NASA GIVES UP ON MARS ROVER SPIRIT

Back in March NASA raised concerns over the health of Spirit, one of the Mars rovers that landed on the red planet back in 2004. Spirit‘s problems began back in January of last year when NASA reported that the rover’s mission was concluded as a result of it getting stuck in the Martian sand. At that point, Spirit began operations as a stationary research platform until it went into hibernation in March 2010.

Since then Spirit has been silent. NASA had originally hoped that Spirit might finally wake up when the rover reached its peak solar energy production on March 10th of this year, but alas there was no response. It is believed that a “stressful” Martian winter without much sunlight may have contributed to Spirit’s demise since it likely experienced colder internal temperatures than its previous six years on the planet. Some of the rover’s components are believed to have been damaged by the cold since there was inadequate solar energy to power Spirit’s survival heaters.

As a result, NASA has ceased all attempts to contact the rover using its Deep Space Network of antennas on Earth in addition to its two Mars orbiters. Due to the low probability that Spirit will once again establish communications these communication assets are now being transitioned to NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). The MSL is NASA’s next generation Mars rover that is expected to launch on November 25th of this year. NASA did state that its Deep Space Network may listen for signals from Spirit when “the schedule permits.”

Opportunity, an identical rover that landed on Mars three weeks after Spirit, is in much better shape and continues to explore the planet’s surface. Opportunity’s current odometry as of May 18, 2011 is over 18 miles.

BIN LADEN COMMUNICATED VIA USB STICK AND COURIER

In this day and age if you are trying to track someone down then looking for activity online and an associated IP location may be your best bet. But that didn’t happen with Osama Bin Laden even though he regularly sent out emails. So how did he do it?

His compound didn’t even have a phone line let alone a dedicated line for broadband, but Bin Laden was in possession of a computer. Instead of hooking up to the web, he decided to remain offline and instead employed a courier to take his emails to a working conenction away from where he was hiding.

The communications were loaded on to a USB stick by a trusted person within his network. That stick would then travel to a location where the messages could be sent and then responses were uploaded to the same stick for delivery back to Bin Laden.

While this method of communication is slow, it meant there was never any trace of Bin Laden’s location when the messages were sent. However, now he is dead and his computer has been seized, U.S. officials have gained access to thousands of those messages and their responses. There are thought to be more than 100 drives full of this information.

For those in contact with Bin Laden it must be a worrying time. The U.S. now has hundreds of email addresses and phone numbers as well as a lot of detail about events that have either taken place or were being planned. Some of that could lead to prosecutions, and at the very least a lot of disruption to the terrorist network.

RUMOR: NFC COMING TO NEXT GEN iPHONE AND iPAD

Bloomberg is reporting Apple will be installing near field communication (NFC) chips in the next versions of the iPhone and iPad. This could potentially be huge and finally bring NFC payment systems, without need for a extra accessories (Square) or use of barcodes (Starbucks), to the masses.

Just by waving their NFC enabled device in front of a receiver, users would be able to pay for purchases, much like a credit card. Google is also working on NFC systems for its popular Android devices.

NFC payment systems have been around for some time, at least in theory, but has suffered from a catch-22. Processors, like Visa and Mastercard, refused to implement the backend infrastructure necessary until there was enough demand from consumers. On the opposite side, consumers won't use the systems until they are easily accessible.

If Apple, and Google to an extent, succeeds this will put millions of NFC devices in people's hands, hopefully creating a tipping point for processors to institute the backend processing.