NASA announced this week that it was delaying the first manned spaceflight of its Orion spacecraft to April 2023. NASA scientists still hope to meet their original 2021 goal for Exploration Mission 2 (EM-2), but the revised date give them so breathing room if they encounter unexpected hurdles in the development of the deep space capsule.
Originally scheduled for 2021, the test flight was rescheduled after a performance review identified several potential hardware and software problems that could interfere with the agency’s ability to meet its original goal. In its report, NASA pointed to the reliance on re-used parts for its testing program as one possible cause for a delay. The current timeline does not allow additional time to replaces sensitive parts, which may fail under reuse. There also are other unknowns that may crop up during the development process. By allotting an extra two years, NASA will have ample time to respond if these unexpected issues occur during the development and testing phase.
The Orion capsule would be the first manned spacecraft to fly beyond the moon into deep space. It is designed to carry a crew of four astronauts and will be used to both explore deep space and bring supplies to the International Space Station. NASA has several missions planned for spacecraft with one successful flight completed last year. During Exploration Flight Test 1, NASA launched Orion to its highest apogee and recovered it four hours later in the ocean.
Before its first manned flight, NASA is planning a 2018 Exploration Mission 2 (EM-2) during which an unmanned Orion capsule will fly around the moon. NASA researchers hope to use the information gleaned from these initial missions as it prepares for its first manned flight in 2023. These test flights are these stepping stones to the highly anticipated manned mission to Mars in the early 2030s.
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.