It takes a lot of fuel to break free from Earth’s gravity and navigate outer space. A staggering 90 percent of a rocket’s initial mass is made up of propellant. What if we could trim that fat, launch spaceships with minimal resources, and collect the rest of what we need along the way? Such “massless exploration” is very likely our future in space.
Imagine we wanted to rendezvous with a distant asteroid and bring back samples from its surface. “Today, that mission would have to be launched with enough propellant for the entire round trip,” Kyle Doyle, program manager of Cornell’s Cislunar Explorers, told Digital Trends. “That means lifting the necessary supplies for the return trip from Earth all the way to Mars first, at a tremendous cost.
“Massless space exploration means removing that constraint, allowing missions to continue without needing additional mass sent from Earth,” he added. “This is only possible if we can get that mass from somewhere else.”
Over at NASA, the agency is developing methods to support massless exploration, beginning with resource processing plants on the the Moon and Mars. It recently released new video of the Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR), a processing plants rover with a practically endless drive to mine. “Think of it as a blue collar robot,” NASA wrote online.
RASSOR is designed to scrape the top soil of the Moon or Mars (i.e. its regolith) and then dump it into a machine that extracts water. Another device would then split the water into hydrogen and oxygen atoms — key components for rocket propellant.
The blue collar robots will be expected to work 16-hour days for five years straight, lugging roughly 40 pounds of regolith in each haul, to allow the first astronauts to Mars to be as self-sustaining as possible.
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.