It’s really happening. The James Webb Space Telescope has successfully reached its orbital destination in space, 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from Earth. A final 5-minute thruster firing on January 24, 2022 put JWST in its halo orbit at the Sun-Earth Lagrange 2 (L2) point. The formal commissioning process can now begin. “We’re excited to announce today that Webb ...

Robert McCall’s NASA Moon Base, 1986 Hello to our fellow readers. Weekly publication is here. Enjoy the reading! Ryan Hampton – 01’22 left the “SpinLaunch”, he was a VP Special Projects. Took office as President in “S2S Development”. Michael (Mike) Crones – 01’22 left the “Draper”, he was a Chief of Staff – Head of Corporate Strategy & Communications. Took ...

Vision-based reinforcement learning could allow robotic manipulation in unstructured environments through flexible policies operating directly from visual feedback. However, current methods often rely on important state information that is difficult to obtain in the real world. Anthropomorphic robot for liquid handling. Image credit: Pzucchel via Wikimedia, CC-BY-SA-3.0 A recent paper published on arXiv.org suggests a setting for vision-based robotic manipulation. ...

Artist’s illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA The James Webb Space Telescope slipped into orbit around a point in space nearly a million miles from Earth Monday where it can capture light from the first stars and galaxies to form in the aftermath of the Big Bang. As planned, the European Ariane 5 rocket that launched Webb ...