Gadgets

Swarms of tiny satellites could act like one giant space telescope – TechCrunch

Published

4 years ago

January 5, 2019

It won’t be long before the James Webb Space Telescope is launched, an enormous and complex feat of engineering — but all one piece. That’s a good thing for now, but new research suggests that in the near future giant telescopes like the Webb might be replaced (or at least augmented) by swarms of tiny spacecraft working in concert.

One advance, from Ben-Gurion University in Israel, is a leap in the capabilities of what are called synthetic aperture systems. It’s a technique where a single small camera moves across a space, capturing images as it goes, and by very careful analysis of the data it collects, it can produce imagery like that created by a much larger camera — essentially synthesizing a bigger aperture.

As documented in a paper published today in Optica, the team leapfrogs existing methods in an interesting way. Two satellites move in synchrony around the edge of a circle, collecting data as they go and beaming it to a third stationary one; this circle describes the synthetic aperture the two cameras are creating.

“We found that you only need a small part of a telescope lens to obtain quality images,” explained BGU grad student Angika Bulbul, who led the research, in a news release. “Even by using the perimeter aperture of a lens, as low as 0.43 percent, we managed to obtain similar image resolution compared to the full aperture area of mirror/lens-based imaging systems.”

In other words, they were basically able to get the results of a camera 50 times the size. That would be impressive anywhere, but up in space it’s especially important. Putting something as huge and complex as the Webb into orbit is an incredibly complicated and drawn out endeavor. And it’s putting a lot of eggs in one (very carefully checked and rechecked) basket.

But if you could instead use a handful of satellites working together, and just replace one if it fails, that really opens up the field. “We can slash the huge cost, time and material needed for gigantic traditional optical space telescopes with large curved mirrors,” Bulbul said.

One of the challenges of space telescopes, however, is that they need to take measurements with extreme precision. And keeping a satellite perfectly still is hard enough, to say nothing of having it move perfectly to within fractions of a millimeter.

To keep on track, right now many satellites use reliable fixed sources of light, like bright stars, as reference points when calculating various things relating to their operations. Some astronomers have even used lasers to excite a point high in the atmosphere to provide a sort of artificial star for these systems to use.

These methods both have their strengths and weaknesses, but MIT researchers think they’ve found a more permanent, high-precision solution: a “guide star” satellite that would sit thousands of miles out and train a strong laser on the Earth and its orbital region.

This light source would be reliable, steady and highly visible; satellites could use it to calculate their position and the minute changes to their imaging apparatus caused by heat and radiation, perhaps to a degree not possible with actual stars or atmospheric dots.

Both these intriguing technologies are still very much in the lab, but theory is where all big advances start, and it could be that in a few years, swarms of satellites will be sent into space not to provide terrestrial communications, but to create a massive synthetic telescope looking out on the universe.

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Gadgets

The MacBook Air gets bigger with new 15-inch model

Published

3 hours ago

June 6, 2023

Francisco Peguero

The color options (left to right): midnight, starlight, space gray, and silver.

Apple
The 15-inch MacBook Air.
Port selection.

Apple
5.3-mm borders surround the 15.3-inch panel.

Apple
11.5 mm thick.

Apple
Some specs.

Apple

CUPERTINO, Calif.—It’s common for Apple to refresh its various MacBook models more or less annually, but it’s not so common that an entirely new screen size is introduced. But that’s what happened today during the company’s WWDC keynote: Apple announced a 15-inch variant of the traditionally 13-inch MacBook Air.

It’s a move that has been rumored for years.

The 15-inch MacBook Air is in most respects identical to its 13-inch counterpart and has Apple’s M2 chip. The star is the 15.3-inch screen, which has 5-mm borders and a brightness of 500 nits. Apple hasn’t provided the resolution for the screen yet, but it was rumored that the 15-inch MacBook Air would have the same resolution as the 14-inch MacBook Pro, 3024×1964. The 15-inch MacBook Air will be available with up to 24GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, Apple said today.

Design-wise, it looks like a larger version of the existing Air—or a bit like a slimmer 16-inch MacBook Pro, depending on your perspective. It’s 0.45 inches (11.5 mm) thick and weighs 3.3 pounds (1.5 kg). As on the 13-inch MacBook Air, there are two Thunderbolt ports and a headphone jack, plus MagSafe. There are also four color options.

Apple MacBook Air 15-inch with M2

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Apple is claiming an 18-hour battery life with the larger-screened Air. It has also equipped the machine with a 1080p camera, three microphones, and a six-speaker array that includes two tweeters and two sets of “force-cancelling” speakers.

The fanless 15-inch MacBook Air starts at $1,299 ($1,199 for education) and will ship next week. Orders on the Apple Store begin today.

Apple will also still sell the 13-inch MacBook Air, but the M2 version will now be $1,099, $100 less than before. The M1 version, meanwhile, will start at $999.

Gadgets

As rumored, the Mac Studio gets an M2 refresh, including fused-together M2 Ultra

Published

4 hours ago

June 6, 2023

Francisco Peguero

M2 Studio shot with monitor overhead — Enlarge / Apple’s new Mac Studio offers the M2 Ultra chip, which, like its M1 counterpart, provides vastly greater computing power.

Apple

CUPERTINO, Calif.—The Mac Studio will be refreshed this summer with chips based on the M2, including the M2 Max and new M2 Ultra, the “most powerful chip” ever released “for a personal computer.”

The M2 Pro and M2 Max have previously been seen in MacBook Pro models released late last year, but the M2 Ultra will be a first. In the M1 line, the Ultra was the top-of-the-line chip with substantially better performance than the Pro or Max—particularly in graphically intensive tasks. M2 Ultra will support 192 GB of unified memory, 800 GB/s memory bandwith, and a 24-core CPU and up to 76 cores of GPU. Apple claims the M2 Ultra will work 30% faster than the M1 Ultra, and that a single system with the Ultra can work machine learning datasets that would choke systems with discrete GPUs.

The M2 Max is “up to 50 percent faster” than the prior Max-based Studio, according to Apple, and features a 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU, and up to 96 GB unified memory, with 400 GB/s memory bandwidth.

The M2 Studio's notable specs, as squared up by Apple — Enlarge / The M2 Studio’s notable specs, as squared up by Apple

Apple

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Beyond the new chips, the Mac Studio’s refresh is mostly business as usual. There aren’t any substantial differences in design or features compared to the previous model. There is higher bandwidth HDMI, and it can support up to six high-resolution displays. Notably, the Mac Studio is somewhat upstaged this year by the debut of the new M2-powered Mac Pro.

The new Mac Studio will launch “next week” and pre-orders start today. It starts at $1,999.

Gadgets

This is the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro

Published

5 hours ago

June 6, 2023

Francisco Peguero

The Apple Mac Pro. It’s still the cheese grater design.

Apple
The back.

Apple
The inside, with lots of room for activities.

Apple
The rackmount version.

Apple

CUPERTINO, Calif.—It has been three years since Apple began transitioning its Mac lineup away from Intel chips to its own silicon, and that project completes today with the last product to make the transition: the Mac Pro desktop tower.

The Mac Pro might not look different from its predecessor on the outside, but on the inside, Intel’s Xeon CPU and AMD’s Radeon Pro graphics are gone, and in their place we have a new chip called the M2 Ultra. This is the same chip in the new Mac Studio; it has a 24-core CPU and an up to 76-core GPU, and it starts with twice the memory and SSD storage of the old Mac Pro. Apple promises it will be “3x faster” than the Intel Mac Pro. Memory tops out at 192GB. These stats all match the new Mac Studio—the only thing you get from the bigger chassis is expansion capabilities and more ports.

Apple

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The whole point of a Mac tower is support for traditional expansion cards, and that normally means discrete GPUs. Apple demoed some expansion cards, but none of them were graphics cards. It sounds like you’ll be using the M2 Ultra’s on-board GPU. Making real graphics cards work with an ARM chip would have been a massive undertaking—for starters, no ARM drivers exist. Even for the non-GPU options, compatibility will be an interesting problem. Apple calls out digital signal processing (DSP) cards, serial digital interface (SDI) I/O cards, and additional networking and storage as PCI express card possibilities.

The new Mac Pro comes with eight Thunderbolt 4 ports—six on the back and two on the top—and seven total (six open) PCI Express Gen 4 slots. There are three USB-A ports (one top, two back), two HDMI ports that support 8K resolution and up to 240 Hz frame rates, two 10Gb Ethernet ports, and a headphone jack (!). The new Mac Pro has no hard-wired back panel, and every one of those back ports (six Thunderbolt, three HDMI, two USB, and one headphone) lives on the one included PCI Express card. The tower also supports Wi-Fi 6e and Bluetooth 5.3. It’s available in both tower and rack-mount form factors.

The Mac Pro starts at $6,999. It’s up for preorder today on the Apple Store and will ship on June 13.

Listing image by Apple