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The first astronauts arrived at China’s new space station on Thursday in the country’s longest crewed mission to date, a landmark step in establishing Beijing as a major space power.

The trio blasted off on a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan launch centre in northwest China’s Gobi desert, and their craft docked at the Tiangong station around seven hours later, where they will spend the next three months.

State broadcaster CCTV showed a live feed from inside the spacecraft during the journey, with the three astronauts lifting their helmet visors after it reached orbit as one smiled and waved at the camera.

Another floated a pen just off his lap in zero-gravity as he browsed the flight manual.

Around seven hours after lift-off, space officials confirmed that the craft had docked with Tianhe, the core module of the country’s new space station.

The Shenzhou-12 craft has “successfully docked with the forward port of the core module” of the Tiangong station, said the China Manned Space Agency, as state TV showed live footage.

At a ceremony before blast-off, the three astronauts, already wearing their space suits, greeted a crowd of supporters and space workers, who sang the patriotic song “Without the Chinese Communist Party, there would be no new China”.

The mission’s commander is Nie Haisheng, a decorated air force pilot in the People’s Liberation Army who has already participated in two space missions.

The two other members are also members of the military.

Space life
The Tianhe module of the space station has separate living spaces for each of the astronauts, a “space treadmill” and bike for exercise, and a communication centre for emails and video calls with ground control.

It is China’s first crewed mission in nearly five years.

Huang Weifen of the China Manned Space Program said the astronauts will perform two spacewalks during the mission, both lasting around six or seven hours.

She also said the trio will wear newly-developed spacewalk suits.

The launch represents a matter of huge prestige in China, as Beijing prepares to mark the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party on July 1 with a massive propaganda campaign.

To prepare for the mission, the crew underwent more than 6,000 hours of training, including hundreds of underwater somersaults in full space gear.

The Chinese space agency is planning a total of 11 launches through to the end of next year, including three more manned missions that will deliver two lab modules to expand the 70-tonne station, along with supplies and crew members.

China’s space ambitions have been fuelled in part by a US ban on its astronauts on the International Space Station, a collaboration between the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe, and Japan.

It is due for retirement after 2024, even though NASA has said it could potentially remain functional beyond 2028.

Tiangong will be much smaller than the ISS, and is expected to have a lifespan of at least 10 years.

China has said it would be open to international collaboration on its space station although it has yet to give specific details.

Zhou Jianping, chief designer for the space programme, said “foreign astronauts are certainly going to enter the Chinese space station one day”.

“There are a number of countries that have expressed a desire to do that and we will be open to that in future,” he said.

Beijing said in March it was also planning to build a separate lunar space station with Russia, and this week the two countries issued a “roadmap” for potential collaboration opportunities.
 


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Neuralink Searching for Human Trials Partner for Brain Implant Testing

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Neuralink Searching for Human Trials Partner for Brain Implant Testing

Elon Musk‘s brain implant company Neuralink has approached one of the biggest US neurosurgery centers as a potential clinical trials partner as it prepares to test its devices on humans once regulators allow for it, according to six people familiar with the matter.

Neuralink has been developing brain implants since 2016 it hopes will eventually be a cure for intractable conditions such as paralysis and blindness.

It suffered a blow in early 2022, when the US Food and Drug Administration rejected its application to progress to human trials, citing major safety concerns, Reuters reported earlier this month.

The company has since been working to address the agency’s concerns, and it is unclear if and when it will be successful.

Neuralink has been talking to Barrow Neurological Institute, a Phoenix, Arizona-based neurological disease treatment and research organization, to help carry out the human trials, the sources said.

The talks may not result in a team-up. Neuralink has also discussed partnering with other centers, added the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss the confidential deliberations.

Reuters could not verify the latest status of the talks. Neuralink representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

Francisco Ponce, director of Barrow’s Center for Neuromodulation and Neurosurgery Residency Program, declined to comment on Neuralink but said Barrow was well-positioned to conduct such implant research because of its long track record in the field.

The FDA declined to comment on Neuralink’s efforts to find a partner for its clinical trials.

Neuralink’s latest efforts come as it faces two known US federal probes into its practices.

The US Department of Agriculture’s Inspector General began looking into potential animal-welfare violations at Neuralink last year. Current and former employees have detailed concerns to Reuters about the company’s rushed animal experiments, resulting in needless suffering and deaths.

The US Department of Transportation has said it is investigating the potential mishandling of hazardous pathogens during the company’s partnership on animal trials with University of California, Davis between 2018 and 2020.

Barrow has helped standardize brain implant surgeries in which the patient can remain asleep, a key step in making it more acceptable to a broad set of the population, Ponce said.

This is in line with Musk’s vision for Neuralink’s brain chip. The billionaire CEO of Tesla and majority owner of Twitter has said Neuralink’s brain implants will become as ubiquitous as Lasik eye surgery.

The devices Barrow has been implanting so far are different than Neuralink’s. Barrow works with deep brain stimulation devices, which received FDA approval in 1997 to help reduce Parkinson’s tremors and have been implanted in more than 175,000 patients.

Neuralink’s implant is a brain computer interface (BCI) device, which uses electrodes that penetrate the brain or sit on its surface to provide direct communication to computers. So far, no company has received US approval to bring a BCI implant to the market.

© Thomson Reuters 2023
 


Realme might not want the Mini Capsule to be the defining feature of the Realme C55, but will it end up being one of the phone’s most talked-about hardware specifications? We discuss this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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IISc Team Working on Antennas to Empower 6G Technology for V2X Communications

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IISc Team Working on Antennas to Empower 6G Technology for V2X Communications

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) are working on designing antennas that can empower 6G technology, which is instrumental in realising efficient V2X (Vehicle to Everything) communications. In a recent study, the team, led by Debdeep Sarkar, Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, shows how self-interference in full-duplex communication antennas can be reduced, and consequently the movement of signals across the communication network can be faster and more bandwidth-efficient.

“Such full-duplex antennas are particularly helpful for applications that require almost instantaneous relay of commands, like driverless cars”, Bengaluru-based IISc said in a statement on Friday.

Full-duplex antennas consist of a transmitter and a receiver to send and receive radio signals.

Traditional radio transceivers are half duplex, which means that they either use signals of different frequencies for sending and receiving or there is a time lag between the signal transmitted and the signal received.

This time lag is needed to ensure that there is no interference – the signals going back and forth should not cross paths with each other, similar to two people talking to each other at the same time, without pausing to listen to the other. But this also compromises the efficiency and speed of signal transfer.

In order to transmit data much faster and more efficiently, full-duplex systems are required, where both the transmitter and receiver can operate signals of the same frequency simultaneously. For such systems, eliminating self-interference is key. This is what Sarkar and his IoE-IISc postdoctoral fellow, Jogesh Chandra Dash, have been working on for the past few years, the statement said.

“The broad objective of the research is that we want to eliminate the signal that is coming as self-interference,” says Sarkar.

There are two ways to cancel self-interference – passive and active. Passive cancellation is done without any additional instrument, by just designing the circuit in a certain way (for example, increasing the distance between the two antennas).

Active cancellation relies on additional components like signal processing units to cancel out the self-interference. But the components needed for these steps can make the antenna bulky and expensive. What is needed, instead, is a compact, cost-efficient antenna which can be easily integrated into the rest of the circuitry of any device.

The antenna developed by Sarkar and Dash, by virtue of its design, relies on passive interference, allowing it to operate as a full-duplex system. It consists of two ports, either of which can act as transmitter or receiver. The two ports are isolated from each other by electromagnetic tools called metallic vias. Metallic vias are holes drilled into the metal surface of the antenna which disrupt the electric field. In this way, the team managed to cancel out most of the interference passively, alongside achieving a cost-effective and compact design.

“We are eliminating all the conventional techniques for self-interference cancellation, and we are integrating a very simple structure that can be installed in a car,” says Dash.

In the immediate future, the team plans to optimise their device so that it can entirely remove passive interference, and reduce the overall size of the antenna. Then, it can easily be fixed onto a vehicle where it can transmit and receive data at very high speeds, bringing driverless operation as well as 6G mobile connectivity closer to reality, the statement added.


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Elon Musk Denies Report on Plans for Saudi, UAE Funding for SpaceX

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Elon Musk Denies Report on Plans for Saudi, UAE Funding for SpaceX

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, on Friday denied a media report from earlier this week that said investors from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were planning to invest in a multi-billion dollar funding round in the company.

A unit of Saudi Arabia’s investment fund and an Abu Dhabi-based company are planning to invest in a multi-billion dollar funding round for SpaceX, the Information had reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions.

Musk tweeted “not true” responding to the report.

The funding round is expected to value the rocket maker at about $140 billion (roughly Rs. 11,54,384 crore), the report added.

SpaceX raised $2 billion (roughly Rs. 16,491 crore) in 2022 and $2.6 billion (roughly Rs. 21,438 crore) in 2020, according to venture capital firm Space Capital.

Meanwhile, Amazon announced last week that it plans to launch its first Internet satellites to space in the first half of 2024 and offer initial commercial tests shortly after, as it prepares to vie with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others to provide broadband Internet globally.

Amazon’s satellite Internet unit, Project Kuiper, will begin mass-producing the satellites later this year, the company said. Those will be the first of over 3,000 satellites the technology giant plans to launch in low-Earth orbit in the next few years.

“We’ll definitely be beta testing with commercial customers in 2024,” Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon devices, said at a conference in Washington.

With plans to pump more than $10 billion (roughly Rs. 82,400 crore) into the Kuiper network, Amazon sees its experience producing millions of devices from its consumer electronics powerhouse as an edge over rival SpaceX, the Musk-owned space company whose Starlink network already has roughly 4,000 satellites in space.

© Thomson Reuters 2023


The newly launched Oppo Find N2 Flip is the first foldable from the company to debut in India. But does it have what it takes to compete with the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4? We discuss this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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