ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft is about to complete its decade-long mission by landing on a comet

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft has spent the last decade winding its way around the Solar System. It has been slingshotting around planets and picking up speed to complete its mission — to be the first spacecraft ever to land on a comet. In just a few days, Rosetta is scheduled to wake up from its long sleep and get ready to make history.

Rosetta was launched way back in March of 2004 with the aim of landing on the 4 km-long comet 67P, which it will rendezvous with near the orbit of Jupiter. But why has it taken so long to get out there? Like most comets, 67P is has built up a lot of speed over the eons of swinging around the Sun. In order to successfully land on its surface, Rosetta needed to match its course and speed almost exactly. It would have been profoundly costly in fuel to do that with a rocket, so the craft has spent these last 10 years lining up four separate gravitational assists from Earth and Mars.

The length of the missions required the solar-powered spacecraft to conserve energy, so it has been in hibernation mode for the last 18 months as it closed in on its target. On January 20, Rosetta is set to wake up. If the ESA doesn’t get the all clear signal from the $1.36 billion probe in a matter of hours, the mission could be over after 10 years of planning. Once it comes online, Rosetta will get its bearings and use thrusters to control its spin to better soak up power with its solar panels.

Rosetta is scheduled to catch up to the comet in May and should begin scanning the surface shortly thereafter. The probe itself isn’t going to be making the landing — it carries a small lander called Philae for that. The landing element of the mission isn’t taking place until November 2014, when Rosetta will release Philae and allow it to float toward the surface. To prevent the lander from bouncing off, it will fire two harpoons into the surface as it lands.

Scientists believe that comets could have delivered some of the organic molecules to the early Earth that led to the formation of life (panspermia). Comets like 67P likely contain those same ingredients from the formation of the planets, picked up as they formed in the extreme outer Solar System billions of years ago. Having the chance to examine these frozen fossils more closely could tell us a great deal about how life arose and the Solar System formed.

Despite a number of flybys and the 2005 Deep Impact collision study, we still know very little about the molecules present in comets — we don’t even know what the consistency of the surface will be like when Philae lands. Before you ask, no, Deep Impact wasn’t the first real first landing on a comet — a 23,000 mph collision doesn’t count as a landing. Rosetta and Philae both contain instruments to characterize the structure and composition of the comet. They will measure the levels and forms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen locked in the icy interior.

Rosetta could open up a new era of understanding our place in the universe when it wakes up in a few days. Of course, that’s only if it does wake up.

Dell XPS 8700 desktop with 1080p touch monitor

Desktops are dead to some, but for the rest of us they offer a great amount of performance and expansion for the dollar that simply can’t be matched by a laptop. While enthusisatic power users may prefer to build their own machine, it’s tough to beat the value of a good pre-built PC deal.

As our deal hunters have found time and again, if you happen to need a full PC setup, not just a monitor or a desktop separately, that the bundle deals offer the best value. You typically get the desktop, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and of course all the benefits of a pre-build PC like warranty and OS. Our hot deal today is an offer we haven’t come across before, pairing a high-end PC with a multi-touch monitor.

The XPS 8700 is no stranger to our deal listings here, offering a strong combination of performance, features, and design at a very competitive price. Many of the XPS 8700 deals we feature easily beat a custom-built PC for value and this one is no different. The system included in this bundle is well equipped with a quad-core Haswell Core i7, 12GB of RAM, 1TB hard drive, GeForce GT 635 graphics, Wireless-N, Windows 8, and a host of other standard features.

For a display, you get the 21.5-inch S2240T, a sleek piece of kit with 10-point multi-touch and a unique hinge that allows it to lay at the perfect angle for touch interaction. It serves up 1080p resolution on a gorgeous IPS LCDpanel, ensuring extra-wide viewing angles and rich colors. Paired with the Windows 8 OS, the open-minded users will come to enjoy the added level of interaction that touch offers (I know, it sounds crazy, but I went through it myself recently).

The XPS 8700 desktop is covered by a two year warranty that includes in-home service and 24×7 phone support that covers both hardware and software support. The monitor likely comes with its own one year warranty that includes advance exchange to avoid costly shipping bills, though Dell isn’t clear about separate warranty coverage.

This bundle normally runs $1469, but a hefty instant discount knocks that down to just $1000 with free shipping. Check this out over at Dell.com and step into a complete and powerful new computer system.

Click here to start at Dell.com. Total $469 instant savings applied automatically. This deal ends January 21 or sooner.

Soft robotic gripper

Robots are getting faster and stronger all the time, but for the power and cunning engineered behind all those servos and actuators, the subtle elegance of picking up an object is still a tricky thing in robotics. Designing a conventional grasper that pinches together and lifts items is the traditional approach, but it might not be the best. A new type of vacuum-powered gripper called the Versaball is now commercially available.

This device was originally devised a few years ago as part of a collaboration between researchers at Cornell, University of Chicago, and iRobot (with funding from DARPA). The Versaball is able to grab hold of things using a property called jamming transition. The Versaball is a serious piece of robotics gear, but the concept can be illustrated with regular household items.

Small granular materials that are packed into a rubber housing like the one at the end of the Versaball have an almost fluid consistency. If you press the bulbous shape down on something, the material flows around it. Jamming transition is applied when the air is evacuated from the rubber membrane. This causes the granular particles to be pulled closer together and act more like a solid, thus locking the object into place. It’s the same phenomenon you might have experienced with vacuum-packed goods like coffee grounds — they’re hard as a rock until you open the package. In fact, an early version of the Versaball used coffee grounds in a regular balloon.

The Versaball, sold by Empire Robotics, is much more advanced than a party balloon filled with coffee, but the principal is the same as it ever was. The super-durable rubbery bulb is pressed into an object, allowing the granular material to fill in around it and solidify when the air is pulled out (in under 0.5 seconds). The business end of the Versaball has a beanbag-like consistency and comes in three-inch and six-inch varieties. Assuming a solid grip, the Versaball can lift up to 20 pounds.

This approach is appealing because it has what roboticists call high error-tolerance. When dealing with a mechanical grasper, the operator has to very carefully align the device to pick something up. Jamming transition is just more forgiving — the head doesn’t have to be right on the money to attach firmly to something, and the surface doesn’t have to be smooth or regular. For systems relying on robot vision, this is even more desirable.

Empire Robotics sees the Versaball having applications in robots, of course, but also in assisted living, prosthetics, and handling hazardous material. The first batches of Versaball kits are expected to ship later this month.

5K TVs

With 4K UHD TVs the most visible stars of CES, including Sony’s new X-tended dynamic range models, of course someone had to up the ante with a 5K set. Toshiba was showing off this model that doesn’t have any more vertical resolution than a 4K set, but is wider, allowing full-screen display of cinematic content (which generally has a wider aspect ratio than normal wide-screen displays).

Photosynth 3D

When Blaise Aguera y Arcas (then of Microsoft Research, but now at Google) demonstrated Photosynth at TED 2007, it became an immediate hit and has since become one of the most-watched and discussed tech demos of all time. While the original iteration of Photosynth was certainly cool, the new version — Photosynth 3D — will blow your mind.

The Photosynth project was started almost a decade ago for the purpose of “reinventing the whole enterprise of photography for ordinary people,” says Agüera y Arcas said. The first iteration of Photosynth, released in 2007, stitched together thousands of photos — cobbled together from all over the web — to create a seamless 2D image that you can explore. It was basically a clever computer vision algorithm combined with a “gigapixel” panorama builder/viewer. While the underlying tech was undoubtedly cool, it was the slickness of the interface that really wowed people. The original Photosynth video is embedded at the end of the story.

The new version, Photosynth 3D, takes that clever computer vision algorithm and incredible interface slickness into the third dimension. Photosynth can now take a bunch of photos and turn them into four different 3D views: Spin, Panorama, Walk, and Wall. The best way to demonstrate these four views is to watch the video, or to play around with some of the embedded synths below.

As you can see, all of these views are very similar to the original Photosynth, but now it’s also possible to move in space, rather than just panning and zooming a 2D plane. The 3D Panorama and Wall views are actually very similar to the original Photosynth, but the addition of 3D parallax makes it feel like you’re actually there, or that you’re watching a video.

Spin is a new mode that basically turns the panorama inwards, towards an object. Instead of turning on your feet to shoot a panorama of a scene, a Spin view is created by walking around a subject and taking dozens of photos. The Walk view, as the name implies, is basically a series of photos captured while you walk forward, and stitched together to create a 3D space. For all four modes, remember that when you stop the camera, you have full access to the original high-res images — it’s still like a gigapixel panorama in that regard. (Read: Autodesk Catch: Make a 3D print of anything, just by walking around it with a camera.)

Technologically, while the original Photosynth used computer vision to align a large number of images in two dimensions, Photosynth 3D uses the spacial gap between each image to generate 3D models of the objects in each scene. Then, depending on your position in the scene, textures (which have been cut out of the original photos) are overlaid on those objects. It’s fairly ingenious, and the new, mega-slick Photosynth viewer really adds to the experience. If you get a chance, try hitting the “c” or “m” keys while in the new Photosynth viewer; C reveals the 3D interpretation for each image, while M shows you the (scarily accurate) reconstructed path taken by the camera.

The future of Photosynth

As exciting as the original Photosynth was, we never really saw the tech come to fruition. In theory it is built into Bing Maps, allowing it to bring up geo-tagged synths, but it never really hit the critical mass required. For the most part, the Photosynth website seems to be Yet Another Gigapixel Panorama repository. (Read: Ricoh Theta: The first camera that can take spherical 360-degree panoramas.)

With these new 3D views, though, it’s easy to see the correlation between these new 3D views and competing services such as Google’s Streeview — especially when you consider that the Photosynth team moved from Microsoft Research to the Bing Maps department a few years ago. For now Photosynth 3D is just a tech preview, but hopefully Microsoft can find a way to bring it to the mass market. The tech is simply too cool to keep hidden away in the vaults. Copyright issues aside, imagine if Microsoft just left a few hundred Photosynth servers running in the background, joining up all of the photos on Flickr and Facebook to create a 3D panorama of the entire world…