Prototype Robot With Smartphone to Test 3-D Mapping, Navigation Inside Space Station

Credit: NASA/Ames

Orbital Sciences Corporation's Cygnus spacecraft will carry 3,293 pounds (1,493.8 kg) of cargo on its upcoming commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station, including crew supplies, nanosatellites, student research and this prototype free-flying space robot equipped with a smartphone, known as Smart SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient Experimental Satellites).

NASA has been testing SPHERES on the space station since 2011. This summer, astronauts will upgrade these existing space robots to use Google’s "Project Tango" smartphone, which features a custom 3-D sensor and multiple cameras.

NASA will then use the Smart SPHERES to test free-flying 3-D mapping and navigation inside the space station.

NASA is developing the Smart SPHERES to perform work on the space station that requires mobile sensing, such as environmental surveys to monitor levels of radiation, lighting and air quality.

They also will be used to monitor inventory and conduct experiments. The development and testing of Smart SPHERES is funded by the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Android L: Google releasing its new Android KitKat replacement to developers

Google’s much anticipated follow–up to Android KitKat is coming.

Currently dubbed Android L, it was detailed last week during the search giant’s annual I/O developer event in San Francisco.

So, what’s changed? Well, Google seems very keen to shout about its plans.

This is the first time it’s made a similar move to Apple and released an early preview for devs to tinker with. What’s more, it’s made some tweaks that are bound to impress casual and hardcore fans alike.

Stock Android has had a similar design for a few years now and while it’s not badly dated, Google has decided to spruce things up a bit.

It’s using a new design language called ‘Material Design’, which serves up similar looks across its own apps, as well as making the home screen look a lot less cluttered.

The feeling is that the whole thing looks a lot ‘flatter’, something which Apple’s iOS 7 achieved last year.

The aim is simple: To make basic Android look fancier, so manufacturers don’t feel the need to customise it so much, which usually slows down software updates.

Notifications have been given a major new look in Android L.

They’re now readily available from your lock screen, so you can either tap to see what’s what, or swipe to dismiss, without having to open up your phone and delve into a specific app.

What’s more, notifications will pop up at the top of your screen no matter what app is open, so you’ll never miss an important message or email again.

This is called ‘Heads Up’. This subtle change should make Android a lot easier to use.

Notifications will also be ordered according to importance, not alphabetised, with Android knowing which ones you check most frequently.

Android L is up for grabs now.

However, there are plenty of caveats. For starters, you’ll need either a Nexus 5 or a Nexus 7 2013 tablet with Wi-Fi only.

Then you’ll need to snare it from Google’s Android developer site.

Google says that it’s nowhere near finished and that users should be aware this is an early build which could harm their devices.

Still keen? Well, if you download and change your mind, Google says you can easily go back to Android KitKat. But that if you do, all your data will be deleted. Still, you’ll be a pioneer.

Google reckons that tapping in a code or using a swipe pattern to unlock your device slows you down.

True, even if it does keep you safe. So, with Android L, it’s using what it calls ‘trusted environments’ to let you fire up your phone securely without resorting to standard unlocking techniques.

You can use a Bluetooth device to unlock your phone, whenever it’s nearby it’ll work and when it moves out of range it’ll lock down.

This looks especially cool next to Google’s new range of Android Wear smart watches, which can unlock your phone when you’re wearing them.

Well aware that excessive battery drain is becoming a real issue on Android phones, Google has instituted a new battery saving mode with L.

Fire this up and it will switch off data, slow down the device’s clock speed and ensure that everything keeps kicking for longer when you need it most.

A new developer tool also allows app makers to work out just how much battery power their add–ons use and tinker with code to fix it accordingly.

Hopefully this will mean desperately searching out a power source becomes a thing of the past.

Android L phones promise to be much, much snappier than Android KitKat ones.

Why? Because Google is using a new platform to ensure its updated devices run more efficiently and use less memory.

Called ART, this new tool will work automatically with apps and support 64-bit chips.

That means mobile makers can create speedier phones which should mean zipping between apps and firing up games will be lightning fast.

Google Plans $1Bn Satellite Network For Global Internet Access - video

The Wall Street Journal reports Google is planning to launch 180 satellites around the globe, offering broadband Internet access to everyone.

Google X skunk works: Google aiming for the Moon

In a rare public speech, Google Inc. CEO Larry Page once suggested the tech industry needs "safe places where we can try out new things" without rules or interference. 

Some people thought he was describing a futuristic fantasy, perhaps a remote desert island where robots roam free.

But Page already has the next best thing in Google X, the secretive skunk works where company scientists get plenty of resources and free rein to work on things like self-driving cars, Internet-connected balloons and flying power generators.

At a time when other tech companies have trimmed research budgets or focused tightly on their core business, Google's X division is pursuing a range of seemingly outlandish ideas.

While much of it is hush-hush, the X projects that have been announced publicly may push the envelope even further than Google's ventures into ultrafast fiber networks, industrial robotics and high-tech home thermostats.

"They're doing a lot of incredibly weird stuff," said Rob Enderle, analyst at the Enderle Group, "but they're rolling in money." Google made $13 billion profit on $60 billion in sales last year, mostly from online ads.

"That gives them a lot of latitude in what they invest in."

While the X division is housed in two nondescript office buildings near Google's main campus, it's been compared to "Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory" by the man who runs it on a daily basis.

Eric "Astro" Teller, an entrepreneur and scientist who reports to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, once described his staff as "Peter Pans with Ph.D.s."

"They understand that their mission is to think really audaciously, to incubate magic," Teller said in a speech last year, adding that X's goal is to "have an impact on the world and then worry later about making money on it."

The message is classic Page and Brin. Google's co-founders built their powerful Internet search engine as grad students and, as they enter middle age, still espouse a passion for ideas that sound like science fiction.

Consider the driverless cars, often seen near Google's headquarters or zipping up and down Highway 101.

Brin and Page have said they're convinced that cutting-edge sensors and navigational software can eliminate thousands of traffic accidents now caused by human error.

Critics question how that relates to Google's core business, although some analysts believe Google might sell more ads if people spend more time checking email and surfing online in their cars.

Teller describes the mandate for X this way: Identify some really big problems that Google might be able to solve by applying technology in a radically new way.

"There's this open question of what Google is going to be, a decade or more from now," Teller said in an interview.

"Google X isn't the only answer to that question, but it was built as a place to do some of the exploration to find some great new problems for Google to tackle."

As head of X, Teller is known as Google's "captain of moonshots" - a reference to Page's penchant for ambitious projects that promise big impact. Teller, a grandson of pioneering physicist Edward Teller, got the nickname "Astro" from high school friends who thought his spiky haircut looked like artificial turf.

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Google Acquisition Trail goes on: UK Spider provides Security

This is the image posted on UK's spider.io after Google's acquisition.

Google said Friday it was buying the British-based startup spider.io for its technology to weed out fraud in online advertising.

"Advertising helps fund the digital world we love today... but this vibrant ecosystem only flourishes if marketers can buy media online with the confidence that their ads are reaching real people, that results they see are based on actual interest," said Neal Mohan at Google's DoubleClick unit which develops targeted ads.

Neal Mohan

With the new acquisition, Mohan said, "our immediate priority is to include their fraud detection technology in our video and display ads products, where they will complement our existing efforts."

He added that "by including spider.io's fraud-fighting expertise in our products, we can scale our efforts to weed out bad actors and improve the entire digital ecosystem."

The move helps Google combat the practice of click fraud, where criminals use automatic programs to boost the number of clicks on an online ad to boost revenues. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Google plans aerospace, robotics projects for Hangar One

A NASA spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday that Google Inc plans using a 350,000-square-foot hangar that was originally built to house helium airships for the U.S. Navy and its cavernous interior, for building and testing new robots, planetary rovers and other space or aviation technology.

The proposal submitted by Google, the giant Internet company, plans to restore the outside of the landmark structure known as Hangar One at Moffett Federal Airfield in California.

Based on that proposal, U.S. officials said this week they will negotiate a long-term lease with Google for a significant portion of the former naval base, including three historic hangars, two runways and some adjacent land and buildings.

While the company is best known for its Internet search engine, software and other online services, Google's founders and several top executives also have a well-documented interest in robots, high-altitude balloons, aviation and space exploration.

In recent months, Google has confirmed buying eight small robotics companies for a mysterious new division headed by its former Android software chief, Andy Rubin.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin already own a fleet of jets now parked at Moffett Field. And Page, the company's CEO, has reportedly invested in a separate company that hopes to mine asteroids for precious metals.

While a Google spokeswoman didn't respond to requests for more details about the company's plans, it's clear the massive Hangar One would provide plenty of room for tinkering with exotic hardware.

The Depression-era structure is 200 feet tall and covers 8 acres.

All told, the proposed lease would provide more than 1 million square feet of space in Hangar One and its two neighbors, known as Two and Three.

That's probably enough for projects such as Google's plans to develop new robot technology for manufacturing and retail shopping.

Rubin is reportedly working in a Palo Alto, Calif., office now, but the effort appears to be expanding.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Rubin has discussed a robotics partnership with the Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn.

It's unclear if Google plans to sublet any of the Moffett space to other commercial tenants, although local real estate experts say it would be an attractive property.

Neighbouring residents said they might be concerned if Google brings more air traffic or daytime workers into the area. Mountain View City Manager Dan Rich, however, said in a statement that he's pleased the landmark hangar will be restored.

Officials at NASA and the U.S. General Services Administration, which helps administer federal property, said only that the proposal from Google subsidiary Planetary Ventures described using all three historic hangars for "research, testing, assembly and development" of new technology related to space, aviation and "rover/robotics."

The proposal also calls for building a new 90,000-square-foot structure on the property that Planetary Ventures would make available "at no cost" for a "public benefit educational/museum/incubator," said GSA spokeswoman Jackeline Stewart.

Federal officials rejected competing proposals from two other groups, including a coalition of scientists and entrepreneurs that wanted to make the airfield a center for new aerospace companies.

One rival was disqualified because it didn't follow procedures, officials said, while another fell short on several criteria.

As part of its proposal, which NASA official Richard Keegan rated "exceptional," Google promised to upgrade a golf course on the property and provide a net increase in revenue for the federal government, while operating the two runways on a "low-use" basis for a mix of private and government flights.

Officials said specific financial terms haven't been negotiated.

Since it was decommissioned as a Navy air base in 1994, the sprawling, 2,000-acre Moffett property has been home to a mix of private tenants and government agencies, including NASA's Ames Research Center and a wing of the California Air National Guard. NASA currently occupies about 500 acres, but the government has negotiated long-term leases for other portions over the years.

Google has a separate long-term lease to build a planned office campus on 42 acres of the site, which are not physically connected to the airfield portion.

A coalition of local colleges has a lease for 77 acres, where it hopes to build classrooms, labs and possibly housing.

Several aerospace contractors also use the site. Former NASA scientist Sean Casey, who led one of the rival bidding groups, said he hopes Google will keep the airfield open to aerospace startups.

"Moffett Field is a great place for new space companies to connect with the investment community and with NASA Ames," he said.

In a statement Monday, Google said simply: "We are delighted to move ahead in the selection process and we are looking forward to working with both GSA and NASA to preserve the heritage of Moffett Federal Airfield."

DeepMind: Google acquires another AI organisation

The golden age of AI is upon us. Credit: kidpixo

All eyes turned to London this week, as Google announced its latest acquisition in the form of DeepMind, a company that specialises in artificial intelligence technologies.

The £400m pricetag paid by Google and the reported battle with Facebook to win the company over indicate that this is a firm well worth backing.

Although solid information is thin on the ground, you can get an idea of what the purchase might be leading to, if you know where to look.

Google has always been active in artificial intelligence and relies on the process for many of its projects.

Just consider the "driver" behind its driverless cars, the speech recognition system in Google Glass, or the way its search engine predicts what we might search for after just a couple of keystrokes.

Even the page-rank algorithm that started it all falls under the banner of AI. Acquiring a company such as DeepMind therefore seems like a natural step.

The big question is whether Google is motivated by a desire to help develop technologies we already know about or whether it is moving into the development of new technologies.

Google has the money and the drive to tackle the biggest questions in science, and developing computers that think like humans has, for a long time, been one of the biggest of them all.

Demis Hassabis

The headlines this week have described DeepMind as a "secretive start-up", but clues about what it gets up to at its London base can be gleaned from some of the research publications produced by the company's co-founder, Demis Hassabis.

Hassabis' three most recent publications all focus on the brain activity of human participants as they undergo particular tasks.

He has looked into how we take advantage of our habitat, how we identify and predict the behaviour of other people and how we remember the past and imagine the future.

As humans, we collect information through sensory input and process it many times over using abstraction.

We extract features and categorise objects to focus our attention on the information that is relevant to us.

When we enter a room we quickly build up a mental image of the room, interpret the objects in the room, and use this information to assess the situation in front of us.

The people at Google have, until now, generally focused on the lower-level stages of this information processing.

They have developed systems to look for features and concepts in online photos and street scenes to provide users with relevant content, systems to translate one language to another to enable us to communicate, and speech recognition systems, making voice control on your phone or device a reality.

The processes Hassabis investigates require these types of information processing as prerequisites.

Only once you have identified the relevant features in a scene and categorised objects in your habitat can you begin to take advantage of your habitat.

Only once you have identified the features of someone's face and recognised them as a someone you know can you start to predict their behaviour.

And only once you have built up vivid images of the past can you extrapolate a future.

Other recent acquisitions by Google provide further pieces to the puzzle.

Ray Kurzweil

It has recently appointed futurist Ray Kurzweil, who believes in search engines with human intelligence and being able to upload our minds onto computers, as its director of engineering.

And the purchase of Boston Dynamics, a company developing ground breaking robotics technology, gives a hint of its ambition.

Google is also getting into smart homes in the hope of more deeply interweaving its technologies into our everyday lives.

DeepMind could provide the know-how to enable such systems to exhibit a level of intelligence never seen before in computers.

Combining the machinery Google already uses for processing sensory input with the ideas under investigation at DeepMind about how the brain uses this sensory input to complete high-level tasks is an exciting prospect. It has the potential to produce the closest thing yet to a computer with human qualities.

Building computers that think like humans has been the goal of AI ever since the time of Alan Turing.

Progress has been slow, with science fiction often creating false hope in people's minds. But these past two decades have seen unimaginable leaps in information processing and our understanding of the brain.

Now that one of the most powerful companies in the world has identified where it wants to go next, we can expect big things. Just as physics had its heyday in the 20th century, this century is truly the golden age of AI.

Boston Dynamics: Why does Google want access to DARPA robots?

The Atlas humanoid robot is just one of the Boston Dynamics stable of advanced robotic platforms acquired by Google. 

Photograph: Boston Dynamics 

Google’s recent acquisition of Boston Dynamics marks its eighth robotics purchase in the past six months, showing Google’s “moonshot” robotics vision is more than just a pet project.

Boston Dynamics is the most high-profile acquisition, however, instantly adding world-leading robotics capability, including robots that can walk all on their own, to Google’s arsenal – as well as significant links to the US military – conjuring images of Skynet and the artificial intelligence-led robot uprising.

What is it?
Boston Dynamics is an engineering and robotics design company that works across a wide range of computer intelligence and simulation systems, as well as large, advanced robotic platforms.

The company was created as a technology spin-off from Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Prof Marc Raibert in 1992, then the founder and lead researcher of the Leg Lab – a research group focussed on systems that move dynamically, including legged robots.

What does it do?
Raibert describes the Boston Dynamics team as “simply engineers that build robots”, but in reality Boston Dynamics is much more than that.

Its robotics work is at the forefront of the technology creating the self-proclaimed “most advanced robots on Earth” particularly focused around self-balancing humanoid or bestial robots.

Funding for the majority of the most advanced Boston Dynamics robots comes from military sources, including the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) and the US army, navy and marine corps.

The terms of contracts currently held by Boston Dynamics with military bodies are unknown, although Google has committed to honouring existing contracts, including recent $10.8m funding from Darpa.


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Google: New Public Application of Landsat Images Released

The Columbia Glacier.

Credit: Nasa Earth Observatory

Google released more than a quarter-century of images of Earth taken from space Thursday compiled into an interactive time-lapse experience. 

Working with data from the Landsat Program managed by the U.S. Geological Survey, the images display an historical perspective on changes to Earth's surface over time.

NASA Associate Administrator for Communications David Weaver issued the following statement about the Google announcement:

"The Landsat data record -- humanity's longest continuous record of our planet from space -- has been an invaluable tool for scientists and decision-makers in many fields, from natural resources to agricultural productivity and climate change.

The release on Google's Earth Engine of new Landsat time-lapse data animations shows key changes across our planet and helps share this remarkable U.S. resource with the public in an engaging new way.

"The Obama administration is committed to keeping this freely accessible archive of continuous global land observations growing for years to come. That's why the president's Fiscal Year 2014 budget includes funding to have NASA take the lead on the design of a new spaceborne system that will continue the acquisition of Landsat-quality measurements.

"NASA launched the newest Landsat satellite in February. Later this month, we will be handing over operations of this mission to our long-time partners at the U.S. Geological Survey. NASA is looking forward to beginning the work to extending this critically important national resource."

NASA - Tour Kennedy Space Center with Google Street View

With its seaside location and unique facilities steeped in history, NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida boasts amazing views typically seen only by employees and astronauts.

Now space enthusiasts around the world can take a virtual walk through the transfer aisle of the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building, stand at the top of Launch Pad 39A, and more, thanks to a new partnership between Kennedy and Google Maps with Street View.

"We are pleased to partner with Google on the new Street View project, which offers the public a behind-the-scenes look at the Kennedy Space Center's unique facilities that launched humans to the moon and Space Shuttles to low Earth orbit.

Viewers also will get a peek inside areas where flight hardware was processed, including elements of the International Space Station, and planetary and scientific payloads," said Lisa Malone, director of KSC Public Affairs.

The collaborative effort offers unprecedented views of Kennedy Space Center at a dynamic time for the spaceport.

Kennedy is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and continues to transition its facilities and infrastructure from a focus on the Space Shuttle Program, which ended in 2011, to a modern and flexible launch complex.

"The Street View team tries to go to amazing places around the world, because we know that our users love to see them and experience them online," said Ryan Falor, project manager for Google Street View.

"Kennedy Space Center is an obviously amazing location with one-of-a-kind buildings and structures that we knew people would be excited to see. When I started managing the team, I knew that one of my goals was to bring Street View to NASA and I was thrilled when we got a positive response from Kennedy about the project."

Through Google Maps with Street View, users can travel the same route the astronauts traveled from the Operations and Checkout Building to the launch pad; stand inside the Firing Room in the Launch Control Center, the nerve center of Launch Complex 39; walk through the high bay of the Space Station Processing Facility; and visit the Space Shuttle Main Engine shop, among other locations.

Go to http://maps.google.com/streetview to begin the virtual tour. Visitors also can use Google Maps to navigate to Kennedy Space Center, then switch to Street View for an eye-level look at the spaceport. 

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Asteroid Mining Venture Backed by Google Execs, James Cameron

Small, water-rich near-Earth asteroids can be captured by spacecraft, allowing their resources to be extracted, officials with the new company Planetary Resources say.

CREDIT: Planetary Resources, Inc.

A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — is set to announce plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water.

Planetary Resources, Inc. intends to sell these materials, generating a healthy profit for itself but it also aims to advance humanity's exploration and exploitation of space, with resource extraction serving as an anchor industry that helps our species spread throughout the solar system.

"If you look at space resources, the logical next step is to go to the near-Earth asteroids," Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman Eric Anderson reported.

"They're just so valuable, and so easy to reach energetically. Near-Earth asteroids really are the low-hanging fruit of the solar system."

Google's Project Glass: One day... - YouTube

We believe technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don't.

A team within our Google[x] group started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.

Follow along with us at projectglass as we share some of our ideas and stories. We'd love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?

Google glasses: Streaming info to your eyeballs

When smartphones came out, it seemed like a leap in convenience to be able to carry important information on us at all times, instead of leaving it with our computers.

But soon, it may seem onerous to reach for your phone, turn it on and find the right app to get a piece of information, when you could instead just wear a pair of glasses that directly stream information to your eyeballs.

By year’s end, Google is set to release glasses that do exactly that in real time, so you won’t constantly have to reach into your purse or pocket.

The glasses, which will be Android-based, will cost about as much as a smartphone ($250-$600) and feature a 3G or 4G data connection and GPS and motion sensors and, of course, they’ll sport a screen a few inches away from the eye.

Here are some other key features:

• A unique navigation system that scrolls and clicks with a tilt of the head: Seth Weintraub, a 9 to 5 Google blogger who broke the story says, “We are told it is very quick to learn and once the user is adept at navigation, it becomes second nature and almost indistinguishable to outside users.”
• A low-resolution built-in camera: It will monitor the world in real time and overlay relevant information about the location, nearby buildings and friends who happen to be in the area.
• The ability to send data to the cloud: Then, the wearer can tap into services such as Google Latitude to share his/her location, Google Goggles to search images and figure out what he/she is looking at, Google Maps to find out what else is nearby, and to check in to places.

They’ll look like Oakley Thumps (pictured above), and Google expects that users won’t wear them all the time but only when they want the augmented reality view.

The glasses are being developed at the Google X offices, a secret lab that works on futuristic projects such as robots and space elevators.

"Internally, the Google X team has been actively discussing the privacy implications of the glasses and the company wants to ensure that people know if they are being recorded by someone wearing a pair of glasses with a built-in camera."

For now, Google isn’t yet thinking about developing business models from the glasses, but will wait to see if the glasses take off first.

Meanwhile, Apple is also reportedly working on wearable computing, the inform of a computer that straps around the wrist.

Meanwhile, Google is said to be building a $120 million electronics facility for testing “precision optical technology.”

GPS with Android and WiFi on its way

The world's first handheld GPS to use the Android mobile operating system is here.

The All Sports GPS from Holux is also the first handheld unit with WiFi capability.

The idea is to fuse smartphone capability into a handheld GPS, allowing users to download GPS apps directly without having to hookup to a computer.
 
The All Sports GPS is a cooperative effort between Taiwan's Holux, which manufactures GPS products, and Satski, a Canadian company best known for its winter sports apps.

So, it's not surprising that the GPS will come pre-loaded with the SatSki app and a companion suite that includes other sports apps for golf, biking, running and geo-caching, among other activities.

The apps provide all sorts of speed, distance, real-time location and navigation information. For winter sports fans, the Satski app uses resort trail maps.

There's also Facebook and Twitter integration and on online community at luvthesnow.com to share and boast about your greatest runs.

Another app included in the package is All Sports Maps, which allows users to download live maps, including Google, Nokia OVI, Open Street and Open Cycle, for later offline use, all for free.

Similar apps in the Android Market can run you as much as ten US dollars for something well-suited to backcountry use, out of the range of a data connection.

SatSki promises that the All Sports GPS will be a "rugged, highly sensitive IPX 6-rated unit" that also supports Bluetooth health monitor accessories. No word on an exact release date or pricing for the device, but the company promises it is "coming soon."

Thales Alenia Space: Building four more satellites for Google's O3b constellation

O3b Networks will supply trunking and mobile backhaul connectivity to telecom operators at speeds comparable to those offered by Fiber providers. 

By increasing the constellation from eight to twelve satellites, O3b Networks will virtually double its capacity and guarantee greater service availability and reliability.

Thales Alenia Space has announced that it had signed a contract with O3b Networks Limited to deliver four more satellites for their Medium Earth Orbit constellation.

These satellites are in addition to the eight already ordered from Thales Alenia Space.

The first group of eight satellites successfully passed their Critical Design Review in May of this year and the system is on track for an initial launch in the first quarter of 2013, with service expected to start in the second quarter of that year.

Positioned at an altitude of 8,000 km which is four times closer to the earth than geo-stationary satellites, these Ka-band satellites will offer high speed, low cost, low-latency Internet and telecommunications services to people and businesses in emerging markets.

O3b Networks will supply trunking and mobile backhaul connectivity to telecom operators at speeds comparable to those offered by Fiber providers.

By increasing the constellation from eight to twelve satellites, O3b Networks will virtually double its capacity and guarantee greater service availability and reliability.

"This latest contract for four additional satellites clearly shows Thales Alenia Space's leadership in telecom constellations," said Reynald Seznec, President and CEO of Thales Alenia Space.

"O3b can count on this platform, already proven in orbit. Our platform is perfectly suited to telecom constellations, with excellent in-orbit performance and guaranteed development.

We are honoured to have O3b's confidence in Thales Alenia Space and we are eager to contribute to their mission which will be enhanced through the delivery of these four additional satellites"

"We are very happy with Thales' progress with the O3b satellites so far and we are firmly on schedule to meet our launch dates on the first eight satellites," said Brian Holz, CTO of O3b Networks.

"The Payload and Spacecraft Critical Design Reviews were successfully completed earlier this year with higher than expected performance, allowing O3b to further improve competitiveness.

We therefore have every confidence in awarding them with the contract for our four additional satellites."

Moon Express Gets Thumbs-Up from NASA for Developing New Lunar Landing Technology

Moon Express, a Google Lunar X PRIZE contender, announced that it has successfully demonstrated a critical component of its lunar landing technology to NASA under its Innovative Lunar Demonstration Data (ILDD) Program contract.

The Moon Express Mini-Radar System promises to radically reduce the cost and mass of the company's commercial lunar landing system.

NASA has reviewed and accepted the Moon Express Mini-Radar data package, satisfying the requirements of the $500K First Task Order under the company's $10M commercial lunar data contract.

Silicon Valley-based Moon Express was one of only three U.S. companies awarded the first Task Order under NASA's ILDD program. Under the task order, NASA agreed to purchase data resulting from the successful test and demonstration of the company's state-of-the-art Mini-Radar sensor, a critical component of its lunar landing system.

Radar provides autonomous landing spacecraft with crucial ranging information to the surface and has been one of the most challenging and high risk elements of all lander systems.

Radar systems have also been historically very expensive in terms of dollars, mass and energy. As part of its risk reduction engineering activities, Moon Express initiated a program to continue the development, test and space qualification of an innovative, low cost, low mass, low energy radar concept invented by Stellar Exploration that showed great promise through progressive developments under NASA Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) programs.

The Moon Express investment significantly advanced the radar technology toward spaceflight readiness.

The testing and space validation of the Mini-Radar involved multiple units subjected to a series of laboratory and field testing.

These included multiple dynamic tests on the Lunar Lander Test Vehicle, developed in partnership with NASA, and long range tests on the Zeppelin 'Eureka', owned and operated by Airship Ventures, which took the Mini-Radar on flight tests down the California coast and at the Oshkosh Airshow.

Additional environmental testing in thermal-vacuum and vibration chambers proved the ruggedness of the Mini-Radar design for spaceflight.

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Google Earth provides dizzying 3D views of Mars

Images from past and current Mars probes are combined to create a global, three-dimensional exploration tool in the new version of Google Earth (Illustration: Google)

Mars enthusiasts can fly from the towering peak of Olympus Mons to Mars Pathfinder's peaceful resting place in an add-on to the latest version of the desktop application Google Earth, which was released on Monday.

The new Mars map amasses some 1000 gigabytes of data from a range of Mars probes, including NASA's Viking orbiters, Europe's Mars Express orbiter, and six landers, such as NASA's twin rovers, to create a three-dimensional view of the planet at a wide range of scales.

"What we've done is bring all that information into one single, easy-to-use platform," says Matthew Hancher of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "Everything that's ever gone to Mars has been put together to give us this unified view of the planet."

The new tool is accessible enough to appeal to a wide audience, but Hancher hopes the tool will also help researchers by allowing them to determine what data is available - such as infrared images and mineral maps made by orbital spectrometers - for particular regions of interest.

Interactive software

The software is intended to be interactive, allowing users to draw lines, add text, embed videos, and add images. Researchers may also add new content, which must be encoded in a language called KML in order to be properly overlaid on the globe.

So far adding new data to the Mars layer is not automated, and only a few hundred images from the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet - have been added, Hancher says.

The new software is an outgrowth of Google Mars, an online tool that allows users to view two-dimensional maps of the Red Planet, pieced together from images taken by Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey.

Read more about how to use the new Mars features in the Google Earth Blog.