There had been many previous attempts to develop cameras that mimic the eyes of insects, fish and other living creatures. However, development of artificial vision systems that can see both underwater and on land has apparently been pretty limited. Further, biomimetic cameras are usually restricted by their 180-degree field-of-view. Now, a team of scientists from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) and Seoul National University in Korea have developed a new artificial vision system with a 360-degree field-of-view that can work on amphibious machines.

The team was inspired by the semi-terrestrial fiddler crab, which has a 3D omnidirectional field-of-view. They evolved to be able to look at almost everything at once on land and underwater to avoid attacks and to see communicate with fellow fiddler crabs. Scientists have apparently been having issues finding a way to sustain a camera's focusing capability when the environment changes, which is why this team has decided to take a closer look at the fiddler crab. 

The resulting artificial eye is a nondescript black ball that combines various materials and lenses. Its configuration allows light rays from multiple sources to converge at the same spot regardless of the refractive index of its surrounding — in other words, whether the device is underwater or not. The team tested the technology by conducting in-air and in-water experiments: To be specific, they projected "cutesy" objects in the shape of a dolphin, an airplane, a submarine, a fish and a ship at different distances and in various angles onto the artificial vision system. The result? They found that their camera was successfully able to see the objects whether they were or weren't submerged in water.

Young Min Song, professor of electrical engineering and computer Science at GIST, said:

"Our system could be of use in the development of unconventional applications, like panoramic motion detection and obstacle avoidance in continuously changing environments, as well as augmented and virtual reality."

Other potential applications Song didn't mention include population surveillance and environmental monitoring, which could make the technology an invaluable tool for keeping a close eye on endangered, vulnerable and threatened species. You can check out the scientists' paper with more details about the new vision system in Nature.

NASA will soon require a retired astronaut to serve as mission commander on all private flights to the International Space Station, according to an agency notice posted today. The policy — which has yet to be finalized — is intended to both increase passenger safety and reduce any strain on existing ISS operations. The former astronaut would provide “experienced guidance for the private astronauts during pre-flight preparation through mission execution." A number of changes also impact space tourists themselves, including new medical standards for private astronauts, more lead time for private research projects, changes to the policy for return cargo and additional time for private astronauts to adjust to microgravity.

According to the notice, the new changes were a result of “lessons learned” on last April’s Axiom Space flight, where passengers paid $55 million each to fly on the first private astronaut mission to the ISS. The hectic, two-week trip — where passengers also worked on their own research — took a toll on both the ISS crew and the Axiom crew themselves, according to interviews with astronauts following the mission’s return.

The Ax-1 mission actually had a former NASA astronaut at its helm — Michael López-Alegría, who currently is the Chief Astronaut at Axiom. The company was considering crewing future missions without a professional astronaut on board as that would free up space for an extra (paying) passenger on board, Axiom president Michael Suffredini said at a press conference earlier this year. The new policy by NASA is likely an effort to prevent such unsupervised missions.

Capable astronauts aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. Currently, there are well over 200 living retired NASA astronauts, according to the agency’s website — though it’s unclear how many would be willing to command future missions or meet the medical requirements. NASA itself is in the middle of an astronaut shortage — its current corps of 44 astronauts is the smallest since the 1970s. An agency report from January said a lack of working NASA astronauts could complicate future missions to the ISS and the moon.

NASA’s Artemis 1 test flight dummy will have company on its flight to the Moon. On Tuesday, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that Shaun the Sheep will join the unmanned mission when it hopefully takes off later this year. With the announcement, Aardman’s beloved character will technically become the first ESA astronaut to participate in the Artemis program.

“This is an exciting time for Shaun and for us at ESA,” ESA Director for Human and Robotic Exploration David Parker said. “We’re woolly very happy that he’s been selected for the mission and we understand that, although it might be a small step for a human, it’s a giant leap for lambkind.”

Following a successful fueling test of its next-generation SLS rocket, NASA said Artemis 1 could launch as early as August 23rd. The mission will send the agency’s Orion spacecraft – as well as Shaun and Commander Moonikin Campos – on a trip beyond the moon. If all goes according to plan, the capsule should return to Earth after spending 39 to 42 days in space. “The spacecraft will perform a flyby of the Moon, using lunar gravity to gain speed and propel itself 70 000 km beyond the Moon, almost half a million km from Earth – farther than any human, or sheep, has ever traveled,” the ESA said.

Aardman didn’t say as much, but Shaun will likely serve as the mission’s zero-g indicator. Ever since Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin took a small doll with him on the first-ever human spaceflight, it’s become a tradition for space crews to bring a plush toy on missions. Even some unmanned flights have taken part in the practice. In May, for instance, Boeing’s Starliner capsule brought Jebediah Kerman from Kerbal Space Program to the International Space Station.

NASA and its partners on the James Webb Space Telescope have shared more spectacular images from the observatory. This time around, they provided a fresh look at the Cartwheel Galaxy, which Hubble and other telescopes previously observed. NASA said JWST has been able to reveal new details about both star formation and the black hole at the center of the galaxy, which is around 500 million light years from Earth.

Using infrared light detection, JWST was able to peer through the dust that obscured the Cartwheel Galaxy from view when other telescopes observed it. The above image is a composite from JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). The JWST website has higher-resolution versions.

Data from NIRCam, which is the JWST's primary imager, is colored in blue, orange, and yellow, while MIRI's data is in red. NASA says the blue dots that appear in the red swirls of dust are individual stars or pockets of star formation. "NIRCam also reveals the difference between the smooth distribution or shape of the older star populations and dense dust in the core compared to the clumpy shapes associated with the younger star populations outside of it," the agency noted.

MIRI, meanwhile, was able to unearth more details about the galaxy's dust. It detected regions that are rich in hydrocarbons and other chemical compounds, along with silicate dust, which is similar to a lot of the dust present on Earth. Those regions form several spiraling spokes that led to the naming of the Cartwheel Galaxy. Hubble was previously able to image the spokes, but they're much clearer in the JWST observations. NASA also provided a MIRI-only image of the galaxy:

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI and Webb ERO Production Team

The Cartwheel Galaxy formed following a collision between a large spiral galaxy and a smaller one. It has two rings, a bright inner ring and a colorful outer one. The outer ring has been expanding from the center of the collision for around 440 million years.

The interior ring contains "a tremendous amount of hot dust," NASA said. The brightest areas host gigantic young star clusters. The outer ring, meanwhile, features star formation and supernovas. When it expands and hits surrounding gas, star formation occurs.

NASA, the European Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency and the Space Telescope Science Institute last month revealed the first stunning full-color images from JWST. They included one that showed the "Cosmic Cliffs" of the Carina Nebula and a peek at stars in the early stages of formation. The telescope has also caught sight of Earendel, the most distant star that we know of in the universe. While it's still very early days for the JWST's science operations, it's already helping scientists develop a deeper understanding of the cosmos — as well as providing some incredible images for the rest of us to admire.

After carrying the latest piece of the country’s Tiangong space station to orbit on July 24th, a Chinese Long March 5B rocket reentered Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday, creating a dazzling (albeit somewhat unsettling) display as it crashed down in the Indian Ocean. A Twitter user named Nazri Sulaiman captured a 27-second clip of the rocket’s first stage breaking up in the skies above Kuching, Malaysia. Sulaiman and others initially confused the spacecraft with a meteor shower until astronomers correctly identified the debris as the remains of a Chinese rocket.

On Saturday afternoon, US Space Command confirmed the Long March 5B re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at 12:45PM ET. China said most of the debris burned up in re-entry over the Sulu Sea between the Philippines and Malaysia. Unlike many modern rockets, including the SpaceX Falcon 9, the Long March 5B can’t reignite its engine to complete a controlled atmospheric re-entry. That has led to worry about where the rocket would land every time China has launched one. On a test flight in 2020, remnants of a Long March 5B fell on villages in the Ivory Coast, leading to property damage.

Following Saturday's re-entry, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized China for lack of transparency. “The People’s Republic of China did not share specific trajectory information as their Long March 5B rocket fell back to Earth,” he said on Twitter. “All spacefaring nations should follow established best practices, and do their part to share this type of information in advance to allow reliable predictions of potential debris impact risk, especially for heavy-lift vehicles, like the Long March 5B, which carry a significant risk of loss of life and property.”

China plans to employ the Long March 5B at least two more times. In October, the rocket will carry the third and final part of Tiangong to space. Next year, it will do the same with the country’s Xuntian space telescope.

In late 2020, Alphabet's DeepMind division unveiled its novel protein fold prediction algorithm, AlphaFold, and helped solve a scientific quandary that had stumped researchers for half a century. In the year since its beta release, half a million scientists from around the world have accessed the AI system's results and cited them in their own studies more than 4,000 times. On Thursday, DeepMind announced that it is increasing that access even further by radically expanding its publicly-available AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFoldDB) — from 1 million entries to 200 million entries.

Alphabet partnered with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) for this undertaking, which covers proteins from across the kingdoms of life — animal, plant, fungi, bacteria and others. The results can be viewed on the UniProt, Ensembl, and OpenTargets websites or downloaded individually via GitHub, "for the human proteome and for the proteomes of 47 other key organisms important in research and global health," per the AlphaFold website.

"AlphaFold is the singular and momentous advance in life science that demonstrates the power of AI," Eric Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, siad in a press statement Thursday. "Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take many months or years, it now takes seconds. AlphaFold has already accelerated and enabled massive discoveries, including cracking the structure of the nuclear pore complex. And with this new addition of structures illuminating nearly the entire protein universe, we can expect more biological mysteries to be solved each day."

AlphaFold has been leveraged in a number of applications, from advancing Leprosy and Chagas Disease research to conserving honeybees and addressing plastic pollution. DeepMind has also developed AIs that can outmatch top human players, master games without even knowing the rules and even improve traffic patterns. DeepMind's co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, left the company in January in order to launch a new venture, Inflection.AI, with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, shortly before accusations of ongoing sexual harassment were leveled at the company by a former employee.

Blue Origin has revealed when New Shepard's sixth crewed flight will take place. The NS-22 mission (New Shepard's 22nd launch overall) is set for August 4th, which is two months to the day after its previous spaceflight. The launch window opens at 9:30AM ET.

The company recently announced the passengers who will travel to the edge of space this time around. Among them are engineer Sara Sabry and entrepreneur Mário Ferreira, who will be the first Egyptian and Portuguese people to visit space, respectively. Mountaineer Vanessa O’Brien, meanwhile, will become the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, venture to Challenger Deep (believed to be the deepest point of the ocean) and cross the Kármán line — the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space.

The crew also includes Coby Cotton, a cofounder of the popular trickshot and comedy YouTube channel Dude Perfect, and telecoms executive Steve Young. The sixth passenger is Clint Kelly III, who started the Autonomous Land Vehicle project at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the 1980s. Blue Origin notes that Kelly is credited with creating the technology base that paved the way for modern self-driving vehicles.

Blue Origin

NASA has altered the Mars Sample Return Program meant to bring back the rock samples the Perseverance rover has been drilling and collecting from the Jezero crater in a big way. Instead of sending the Sample Fetch Rover to the red planet like originally planned, the program will make use of Perseverance itself and send over two helicopters based on the Ingenuity for backup. 

NASA and the ESA have been working together on the Sample Return Program over the past few years. The original plan was to send over the ESA-made Sample Fetch Rover to retrieve the samples and drive them back to a rocket, which will fly them up to be snatched by the Earth Return Orbiter. As The New York Times notes, though, the rover's design became too big until it could no longer fit in one lander with the return rocket. NASA would have to use one lander for each of them.

But why do that when there are other, more affordable options? The Sample Return Lander isn't scheduled to arrive on Mars until 2030, but NASA is confident that Perseverance will still be operational by then — after all, the Curiosity rover is still up and running almost 11 years after it launched. Under their renewed plan, the Perseverance will drive up to the lander to deliver 30 rock samples that will be loaded onto the rocket.

If anything goes wrong with Perseverance before then, though, the lander would settle closer to the rover and then the backup helicopters will fly over to retrieve the samples. While the helicopters are modeled after the Ingenuity, they'll have small wheels at the bottom. These will allow them to drive up to the samples that are sealed inside tubes and pick them up from the ground where the rover has dropped them.

The Ingenuity helicopter completed its first test flight on Mars in April 2021. NASA wasn't expecting much from the helicopter, which was just supposed to prove that flight on Mars is possible. It was also only supposed to fly a handful of times during a one-month technology demonstration, but it has accomplished 29 successful flights so far, with more on the way. Ingenuity's success has given NASA another means to retrieve the precious samples Perseverance has been collecting.

Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's science directorate, said during the press conference announcing the new Sample Return Program plans:

"We reached our decision based on new studies and recent achievements at Mars that allowed us to consider options that, frankly, weren’t available to us one year ago or before."

The Earth Return Orbiter and Sample Retrieval Lander will take off in the fall of 2027 and the summer of 2028, respectively. Their journey to and from the red planet will take years, so the samples aren't expected to arrive on Earth until 2033.

Doing just about anything in space is expensive, but a group of MIT scientists has found a way to bring down some costs — and perhaps help accelerate climate change research. The team has developed what MIT said are the first 3D-printed plasma sensors for use in satellites. The sensors can detect the chemical composition and distribution of ion energy in plasma in the upper atmosphere.

The researchers used a printable glass-ceramic material called Vitrolite to make the sensors, also known as retarding potential analyzers (RPAs). It's said to be more durable than other materials that are commonly used in sensors, such as thin-film coatings and silicon. Using a 3D-printing method, the team created sensors with complex shapes that MIT said can "withstand the wide temperature swings a spacecraft would encounter in lower Earth orbit." Vitrolite can handle temperatures of up to 800 degrees Celsius without melting, while polymers used in other RPAs start to break down at 400 degrees Celsius.

That means these sensors could be a good fit for low-cost cubesats. When they're used on orbiting satellites, RPAs can carry out chemical analysis and measure energy, which can help with weather predictions and monitoring climate change.

The scientists claim the sensors perform as well as similar devices that use semiconductors and are made in a clean room. Assembling RPAs in a clean room is an expensive process that can take several weeks. Making them with 3D printers and laser cutting takes just days and costs "tens of dollars."

Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, a principal scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories and senior author of a paper on the sensors, already sees room for improvement. He wants to reduce the thickness of the layers or pixel size of the glass-ceramic vat polymerization in the hope of creating more complex and precise devices. There's also the belief that "fully additively manufacturing the sensors would make them compatible with in-space manufacturing."

NASA has been working on space-based 3D printing for several years. It has printed wrenches on the International Space Station. As early as 2024, NASA plans to launch a demonstration spacecraft that can build, assemble and deploy a surrogate solar array to learn how the approach can benefit the Artemis program.

The head of Russia's space program says the country will withdraw from the International Space Station after 2024. It will instead focus on building its own space station as a successor to Mir, Roscosmos administrator Yuri Borisov said, according to the Associated Press. The country made the call at a time of heightened tensions with the West following Russia's invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. 

Russia and its cosmonauts will remain on the ISS for at least next two and a half years in order to fulfill obligations to partners. Earlier this month, NASA and Roscosmos signed an agreement to swap seats on flights to the ISS starting in September. For the time being, NASA astronauts will once more join Soyuz flights, while Russian cosmonauts will travel on SpaceX Crew Dragon trips.