NASA is heading to Europa, Jupiter’s icy (and potentially life-supporting) moon, in the next decade. The mission could be ready for launch as soon as 2023, the agency said in a statement on Tuesday, although it is currently committed to being launch-ready by 2025.
Europa is a compelling destination: It’s the sixth-largest moon in the solar system and has a crust primarily comprised of water ice. Astrophysicists have long speculated that there is liquid water below, and potentially alien life. The Europa Clipper mission will send a spacecraft to orbit Jupiter and perform at least 45 close flybys of the moon, which will enable more detailed imagery than ever before.
“We are all excited about the decision that moves the Europa Clipper mission one key step closer to unlocking the mysteries of this ocean world,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA Science Mission Directorate associate administrator, said in a statement.
Among the instrument payload currently expected are high-definition cameras and an ice-penetrating radar, the latter of which would look for the subsurface lakes scientists think are there. A magnetometer would measure the salinity and depth of these oceans based on measurements of the magnetic field, while other equipment would look for evidence of an atmosphere and recent water eruptions on Europa’s surface.
While the Europa Clipper won’t touch down on the moon, it will provide crucial information to NASA on the feasibility and value of a surface-based mission in the future. If water is discovered that is of a similar salinity to that of Earth, the ramifications of such a discovery could be game-changing.
“Europa we don’t really get — there are these really key mysteries we’re trying to understand,” Robert Pappalardo, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory planetary scientist, told Space.com in January. “People care about it, people want to know about this mysterious world that might harbor life. That’s a really important reason to do it.”
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.