Tech Talk

After weeks of pre-launch controversy and days of postponements on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, the crew of STS-121, Space Shuttle Discovery, rode safely into space on the Fourth of July. Nearly two weeks later, earlier today, the crew minus one astronaut, who was delivered to the International Space Station (ISS), returned safely to their home base in Florida. Their mission was flawless. In a post-landing briefing, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said, "It's a real honor for me to be here as part of this team."

They flew 5.3 million miles around the Earth in a little over 12 days and 18 hours to perform the dual mission of testing shuttle safety improvements to okay future assignments and carrying new ISS crewmate Thomas Reiter (of the European Space Agency) to the space station, make repairs, and re-stock it with supplies.

Firing its de-orbit engines for three minutes at 7:07 a.m. CDT high above the Indian Ocean to begin descent, Commander Steve Lindsey guided the ship over the Pacific Ocean, Central America, and the Gulf of Mexico to a pinpoint touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center's Runway 15 at 8:15 a.m. CDT, according to NASA. Returning to Earth, with Lindsey were Pilot Mark Kelly and Mission Specialists Mike Fossum, Lisa Nowak, Stephanie Wilson, and Piers Sellers (see our previous entry on Discovery in this space for more on the crew).

After landing, Lindsey led the crew and ground technicians on the traditional post-flight vehicle inspection. "I have been on four flights, and this is the cleanest vehicle I've ever seen," said Lindsey. NASA Launch Director Mike Leinbach said, "Discovery is in outstanding condition. We had to search for dings to the tiles, and the couple we saw were very, very minor."

Later today, Discovery will be towed to the Orbiter Processing Facility where it will be further inspected and readied for its next flight. The success of STS-121, which had met with a great deal of pre-flight safety concern among program administrators, clears the way for NASA to concentrate on completing an ambitious schedule of 17 more assignments, many to help complete the ISS. The next shuttle mission, STS-115, to be flown by Space Shuttle Atlantis, is targeted for late August or early September.

"We had two major objectives and we accomplished both of those, and we're ready to assemble the space station," said Lindsey of the Discovery crew's efforts the last two weeks.

"I think you've seen what the team can accomplish—they're as motivated and skilled a group of people as I've ever had the opportunity to work with," Griffin noted proudly.

Nice flying, STS-121.

Yesterday, Hewlett-Packard unveiled a new wireless data chip smaller than a grain of rice that can, the company said, provide broad access to digital content in the physical world. Developed by the "Memory Spot" research team at HP Labs, the new microchip is a CMOS device smaller than 1.4 millimeter square with an antenna built right onto its silicon and enough writable memory and data access speed to make it capable of tackling real-world applications that RFID chips can only aspire to.

The HP announcement claimed that the Memory Spot chip could find use in the future in such varied functions as: storing medical records on a patient's wristband; fighting counterfeit pharmaceuticals; and adding security to identity cards and passports. The Memory Spot transfers data at 10 megabits per second and early prototypes store as much as half a megabyte of data, enough to capture a very short video clip, according to HP. Corresponding read-write devices for the technology can be built into electronics ranging from cellphones to cameras to PDAs—which also power the tiny chip through inductive coupling.

"The Memory Spot chip frees digital content from the electronic world of the PC and the Internet and arranges it all around us in our physical world," said Ed McDonnell, the chip's project manager at HP Labs, in Bristol, England.

The minute size of the Memory Spot enables it to be used on almost anything, especially in the form of self-adhesive dots. It varies from its well-known cousin, the RFID chip, in size, speed, and capacity. However, unlike RFID, which has a transmission range of about 15 feet (ideal for inventory tracking), the Memory Spot has a range of about 1 mm, which means they must practically come into physical contact with their reader-writers. This limits some applications but increases privacy and security.

"We are actively exploring a range of exciting new applications for Memory Spot chips and believe the technology could have a significant impact on our consumer businesses, from printing to imaging, as well as providing solutions in a number of vertical markets," Howard Taub, HP vice president and associate director of HP Labs, said.

He told the media that he expects the brainy little chips to initially retail for about a dollar (U.S.) apiece and that HP could scale up manufacturing to mass produce units in about two or three years, at which time the price point could eventually fall to as little as ten cents.

That's a lot of computing in something the size of a grain of rice—for a few pennies.

Scientists at the University of Manchester, in England, announced Monday that they've created a system that tests individuals for telepathic ability. It employs a head-mounted 3D display and an electronic glove that enables subjects to enter a virtual world that offers them game-like objects to choose from and then asks them to telepathically transmit their choices to a partner immersed in the same "reality."

The test is carried out using pairs of volunteers who could be friends, colleagues, or family, who are placed in separate rooms on different floors of the same building to eliminate any possibility of communication, according to the university. When both are immersed in the same computer-generated world, the first participant selects an object such as a telephone, a football, or an umbrella to concentrate on and interact with. The other participant is subsequently asked to select among a similar group of objects, which now includes decoys, the same object selected by his or her partner.

The experimenters will test about 100 participants for possible telepathic abilities. It will also collate results to test for any particular affinities between socially bonded subjects. The project was designed by Craig Murray, of Manchester's School of Psychological Sciences, and implemented by Toby Howard and Fabrice Caillette, of the School of Computer Science. Their results will be published early next year, according to the university.

"This system has been designed to overcome the many pitfalls evident in previous studies which could easily be manipulated by participants to produce an effect which looks like telepathy but is not," Howard said in the announcement. "By creating a virtual environment we are creating a completely objective environment which makes it impossible for participants to leave signals or even unconscious clues as to which object they have chosen."

Project researcher David Wilde, of the School of Psychological Sciences, added: "By using this technology we aim to provide the most objective study of telepathy to date. Our aim is not to prove or disprove its existence but to create an experimental method which stands up to scientific scrutiny."

We sense something that was, heretofore, virtually unknown will be revealed by the Manchester team. Concentrate. You're getting it. There, you see.

We overlooked an important anniversary in the history of technology yesterday. So we'll attempt to make amends by celebrating it a day late (call it a tardy birthday card of sorts). Thirty years ago yesterday, the Viking 1 spacecraft touched down on the surface of Mars. The occasion marked the first space mission to land successfully on another planet. Even now, the achievement stands out as one of the major milestones of human exploration.

As it was a first, the landing of Viking 1 on the Chryse Planitia of Mars—which was incorrectly thought to be a barren plain by project planners at the time—was anxiously anticipated on 20 July 1976 by the scientists and engineers who had designed and built the tiny space vehicle and its massive delivery components. Simply put, they had no idea what to expect, potential failure loomed at every critical sequence as the Viking 1 lander separated from its orbiter and made its descent, recalled its mission planning director yesterday.

"The Viking team didn't know the Martian atmosphere very well, we had almost no idea about the terrain or the rocks, and yet we had the temerity to try to soft land on the surface," said Chief Engineer Gentry Lee of Solar System Exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif. "We were both terrified and exhilarated. All of us exploded with joy and pride when we saw that we had, indeed, landed safely."

After successfully landing and deploying its cameras and sensors, the NASA project teams in Pasadena and Hampton, Va., discovered via the television images sent from the surface of the Red Planet across tens of millions of miles to this planet that they had somehow managed to place their spacecraft right side up and in perfect working order in the middle of rock-strewn plateau.

The next big surprise came after the similarly successful landing of Viking 2 in the Utopia Planitia—9600 miles away from the Chryse site—on 3 September 1976. Both vehicles performed as planned, sending back pictures and running tests on the Martian atmosphere and soil to test for evidence of possible past life on the planet. Each was designed for a functional lifespan of 90 days, but neither stopped operating for an astounding six years.

The landers accumulated 4500 images of the Martian surface, according to NASA. Their accompanying orbiters sent back more than 50 000 images, mapping 97 percent of the planet. These images and data from chemical and biological tests are still being evaluated, thirty years later. Even now, scientists still debate this very data on the possible biology of Mars, which a consensus of scientists—but not all—believe indicate that conditions favorable to life may have existed far in the past.

The Viking missions were followed, decades later, by the highly successful Pathfinder (1997) and Spirit and Opportunity (2004) missions, the last two of which are still operational, long past their expected functional lifetimes, too. There is, though, that unmistakable cachet of being first.

"The Viking mission looms like a legendary giant, an incredible success against which all present and future missions will be measured," said Doug McCuiston, Mars Exploration Program director at NASA Headquarters, in Washington, D.C.

Today, there are two quieted planetary spacecraft resting on the Martian plains that are silent monuments to the quest for discovery. One day, we'll visit them and pay them the respect due to the longest successful residents sent from Earth to another planet.

Every once in a while, a story comes along that makes you do a double-take. That's the case today for an item circulating the Web that asserts that the U.S. government was so determined to beat the Soviet Union to the moon that it launched the historic Apollo 11 mission before it was completely ready and was prepared to announce their deaths at a moment's notice. The story comes from a documentary, Apollo 11: The Untold Story, being aired tonight on Britain's Channel Five TV station.

We're all well aware that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were down to their last few seconds of fuel as they touched down at "Tranquility Base" on the lunar surface on 20 July 1969. According to the account in the Channel Five documentary, apparently, NASA's management and senior U.S. officials were just as prepared for them to crash into the Sea of Tranquility as they were for them to land successfully.

As reported in today's London Daily Mirror, a bastion of journalism, the film claims that U.S. President Richard Nixon had a speech to the nation at the ready to announce that the intrepid astronauts had perished in their attempt. It apparently also claims that the mission was again saved on take-off from the moon when Aldrin noticed that the switch of a key circuit breaker had broken off during the comings and goings of the astronauts during their historic moonwalks. Keeping his wits, Aldrin reportedly jammed the plastic end of a standard ballpoint pen into the opening and set the circuit to "go"—saving the Eagle and its crew.

The most far-fetched element to the revised history of Apollo 11 in the documentary, again apparently, is the claim that the explorers believe they viewed an unidentified flying object during the mission and that NASA has been covering up this aspect of the record for the last 37 years. Multiple published accounts have Aldrin stating: "There was something out there that was close enough to be observed."

We haven't seen Apollo 11: The Untold Story, so we're not going to judge. Still, on just reading the breathless accounts in the British tabloids, it sounds like we can count on it being, at least, as accurate as the latest news on David Beckham and Posh Spice.

Today's failure of a Russian rocket launch has had a profound impact on engineering students in California. The Russian News and Information Agency (RIA Novosti) reported earlier today that the first-stage booster of a Dnepr launch vehicle had quit shortly after lift-off, resulting in total failure of the mission, which included the deployment of a number of miniature satellites built by students in the U.S.-based CubeSat program.

"During the launch of a Dnepr carrier rocket, which was to have orbited 18 Russian and foreign-made satellites, the rocket's first stage engine experienced an emergency shutdown," said Federal Space Agency Press Secretary Igor Panarin. "This is the agency's official viewpoint."

The lift-off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, took place at 19:43 UTC and the first announcement of the premature shut-down of the booster came 21 minutes later. In an update on the CubeSat Web site, the First Deputy Director General of the Baikonur Base said:

"The State Launch Committee continues their work to investigate what happened. We have some preliminary information of the cause [of the failure]. They have an idea of what might have happened. They know the location of where the rocket fell. They are performing the debris recovery plan. [They] always have that plan for such cases. As soon as tomorrow morning, the rescue team will be in the debris area... We will have more feedback from [them], but I'm not sure that it will be at exactly 10 o'clock [Thursday morning] when they'll tell us something. We'll do our best to keep you updated as much as possible as soon as possible. As soon as we have any specific information of when the debriefing will take place, we will inform you immediately. All we can say right now is that it's a pity, and we're really sorry."

The CubeSat group was formed by students at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo and Stanford University's Space Systems Development Lab. It's composed of participants from over 60 universities and high schools interested in the aerospace industry. Today's mission, known as Dnepr 1, was to have deployed in orbit (of 500-600 km) 14 CubeSat picosatellites. A follow-up mission, to launch 7 CubeSats on Dnepr 2, is tentatively scheduled for September, according to the group.

RIA Novosti reported that the accident involved no casualties or environmental damage and that a special commission has been formed to investigate the failure.

It's a sad end to a project eagerly anticipated by engineers on two continents.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Wednesday called for comments from the public on the recommendations of a panel of experts formed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to propose steps to avoid communications problems in future disasters. The public will have until 7 August 2006 to file comments in the matter. The FCC urged parties filing comments to address the applicability of the panel's recommendations to all types of disasters.

The Independent Panel Reviewing the Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Communications Networks (or Independent Panel) submitted its Report to the Commission on 12 June 2006 on the telecommunications and media infrastructure in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. One week later, the FCC issued its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for public discussion by private citizens and government officials and lawmakers.

Wednesday's public notice stated that the Independent Panel's recommendations were categorized into four areas:

1. Pre-positioning the communications industry and the government for disasters in order to achieve greater network reliability and resiliency;

2. Improving recovery coordination to address existing shortcomings and to maximize the use of existing resources;

3. Improving the operability or interoperability of public safety and 911 communications in times of crisis;

4. Improving communication of emergency information to the public.

The FCC said its goal in the proceedings is "to take the lessons learned from this disaster [Hurricane Katrina] and build upon them to promote more effective, efficient response and recovery efforts, as well as a heightened readiness and preparedness in the future." It added that it seeks input on "whether we should rely on voluntary consensus recommendations, as advocated by the Independent Panel, or whether we should rely on other measures for enhancing readiness and promoting more effective response efforts."

It then went on to emphasize that it would like all parties to bear in mind in their responses that communications failures arising from catastrophic emergencies can come from all manner of disasters and affect all regions of the country at any time:

'Specifically, parties should address not only the applicability of the Independent Panel's recommendations to areas of the country subject to hurricanes, but to areas prone to other types of disasters. Would other types of disasters warrant modifications or other changes to the Independent Panel's recommendations? For example, would the characteristics of earthquakes, floods, forest fires, or other natural disasters require modifications to the Independent Panel's recommendations? In addition, we request that parties filing comments discuss the impact of the country's diverse topography on the Independent Panel's recommendations. Would a region's topography warrant modifications or other changes to the Independent Panel's recommendations? If additional steps are warranted to account for unique topography, what actions can the Commission take to improve network resiliency and reliability, recovery coordination, first responder communications, and emergency communications to the public in those areas? Finally, different regions may have different communications capabilities. For example, a metropolitan urban area may have greater and diverse communications capabilities than a rural, mountainous region. Would the availability of different communications capabilities in a region affect the Independent Panel's recommendations? If so, what actions should be taken in this regard?'

These are very important and serious questions. We strongly urge IEEE members in the communications industry and those in all areas of engineering affected by the communications infrastructure of the United States to review the recommendations of the Independent Panel and to file comments to the FCC in a timely manner. Further information on the commentary process may be obtained from the FCC's Enforcement Bureau Contact, Lisa M. Fowlkes, at 202-418-7452 (or lisa.fowlkes@fcc.gov).

As visual displays get smaller and smaller, in order to accompany us wherever we go, playing movies or games on portable devices, the need to wring the most amount of information using the least amount of electricity grows larger and larger. On the desktop or in the home, such constraints are relatively unimportant; but when you are carrying your display unit, they become crucial. Thankfully, engineers today are developing new display technologies that reduce power consumption and use a technique called biomimetics to literally trick your eyes into seeing just the amount of information needed to perceive a perfect likeness. In this month's cover story, visual display expert Joel Pollack explains how they pull it off, in "Displays of a Different Stripe".

Biomimicry is well known to audio engineers, who have long employed it to design microphones, amplifiers, and speakers for frequency ranges that match the human auditory system. For the human visual system, such compression algorithms are being designed to take advantage of the photoreceptors in the eye. Known as cones, these receptors come in three types, each defined by a special protein they produce, called a photopigment. The two dominant photopigments, one that detects photons in the reddish-yellow band of wavelengths and the second in the greenish-yellow band, do almost all the work of resolving an image—its luminance, edges, and other structural detail—as well as its color, partially. The third type of cone senses only color in the blue wavelengths and fills out the full picture.

In conventional visual displays, however, images are produced by using a ratio of 1:1:1 of red, green, and blue picture element pieces, or subpixels. Because the blue subpixels do almost nothing to help the eye resolve images, most of them go to waste, Pollack writes. To take advantage of this imbalance, contemporary display designers are changing the ratios of the subpixels and even adding new ones, such as white, to produce images that are more tuned to the actual working of the visual system. For example, Pollack's firm has found ways to render a pixel with an average of just two subpixels—two-thirds as many as in the conventional RGB pattern—by using algorithms to create, in effect, virtual pixels. Basically, the algorithm fools the eye. It defines an edge of an object in an image with the red, green, and white subpixels, and adds the requisite dash of blue off to the side.

Pollack writes that the bottom line is that brightness and color can be conveyed in more than one combination of red, green, blue, and white. The benefit is that these enhancements to displays provide about twice the brightness for a given draw of power. The savings in manufacturing costs more than balances any increase occasioned by the addition of a fourth, clear, color filter. Engineers can use the gains to save power or to intensify the brightness.

The expansion of information technology into new domains means that engineers must now learn to make products that conform to the needs of the mind and the senses to best improve them, Pollack concludes. It's an object lesson in mind over matter.