TechLuver.com

Houston — Dec 05, ‘07 — On August 07, 2008, after 20 years of hype, disappointment, blunders, triumphs and peerless glittering vistas of space and time, and four years after NASA decided to leave the Hubble Space Telescope to die in orbit, setting off public and Congressional outrage, a group of astronauts will ride to the telescope aboard the space shuttle Atlantis with wrenches in hand. Says NYTimes.

That, at least, is the plan.

Servicing Mission 4
NASA managers officially are targeting August 7, 2008, for the launch of the fifth and final space shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. During the 11-day flight, Atlantis’ seven astronauts will repair and improve the observatory’s capabilities through 2013.

Mission planners have been working since last fall, when the flight was announced, to determine the best time in the shuttle manifest to support the needs of Hubble while minimizing the impact to International Space Station assembly. NASA also will support a “launch on need” flight during the Hubble mission. In the unlikely event a rescue flight becomes necessary, shuttle Endeavour currently is planned to lift off from Launch Pad 39-B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla. However, managers constantly are evaluating the manifest to determine the best mission options.

Shuttle missions beyond the Hubble flight, designated STS-125, still are being assessed. Shuttle and station program officials will continue to consider options for the remainder of the shuttle flights to complete construction of the space station by 2010, when the fleet will be retired. Those target launch dates are subject to change.

More at NASA, NYTimes.

Stereo Vision System To Enhance Unmanned Mobile Robot’s Ability To Navigate Martian and Lunar Terrain. MENLO PARK, Calif., Oct. 23 /PRNewswire/ — TYZX, Inc., the 3D vision technology company, today announced that it is working with the National Aerospace and Science Administration (NASA) to enhance navigation and obstacle avoidance capabilities of mobile robotic test platforms with faster stereo vision processing targets.
TYZX is working with NASA Ames Research Center’s Intelligent Robotics Group and their K10 rover, a mobile robot with four-wheel drive and four-wheel steering. The K10 is being used to conduct geophysical site surveys of lunar and Martian analog sites on Earth, and going forward, such surveys will focus on resource prospecting, including subsurface structure mapping and water detection with a ground-penetrating radar, as well as charting terrain topography with stereo vision and 3D lidar.

“Working with TYZX, NASA hopes to achieve faster stereo vision processing and enhanced surface-modeling capabilities, both directly applicable to future Mars missions,” said Lisa Lockyer, chief of the Technology Partnerships Office at NASA Ames. “This partnership is an excellent example of what NASA’s Space Act authority is designed to achieve: technology transfer in both directions that enhances NASA missions, improves the quality of life on Earth, and leverages taxpayer dollars.”

One of the key challenges in mobile robot navigation is determining which areas of the local environment are topographically safe for driving. In particular, the robot has to identify regions that are hazardous to traverse due to slope, obstacles, depressions, etc. Thus, successful site-surveying endeavors are contingent on NASA’s ability to analyze traversability, both for local obstacle avoidance and global path planning.

More at PRNewsWire

CNET is reporting on Adobe’s new 3D camera technology.

In their words “Today, if you want to trim all the distracting background out of a picture–say, the crowd behind your daughter playing soccer–you have to do a lot of artful selection with high-powered software such as Photoshop. But what if your computer understood the depth of the image, just as you did when you took the picture, and could be told to just erase everything that’s a certain distance behind your kid?

That’s one possible way to use technology that Adobe Systems has begun showing off–and that can be seen in video of a news conference posted by the Audioblog.fr site last week.

Dave Story, vice president of digital imaging product development at Adobe, showed off aspects of how the technology worked. First comes a lens which, like an insect’s compound eye, transmits several smaller images to the camera. The result is a photograph with multiple sub-views, each taken from a slightly different vantage point at exactly the same time.

From this information, the computer reconstructs a model of the scene in three dimensions.

Story then showed a video with significant transformations of an image based on this 3D understanding. The image had three major elements–a statue in the foreground, a statue in the middle distance, and a wall in the background. The video showed a simulation of a person shifting vantage point left and right–natural enough given that the multiple views captured that information.

More at CNET…