While NASA scientists were busy binge-eating turkey and online shopping last November, the Curiosity Rover wasn’t taking a break, instead snapping a 1.8 billion-pixel image from the surface of Mars. The 360-degree panorama, shared by NASA on March 4, is the highest resolution captured by the Curiosity Rover yet, providing enough detail to zoom in on some impact craters, ridges, and mountains, and some Martian dirt believed to have once been underwater.
The Curiosity Rover had to spend four days in the same spot to capture the panorama — which is likely one of the reasons Nasa hasn’t attempted such a high-resolution panorama before. To get the rover working while NASA scientists were off on Thanksgiving break, the Mastcam operators programmed the rover to take those photos, adjusting the position of the rover mask and focusing the camera.
The process took Curiosity six and a half hours over the span of four days at the end of November 2019, because the camera was only set to work between noon and 2 p.m. Mars time in order to achieve consistent lighting across the entire panorama.
That same panorama took NASA researchers months to stitch together. Between 1,000 and 1,200 photos were used to assemble the final photograph.
At the same time, Curiosity also snapped photos with its medium angle lens, which is wide enough to capture a panorama that includes part of the rover itself. The 650-megapixel panorama has a lower resolution but still offers enough detail to get a close-up look at the rover’s wires and the Martian dust coating its surface.
Both photos capture the area called Glen Torridon.
While the photo is the highest resolution stitch from the now 7-year-old rover, the team has in the past instructed the rover to snap the images for a 1.3 billion-pixel stitch.
“While many on our team were at home enjoying turkey, Curiosity produced this feast for the eyes,” Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “This is the first time during the mission we’ve dedicated our operations to a stereo 360-degree panorama.”
To get the full effect of what 1.8 billion pixels look like, explore the image using NASA’s navigation tool.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.