London’s Big Ben, Alcatraz and then the Empire State Building: the new 3D view from Google Maps provides a bird’s-eye view of well-known sights.
At least planning the next sightseeing tour is made easier with the new map view from Google Maps: photo realistic aerial photos of almost 100 of the world’s most popular sights in cities such as Barcelona, London, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo – this is what the new Google Maps function delivers. Immersive View, a 3D view of the Maps platform that has now been rolled out in the Maps app for Android and iOS.
Google Maps Immersive View”provides impressive and very authentic images of numerous sights. (Image: Google)
In addition to the conventional street view, users can now view many images of the earth from a satellite view, partly from an airplane perspective or via user photos. These are collages created from thousands of images taken from Google Street View, aircraft footage and artificial intelligence. A virtual tour of some of the world’s metropolises – via smartphone, tablet or laptop.
Explore cities in wind and weather
Other and very handy updates that the feature brings: For easier route planning, Google has updated Maps’ bike navigation with more detailed route information, including heavy car traffic, stairs, steep hills and road types (e.g. a main road vs. a side road). The “live traffic” feature, including traffic jam forecasts, is also planned.
In addition, you can call up different weather displays (including live weather) or times of day. There are also plans to extend the application to include AI-generated views of restaurants and other popular places; so you can plan better before the trip and see opening times or occupancy.
Two more drones are scheduled to land on Mars in 2027 bring samples to Earth.
Nasa announced that it plans to send two more Ingenuity drones to Mars aboard its upcoming Sample Retrieval Lander. As early as 2020, the US space agency sent a model to Mars along with the Perseverance rover, which landed on the red planet in February last year. The small helicopter made a total of 29 flights – scanning the surface and taking lots of photos. The new Ingenuity drones not only have additional wheels, but also a slightly different task: They are supposed to collect samples from the surface of Mars so that they can be sent back to Earth.
Image: Nasa/JPL-Caltech
First Ingenuity drone has exceeded expectations
It’s no surprise that NASA is using two Ingenuity drones for its next big mission. After all, the almost 1.20 meter tall helicopter exceeded the expectations of the researchers. The first flight was a hover at a height of three meters. The drone only flew over the surface of Mars for 40 seconds – but successfully. Subsequent flights became increasingly ambitious as the time allotted to operate the helicopter became increasingly scarce. No one at NASA expected the drone to survive a full 29 flights, making it a year older than planned. That’s why two successors to the Ingenuity model are now to be sent to Mars.
First time to bring Mars samples to Earth
This time, however, the drones have a different mission: instead of taking photos, soil samples are to be collected from the surface of Mars. The Sample Fetch Rover and the associated second lander will therefore have to stay at home for the next mission. The Mars Sample Retriever, which – as the name might suggest – accepts and collects the samples from the two Ingenuity drones is also allowed to come along . Also part of the Retriever is the Mars Ascent Vehicle . Here, too, the creative naming can be traced back to the function: the rocket is to take off from Mars together with rock and oil samples and bring them safely to Earth.
Anyone who is looking forward to being able to hold a Mars sample in their hands in a short time will have to be disappointed. The joint mission of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) is not scheduled to start until autumn 2027. A second launch is scheduled for summer 2028. We’ll have to wait a lot longer for rehearsals. If everything goes according to plan, it will take more than ten years until 2033 for the samples to arrive on Earth. However, once the samples are here, we can learn a lot more about the history of the planet. One can only hope that no grim discovery is made in the process.
At the weekend, SpaceX brought its number of rocket launches to 33 with two more missions. Elon Musk’s group broke its record from the previous year – and that in July.
Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX launched 31 rockets last year. In 2022, the group already exceeded this number when the Falcon 9 rocket sent a load of 46 Starlink satellites into space on Friday, setting off on its 32nd mission. On Sunday, SpaceX added 53 satellites – rocket launch number 33.
The company has already broken its existing record for most rocket launches in a year, as confirmed by Elon Musk on Twitter , where he congratulated his team. In addition, there are still several months left to further expand the record.
Screenshot: Twitter
Elon Musk’s goal for 2022: 52 rocket launches
SpaceX intends to do the same, because at the beginning of the year the ambitious goal was announced of sending 52 rockets into space this year. So far, SpaceX is on track to meet its schedule. This is made possible by the reusable rocket stages of the Falcon 9. The rocket, which was launched on Sunday, has already completed four missions. Another rocket already has 13 missions under its belt. These cycles allow SpaceX to ramp up its rocket launch cadence every year except for 2019, when the number dropped.
In addition, SpaceX is its own customer for a large number of the rocket launches. The company is using the missions to increase its fleet of Starlink Internet satellites. Around 2,900 have been sent into orbit so far, of which around 2,600 are currently active. SpaceX has approval for a total of 12,000 but is seeking to relax international rules to allow up to 30,000 satellites into orbit.
SpaceX has big plans
But even without its Starlink project, SpaceX will not run out of work. Thanks to the cooperation with NASA, the company repeatedly sends off Dragon-type space capsules to send people and cargo to the ISS. There are also SpaceX’s commercial space flights, which take tourists into space, and launches for the US Department of Defense.
In the long term, Elon Musk is pursuing particularly ambitious plans with SpaceX. The billionaire has never made a secret of the fact that he has set himself the goal of populating Mars – and even wants to outperform NASA in the race for the red planet .
A new chip from Infineon is powered via NFC via the smartphone – enough to open and close small locks
Infineon’s new NAC1080 chip makes it possible to open and close digital locks without their own power supply. Instead of an internal power supply, the user’s smartphone – which is also the key – supplies the power to open it, as the chip manufacturer reports.
Both data and energy are exchanged via NFC – a process that is used, for example, for payment transactions via smartphone. Data transmission is encrypted thanks to an integrated AES128 accelerator and a random number generator.
To open the lock, the smartphone must be held directly against the lock equipped with the chip, as with other smart locks. The lock then draws energy from the built-in NFC technology through so-called energy harvesting. On average, different devices can transmit around 20 milliwatts, according to Infineon, and significantly more with some models.
Use with smaller locks
A capacitor collects the energy; the chip uses them to check whether the user is authorized and to open the lock with a small motor. According to Infineon, the technology is particularly suitable for smaller locks on office cabinets, lockers, parcel boxes or mailboxes. The duration of the opening process should be around two seconds – depending on the smartphone used and the energy transmitted.
Larger, harder-to-move locks require more energy to be transferred, which takes longer. It is therefore more conceivable to use it as an emergency option for house or hotel doors if the lock’s own energy supply fails. According to Infineon, one would then have to wait a little longer for the opening, but at least this could save the expensive key service. The first products with the chip could be on the market next year.
With the chip bottlenecks in the Corona crisis, months of waiting for washing machines and cars became just as normal as the futile search for new Playstation consoles. How long will this go on?
Source: dpa
Some experts are cautiously optimistic: Industry analyst Alan Priestley from the IT market researcher Gartner can imagine that overcapacities will occur again in the coming year. At the chip group Intel, however, company boss Pat Gelsinger warns that problems with production capacity and the availability of necessary machines are likely to last at least until 2024.
Expert Priestley is counting on the large-scale expansion of production soon bearing fruit. The industry has been investing in new factories since the first signs of bottlenecks at the beginning of the corona pandemic. “Therefore we will probably have overcapacity in 2023 or 2024,” he predicted. At least until the increasing demand eats them up.
This interplay is in itself typical for the chip industry, stressed Priestley. “As soon as demand and supply are in balance, investments are made in order to have capacities for the next surge in demand.” The current chip crisis was so severe because in some areas not enough was invested in expansion – and at the same time demand increased by leaps and bounds with the increased work and learning in the corona pandemic.
Different chips require different production processes
It makes everything even more complex that there is not just one semiconductor industry. Different chips are required for different tasks – and for these there are different production processes that cannot be arbitrarily interchanged. An important feature is the so-called structure widths – roughly speaking, how finely the circuits are worked. The narrower the structure widths in modern production processes, the more powerful and efficient the processors are.
For something like a transformer or other simple tasks, old production processes are sufficient – which are also less lucrative, so that the capacities for them had leveled off at a low level. And then came the Corona boom. It was often the lack of a few simple components that prevented cars or computers from being completed.
In addition, chip factories not only cost billions and have to be built over years – they are also not necessarily flexible. “If I build a factory for chips with a structure width of seven nanometers, I cannot easily convert them to five nanometers,” says Priestley. And it is not as easy as in other areas to simply let production rest. That’s why companies have to plan their expansion decisions with particular foresight – and new capacities in one area are not necessarily helpful for other parts of the industry.
Machines for chip production are still scarce
Another bottleneck are machines for chip production. With super-narrow structure widths, the only way forward is with UV lithography – and the European manufacturer ASML is practically the only supplier for this. He is accordingly fully booked.
Stories of desperate measures are doing the rounds in the industry. At the presentation of the latest quarterly figures, ASML boss Peter Wennink talked about his conversation with the management of a “very large industrial group”, whose name he kept to himself. “They actually told me that they buy washing machines to rip out semiconductors and put them in industrial modules.” Of course, one could say that this is just an anecdote, admitted Wennink. “But that happens everywhere.”
Another problem for the industry came with the war in Ukraine. The lasers of the lithography machines require neon in addition to other gases. And that’s a common by-product of steelmaking. The huge Azovstal steel works in Mariupol, which has been shelled and bombed by Russian troops in their war of aggression against Ukraine for weeks, was an important supplier of neon. The loss of shipments from Ukraine, while disruptive, will be something the industry will have to digest, Priestley said. “There are also other sources” – including the large steel mills in South Korea.
