Indian team to compete in NASA's Human Exploration Rover Challenge

A group of Indian students is part of 80 teams that will participate in the US space agency's "Human Exploration Rover Challenge" to help NASA realise its goals for future exploration to Mars and beyond.

Nearly 80 teams from the US, India, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Colombia, Russia and Puerto Rico will compete in NASA's annual challenge to be held at the US Space and Rocket Centre in Huntsville, Alabama on April 8 and 9.

The rover challenge requires student teams to design, construct, test and race human-powered rovers through an obstacle course that simulates the terrain potentially found on distant planets, asteroids or moons.

Teams race to finish the three-quarter-mile-long obstacle course in the fastest time, vying for prizes in various divisions, NASA said in a statement.

This year's event incorporates two new and important changes. Teams are required to design and fabricate their own wheels.

Any component contacting the course surface for traction and mobility, including, but not limited to wheels, tracks, treads or belts cannot be purchased or considered an off-the-shelf product.

The second new feature is an optional "Sample Return challenge".

Teams competing in this separate competition will collect four samples -- liquid, small pebbles, large rocks and soil samples -- using a mechanical arm or grabber they design and build.

The event will conclude with a ceremony at the Davidson Centre for Space Exploration in Huntsville where the awards will be presented for best design, rookie team, pit crew award and other accomplishments.

Inspired by the lunar roving vehicles of the Apollo moon missions, the competition challenges students to solve engineering problems, while highlighting NASA's commitment to inspiring new generations of scientists, engineers and explorers.

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Flexible Camera Developed That Can Be Wrapped Around Objects

A team led by an Indian-origin professor at Columbia University has created a novel sheet camera that can be wrapped around everyday objects to capture images that cannot be taken with one or more conventional cameras. "Cameras today capture the world from essentially a single point in space. While the camera industry has made remarkable progress in shrinking the camera to a tiny device with ever increasing imaging quality, we are exploring a radically different approach to imaging," said Shree K Nayar, computer science professor at Columbia University. "We believe there are numerous applications for cameras that are large in format but very thin and highly flexible," added Nayar who graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, in 1984. Nayar's team designed and fabricated a flexible lens array that adapts its optical properties when the sheet camera is bent. This optical adaptation enables the device to produce high quality images over a wide ...

Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) Leaked in Press Images

The anticipated successor to the popular Samsung Galaxy J1, tipped to be called the Galaxy J1 (2016), has once again been leaked in images on the Web. While in the previous leaks we have seen the unannounced smartphone in its Black colour variant, the new leaked image shows the handset in two additional colour variants. The image tweeted by @evleaks on Monday shows the Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) smartphone in Gold and White colour variants. The design of the handset also fall in line with the models leaked in images previously. It is worth mentioning that the screen bezel seen in the image stay black in all the three colour variants. The smartphone is seen featuring a physical home button, along with a multi-window, and a back capacitive button on either side. At the back, the smartphone sports a camera at the centre with a LED flash and a speaker on either sides. Samsung is yet to announce the smartphone. The Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016)leaked in images last month as well...

IntellectBeat

Search This Blog