cross pond high tech

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Struggling to get a phone signal at home on planet Earth? Perhaps you’ll have better luck on the moon.

Nokia has been selected by NASA to build the first cellular network on the moon, the Finnish company said on Monday, as the U.S. space agency plans for a future where humans return there and establish lunar settlements.

NASA aims to return humans to the moon by 2024 and dig in for a long-term presence there under its Artemis programme.

Nokia said the first wireless broadband communications system in space would be built on the lunar surface in late 2022, before humans make it back there.

It will partner with a Texas-based private space craft design company, Intuitive Machines, to deliver the equipment to the moon on their lunar lander. The network will configure itself and establish a 4G/LTE communications system on the moon, Nokia said, though the aim would be to eventually switch to 5G

The network will give astronauts voice and video communications capabilities, and allow telemetry and biometric data exchange, as well as the deployment and remote control of lunar rovers and other robotic devices, according to the company.

The network will be designed to withstand the extreme conditions of the launch and lunar landing, and to operate in space. It will have to be sent to the moon in an extremely compact form to meet the stringent size, weight and power constraints of space payloads.

Nokia said the network would be using 4G/LTE, in use worldwide for the last decade, instead of the latest 5G technology, because the former was a more known quantity with proven reliability. The company would also “pursue space applications of LTE’s successor technology, 5G”.

SpaceIL's first attempt at a private Moon landing didn't go according to plan. However, that isn't deterring the team from giving it another shot. Founder Morris Khan has announced that the team will build another Beresheet lander and "complete the mission." The task force behind the new lander will start its work "first thing" on April 14th, he said.

Operating independently for the first time since Chandrayaan-2was launched on July 22, Vikram, the lander, underwent its first manoeuvre around Moon.
Isro successfully completed the first de-orbiting manoeuvre at 8.50 am Tuesday, using for the first time, the propulsion systems on Vikram. All these days all operations were carried out by systems on the orbiter, from which Vikram, carrying Pragyan (rover) inside it, separated from on Monday.
"The duration of the maneuver was 4 seconds. The orbit of Vikram is 104kmX128 km, the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter continues to orbit Moon in the existing orbit and both the orbiter and lander are healthy," Isro said.

The next de-orbiting maneuver is scheduled on September 04 between 3.30 am and 4.30 am.
As reported by TOI, the landing module (Vikram and Pragyan) successfully separated from the orbiter at 1.15 pm Monday (September 2), pushing India's Chandrayaan-2 mission into the last and most crucial leg: Moon landing.
"The operation was great in the sense that we were able to separate the lander and rover from the orbiter—It is the first time in the history of Isro that we've separated two modules in space. This was very critical and we did it very meticulously," Isro chairman K Sivan told TOI soon after the separation.

Margaret Hamilton wasn’t supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three-year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn—she wanted a graduate degree in math.

But the Apollo space program came along. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change the future of what was humanly—and digitally—possible.

As a working mother in the 1960s, Hamilton was unusual; but as a spaceship programmer, Hamilton was positively radical. Hamilton would bring her daughter Lauren by the lab on weekends and evenings. While 4-year-old Lauren slept on the floor of the office overlooking the Charles River, her mother programmed away, creating routines that would ultimately be added to the Apollo’s command module computer.

“People used to say to me, ‘How can you leave your daughter? How can you do this?’” Hamilton remembers. But she loved the arcane novelty of her job. She liked the camaraderie—the after-work drinks at the MIT faculty club; the geek jokes, like saying she was “going to branch left minus” around the hallway. Outsiders didn’t have a clue. But at the lab, she says, “I was one of the guys.”

Then, as now, “the guys” dominated tech and engineering. Like female coders in today’s diversity-challenged tech industry, Hamilton was an outlier. It might surprise today’s software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day.

‘When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West.’ — Margaret Hamilton

As Hamilton’s career got under way, the software world was on the verge of a giant leap, thanks to the Apollo program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961. At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code for the world’s first portable computer. She became an expert in systems programming and won important technical arguments. “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it,” Hamilton says.

This was a decade before Microsoft and nearly 50 years before Marc Andreessen would observe that software is, in fact, “eating the world.” The world didn’t think much at all about software back in the early Apollo days. The original document laying out the engineering requirements of the Apollo mission didn’t even mention the word software, MIT aeronautics professor David Mindell writes in his book Digital Apollo. “Software was not included in the schedule, and it was not included in the budget.” Not at first, anyhow.