It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, September 10, 2021
Illinois team awarded $5.8M DARPA effort to understand how people respond to influence messaging
WHY WOULD THE US MILITARY WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THAT (RHETORICAL QUESTION)
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS GRAINGER COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
IMAGE: TAREK ABDELZAHER, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA-CHAMPAIGNview more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
There’s no end to the variety of bizarre rumors circulating about COVID-19 vaccines: recipients’ bodies become magnetized, perhaps, or connected to 5G signals. Many assume that such tales are cooked up by eccentrics, but some of the rumor-mongering has more sinister origins. In August 2021, for example, Facebook uncovered a huge, Russia-based anti-vaccination campaign, in which hundreds of fake accounts were working in coordination to spread the belief that people who received the AstraZeneca vaccine were being tainted by injected chimpanzee tissue.
Such misinformation campaigns have become a worrisome feature of the modern threat landscape, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just awarded $5.8 million to a team, led by CSL faculty member Tarek Abdelzaher, that will work to characterize how different foreign populations respond to influence campaigns as a first step towards development of effective countermeasures. This work is a part of DARPA’s INfluence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking (INCAS) program.
Abdelzaher, who is a Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor and a Willett Faculty Scholar in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, explains that humanity has a lot of hard-won knowledge of how physical weapons work, and how to employ countermeasures against them. “But today,” he says, “information is weaponized. People create narratives that are divisive. They are intended to polarize, radicalize, whatever... But we don’t understand the impact of that weapon on the population, the way we understand the impact of a bomb or a lightning strike.”
The team will work to develop tools that, first, can detect when an attack is happening in the information space, and second, can understand the impact of the attack. What is it trying to accomplish, what is its audience, and what influence technique is it using? How will it affect the population, or specific subsets of the population? How will they respond?
Abdelzaher points out that modeling of social systems has challenges beyond those involved in modeling physical systems. “Let’s say you have an autonomous car or a drone, and you want to predict its trajectory. We have theory behind it; we have laws of nature behind it.” But what “laws” can describe social systems?
That’s where the project’s experts on social psychology will step in. They will advise on the rules of psychology that govern human behavior, and develop answers to questions about how a population that’s characterized by certain psychological traits, or certain moral values, is likely to respond to a particular type of campaign.
Jesse Graham, who is the George S. Eccles Chair in Business Ethics at the University of Utah, is one of those experts. He’s one of the originators of “moral foundations theory,” which describes moral reasoning in terms of the interplay among a small set of foundational values, such as loyalty and fairness. That theory will be one of the starting points for the new project. He explains, “We’re trying to have some sort of taxonomy, or some sort of model, of what are the kinds of moral intuitions people have, [and] why do we have them.”
“It feels like [this is] a really important topic, understanding what kinds of influence campaigns are happening out there in the world of social media, and trying to predict how people will respond to them,” Graham says. “It’s a very, very big problem. But I think it’s a tractable one, that we can actually get some useful information out of.”
The new DARPA project is entitled “Analytics of Information Influence: Effect Characterization.” In addition to Abdelzaher and Graham, the team includes faculty members Jiawei Han, an expert in data mining; Heng Ji, an expert in natural language processing; and Hanghang Tong, an AI expert (all of Computer Science, UIUC); Boleslaw Szymanski (Computer Science and Physics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute); and Morteza Dehghani (Psychology and Computer Science, the University of Southern California).
IMAGE: COVER FOR "SELF-ORGANISING MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS: ALGORITHMIC FOUNDATIONS OF CYBER-ANARCHO-SOCIALISM"view more
CREDIT: WORLD SCIENTIFIC
We cannot simply assume that unthinkingly applying digital technologies will inevitably bring about a seamless transition to a "better" digital world—a world in which the values of collective action, common knowledge and civic dignity are the norm—rather than ending up in a world of financial or social exploitation through surveillance capitalism, techno-feudalism and diminished humanity.
"The message from world leaders, academics and non-governmental organisations is clear: if we want to address existential threats like climate change, or if we want to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for peace, equality, and social justice, then rapid societal transformation is necessary," says Jeremy Pitt, Professor of Intelligent and Self-Organising Systems at Imperial College London, UK, "But we need to ensure that the transformations that digital technologies will help bring about are indeed the societal transformations of the kind that we actually want. As computer scientists and software engineers, we have to think carefully about, and take responsibility for, the impact that our algorithms and systems will have on society. Although difficult and complex, the first principle is quite easy: primum non nocere—first, do no harm. Then, do good."
It is possible to engineer socio-technical systems which point to a "better" digital world, through the direct or indirect codification of algorithms which encapsulate the deep social knowledge of philosophy, political science, and economic science. This includes the Nobel prize winning theory of Elinor Ostrom on institutions for sustainable common pool resource management, Nicholas Rescher's theory of distributive justice for fair resource allocation, and Josiah Ober's theory of basic democracy as a platform for legitimate governance and civic dignity.
Prof Jeremy Pitt’s new book, Self-Organising Multi-Agent Systems: Algorithmic Foundations of Cyber-Anarcho-Socialism approaches the Digital Transformation through a different lens, offering a fresh perspective for educating students and researchers from both the information and social sciences. It shows how ''planned emergence''—the intentional appearance of global properties, such as qualitative values—can be a product of the local self-organisation of conventional rules by autonomous agents.
Self-Organising Multi-Agent Systems is the first volume to bring together ideas from computer science (self-organisation, distributed systems, and artificial intelligence) with ideas from the social sciences (philosophy, economics and politics). The book features an introduction to some concepts and technologies for multi-agent systems and self-organising systems, and then considers the problems of strategic interaction (individual decision-making under uncertainty) and social interaction (collective decision-making under uncertainty). The text covers topics as diverse as game theory, social choice theory and alternative dispute resolution, through to knowledge representation and algorithmic reasoning for electronic institutions, social construction of conceptual resources, and political engagement. Readers will be presented with algorithms for implementing interactional justice, which enable a set of individual subjective assessments on a qualitative matter, such as fairness, can be aggregated into a collective objective assessment, providing a basis for continuous systemic improvement; and will gain insights into the knowledge management processes of basic democracy, providing the basis for both self-determination (whereby those affected by a set of rules participate in their selection, modification and application) and the avoidance of tyranny in all its forms (autocracy, oligarchy and majoritarianism).
Jeremy Pitt is Professor of Intelligent and Self-Organising Systems in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He received a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Manchester and a Ph.D. in Computing from Imperial College (University of London). He has been teaching and researching Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction for over thirty years, where his research programme has used computational logic to specify algorithmic models of social processes, with applications in cyber-physical and socio-technical systems, especially for sustainable, fair and legitimate self-governance. He has collaborated on research projects extensively in Europe, but also in India and New Zealand, and has held visiting professorial positions in Italy, Japan and Poland. He has published more than 200 articles in journals, conferences and workshops, and this work has received several Best Paper awards. He is a trustee of AITT (the Association for Information Technology Trust), a Fellow of the BCS (British Computer Society) and of the IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology), and in 2018 was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Technology & Society Magazine, renewed for three years in 2021.
About World Scientific Publishing Co.
World Scientific Publishing is a leading international independent publisher of books and journals for the scholarly, research and professional communities. World Scientific collaborates with prestigious organisations like the Nobel Foundation and US National Academies Press to bring high quality academic and professional content to researchers and academics worldwide. The company publishes about 600 books and over 140 journals in various fields annually. To find out more about World Scientific, please visit www.worldscientific.com.
Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that were li…
2001-05-12 · Anarcho-technocracy is the theory of Direct Action on Things. It is anarchist, inasmuch as it states that all government over men must be replaced by the …
Groundbreaking technique yields important new details on possible ‘fifth force’
A group of researchers have used a groundbreaking new technique to reveal previously unrecognized properties of technologically crucial silicon crystals and uncovered new information about an important subatomic particle and a long-theorized fifth force of nature.
The research was an international collaboration conducted at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Dmitry Pushin, a member of the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing and a faculty member in Waterloo’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, was the only Canadian researcher involved in the study. Pushin was interested in producing high-quality quantum sensors out of perfect crystals.
By aiming subatomic particles known as neutrons at silicon crystals and monitoring the outcome with exquisite sensitivity, researchers were able to obtain three extraordinary results: the first measurement of a key neutron property in 20 years using a unique method; the highest-precision measurements of the effects of heat-related vibrations in a silicon crystal; and limits on the strength of a possible “fifth force” beyond standard physics theories.
In collaboration with researchers from Japan, the U.S. and Canada, the latest work resulted in a fourfold improvement in precision measurement of the silicon crystal structure factor.
Pushin, whose research specializes in neutron physics and interferometry, was instrumental in collecting neutron data and chemically etching samples, which led to examining unexplored forces beyond Standard Model.
“This was a multi-year experiment, and we had great results that are technically exciting and opens the door to future technologies,” said Pushin.
The Standard Model is currently the widely accepted theory of how particles and forces interact at the smallest scales. But it’s an incomplete explanation of how nature works, and scientists suspect there is more to the universe than the theory describes.
The Standard Model describes three fundamental forces in nature: electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear force. Each force operates through the action of “carrier particles.” For example, the photon is the force carrier for the electromagnetic force. But the Standard Model has yet to incorporate gravity in its description of nature. Furthermore, some experiments and theories suggest the possible presence of a fifth force.
The researchers are already planning more expansive pendellösung measurements using both silicon and germanium. They expect a possible factor of five reduction in their measurement uncertainties, which could produce the most precise measurement of the neutron charge radius to date and further constrain — or discover — a fifth force. They also plan to perform a cryogenic version of the experiment, which would lend insight into how the crystal atoms behave in their so-called “quantum ground state,” which accounts for the fact that quantum objects are never perfectly still, even at temperatures approaching absolute zero.
IMAGE: A WOLF SPOTTED IN SIERRA DE LA CULEBRAview more
CREDIT: CHISCO LEMA
Large carnivore populations are expanding across Europe and experts are calling for increased support for communities to encourage harmonious relationships with their new neighbours.
New research led by the University of Leeds studied three types of rural communities in Spain: one with a permanent presence of wolves; one where they have returned; and one where their return is expected within the next decade. It explored the conditions under which humans and wolves can coexist - living peacefully and sustainably alongside one another.
The research found that the ecological, economic, and social conditions for coexistence in these communities varied significantly. For instance, while guardian dogs (a large breed of dogs specially trained to fend off wolf attacks) were remarkably efficient in one location, topography, tourism and other factors made them less feasible in another.
The findings illustrate the importance of working with individual communities to find solutions adapted to their local needs and conditions, rather than generalised technical and legal fixes.
Spain is home to one of Europe’s largest wolf populations, estimated between 2,000 to 2,500. The research is published just two weeks before the Spanish government is set to impose a national ban on wolf hunting, which could aggravate current tension over how wolves should be managed, and by whom.
Lead author Hanna Pettersson is a PhD researcher in Leeds’ Sustainability Research Institute and spent most of 2020 living in three villages in Spain to try and understand the key ingredients for coexistence with wolves in the different communities.
Ms Pettersson, who is from Sweden, said: “The main problem with wolves in areas where wolves and people shared space was often less about the wolves themselves, but about economic and social pressures that were threatening the livelihoods, cultures and autonomy of local communities. For different reasons, the wolves often came to represent these pressures. Up until now, we knew a lot about the factors that lead to dysfunctional relationships, but much less about what fosters functional coexistence.
“Today, thanks to strict conservation laws, urbanisation and improved habitat conditions, we are seeing a return and expansion of large carnivores, such as wolves, to many types of landscapes across Europe. This is a hopeful sign for the global nature restoration movement, which is a crucial part of dealing with the ongoing biodiversity and climate crises.
“However, to ensure this movement is just and sustainable, it is important we work proactively in the communities that will share space with these large predators. In some cases, they can bring economic benefits through ecotourism, and they can provide natural regulation of ecosystems, for instance, by keeping herbivore numbers in check.
“Wolves are beautiful creatures admired by many, but they also cause problems for traditional farming communities, many of whom are already vulnerable due to unfavourable market conditions and social marginalisation. The survival of these communities is crucial to maintain their rich cultural heritage and sustainable food production practices, and therefore we must ensure the right conditions are created to enable them to persist in a wilder and more biodiverse countryside of the future.
“Wolves are returning to places where they have been extinct for decades, sometimes centuries. The key challenge we face is preparing and supporting communities so that they can adapt and flourish, thanks to, or sometimes despite, their return.”
The research was published in Frontiers in Conservation Science by academics from the University of Leeds and Oviedo University, Spain.
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Livestock guardian dog at work in Sanabria
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Hanna Pettersson
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Livestock guardian dogs at work in Asturias
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Hanna Pettersson
Traditional methods for living with wolves
Traditional farming practices are still prevalent in Spain, where shepherds graze their livestock across wide geographic areas. As their animals roam freely, they face the risk of predation from wolves.
Some communities, such as one studied in Sierra de La Culebra in north west Spain, have lived alongside wolves for generations and they have adopted various successful coping methods to coexist.
They protect their animals by enclosing them overnight, accompanying them on foot during the day and keeping guardian dogs with their flocks at all times.
But these methods are highly work intensive and costly, particularly for small-scale farmers whose economic margins often are very narrow. In Spain, the few subsidies available for preventative methods have so far been focussed on communities where wolves have returned and caused rampant social conflict. People in harmonious areas have been left, in the best of cases, with bureaucratically cumbersome and inefficient compensation payments, if they can prove their animal was killed by a wolf, which is often impossible.
Ms Petterson said: “If we don’t recognise, celebrate, and support these communities, it will be almost impossible for them to pass on their way of life to future generations and we will lose the knowledge and skills of those who have successfully lived alongside wolves for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Without support, coexistence farmers will always be worse off than those who live in areas without wolves, and that sends the wrong signal.
“We need coexistence communities to thrive, to provide a positive example and illustrate to those who are anticipating the return of wolves that living with them is possible.”
The research identifies examples of successful new approaches to supporting communities, which have helped to improve coexistence conditions. In Asturias, where wolves have returned and caused significant social conflicts and damage to the livestock sector, a local NGO have set up a certification scheme that ensures high and reliable prices for “pro-biodiversity” lamb. It provides the shepherds with flexibility and funds to ensure compliance to the conditions as they see fit, and public acknowledgement of their environmental services in the shops and restaurants where their meat is sold.
Another approach has been led by the Spanish charity Fundación Entretantos, a local partner of the study. They created and ran roundtable discussions for communities experiencing conflict due to the arrival of wolves.
Julio Majadas Andray, a member of the foundation, emphasised the importance of solutions beyond technical fixes to protect livestock: “We should not commit the error of thinking that the problems will be solved without there being a clear intention to work with the local agents and the people who are involved in the conflict.
“Spanish people’s coexistence with the wolf is currently passing through a very sensitive and complex phase that has dragged on for years.
“We must ensure that solutions are built collectively and that decision-making is supported by a large part of society - especially by the people, entities and groups affected.”
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PhD researcher Hanna Pettersson talking about wolves in a local school
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C.E.I.P. San Martín, Garganta la Olla
Conditions for human-carnivore coexistence
The researchers argue that four key conditions are needed for successful coexistence of people and large carnivores:
Effective institutions – both formal and informal, to provide support and incentives, transparent and participatory decision-making, and which can tailor the demands of global conservation priorities to local conditions and mediate disputes as they arise
Stable carnivore persistence – local conditions that allow the long-term survival of a species, including habitat to live in, abundant prey and genetic diversity within the population
Social legitimacy – trust in local decision makers and public acceptance of both the procedure and the outcomes of decision-making
Low levels of risk or vulnerability – minimal interaction between humans and the carnivores, maintained livelihood resilience and the ability of both people and carnivores to adapt their behaviour to life in the vicinity of one another
The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.
IMAGE: UC SAN DIEGO POSTDOCTORAL SCHOLAR MING LI, FIRST AUTHOR OF A NATURE COMMUNICATIONS PAPER DESCRIBING A CRISPR-BASED PRECISION-GUIDED STERILE INSECT TECHNIQUE IN AEDES AEGYPTI MOSQUITOES, SHOWN SORTING PGSIT MOSQUITO LARVAE.view more
CREDIT: AKBARI LAB, UC SAN DIEGO
Leveraging advancements in CRISPR-based genetic engineering, researchers at the University of California San Diego have created a new system that restrains populations of mosquitoes that infect millions each year with debilitating diseases.
The new precision-guided sterile insect technique, or pgSIT, alters genes linked to male fertility--creating sterile offspring--and female flight in Aedes aegypti, the mosquito species responsible for spreading wide-ranging diseases including dengue fever, chikungunya and Zika.
“pgSIT is a new scalable genetic control system that uses a CRISPR-based approach to engineer deployable mosquitoes that can suppress populations,” said UC San Diego Biological Sciences Professor Omar Akbari. “Males don’t transmit diseases so the idea is that as you release more and more sterile males, you can suppress the population without relying on harmful chemicals and insecticides.”
Details of the new pgSIT are described September 10, 2021, in the journal Nature Communications.
pgSIT differs from “gene drive” systems that could suppress disease vectors by passing desired genetic alterations indefinitely from one generation to the next. Instead, pgSIT uses CRISPR to sterilize male mosquitoes and render female mosquitoes, which spread disease, as flightless. The system is self-limiting and is not predicted to persist or spread in the environment, two important safety features that should enable acceptance for this technology.
Akbari says the envisioned pgSIT system could be implemented by deploying eggs of sterile males and flightless females at target locations where mosquito-borne disease spread is occurring.
“Supported by mathematical models, we empirically demonstrate that released pgSIT males can compete, and suppress and even eliminate mosquito populations,” the researchers note in the Nature Communications paper. “This platform technology could be used in the field, and adapted to many vectors, for controlling wild populations to curtail disease in a safe, confinable and reversible manner.”
Although molecular genetic engineering tools are new, farmers have been sterilizing male insects to protect their crops since at least the 1930s. United States growers in the 1950s began using radiation to sterilize pest species such as the New World Screwworm fly, which is known to destroy livestock. Similar radiation-based methods continue today, along with the use of insecticides. pgSIT is designed as a much more precise and scalable technology since it uses CRISPR—not radiation or chemicals—to alter key mosquito genes. The system is based on a method that was announced by UC San Diego in 2019 by Akbari and his colleagues in the fruit fly Drosophila.
As envisioned, Akbari says pgSIT eggs can be shipped to a location threatened by mosquito-borne disease or developed at an on-site facility that could produce the eggs for nearby deployment. Once the pgSIT eggs are released in the wild, typically at a peak rate of 100-200 pgSIT eggs per Aedes aegypti adult, sterile pgSIT males will emerge and eventually mate with females, driving down the wild population as needed.
Beyond Aedes aegypti, the researchers believe the pgSIT technology could be directed to other species that spread disease.
“… This study suggests pgSIT may be an efficient technology for mosquito population control and the first example of one suited for real-world release,” the researchers say. “Going forward, pgSIT may provide an efficient, safe, scalable, and environmentally friendly alternative next-generation technology for wild population control of mosquitoes resulting in wide-scale prevention of human disease transmission.”
The complete list of paper co-authors: Ming Li, Ting Yang, Michelle Bui, Stephanie Gamez, Tyler Wise, Nikolay Kandul, Junru Liu, Lenissa Alcantara, Haena Lee, Jyotheeswara Edula, Robyn Raban, Yinpeng Zhan, Yijin Wang, Nick DeBeaubien, Jieyan Chen, Hector Sanchez C., Jared Bennett, Igor Antoshechkin, Craig Montell, John Marshall and Omar Akbari.
Funding for the research was provided by a DARPA Safe Genes Program Grant (HR0011-17-2-0047); the National Institutes of Health (R01AI151004 and R56-AI153334); the U.S. Army Research Office (cooperative agreement W911NF-19-2-0026 for the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies); and the Innovative Genomics Institute.
Note: Akbari is a co-founder with equity interest, and former consultant, scientific advisory board member and income recipient of Agragene Inc.
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An illustration by study coauthor Stephanie Gamez depicts flightless females and sterile male mosquitoes, features of the new precision-guided sterile insect technique, or pgSIT, which is
designed to control disease-spreading Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
IMAGE: FIGURE 1: THE NASA HAUGHTON-MARS PROJECT RETURNS TO APOLLO ERA TRAINING AND SPACESUIT TESTING SITES IN OREGON. LEFT: APOLLO ASTRONAUT WALTER CUNNINGHAM IN A SPACESUIT FOR ANALOG STUDIES AT THE BIG OBSIDIAN LAVA FLOW, OREGON IN SEPTEMBER 1964. RIGHT: SPACESUIT ENGINEER ASHLEY HIMMELMANN IN A COLLINS AEROSPACE SPACESUIT FOR ANALOG STUDIES WITH INTEGRATED INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND INFORMATICS SUBSYSTEM (IT IS) AT THE SAME LOCATION IN AUGUST 2021.view more
CREDIT: (PHOTO NASA HAUGHTON-MARS PROJECT / P. LEE).
September 9, 2021, Mountain View, CA -- The NASA Haughton-Mars Project (HMP) and collaborating organizations SETI Institute, Mars Institute, Collins Aerospace, and Ntention are announcing the successful field testing of new spacesuit technologies for future astronaut science and exploration operations on the Moon and Mars.
The field tests were conducted in Oregon’s High Desert region, at the same sites once used by Apollo astronauts to train and test spacesuits in preparation for their historic journeys to the Moon. Several new sites also considered relevant for future Moon and Mars exploration in hindsight of the lessons from Apollo and from recent robotic missions to the Moon and Mars, were also visited.
“It was exciting to be in Oregon to revisit some of the very locations where, in 1964 and 1966, the Apollo astronauts received field training in geology and tested spacesuits,” said Dr. Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute and the Mars Institute, and director of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project at NASA Ames Research Center. “We have also identified new candidate sites for Moon and Mars exploration preparation, now that we know more, compared to the mid-60s, about the Moon and Mars.”
The sites visited by the NASA Haughton-Mars Project team included the main Apollo legacy training and spacesuit test sites in Oregon: Lava Butte, Big Obsidian Lava Flow, Fort Rock, Hole in the Ground, and Yapoah Lava Flow at McKenzie Pass. New sites visited in preparation for exploring the Moon’s south polar highlands and lunar caves, and eventually Mars, included Pumice Slope at Crater Lake National Park, the Painted Hills at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, and Skylight Cave, a lava tube with multiple roof collapse openings. The sites were accessed with support from the United States Forestry Service Deschutes National Forest and the National Park Service.
NASA’s current Artemis Program aims to land the first woman and next man on the Moon, near the lunar South Pole, by the end of this decade and build on this experience to eventually send humans to Mars. In anticipation of the science and exploration needs of future Moon and Mars astronauts, several new technologies are undergoing development and testing to help optimize the safety, productivity, and cost-effectiveness of future EVAs (Extra-Vehicular Activities) or spacewalks.
Central to the week’s field tests was Collins Aerospace’s innovative, integrated Information Technologies and Informatics Subsystem (IT IS). Currently, astronauts on spacewalks rely on spiral-bound notebooks attached to their elbows to flip through checklists. The Collins IT IS allows astronauts to autonomously track these checklists and act upon the status of their health and that of their EVA companions (vital signs, exertion levels) through a display system in their helmets. They can also monitor the performance of a wide range of EVA systems - power, oxygen, water reserves - the astronauts’ location, EVA elapsed time, EVA time remaining, and range from supplies. The IT IS also displays maps and a wide array of other data supporting astronaut science and exploration activities, such as imaging, note-taking, and sample management.
“We see the integration of our Information Technologies and Informatics Subsystem into a spacesuit as a game-changer for conducting EVAs,” says Greg Quinn, lead for advanced spacesuit development at Collins Aerospace. “The Collins IT IS will help enhance the autonomy, productivity, and safety of future explorers.”
“While real-time mission support from Earth will remain important, exploring the lunar poles, where NASA intends to land Artemis astronauts, means that direct-to-earth communications will not, at times, be possible, even via orbital relays. So we need to provide future lunar explorers with the means to safely perform more autonomous EVAs”, explains Lee. “The need for autonomy will be further compounded in the case of Mars, where communications delays will drastically limit real-time mission support from Earth.”
Field tests in Oregon began at dawn hours each morning to take advantage of grazing solar illumination in anticipation of challenging lighting conditions at the lunar South Pole. The field sites accessed offered a wide range of terrain roughness, slopes, topographic complexity, and scales of operation anticipated during future EVAs in the lunar South Pole region. EVA systems requirements for future lunar pit and cave exploration were also investigated, a first for a spacesuit manufacturer.
One of the field campaign’s key achievements was successfully integrating the Norwegian company Ntention’s innovative Astronaut Smart Glove (ASG) system with Collins Aerospace’s IT IS. The ASG is an advanced human-machine interface (HMI) integrated into the spacesuit helmet and glove. It allows an astronaut to remotely operate a wide range of possible robotic assets such as robotic arms, cranes, rovers, and even drones, with minimal hand gestures compatible with wearing a constricting and rigid pressurized spacesuit. The ASG field test demonstrated the successful collection of rock sample materials from remote locations not directly accessible to the astronaut.
“Our field test this year demonstrated how an HMI like our Astronaut Smart Glove system can be seamlessly integrated into a spacesuit and offer future astronauts on the Moon and Mars much greater perception, reach, and control of their surroundings,” said Moina Tamuly, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Ntention.
“By coming to Oregon, we wanted to recapture Apollo’s historic legacy, but also scout out new experiences for future astronaut training and spacesuit testing as we take on this century’s new challenges, the lunar poles and Mars,” said Lee. “I’m excited to report that we did catch a glimpse of this exciting future this week.”
About the Haughton-Mars Project The Haughton-Mars Project (HMP) is a field research project centered on the scientific study of the Haughton impact crater and surrounding terrain on Devon Island, High Arctic, viewed as a Moon and Mars analog. The HMP also leads field exploration studies to help plan the future robotic and human exploration of the Moon and Mars.
The Haughton-Mars Project engages several collaborating organizations and is supported in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under Cooperative Agreement NNX14AT27A between NASA and the SETI Institute. The HMP is headquartered at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
The HMP’s base camp on Devon Island, the Haughton-Mars Project Research Station (HMPRS), is operated by the Mars Institute. The HMPRS is the largest privately-operated polar research station on Earth and a leading field research facility dedicated to planetary science and exploration. Dr Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute and SETI Institute serves as the project’s director. Due to travel restrictions to the Arctic associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the HMP-2021 summer field campaign was rescoped and replanned to take place in Oregon in August, 2021.
About Mars Institute The Mars Institute is a non-profit research organization dedicated to the advancement of Mars science, exploration, and the public understanding of Mars. Research at the Mars Institute focuses Mars and other planetary destinations that may serve as stepping-stones to Mars, in particular Mars’ moons, our Moon, and near-Earth objects. The Mars Institute investigates the technologies and strategies that will enable and optimize the future human exploration of Mars. The Mars Institute operates the Haughton-Mars Project Research Station on Devon Island, High Arctic.
About the SETI Institute Founded in 1984, the SETI Institute is a non-profit, multidisciplinary research and education organization whose mission is to lead humanity’s quest to understand the origins and prevalence of life and intelligence in the universe and share that knowledge with the world. Research at the SETI Institute encompasses the physical and biological sciences and leverages expertise in data analytics, machine learning and advanced signal detection technologies. The SETI Institute is a distinguished research partner for industry, academia and government agencies, including NASA and NSF.
About Collins Aerospace Collins Aerospace is a leader in technologically advanced and intelligent solutions for the global aerospace and defense industry. Collins Aerospace has the capabilities, comprehensive portfolio and expertise to solve customers’ toughest challenges and to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving global market. It is one of the four businesses that form Raytheon Technologies.
About Ntention Ntention is a Norwegian deep tech start-up founded by a group of engineering students from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) with a passion for human-machine interaction. The aim of the company is to radically improve the way one interacts with technology. Ntention is developing a user-centered interaction framework, that captures the user’s intention through multi-modal input methods (such as motion capture, eye-tracking, and voice commands) and translates it into machine command. The system is called the Ntention Interaction Framework (NIF). NIF will be a game changer in several industries, ranging from interaction systems for astronauts, to meeting solutions using VR in the construction industry and has previously been demonstrated in several use-cases, including a music production and performance glove, and the control of robotic arms.
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Figure 2:NASA Haughton-Mars Project field test of new technologies for human Moon and Mars science and exploration in Oregon. Shown here is spacesuit engineer Jake Rohrig in the Collins Aerospace spacesuit for analog studies with its integrated Information Technologies and Informatics Subsystem (IT IS). Test site: Little Nash Crater, Oregon.
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(Photo NASA Haughton-Mars Project / P. Lee)
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Figure 3: NASA Haughton-Mars Project field test of new technologies for human Moon and Mars science and exploration in Oregon. Shown here is spacesuit engineer Ashley Himmelmann in the Collins Aerospace spacesuit for analog studies examining and documenting a rock sample via the spacesuit’s integrated Information Technologies and Informatics Subsystem (IT IS). Test site: Lava Butte, Oregon. (Photo NASA Haughton-Mars Project / Pascal Lee).
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(Photo NASA Haughton-Mars Project / Pascal Lee).
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Figure 4: Left: The lunar south polar regions where Artemis astronauts will land present terrain more challenging in roughness, slopes, and illumination, than the areas explored by the Apollo astronauts. The Painted Hills at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument (Right) offer barren terrain with slopes, terrain textures, and surface material strengths relevant to those anticipated at the lunar South Pole, albeit with different composition and at smaller scales. (Credit: Left: NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter-based visualization. Right: NASA Haughton-Mars Project-2021-Oregon / Pascal Lee).
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(Credit: Left: NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter-based visualization. Right: NASA Haughton-Mars Project-2021-Oregon / Pascal Lee).
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Figure 5: NASA Haughton-Mars Project field test of new technologies for human Moon and Mars science and exploration in Oregon. Shown here is the Collins Aerospace spacesuit for analog studies, equipped with integrated Information Technologies and Informatics Subsystem (IT IS), undergoing testing in the Moon and Mars-like landscape of the Painted Hills at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.
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(Credit NASA Haughton-Mars Project / Sawan Dalal)
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Figure 6: NASA Haughton-Mars Project field test of new technologies for human Moon and Mars science and exploration in Oregon. Shown here is the Collins Aerospace spacesuit for analog studies, equipped with integrated Information Technologies and Informatics Subsystem (IT IS), during a study of requirements for future human pit and cave exploration on the Moon and Mars. Such a field study in a cave is a first for a spacesuit manufacturer. Test site: Skylight Cave, Oregon.
CREDIT
(Credit NASA Haughton-Mars Project / Pascal Lee).
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Figure 7: NASA Haughton-Mars Project field test of new technologies for human Moon and Mars science and exploration in Oregon. Shown here is the Collins Aerospace spacesuit for analog studies, equipped with integrated Information Technologies and Informatics Subsystem (IT IS), during a study of requirements for future human pit and cave exploration on the Moon and Mars. Such a field study in a cave is a first for a spacesuit manufacturer. Test site: Skylight Cave, Oregon.
