble-39c2fe1b5b3c

    So why is the “Blue Marble” a bigger deal than these? Turns out, it’s quite tricky to take a good photo of the entire Earth.

    The first challenge is that our planet is big. The only way to view all of it at once is to get much farther away from the Earth than we do for many of our activities in outer space. The International Space Station, for instance, orbits at a height of just 400 kilometers, or about 249 miles away from Earth.

    The second problem is a familiar one that plagues many photographers who are Earthbound: lighting. In order to view the Earth as a fully illuminated globe, a person (or camera) must be situated in front of it, with the sun directly at his or her back. Not surprisingly, it can be difficult to arrange this specific lighting scheme for a camera-set up that’s orbiting in space at speeds approaching thousands of miles per hour.

    As a result of these challenges, NASA, NOAA, and other science agencies most often rely on composite images to depict our planet. These images stitch together multiple high-resolution snapshots taken by satellites already in orbit to produce one seamless portrait of the Earth. And that’s what the three photos above are: composite images produced by NASA over the past fifteen years (released respectively in 2002, 2007, and 2012).

  • Space in Images - 2015 - 07 - Station Moon transit
    http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2015/07/Station_Moon_transit

    This image of the Moon was taken by amateur photographer Dylan O’Donnell as the International Space Station passed by at 28 800 km/h. At such speeds the weightless research laboratory was visible for only about a third of a second before returning to the dark skies.

    Dylan captured the moment in Byron Bay, New South Wales, the eastern-most point of Australia, where the absence of larger towns offers low levels of light pollution.

    The image was taken on 30 June 2015 at 19:54 local time with the Space Station flying 400 km above the Pacific Ocean. A conventional camera was placed behind a 2300 mm / f10 telescope and Dylan took as many pictures as possible during the Station’s brief passage and hoped for the best.

    Five images of the Moon taken before and after the Station passed by were processed using freely available astrophotography tools to improve sharpness, a process called stacking. Lastly, the colours were enhanced to bring out the Moon’s colourful surface geology.

    Photo d’amateur… éclairé !

  • Supply Craft Finally Docks At ISS
    http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-space-station-supply-craft-docks-/27110466.html

    After three failed attempts to deliver supplies to the International Space Station in the last year, a Russian Progress spacecraft loaded with 2.4 tons of food, water, oxygen, fuel, and scientific instruments has successfully docked with the orbiting station.

    It marks the first successful rendezvous with the space station since April, and follows the spectacular failure of three previous cargo missions, including the explosion shortly after liftoff of a SpaceX rocket headed to the space station last weekend.

    Les échecs précédents
    • SpaceX 28/06/15 http://seenthis.net/messages/385275
    • Progress 30/04/15 http://seenthis.net/messages/368239
    • Antares de Orbital Sciences 28/10/14 http://seenthis.net/messages/306836

    The current mission is carrying more food than previous ones. Standard rations include canned fish and meat, fresh apples, tomatoes, oranges, onions, and garlic as well as confections.

    We’ve always assumed we would lose a vehicle every so often,” said NASA manager Michael Suffredin. “Having three this close together is not what we’d hoped for.

    #understatement

  • These are the first full-color HD videos of earth from the International Space Station - Quartz

    http://qz.com/429946/these-are-the-first-full-color-hd-videos-
    of-earth-from-the-international-space-station/

    Super cool ce truc.

    https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/winnipeg-theia.jpg?w=1600

    Dan Lopez pulled his iPhone out of his pocket to show me a series of texts. Each was a satellite picture of a particular farm in Syria, optimized to show a kind of heat map—where food is growing, and where food is burning. That is, his phone gets automatic updates on the state of a food crisis half a world away.

    Lopez is a technologist at Urthecast, and his phone captures the promise of the satellite imagery company, which operates two cameras on the International Space Station that cost $35 million to develop. Today, it unveiled the first full-color video of earth taken from space. (Top-secret spy satellites have presumably had this capability for a while, but this is the first available to us regular folk.) The video shows three cities at a resolution that makes anything bigger than a meter visible; we recommend watching them in high-definition and full-screen.

  • Further Up Yonder: A Message from ISS to All Humankind
    http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/further-up-yonder-a-message-from-iss-to-all-humankind

    NASA Television shares this inspiring production by Italian videomaker, Giacomo Sardelli, about the International Space Station, its inhabitants, and its role in space exploration. Sardelli writes...

  • ISS - International Space Station: an especially designed space cup to enjoy espresso in microgravity environment. Capillary Flow Experiment

    Researchers are currently testing a special cup which thanks to capillarity allows the drinkers to enjoy a coffee or espresso somewhat normally.

    https://blogs.nasa.gov/ISS_Science_Blog/2015/05/01/space-station-espresso-cups-strong-coffee-yields-stronger-science

    Touching your lips to the rim of the cup establishes a capillary connection, almost like the wicking of water through a paper towel, allowing the drinker access to the entire contents.

    In a normal cup of espresso, carbon dioxide bubbles release and collect to form a crema. Some of the bubbles adhere to the walls of the cup, while the remainder rise and stratify due to their size in layers we refer to as foam. Steam rises above the surface of the crema in part condensing in an advancing front on the inside surfaces of the cup. The cup cools by natural convection and the aromatics waft at rates determined by buoyancy. These processes are completely induced by gravity!

    Remove Earth gravity and none of this works.

    Even the smell of the coffee diffusing through the crema is driven by natural convection currents in the air, which are absent in the microgravity environment.

    A video explaining the problem of fluids in and microgravity, and what the trick is of a possible solution:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZYsOG60dKQ

    Capillary Effects of Drinking in the Microgravity Environment (Capillary Beverage)
    http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/2029.html
    Six designs that are being tested:

    They have even designed a special coffee machine: ISSpresso
    http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/1769.html

    ISSpresso is an on board espresso maker that produces hot beverages, and consommé. Water at room temperature is heated and, under pressure, used to create an espresso for the crew member. The ISSpresso is not much larger than a typical espresso machine that would be found on the ground.


  • The Soyuz TMA-14M capsule with International Space Station (ISS) crew members Barry Wilmore of the U.S., Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova of Russia is seen above clouds as it descends beneath a parachute just before landing southeast of Dzhezkazgan in central Kazakhstan in this March 12, 2015.
    REUTERS/Bill Ingalls/NASA

    L’image du jour pour Reuters