The European Space Agency uploaded the last of its commands to the ExoMars spacecraft, telling the spacecraft what to do once it arrives at the Red Planet on October 19. The instructions include details on when the Schiaparelli probe should disengage from the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) mothership and how the lander should conduct its descent and touchdown on Mars.
The commands arrived over the course of a few days last week. The first, sent on October 3, functioned like an alarm clock, waking the probe up from its months-long hibernation and providing a timeline for the operation of the spacecraft’s scientific instruments. Four days later, the mission command sequence arrived.
“Uploading the command sequences is a milestone that was achieved following a great deal of intense cooperation between the mission control team and industry specialists,” Orbiter flight director Michel Denis said in a press release.
The ExoMars (ExoBiology on Mars) mission is a two-part joint venture between the ESA and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), with the primary goal to find signs of past or present life on Mars.
The first phase of the mission, which saw the TGO and Schiaparelli probe launch in March, will involve a rendezvous with the Red Planet later this month. At that time, Schiaparelli will separate from the TGO and dive into the Martian atmosphere. The command sequence sent last week is intended to keep the probe on course before a parachute deploys to slow the craft’s descent and the lander disengages its protective entry shield, firing a set of thrusters to settle into a soft landing.
The agencies hope to test and demonstrate key technologies in this first phase that will be employed in the second phase, which will see a rover land on Mars to search for life in 2020.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.