Month: April 2016

A study found that ground-based (LSST) and space-based (NEOCam) telescopes would complement one another in the search for potentially hazardous asteroids. Without them, NASA will still miss about 50 percent of threats by 2030. (credit: Astronomical Journal)

A decade ago, in a strikingly forward-thinking move, the US Congress passed a law requiring NASA to identify 90 percent of asteroids that were 140 meters across or larger and could potentially threaten Earth. Congress gave NASA a deadline of 2020 to meet that goal, but the agency will fall far short of that target. The agency has a valid excuse: it never received funding to meet this goal.

Now, however, there is some hope for finding killer asteroids. The National Science Foundation has backed the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile, and NASA is considering funding NEOCam, a space-based infrared telescope that would specialize in identifying potentially hazardous asteroids. But scientists weren't quite sure how these two instruments would fare in a concerted hunt for large asteroids.

A new pre-print on arXiv offers some clarity, and the answer appears to be that the ground-based and space-based approaches will complement one another nicely. According to a new simulation of near-Earth threats and the capabilities of these two instruments, neither the ground-based telescope nor NEOCam would come close to finding all of the potential hazards on their own. However, when combined, they were projected to find a little more than 90 percent of the threats.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Google has just released the first of several promised updates to the Android N developer preview. Android N Developer Preview 2 makes several major changes to the work-in-progress operating system and also includes bug fixes and tweaks to the new multi-window API.

The biggest addition is support for the Vulkan graphics API, a low-overhead counterpart to OpenGL that's analogous to DirectX 12 in Windows or Metal in iOS and OS X. It also includes support for Unicode 9.0 emoji and redesigns Google's stock emoji characters to make them "more human-looking." Unicode 9.0 is currently in draft, but it should be finalized and released this summer before Android N's final version is available. Finally, Google has added something called "launcher shortcuts," which use Intents to create shortcuts to specific in-app activities like navigating home in Google Maps or sending messages to specific people.

The Android N preview is available for the Nexus 6, 5X, 6P, and 9, the Pixel C tablet, and the General Mobile 4G; an update for the Nexus Player version of the N preview will be available soon. Those of you running Marshmallow on a supported device can update over the air by enrolling in the Android beta program, or you can flash an operating system image to your device manually. If you're already running the first developer preview, your device should receive an over-the-air update "shortly."

A drone in flight during a race in the UK earlier this year. (credit: Dave Stock)

On Wednesday, ESPN announced a partnership with the International Drone Racing Association (IDRA) to stream drone races online and use the footage in edited TV segments.

The multiyear contract will kick off with IDRA’s US National Drone Racing Championships in New York City in August. The three-day event will be streamed live on ESPN3, and then footage will be edited down to a one-hour special to air on one of ESPN’s TV networks. In a joint press release, IDRA and the sports network said they would be streaming first-person-view footage from the racing drones, "offering jaw-dropping views of both lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.“

Drone operators in first-person-view drone races wear goggles that show them a stream from a camera on the front of the drone. The drone operator must navigate their drone through the race's course, and the winning drone is the one that completes the course the fastest.

Nathan Mattise

ET-94 never flew into space and will instead settle at the California Science Center (with Endeavour).

7 more images in gallery

"When you think about [Michoud's] history and its heritage, we did the external tank here," Bobby Watkins, the current director at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility, told Ars in late 2015. "That was really our heritage. We built 135 tanks here at Michoud, and that serviced the shuttle program for years."

Yesterday, NASA ended one of the most notable chapters in its history. External Tank 94 (ET-94) left the Michoud Assembly Facility, meaning the site no longer houses any of the iconic fuel containers that helped shuttles reach space since 1981.

ETs were the orange-ish foam-covered containers attached to the shuttle in order to carry large quantities of fuel and oxidizer. (The first few ETs were painted white—with Michoud employees once even running to a nearby Sears and buying out the store's supply in order to meet a deadline—but NASA eventually learned this did not protect against ultraviolet light and ditched the paint to further reduce weight.) They were massive creations; even lightweight versions like ET-94 came in with jaw-dropping specifications: 65,000 pounds, 154-feet long, and more than 27 feet in diameter. During lift-off, ETs would transfer the fuel and oxidizer to the space shuttle main engines before detaching and falling back to the ocean.

(credit: zodman)

Everybody and their brother has been reporting for weeks that the Israel-based firm Cellebrite assisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation with unlocking the iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of two shooters who killed 14 people in San Bernardino County in December. But the Washington Post says otherwise: the bureau paid so-called "gray hat" hackers for the undisclosed zero-day software exploit.

The Post cites anonymous sources and Ars could not immediately verify the report. The outlet says the undisclosed hackers who assisted the FBI are "ethically murky" because they are somewhere in between "white hats" who disclose their exploits to companies so they can be fixed, and "black hats" who are in the business of stealing private data.

"The individuals who helped the FBI in the San Bernardino, California, case fall into a third category, often considered ethically murky: researchers who sell flaws to governments, companies that make surveillance tools, or groups on the black market," the Post reported Wednesday.