Mars Rovers: Oportunity And Spirit

The Mars Exploration Rover mission, also known as MERS, is the second mission sent to Mars that involved rovers. MERS aims to study Mars surface looking for clues about the past water activity on Mars. This information is vital to accomplish one of the goals of the mission: to find out whether life ever existed in Mars.

To do so, twin rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, were sent to different locations on opposite sides on Mars that were apparently affected by liquid water in the past, the Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum.

Spirit was launched on June 10, 2003 and arrived to Mars on January 4, 2004, and Opportunity was launched on July 7, 2003 and arrived on January 25, 2004.

Mars Rovers: Sojourner

Sojourner was the first exploration rover sent to Mars. It was part of the Mars Pathfinder mission which consisted in sending to Mars a lander and rover. Sojouner traveled inside the lander, later named Carl Sagan Memorial Station, for almost seven moths arriving to the red planet's Aris Vallis region on July 4th, 1997.  The main goal of the Pathfinder mission was to demonstrate that it was possible to send a lander and a rover to another planet at a lower cost than previous missions. One day after the landing, on July 5th, the small rover was deployed, and made its first run on Mars soil.

OSHW Development Boards: Pinguino, Arduino, and Propeller Platform

Pinguino, Arduino and Propeller Platform are fully open source development boards that are available in the market. This is a brief summary about each one explaining their main characteristics trying to offer a simple guide for those who are looking for different options.

BeagleBoard, Get the Power of a PC in the Palm of Your Hand

Beagleboard is a small board, developed by some employees of Texas Instruments, that includes all the capabilities of a laptop in just 3x3 inches. The project aims to produce an inexpensive board that could be used to teach open source hardware and software. Although, Beagleboard doesn't include LCD, keyboard or Wi-Fi module, it has all the hardware necessary to host and control different kind of peripherals. The main reasons to design such a compact board are to reduce the costs, and allow developers to use their own peripherals and do what they want, for example, the USB port can be used to host a hub, so a keyboard, mouse, Bluetooth, cameras, or even a WI-FI connection can be added. The processor inside Beagleboard belongs to the OMAP3 family with ARM Cortex-8 CPU.

Mission Acomplished, Evolta completed the Ironman Triathlon

It’s been a long week, and Evolta's staff worked day and night helping the small robot to complete the course of the Ironman Triathlon. And they did it in time. 

My Keepon Will Hit the Stores This Fall

Keepon is a robot used to study children’s social behavior with an special focus on developmental disorders such as autism. The robot was design by Dr. Hideki Kozima, an expert in artificial intelligence and robotics, around 2003 while he was working at National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).

Open Source Hardware

When we hear about the open source movement we only think of software, but what about hardware? Well, in the last few years a growing community has been working in applying the open source’s principles to hardware. In February 2011, the official Statement of Principles and Definition (version 1.0) of the Open Source Hardware (OSHW) was released. This definition states that “Open Source Hardware (OSHW) is a term for tangible artifacts – machines, devices, or other physical things – whose design has been released to the public in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things.”

Microchip and Texas Instrument's Development kits for Android

Texas Instrument and Microchip offer two different options for those who are interested in developing electronic solutions based on Android OS.

Texas Instrument has launched the AM/DM37x Evaluation module which allows developers to start evaluating AM37x or DM37x processors. The evaluation module includes a DM3730 processor, 800-MHz DSP processor with IVA video accelerator, 256MB MDDR/512 MB NAND, onboard chip antenna, 3.7” LCD touch screen, Ethernet, Wireless, Bluetooth, USB ports, keyboard, and SD card reader. The kit also includes a universal power supply, and 4GB SD card.

Evolta’s Challenge 2011: The Hawaii Ironman Triathlon

Panasonic has recently announced the new challenge for its batteries’ mascot Evolta robot. This is the fourth challenge for the small robot. The first took place in 2008, when the robot climbed a 530-meters high cliff in Grand Canyon. In 2009, it ran the LeMans Circuit in France during 24 hours, and in 2010, it walked throughout the Tokaido road in 49 days. This year, Evolta will race the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon.

GRAIL mission will map Moon's gravitational field

The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory better known as GRAIL is the next lunar exploration mission. The objective of this mission is to obtain a very precise map of the Moon's gravitational field, and based on this information determine the Moon's interior structure, composition, and understand its thermal evolution. To achieve this goal two spacecraft will be placed in the same orbit around the Moon. The probes will sense the relative distance between them, while they fly over the satellite's surface. The variations in measurements will be caused by the different levels of gravity. This data will be transmitted to Earth were scientists will translate all this information into a “high-resolution map”.

Pluto, the former ninth planet of the Solar System

Pluto and its moons. (Image property of NASA)

Pluto was considered for a long time the ninth planet of our Solar System. However, that changed on 2006, when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to reclassify Pluto in the new category named “dwarf planets” changing the landscape of or Solar System as we knew it. But, what were the reasons that made astronomers reconsider our Solar System distribution? And why was just Pluto affected?

The World Wide Web beginning and early years

On August 6, 1991 Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist, wrote in a newsgroup: 

 The WWW Project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system…The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone…

This date is known as the birth of the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web, WWW, or Web is a model that specifies how to share and access information over the Internet. The first steps to becoming the web a reality had taken place in 1980 when Tim Berners-Lee, a graduated in Physics from Queen’s College at Oxford University, started working as Independent Contractor at CERN(European Organization for Nuclear Research). During that time, projects’ information was stored and updated in different computers, and sharing information was difficult because of the differences in hardware, operating systems and software. To solve that issue and improve the way of organizing and sharing the information Berners-Lee built Enquire, an hypertext based software that allowed users create, edit and extract information. Enquire was the predecessor of Web.

Photocopier Transformer

Another not very recent tv commercial, but it is funny.

Lesson: Don't bother your machines if you don't want them to upraise against you.

RHoK Hackathon: Offering solutions for World problems

Random Hacks of Kindness, also know as RHoK, it's an initiative that aims to develop open source solutions for problems in risk management and climate changes. The RHoK collects these problems and helps to organize events in different cities providing the necesary resources to let software designers and developers work together in solutions.

The RHoK was founded by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Nasa and the World Bank. The first "Hackathon" was held in Mountain View, California in November 2009 and it was name "RHoK 0". "I'm Ok" and "Tweak the tweet" are examples of the applications created during this event. Both applications were used in Haiti and Chile earthquake response.

Nasa's Space Shuttle Documentary

Recently, NASA has added to their Video Gallery a documentary about the 30 years of history of the space shuttle. The video is about one hour and 20 minutes long. If you want to watch it, this is the link .

Robot in an advertisement

It's a little old, but I like it

Linux's 20th Anniversary

On 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki, got the idea of developing his own operating system. After he sent a message to a newsgroup explaining his idea and asking for some feedback, many developers joined him in the development of the code. So, what started as a hobby became one of the biggest colaboration projects in in the history of computing. The final product of this work was the Linux Kernel.

Two decades later, Linux Foundation is celebrating the 20th anniversary of this project. The foundation will hold events in diferent locations around the world:

• LinuxConnJapan
• LinuxConn will be held in Vancouber, Canada. Agust 17 - 19, 2011
• LinuxConn Europe will be held in Prague, Czech Republic. October 26 - 28, 2011 
• LinuxConn Brazil, to be held in Sao Paulo, Brazin. November 17 -18,  2011

Also, the anual T-Shirt design and video contests were opened. This year the topic was the "20th Anniversary of Linux". You can see the winner of the T-shirt design contest  here, and the winner of the video contest will be unveiled at the LinuxConn in Vancouver.

Space Shuttle: The Mission

The process of sending a crew to the outer space starts in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). There, the orbiter, external tank (ET) and solid rocket busters (SRB) are attached. The VAB is located at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and it is the largest one story building in the world. It covers 3.25 hectares (8 acres) and it is 160 meters (525 ft) tall, 218 meters (716 ft) long and 158 meters (518 ft) wide.

 From top left to right. Vehicle Assembly Building. Assembly of the solid rocket boosters. 

Joining of external tank and solid rocket boosters. Stack of the orbiter

The Space Shuttle

In the seventies, NASA began the design and construction of a new manned vehicle that would let astronauts travel to the space and go back to earth. Unlike previous spacecrafts the new vehicle would be reusable. On April 12, 1981 the first space shuttle was launched beginning a new era on space exploration history. The space shuttle has three components the external tank, the solid rocket busters and the orbiter, and it was designed to be launched like a rocket, orbit like a spacecraft and re-entry like a space plane.

Atlantis Space Shuttle

Space Shuttle Program: The end of an Era

First space shuttle was launched in April 1981. Almost 30 years later Space Shuttle program has reached its final stage. This era will end when Atlantis complete its last mission. But the history of the space shuttle didn't begin in the early eighties, it took around two decades before the first launch that the idea fo a reusable manned space vehicle became real.

It seems that the idea of a reusable spacecraft began in the fifties, but it wasn't until 1969 that the Space Task Group, a group of Engineers in charge of Manned Spaceflight program, recommended the development of a new space transport. NASA initiated studies and designs of the new space vehicle in 1970. On January 5, 1972, President Richard Nixon announced the project, and on March 15, NASA announced the final details of design. The new vehicle would consist of two rockets, an external tank and a transport vehicle called orbiter. That year NASA gave the contracts. Rockwell Rocket Dyne Division would construct the orbiter's main engines, Rockwell Space Transportation would desing and develop the orbiter, Martin Marrietta would construct the external tank, and Morton Thoikol the solid rocket boosters.

The first orbiter constructed was Enterprise. Curiously, it got its name due to a massive request made by fans of Star Trek. The Enterprise was primarily designed for testing, so no engines and heat shield were added. After the completion of tests, the orbiter was toured for many European countries and states of the United States, before its retirement. On november 18, 1985, the Endevour was moved to Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, where it was restored. Later, it was moved to National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar – Hazy Center at Dullest International Airport. 

Tomotaka Takahashi

Here is a small biography about Tomotaka Takahashi, the creator of Evolta's robot. He born on March 27, 1975. Is a Japanese roboticist. After completed a degree in sociology, he started his studies in robotic. He said that his inspiration was Astroboy (a Japanese cartoon about a robot that looks like a kid).

Takahashi likes to built small-humanoid robots, because they are easier to handle, and pople has more realistic expectations about them.

He founded Robo-Garage in April, 2003, and he is the CEO of the company.

Some of the robots he has built are Chroino, Tachikoma, FT, MANOI PF1, and Evolta.

Actually, He works as a Research Associaate Professor of the University of Tokio and Visiting Professor of Fukiyama University and Osaka Electro Communication University.

waziwazi website published an interview with him. Here is the link

Evolta Robot

A few days ago I went to a local supermarket. On the battery display, something got my attention. I saw a small figure inside each Panasonic battery bundle. I took one packet and looked carefully at the small robot-like toy. I recognized it. It was Panasonic Evolta batteries's mascot. The small robot, also called Evolta, was designed by Tomotaka Takahashi, a famous roboticist in Japan, and it has been used for Evolta batteries publicity in Japan. Evolta robot has gone through a series of challenges to show the endurence of Evolta Alkaline AA batteries.

The first challenge took place in Grand Canyon on May 2008. The small robot helped by a rope had to climb a 530m cliff. It took three attempts to achieve the goal. The first try was on May 22, but a mechanical problem cause the robot couldn't complete the task. On May 23, the ascent had to be stopped due to rough weather. Finally, on May 24, the robot reach the top of the cliff in 6 hour and 46 minutes, and the Guinness World Record recognized Evolta batteries as the Largest lasting AA Alkaline battery in a wide range of devices.