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As promised, Lockheed Martin finally put its SAMARAI monocopter drone on display at AUVSI’s drone extravaganza in D.C. this week, for the first time flying it before a public audience as PopSci and everyone else in the air demo area looked on in awe. After all, the thing has just one rapidly rotating wing--it doesn’t really look like it can stay aloft by itself. Seeing, however, is believing.

The name (it’s not a typo) is actually derived from samara, or maple seeds, on which the monocopter design is based. Those seeds, sporting a single wing-like accessory, spiral from their branches and spin their way through the air--a natural development that allows maples to disperse their seeds more widely.

Lockheed’s version is a bit bigger (but sill weighs less than half a pound) and noisier, as you’ll see below. It also packs a camera that remarkably is able to maintain a steady view in one direction, demonstrating its eventual ISR potential (that camera also can turn 360 degrees with no gimbal). If you turn up your sound, you can hear Lockheed’s own Kingsley Fregene, principal investigator for SAMARAI, explaining how it works. What he didn’t explain to us is how he knew that adding a couple of neon lights to the bottom would make this demo so much cooler.

D-Wave’s technology is something they call a “quantum annealing processor,” and without going to deep into the inner workings of the thing (because I can’t), it is basically a means of finding solutions to “combinatorial optimization problems.” In other words, rather than dealing in ones and zeros, the processor taps the processing power of qubits--or quantum bits--which are multidimensional analogs to the analog bit.

The fundamental advantage here is that a qubit can be in more than one state at the same time, unlike the classical bit. And so quantum computers can, in theory, consider multiple possible solutions to a problem at the same time in essence. That makes them vastly more powerful and much, much faster than today’s conventional supercomputers.

D-Wave has come under some scrutiny from the quantum community, where other researchers have claimed that their “quantum optimizers” can really solve useful problems. But Lockheed seems to think they can. No word on what the company aims to do with their quantum computer, but D-Wave claims it is going to be used to address the Lockheed’s “most challenging computation problems.”

[Kurzweil AI]

The Private EyeBot, which doesn't seem to actually go by that name, is a prototype from Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Labs. It's a small, four-wheeled robot that's equipped with a variety of sensors to enable it to surveil without being seen. The most important of those sensors is a laser scanner, which maps the robots environment in 3-D. (We're wondering why Lockheed didn't just use a hacked Kinect sensor, which seems a perfect fit for the task.) It also has acoustic sensors to detect footsteps and the direction from which they're coming.

The robot has four main goals: to avoid known and unknown sentries, avoid areas without an obvious escape route, and avoid well-lit areas in which it could be easily spotted. None of those four includes the ability to read a newspaper while leaning against a lamp post in a shadowy part of town, but as it's a prototype, we'll let that omission slide for now. Lockheed says they're working on a more advanced artificial intelligence that would give the robot some sense of itself, to know its own shape and size and sounds, the impact of its movement on its environment, the possible lines of sight of any sentries, that kind of thing.

Surveillance robots and robots that can hide and perform other espionage-like actions are an emerging sector, and the U.S. Army seems pretty interested in what Lockheed and other robotics manufacturers can come up with. Let's just hope they realize the need for punchy dialogue.

[via New Scientist]

The mission, Lockheed says, will serve several purposes. Most immediately, it would allow astronauts to study, via unmanned robots, some lunar real estate that hasn’t been seen with human eyes since the Apollo missions. But its real function is to test out technologies and skills that will be necessary to make a manned trip to an asteroid, and then on to Mars.

The idea is to park an Orion space capsule at the L2 Lagrange point about 40,000 miles above the moon’s far side, where the combined gravity from the Earth and the moon would allow the spacecraft to essentially hover in one place in sync with the moon. From there, the astronauts would deploy and conduct remotely-operated surface science, collecting rock samples and exploring the South Pole-Aitken basin, one of the oldest craters in the solar system. From the L2 point, the capsule would continuously maintain line of sight with both the Earth and the far side of the moon.

But the mission would also serve as a test bed for everything from the Orion capsule to the astronauts themselves. The medium-duration missions would test the durability of both the crew and the vehicle over several one-month spans before attempting an asteroid mission, which would likely last six months to ensure both bodies and capsules could withstand prolonged doses to deep space radiation. It would also allow NASA and Lockheed to demonstrate the high-speed reentry necessary for return trips from deep space – speeds reaching up to 50 percent faster than re-entry from LEO.

Lastly, astronauts on an L2-Farside mission would travel 15 percent farther from Earth than the Apollo astronauts did and spend nearly three times longer out in the vacuum. Essentially, the L2-Farside missions would be stepping-stones to prove that human stamina and technological wherewithal are both where they need to be to take the next big step out into deep space.

Of course, Lockheed isn’t going anywhere by itself. To get to the Lagrange point without resorting to a complicated multi-rocket scheme, Lockheed needs NASA to supply a new heavy lift launch vehicle – something that the space agency is working on but doesn’t have on the shelf. It a new heavy lifter does materialize, Lockheed sees an L2-Farside mission feasible as early as 2016.

[SPACE]

A new DARPA-funded electro-optical system will calculate the ballistics for him, telling him where to aim and ensuring a perfect shot, no matter the weather conditions.

Lockheed Martin won a $6.9 million contract this week for the second phase of DARPA’s One-Shot system, which will provide direct observations of a target, measure every variable that influences a bullet’s flight, and calculate the aim offset in a sniper’s rifle scope.

During the project’s first phase, which started in 2007, Lockheed developed a down-range system that measured average crosswind; range to target; spotter scope position; air temperature, pressure, and humidity; and more, according to Military Aerospace. Using all those variables, it calculated the ballistics for a .308 bullet at ranges as far as 3,600 feet.

While that’s impressive, the system was too heavy and unwieldy, and it couldn’t be used with standard rifle scopes. The phase two design will be more compact and able to operate in real time and over longer distances.

It will measure atmospheric conditions, account for the weapon’s maximum effective range and include GPS coordinates. It’s also supposed to communicate with the rifle scope, informing the gun itself of the aim point offset and expected crosswind.

Lockheed is supposed to deliver 15 field-testable prototypes by next October.

[Military Aerospace]

New technology to improve mine safety

A new system developed by Lockheed Martin aims to change that, by using magnetic waves to carry voice and text messages.

The MagneLink Magnetic Communication System works like a radio, but at extremely low frequencies. Unlike radio waves, magnetic energy can penetrate coal and rock, says Dave LeVan, the research engineer at Lockheed who developed the system.

It can connect to the short-wave radios miners use to communicate within mine shafts, but it has a much longer range and can reach the surface.

Each MagneLink system consists of two units, one on the surface and one inside the mine. The in-mine unit is encased in an explosion-proof box and uses very little power, so if it were to short out, there wouldn’t be enough energy to produce a spark that could ignite methane inside the mine.

It would be placed near the mine’s refuge chambers, which are now required in underground mines and are designed to shelter miners in case of an explosion.

The Sago disaster was the impetus for the work, along with some inspiration from a former Lockheed engineer whose uncle worked in West Virginia coal mines, LeVan says. He learned that mine telephones may only be placed near elevators, and that in any case, the wires would melt in a fire or an explosion. He wanted to develop a wireless system instead.

Initially, he considered sonar, familiar to Lockheed’s engineers who work on submarine communications. But LeVan found that sonar takes a lot of power, and any mine device needs to be low-powered enough to prevent a spark.

“Sparks were just not going to work,” he said. “In my research, I ran across many discussions about how magnetic fields are easily able to penetrate rock and coal, so I thought of a wireless system that uses magnetic fields to go through the rocks.”

The MagneLink system modulates text and voice much like a radio would. Each unit includes a keyboard for text messages and a device to capture voice, but the audio input takes longer to reach the surface. Its battery lasts 24 hours and it would most likely be turned on only in an emergency, LeVan says.

Lockheed tested the system last month and found it works inside the mine to a distance of 2,800 feet. It can penetrate about 1,550 feet from the surface.

Warren Gross, Lockheed's project manager for MagneLink, says he expects the system to be certified by the federal government in the next couple of months. Lockheed has worked with the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health to develop the system, he said.

In other mining news, mine safety inspectors said Monday that methane sensors at Massey Energy Co.'s Upper Big Branch mine had not been tampered with. An explosion at the mine this spring killed 29 miners and injured two.

Although the MagneLink system would not have helped those men, it represents a new step in mine safety, which has been in the government's spotlight since the Sago disaster.

Gross said several mining firms are interested in the technology, and some have allowed Lockheed engineers to interrupt their work to test the system.

“The coal companies are after this communication device as well,” he said.

Last week, the STS-134 crew got a preview of the technology from Ball Aerospace, whose engineers designed the system with workers from Lockheed Martin, NASA's primary contractor on the Orion project. The new docking system involves an eye-safe flash Lidar Vision Navigation System and a high-definition docking camera. The system's resolution is 16 times that of the shuttle's, and it provides data from as far away as three miles, triple the shuttle's ability.

It's not often that engineers can test future spaceflight systems in space, notes Jeanette Domber, the project lead for the shuttle test, called "Sensor Test for Orion Relative Navigation Risk Mitigation" (STORMM).

"There's nothing like collecting data in this environment, compared to the testing we can do on the ground," she said.

On the 11th day of the last shuttle mission, astronauts will make a penultimate departure from the International Space Station and move about 3.5 miles away. As the shuttle slowly returns to the ISS, the Orion docking system will switch on. The shuttle will approach the station the way Orion would, and engineers at Ball, Lockheed and NASA will gather streams of data to improve their system's algorithms.

Astronauts will really be using the shuttle's existing docking system, but astronaut Andrew Feustel (currently co-starring in the Hubble IMAX movie) will take the new one for a test drive.

The tests will improve spacecraft docking capability regardless of what Congress and the White House decide to do with the Constellation program. It could be used by pilots or in unmanned craft, says Lisa Hardaway, Ball's chief engineer for the Orion project. If the Obama administration decides to send a vehicle to an asteroid, for instance, a system like this could simplify the rendezvous.

"The beauty of our instruments is that they can be used on any vehicle for any application. For any incarnation that Orion ends up in, our vehicle is still applicable," Hardaway says.

Befitting the space program's legacy, the system might also be useful for Earth applications -- its capability to determine shapes, intensity, and distance could improve terrain mapping, deforestation monitoring and hazard-avoidance systems in transportation.

The space shuttle uses different sensors as it approaches the ISS. At far distances, astronauts track their target with radar. As they approach the station, they use a trajectory control system and a laser.

The new system integrates everything, Domber says. The Lidar system sends out a laser pulse, which is reflected to a sensor and translated into computer data. The astronauts will know exactly where their spacecraft is relative to its docking target, and the high-def camera shows them a real-time view.

Lidar systems can be dangerous, especially for astronauts peering out the space station's cupola to catch a view of the action. Engineers had to build a small but powerful Lidar laser that wouldn't hurt astronauts' eyes, Domber says: "We have done eye-safe lasers that require much more power, and are larger, and we have done not-eye-safe lasers in a small package. We needed to combine the two to make it safe."

The laser fits in the palm of your hand, and the whole package is about the size of a bread box. It is the latest in a suite of new technologies meant to further NASA's goal -- if not Obama's -- to see Orion fly in 2013.

And the latest to help shepherd the shuttle into the annals of history. Learn more about it in this video.