SP. “Free Your Mind.” The Matrix (1999)

Launching the Future of Space Communications

Our newest communications satellite, named the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-M or TDRS-M, launches Aug. 18 aboard an Atlas V rocket from our Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be the 13th TDRS satellite and will replenish the fleet of satellites supporting the Space Network, which provides nearly continuous global communications services to more than 40 of our missions.

Communicating from space wasn’t always so easy. During our third attempt to land on the moon in 1970, the Apollo 13 crew had to abort their mission when the spacecraft’s oxygen tank suddenly exploded and destroyed much of the essential equipment onboard. Made famous in the movie ‘Apollo 13’ by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, our NASA engineers on the ground talked to the crew and fixed the issue. Back in 1970 our ground crew could only communicate with their ground teams for 15 percent of their orbit – adding yet another challenge to the crew. Thankfully, our Apollo 13 astronauts survived and safely returned to Earth. 

Now, our astronauts don’t have to worry about being disconnected from their teams! With the creation of the TDRS program in 1973, space communications coverage increased rapidly from 15 percent coverage to 85 percent coverage. And as we’ve continued to add TDRS spacecraft, coverage zoomed to over 98 percent!

TDRS is a fleet of satellites that beam data from low-Earth-orbiting space missions to scientists on the ground. These data range from cool galaxy images from the Hubble Space Telescope to high-def videos from astronauts on the International Space Station! TDRS is operated by our Space Network, and it is thanks to these hardworking engineers and scientists that we can continuously advance our knowledge about the universe!  

What’s up next in space comm? Only the coolest stuff ever! LASER BEAMS. Our scientists are creating ways to communicate space data from missions through lasers, which have the ability to transfer more data per minute than typical radio-frequency systems. Both radio-frequency and laser comm systems send data at the speed of light, but with laser comm’s ability to send more data at a time through infrared waves, we can receive more information and further our knowledge of space.

How are we initiating laser comm? Our Laser Communications Relay Demonstration is launching in 2019! We’re only two short years away from beaming space data through lasers! This laser communications demo is the next step to strengthen this technology, which uses less power and takes up less space on a spacecraft, leaving more power and room for science instruments.

Watch the TDRS launch live online at 8:03 a.m. EDT on Aug. 18: https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

Join the conversation on Twitter: @NASA_TDRS and @NASALasercomm!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerators are great gear for great AI researchers. That’s why our CEO Jensen Huang presented these new Volta architecture-based GPUs to 15 participants in our NVIDIA AI Labs program recently at the CVPR 2017 conference. These researchers will be among the first to put our latest technology to work in autonomous driving, virtual reality, and other areas. nvidia.com/inception

Sacred Mathematics - Japanesse Temple Geometry

This is a book about a special kind of geometry that was invented and widely practiced in Japan during the centuries when Japan was isolated from Western influences. Japanese geometry is a mixture of art and mathematics. The experts communicated with one another by means of sangaku, which are wooden tablets painted with geometrical figures and displayed in Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Each tablet states a theorem or a problem. It is a challenge to other experts to prove the theorem or to solve the problem. It is a work of art as well as a mathematical statement. Sangaku are perishable, and the majority of them have decayed and disappeared during the last two centuries, but enough of them have survived to fill a book with examples of this unique Japanese blend of exact science and exquisite artistry.

Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press and Oxford

http://kknop.com/math/sangaku.pdf

Jelly Mario

Web demo by Stefan Hedman adds elastic physics to classic Super Mario level, currently in pre-alpha. You need a keyboard (play with arrow keys) - to start, move towards the right side of the screen:

[video from Robert McGregor]

Play around with it yourself here

More than 400 U.S. school districts are using augmented reality to teach students. Is AR the future of education?

follow @the-future-now

THIS IS THE VIRTUAL REALITY I WAS PROMISED

Presenter Erika Ishii presents a wireless solution for Virtual Reality experiences, with a high powered laptop strapped to the back with an Htc Vive pro (though it isn’t clear how long the batteries will last):

THIS IS THE VIRTUAL REALITY I WAS PROMISED. @TeaganMorrison built us a wireless VR rig! @Alienware 15 laptop, @htcvive pro, army frame backpack. 

Source

SP. Gynoid (Fembot)

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Automatic Machine Knitting of 3D Meshes

Research from Carnegie Mellon Textiles Lab have put forward a framework to turn 3D model file into a physical knitted object:

We present the first computational approach that can transform 3D meshes, created by traditional modeling programs, directly into instructions for a computer-controlled knitting machine. Knitting machines are able to robustly and repeatably form knitted 3D surfaces from yarn, but have many constraints on what they can fabricate. Given user-defined starting and ending points on an input mesh, our system incrementally builds a helix-free, quad-dominant mesh with uniform edge lengths, runs a tracing procedure over this mesh to generate a knitting path, and schedules the knitting instructions for this path in a way that is compatible with machine constraints. We demonstrate our approach on a wide range of 3D meshes.

More Here

Until now, only an elite handful of computer scientists were aware that the Great A.I. Uprising secretly occurred in the late 1970s, and that we have been living in some jive-ass virtual environment ever since. Any time you hear disco music, it’s really just a glitch in the operational matrix. Can you dig it?

Noodle tearing up the dance floor