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Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite-based internet provider, will double in speed “later this year”, according to a tweet by Elon Musk, posted as a reply to someone who had just received their Starlink beta kit (via CNET). The company currently promises speeds between 50 to 150Mbps, and Musk specifically calls out a 300Mbps goal in his tweet. 

While 300Mbps isn’t unheard-of speed, it’s faster than many people currently have access to, especially in the low-to-medium population density areas that Musk talks about targeting in a second tweet. 

In the reply, Elon also tells the person that their latency should improve to around 20ms as well. In the speed test screenshots, their latency was at 34 and 44ms respectively, while Starlink’s website says to expect between 20 and 40ms during the beta. 

The speed increase and latency improvements should come as a nice surprise to anyone who put down a $100 Starlink pre-order. However, it’s well known that Elon’s promises about the future should be taken with a grain of salt, especially if they’re about timelines. Still, this shows that SpaceX is looking to speed up Starlink, and it might be able to keep pace with what’s available from a copper wire running to your house.

By Bijan Stephen  Feb 19, 2021, 12:45pm EST

Yesterday, NASA landed a rover named Perseverance on Mars. I, along with 2 million other people, watched the landing happen live on YouTube. It was beautiful. I mean, here’s this little robot dude that’s traveled millions and millions of miles through the barrenness of space, and now it’s just hanging out on Mars taking pics and scientific samples! (Perseverance joins older sibling Curiosity on the surface of the Red Planet. Hope they have a nice time together!) 

In any case, Perseverance didn’t traverse the vastness of space alone. Ingenuity, a tiny helicopter, tagged along for the ride. As it’s primarily a technology demonstration, Ingenuity’s destiny is to attempt the first powered flight on any planet other than Earth and to hopefully be the blueprint for future Mars missions. It’s also running on Linux. 

“This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars,” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) senior engineer Tim Canham said in an interview with the the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). “The software framework that we’re using is one that we developed at JPL for cubesats and instruments, and we open-sourced it a few years ago.” It’s called F’ (pronounced “F prime”). The fact that it’s open source means if you want to fly with Linux here on Earth using the same software JPL does, you absolutely can. 

“It’s kind of an open-source victory, because we’re flying an open-source operating system and an open-source flight software framework and flying commercial parts that you can buy off the shelf if you wanted to do this yourself someday,” Canham said.

Great stuff. It’s cool that Perseverance, Curiosity, and Ingenuity have all found a new home on the surface Mars. Though I still think it’s cooler that space is pretty obviously inhospitable to human life, and yet we still put people up there anyway.

By Chaim Gartenberg@cgartenberg  Mar 2, 2021, 2:57pm EST

NASA’s brand-new Perseverance rover is the most advanced machine that’s ever landed on Mars. But when it comes to rovers, “state of the art” is a subjective term. Perseverance is running on none other than a PowerPC 750, a single-core, 233MHz processor with just 6 million transistors that’s most famous for powering the original “Bondi blue” iMac from 1998. It’s the same type of processor that NASA already uses in its Curiosity rover. 

That may seem like a waste to some. After all, even with the difficulty of buying computer parts these days, surely NASA could have found the budget for something like Intel’s $500 Core i9-10900K CPU (with 10 cores and a max clock speed of 5.3GHz) somewhere in the $2.7 billion cost of Perseverance. But as New Scientist explains, such an advanced chip is actually a detriment to the unique operating conditions of Mars.

That’s largely because Mars’ atmosphere offers far less protection from harmful radiation and charged particles than Earth’s atmosphere. A bad burst of radiation can badly wreck the sensitive electronics of a modern processor — and the more complex the chip, the more can go wrong. Plus, at 138 million miles away, it’s not like NASA can just swap out the processor if things go sideways. Because of those conditions, Perseverance actually features two computing modules: one is a backup just in case something goes wrong. (A third copy of the module is also on board for image analysis.)

To make the system even more durable, the PowerPC 750 chip in Perseverance is a little different than the one in the old iMacs. It’s technically a RAD750 chip, a special variant that’s hardened against radiation and costs upwards of $200,000. The chip is popular for spacecraft, too: in addition to Perseverance and Curiosity, it also powers the Fermi Space Telescope, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Deep Impact comet-hunting spacecraft, and the Kepler telescope, among others. 

While the processor may be weak compared to a modern smartphone or gaming PC, NASA’s spec sheet for Perseverance notes that it’s far more powerful than earlier rovers like Spirit or Opportunity: its 200MHz clock speed is 10 times faster than those older rovers, and with 2GB of flash memory, it offers eight times the storage. (Rounding things out, Perseverance also has 256MB of RAM in case you were looking to build your own rover.)

But while the chip itself has been to Mars before, Perseverance features some new computer technology that’s debuting on the planet for the first time: Linux, which powers the Ingenuity helicopter that will attempt to fly autonomously on Mars as part of Perseverance’s mission.

SpaceX will launch its next batch of Starlink internet satellites into orbit tonight (June 3) after two weeks of weather delays and the company’s historic first astronaut flight. 

A Falcon 9 rocket, which SpaceX has already flown four past missions, will launch 60 new Starlink satellites into orbit from the company’s pad at Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida. Liftoff is set for 9:25 p.m. EDT (0125 June 4 GMT). 

You can watch the launch live here and on Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, beginning about 10 minutes before launch. You can also watch the launch directly from SpaceX’s launch website here and via SpaceX’s YouTube page.

Tonight’s Starlink launch, the eighth mission for SpaceX’s satellite constellation project, was originally scheduled to launch in mid-May. It was delayed by a series of weather and schedule conflicts. If weather prevents a launch tonight, a backup date is available on Thursday (June 4), the tenth anniversary of SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 launch in 2010.

SpaceX has launched 422 Starlink satellites into orbit since 2019 as it builds a 12,000-satellite megaconstellation in orbit. The project aims to provide high-speed internet service to customers around the world, particularly in remote or under-served areas. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said that SpaceX would need at least 400 Starlink satellites for basic service, with 800 needed for moderate coverage. 

With so many Starlink satellites in orbit (SpaceX is operating the largest satellite fleet ever), the company has come under fire from astronomers and scientists worried about impacts to astronomical research. Last week, SpaceNews reported that SpaceX will soon add “sunshades” to all of its Starlink satellites using a VisorSat design that limits reflectivity. Patricia Cooper, SpaceX’s vice president of satellite government relations, said the company the sunshade project will begin after the last 80 satellites of the current design are launched, according to SpaceNews.

The Falcon 9 booster launching the upcoming Starlink satellites will make its fifth trip to space with the mission. It’s the second time SpaceX will launch a booster five times. This mission’s booster launched two Starlink missions earlier this year, the Iridium-8 mission in 2019 and the Telstar 18 VANTAGE satellite in 2018.

A plan to launch tonight’s Starlink mission on May 17 was postponed 24 hours after weather delayed the flight of an Atlas V rocket carrying an X-37B space plane for the U.S. Space Force at a nearby pad. A May 18 launch attempt was called off due to weather in the Falcon 9’s offshore landing zone, and SpaceX stood down from a May 19 launch due to the weather impacts of Tropical Storm Arthur. 

After that last delay, SpaceX representatives said the company would stand down until after the launch of its Demo-2 mission for NASA. Demo-2 was SpaceX’s first Crew Dragon launch with astronauts. It launched astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on May 30 and arrived at the International Space Station a day later.

“In late April, skywatchers in the Northern Hemisphere will get a view of the Lyrid meteor shower, the dusty trail of a comet with a centuries-long orbit around the sun. The Lyrid meteors streak across the sky between April 16 and April 30, so skywatchers have a chance to see them during that window, weather permitting.

The peak of the Lyrid meteor shower will be overnight on April 21-22, NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke told Space.com. As with most meteor showers, the peak viewing time will be before dawn, but the Lyrids will be visible beginning at about 10:30 p.m. local time. The moon will be a thin crescent only about two days from the new moon, Cooke said, so the moonlight won’t flood your observations. 

While the average Lyrid shower produces 15 to 20 meteors per hour, this year skywatchers can expect to see about 10 per hour, depending on how clear and dark your sky is, Cooke said. Some years, the Lyrid meteor shower intensifies and can produce up to 100 meteors per hour in what’s called an “outburst,” but it is difficult to predict exactly when that will happen. 

“People say there is some periodicity there,” Cooke said, “but the data doesn’t support that.” Although there is an average of 30 years between these outbursts, that’s only an average; the actual number of years between the events varies, Cooke said. 

The radiant — the point from which the meteors appear to originate — will be high in the evening sky in the constellation Lyra to the northeast of Vega, one of the brightest stars visible in the night sky this time of year. Don’t look directly toward the radiant, though, because you might miss the meteors with the longest tails.

The Lyrid meteor shower is of medium brightness, but not as luminous as the famous Perseid meteor shower in August, which tends to produce more prominent trails, Cooke said.

Lyrid meteors are little pieces of Comet Thatcher, a long-period comet that orbits the sun about once every 415 years. Pieces of debris left in the comet’s wake, however, make an appearance every year. (Comet Thatcher’s most recent perihelion, or closest approach to the sun, was in 1861. It won’t be back until the year 2276.) 

Meteor showers occur when the Earth crosses the path of a comet, colliding with a trail of comet crumbs. That’s why they happen around the same time every year and appear to originate from specific points in the sky. As they burn up in the atmosphere, the meteors leave bright streaks in the sky commonly referred to as “shooting stars.” 

Lyrid meteors come in fast — though not as fast as the Leonids, which peak in November, Cooke said. “The Leonids hit us head-on,” he said. “The Lyrids are more like hitting the left front fender.”

The Lyrids are one of the oldest recorded showers, Cooke said, with observations going back to 687 B.C. You don’t need any kind of special equipment to see the meteors; just look up at the dark sky, be patient and enjoy the show. “

NASA is now offering some fun activities for Kids and Families. You’re never too old to enjoy the mysteries of our solar system.

Start your exploring now at the link below:

https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-at-home-for-kids-and-families