Monthly Archives: June 2017

SpaceFlight Insider has joined Patreon! – SpaceFlight Insider

Posted: June 28, 2017 at 6:33 am

SpaceFlight Insider

June 27th, 2017

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. SpaceFlight Insider is proud to announce it has joined Patreon, a crowdfunding website that is a simple way for our loyal audience to contribute every month to our coverage of the space industry and get exclusive rewards in return!

For the last four years, we have been endeavoring,with a team of hard-working individuals, to produce daily content in the form of stories, exclusive interviews, a photographic library, videos, live webcasts, and more. In total, more than 100 pieces of content are produced each month along with coverage of launches from around the world.

In working to make our audience an insider regarding all things space, the SFI team has created one of the best launch calendars currently in existence, an ever-expanding gallery of photographs and video packages, a mission monitor page, that, unlike most, provides all the essentials to track missions in one central location and a database of launch vehicles, spacecraft and centers called the Hangar.

At present, SpaceFlight Insider is the only comparable media outlet to host live webcasts during launches at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. We hope to expand that to other locations in the near future.

However, providing these services is a labor of love for the SpaceFlight Insider team. Regular travel expenses, equipment procurement, and maintenance, as well as paying editors, writers, and photographers, consumes much of what funds SFI has managed to acquire so far. All of these efforts require a great deal of infrastructure, manpower, and coordination to achieve.

We at SFI want to create a place where people can turn to for all the information they want regarding space exploration and development. The team aims to deliver high-quality video, audio, still imagery, and much more to give you an insiders view of the whole industry and we take your questions directly to those officials within NASA and other space-related organizations who can answer them.

SFI offers all of its services for free, but we could use your help to keep it that way. We ask those of you who are able, to help us not only maintain what we have doneso far but also to take even larger, bolder steps. We believe that with Patreon, this will allow us to truly make you the insider our name implies.

You can pledge any amount you want for as long as you feel comfortable. However, at five dollars, were going to start giving back to you. Head over to our Patreon page to see what we offer and what works best for you. Contribute what you feel is fair. If only one-third of our daily viewers were to contribute one dollar a month, thats just 12 dollars a year SpaceFlight Insider would finally be able to bring you the level of access that weve envisioned and that you deserve.

Our team has decades of experience covering the space program and we are focused on providing you with the absolute latest on all things space. If we cant pay the bills, let alone our staff which currently consists of mostly volunteers and hard-working space enthusiasts then we cant do everything we can to share the thrill of space exploration with the world.

If you like space and want more space news, launch videos, images, and podcasts, then help us by becoming a Patron of SpaceFlight Insider.

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SpaceFlight Insider is a space journal working to break the pattern of bias prevalent among other media outlets. Working off a budget acquired through sponsors and advertisers, SpaceFlight Insider has rapidly become one of the premier space news outlets currently in operation. SFI works almost exclusively with the assistance of volunteers.

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Space farms will feed astronauts and earthlings – The Conversation CA

Posted: at 6:33 am

Editors note: Canada Day 2017 marks the sesquicentennial of Confederation. While the anniversary is a chance to reflect on the past, The Conversation Canada asked some of our academic authors to look down the road a further 150 years - or Canada +150. What will our world and other worlds be like in 2167? Scientist Michael Dixon suggests there will be a distinctly Canadian advantage when it comes to growing crops on Mars.

Canadian researchers are leading an effort to grow crops in space, paving the way for humanity to live on other worlds and push the frontiers on Earth.

Food is the main obstacle to long-term space exploration. It limits how far away from Earth we can travel and how long we can stay in space.

We can stock enough food for inhabitants of the International Space Station or even for travel to the moon and back. But if we are to travel to Mars and support long-term exploration missions, we need bio-regenerative, self-sustaining food production systems. Or, in simpler terms, space farms.

Farming in space is probably one of the biggest challenges we will have to overcome if we are ever going to spend extended periods on the red planet within the next 150 years. But its a challenge Canadians can definitely lead in tackling.

Although people have signed up to be a part of the first human settlement on Mars, our next home planet is more likely to be one with fewer environmental challenges.

Mars has a miserable climate. Its average temperature is below -60, its atmospheric pressure is less than one per cent of Earths and made up largely of carbon dioxide, and it can be rather windy and dusty for long periods. There are also the dangers of radiation exposure, and without a molten core like ours on Earth meaning virtually no magnetic field the planets environment would have to be significantly altered if we were to ever live there.

However, thats not to say we wont be hanging out on the red planet. When Canada turns 300, we will have hundreds of space explorers spending decades searching for life on Mars. I say decades because a round trip takes two-and-a-half years, so when we do go, we will want to make it worth our while. This means setting up enclosed housing, research facilities and space farms. This is where controlled environment systems will come in.

Canada is among the worlds leaders in biological life support research and technology development. This is because when it comes to farming, the severe conditions of space are similar to those in the northern parts of our country. Trying to grow a tomato on Mars is much like trying to grow a tomato in a snowbank: You cant without creating a controlled environment.

At the University of Guelph, we are moving toward growing crops in space with the research we are conducting on controlled environment systems. Our ongoing work in this area has revealed that plants can function under some strange environmental conditions such as very low atmospheric pressures and much less oxygen than on Earth. This means we dont need enclosed structures that precisely replicate Earths atmosphere for plant-based life support systems on Mars.

In 150 years, we will grow food on Mars in inflatable structures. Inside, everything will be designed to ensure the highest crop yield. The intensity of light and even its colour or spectrum will be tailored for each individual crop. Air flow and pressure, temperature, nutrients, carbon dioxide levels and humidity will be strictly controlled to create the ideal atmosphere in which plants can thrive.

We will grow a conventional array of crops associated with a balanced and nourishing vegetarian diet. Most of the vitamins and minerals we need are available in plants and we will get our protein from soybeans and similar crops.

This huge variety of plants, or candidate crops, will be neatly packed or layered into a small space the opposite of the expansive Canadian prairies. These compact crops will be produced using limited amounts of water and zero waste, because away from Earth, you cant afford to throw anything away. We must learn to recycle everything, as it will be a matter of life and death extreme agriculture at its most challenging.

The work we are doing at Guelph is designed not only for space, but for Canadians and others worldwide who may live in places where food security is a problem and extreme agriculture is the only way to address it.

Today, we spend millions of dollars flying perishable food to Northern Canada, such as buying strawberries from Mexico for sale in Yellowknife. This doesnt make sense.

Sustaining our presence in the North depends on food production in the same way that sustaining our presence on Mars will. By creating these systems, we will be able to inhabit challenging parts of Canada, such as the North, and other parts of the world, such as the deserts of the Middle East.

Space exploration generates invaluable technology on all fronts. For food production, space exploration will enable us to learn how to grow crops almost anywhere and with as little impact on the environment as possible.

By the time Canadas 300th birthday rolls around, we will have overcome the challenge of living on Mars and the huge advancements we will have made to get there will serve not only space exploration but our own survival here on Earth.

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Is the Brain Augmentation Hype Justified? Here’s an Expert’s Take – Singularity Hub

Posted: at 6:32 am

Despite bold predictions from several tech firms about the future of neural interfaces, the science of brain augmentation is still in the early days. So, what do academics think of all the hype coming out of Silicon Valley?

Mikhail Lebedev, a neuroscientist who works on brain-machine interfaces (BMI) at Duke University, recently won a $100,000 prize from the open-access academic publisher Frontiers for a collection of papers on brain augmentation, curated over the last four years.

The prize money is designed to help him and fellow editors Ioan Opris (University of Miami neuroscientist) and Manuel Casanova (University of South Carolina medical doctor) to set up an international conference on the topic next year. So, I took the opportunity to speak to Lebedev about the state of the field.

In the next 10 years we will see realistic visual prostheses of different kinds and a lot of technologies for rehabilitation of stroke and spinal cord injury. How its described in these hype articleslike having people typing from the brain or millions of electrodes implanted in the brainwill be realized, but maybe in 20 years.

I may be wrong, because once new technologies start to come to this field it can really develop fast. If 10 years ago it was fine to insert a half-millimeter-thick electrode into the brain, now there are nanoscale electrodes. Of course, decoding brain activity will still be a problem for quite a while.

We have some basic understanding. We know some areas of the brain are more cognitive compared to others. So, if you want to extract more advanced information from the brain, you should place your electrodes inside or over these areas. But the representation of thought is not well advanced, so I dont think in the next 10 years we will be able to decode free-floating thoughts.

I think it is very realistic, but the first success will come from augmented reality (AR), where you use your normal senses, which are quite good, to interface to this AI, or lets call it an exo-brain. So, interfacing directly is a really good idea, but its still limited by the number of channels for such interfacing. The major problem is that we dont really understand the brain code, so we dont really know how to make this interface very efficient.

But my memory is limited, so AR glasses could really help, like if some AI guides me through an environment. You can imagine a computer and the brain working together. So the brain gives examples and the computer then learns, and the brain takes advantage of the computing power of an external device.

Take any brain function, and you can try to enhance it. In sensory functions, you can add new sensors to the brain. For example, you can add a sensor of electromagnetic fields that we cannot sense normally, and youd have this new sense. You can place these new sensors around the perimeter of the head and then youd have panoramic vision. Of course, I would experiment first in animals for this kind of application!

You can also try to micro-stimulate certain areas in the brain, but so far the majority of papers show you can suppress certain processing steps, not really improve. But if you think this suppression is maybe helpful, then you can come up with some ideas. For example, imagine certain tasks that a person is solving, and the computer knows the right answerso it sends a suppressive impulse to certain parts of the brain and biases the brains decision.

There are two major branches. The first is non-invasive devices, which are very easy to implement, and they kind of work. The problem is that the quality of signals they provide is limited. If you look at electroencephalogram (EEG) systems, theyre composed of the activity of huge numbers of neurons, and the strongest EEGs are recorded during sleep. So all the activities related to, say, fine motor control, become really small and you cannot detect them in EEGs. On top of that, EEGs suffer from artifacts of all kinds.

Of course, EEG devices are not the only ones that use non-invasive approaches. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIR) is actually a very good non-invasive method. They do well in detecting certain activities, but they work very slowly.

The potential of invasive approaches hasnt been realized at all. What we have now is the ability to record from, say, 100 neurons. So in the future, when we record from millions of neurons, we can think about all kinds of decoding ideas. Basically right now the obstacle to that is the invasive surgery needed to implant such a device.

Pharmacology is not my exact field, but drug developers are doing amazing work. They can develop molecules for some specific purpose that can work for one brain receptor, but not another, or one brain area, but not another. So in principle, all these methods can be improved and become targeted for particular problems.

You can even modify brain cells genetically, like in optogenetics, where they make cells that are sensitive to light. This has not been fully realized because there are many more possibilities. The cells can be sensitive to magnetic fields, to stretch, you can probably make mechanosensitive neurons by genetic engineering. Or you can try to implant some cells from another organism in the brain. Any science fiction idea you can find nowadays is being realized, so I wont say no to anything!

Im optimistic, so I see mostly upsides. We really want to improve; we want to become less primitive people. The main downside is probably the same as drug use. So, lets imagine a person implanting himself in the pleasure centre of the brain and then just constantly stimulating himself. Probably you dont want this, but it may be difficult to avoid.

Interfering with the brains motivation and pleasure systems, this can be a problem, and of course, you can imagine militaries getting hold of itand making soldiers they can control. In fact, any BMI interface can also act as a lie detector. You can really detect some things that normally you dont want to expose, that you want to keep private.

I dont worry about this because what will probably happen is the rich people will get the first brain augmentation systems that will be very expensive, very cumbersome, and work really badly. But as the technology develops it will become cheap, then everybody will get access. So, this particular part I dont think is a problem in a capitalistic society.

Editors note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Stock media provided by HighwayStarz/Pond5.com

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Knights of Unicron (SG) – Transformers Wiki – TFWiki.net

Posted: at 6:30 am

The Knights of Unicron are a heroic Autobot subgroup from the Shattered Glass continuity family.

The Knights of Unicron were once evil Autobots, but the benevolent god of extropy Unicron reformatted them into his agents of peace. Now, they serve truth and justice across known space. Their members are:

Following their defeat at Decepticon City on Earth, Optimus Prime's forces retreated aboard Sky Lynx for Cybertron. Memory's Splinter Midway through, however, Sky Lynx announced that they would have to lighten the load. Rodimus took the opportunity to dump Optimus, Brawn, Prowl, Inferno, and Ratchet out the airlock. The five badly injured Autobots then found themselves in the presence of Unicron. Familiar Reflections Now dominated by good due to the Shroud, the god of extropy offered Optimus and his troopers truth and enlightenment. After Unicron showed Optimus a vision of his greatest victory, Prime accepted, and Unicron healed and reformatted them. The newly-formed Knights were then sent to Cybertron to stop Rodimus's chaos. Arriving in Rodimus's throne room, the Autotroopers took on the evil Autobots while Nova went head to head with Rodimus. Nova succeeded, sending Rodimus tumbling down into the depths of Cybertron. Restoration The Knights soon had the Autobots arrested, but Unicron contacted Nova to warn him that a greater threat awaited. Cybertron then seemingly began to fall apart. While the Knights barely maintained their footing, Rodimus reappeared and ordered his Autobots to evacuate. Cybertron then completed its transformation into the physical form of the Cybertronians' creator-god, Primus. Awakened by Rodimus and dominated by evil due to the Shroud, the dark Primus observed the nearby dimensionally-displaced Earth and tried to destroy it. However, Earth revealed itself as another Transformer god, Primus's sister Gaea. As the titans clashed, the Knights came to Gaea's aid, taking out Primus's eyes. Gaea then destroyed Primus and transformed herself into a new Cybertron as a home to both heroic Autobot and heroic Decepticon. The Knights became the guardians of the new joint society as a new age of peace dawned. The Future Buried...

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Mosquitoes in Ascension, en garde: the ‘hunter-killer’ drone has … – The Advocate

Posted: at 6:30 am

GONZALES In the dystopian future portrayed by the movie franchise"Terminator," jet-powered drones with laser guns, known as "hunter-killers," scanned the planet from the skies to destroy the remnants of humanity.

Though Skynet, the artificial intelligence that controlled those fictional drones, may not yet be "self-aware," the drone future is now in Ascension Parish and under human control.

An $8,000, eight-propeller drone arrived Tuesday that parish government officials recently bought to spray and kill mosquito larvae in the waterways and other wet places where they grow in the parish.

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"This is a great tool for us," said David Matassa, Ascension Parish's mosquito control director. "Because larvicide is the most important thing you can do for mosquitoes actually. You're at the birthplace of the mosquito. You're preventing them from becoming an adult."

Matassa and several parish employees were on hand late Tuesday morning at Lamar-Dixon Expo Center for a media demonstration of the drone that preceded a training session for workers in the Ascension Parish Mosquito Control department.

Adam Shaw, president and CEO of Maverick Drone Systems of Savage, Minnesota, and Logan Noess, company executive vice president, delivered the drone, unpacked it from its carrying case and extended the eight propeller arms until the tail-less craft reached its 4- to 5-foot width and was ready for flight.

The men then filled its three-gallon tank with bottled water, and Noess flew the drone with a remote control through several passes, spraying a small patch of a Lamar-Dixon field with the water.

Shaw said the drone, which is battery-powered and recharges in a regular electrical outlet, can cover seven to 10 acres in single battery charge.

Known as theDJI Agras MG-1,the drone was created for agricultural spraying. DJI is a Chinese drone manufacturer, and Maverick is the U.S. dealer for the Agras. Shaw said the craft has made spraying quicker, more efficient and more flexible than using planes or helicopters through traditional aerial spraying methods.

"The Agras has really revolutionized farming, agriculture and, certainly, the mosquito abatement community, which is why we're here," Shaw said.

While some parishes already use drones for mosquito surveillance, Matassa said Ascension is the first parish in Louisiana to use drones to kill mosquitoes or their offspring directly. But Matassa and Shaw said they expect the use of drones to expand quickly.

Shaw said he has received a lot of "really good feedback" from other parish governments in the state.

"I think this is something that is just going boom over here for the next three to five years," Shaw said.

He said his company has also been talking with law enforcement about using Maverick drones equipped with thermal cameras and other equipment that can be used for crime scene and car crash analysis. Shaw said company officials plan to meet with the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office during their visit this week to Louisiana.

Shaw said his company has also gotten interest from the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development for surveying and other uses.

Kyle Gautreau, Ascension Parish spokesman, said parish government could be looking at drones for other uses besides mosquito control, which he termed a pilot effort.

"If this works out really well, without a doubt, this will be explored by other departments for utilization," Gautreau said.

Ascension Parish's new drone doesn't have a camera, but flies by line of sight. Matassa said one parish employee is working on a federal license to fly the drone, and once the employee is licensed, spraying will start.

The parish will still use spray trucks and aerial spraying when needed to kill adult mosquitoes, but when the drone is in action, it will be spraying larvicide in hard to reach places.

"Next couple weeks, we'll be larviciding most probably area ditches, water lines and wherever there are low-lying areas that are hard to get to," Matassa said.

Follow David J. Mitchell on Twitter, @NewsieDave.

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Waterways in Ascension, Livingston reopened Tuesday evening – The Advocate

Posted: at 6:30 am

GONZALES All inland waterways in Ascension and Livingston parishes were reopened to recreational boat traffic at 6 p.m. Tuesday, five days after they were closed, Ascension officials said.

GONZALES The Amite River and all other inland waterways in Ascension and Livingston parish

Tropical Storm Cindy last week dropped rain while its winds pushed surge up waterways throughout the Lake Pontchartrain Basin, including those tied to Lake Maurepas, like the Amite River and Amite River Diversion Canal.

Local leaders closed the waterways to keep boat wakes from pushing high water into homes and to prevent boats from running into debris washed out from last week's storms.

Livingston and Ascension share the Amite, but other rivers and bayous also course throughout both parishes.

Ascension homeland security officials announced the planned waterway reopenings on Facebook Tuesday.

Blind River, which St. James Parish officials also closed last week due to high water, reopened Monday, Ascension officials said in the post.

Follow David J. Mitchell on Twitter, @NewsieDave.

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Ascension Parish Sheriff’s deputies looking for three trying to break … – The Advocate

Posted: at 6:30 am

DONALDSONVILLE The Ascension Parish Sheriff's Office is trying to identify three people two with handguns caught on surveillance video trying to break into vehicles in the Bun Hood subdivision in Donaldsonville early Monday, said Chief Deputy Bobby Webre.

The three fled the subdivision after triggering a motion-light detector, Webre said in a news release.

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Investigators believe the trio also used a brick to break through the window of a residence on Woodland Drive in Donaldsonville, near the same time on Monday, Webre said.

A purse and miscellaneous items were stolen from the home, Webre said.

Anyone with information on the incident is asked to call the Ascension Parish Sheriff's Office at (225) 621-4636, text 847411 or call Crime Stoppers at (225) 344-7867.

If anyone recognizes the three in the video, they should not approach them but should call 911, Webre said.

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Third flood-damaged Ascension Parish public school ready for bid, if the district can find $6.7 million – The Advocate

Posted: at 6:30 am

DONALDSONVILLE With construction underway at two flood-damaged Ascension Parish public schools, with no word yet on federal reimbursement, the restoration project for a third school that flooded is ready to bid if the school district can find the funds for it.

The project at Lake Elementary, closed since last August, is ready to go out to bid, Director of Planning and Construction Chad Lynch told the School Board at a non-voting meeting Tuesday, but, he said, "We don't have a funding source yet."

State law requires that public entities must have funding budgeted before it can advertise for bids for a project.

The school district in recent months began restoration on St. Amant Primary, a $3.5 million project, while it waits to learn if the Federal Emergency Management Agency will approve grant money for reimbursement.

A $1.3 million project to repair St. Amant Middle, on the same campus as the primary school, is also underway, again without word yet on FEMA money. The middle school remained open last school year, despite its damage.

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ST. AMANT Work is underway to restore St. Amant Primary, the first of the five severely fl

Last month, a FEMA spokesman said allocations on both of those school projects should be made some time in July.

The restoration project at Lake Elementary, for which FEMA has not yet allocated funds, is expected to cost $6.7 million, Lynch said Tuesday.

"Lake Elementary is ready to bid, but we don't have $6.7 million behind us yet," he said.

The school district will need to decide "how far do we stick our neck out," Lynch said.

"The message here is that we have projects ready to bid, with no funding," said Todd Mann, project manager with CSRS, the school district's flood recovery consultant.

Superintendent David Alexander has a formal request in hand, made recently by CSRS, on whether funding is available for the Lake Elementary project, Mann said.

Alexander, who is attending a school-related conference in Tennessee this week, will be bringing a recommendation on the funding issue to the board.

CSRS has estimated that total restoration costs for flood damage in the Ascension Parish school district come to approximately $108 million.

Taking into account optimum FEMA reimbursements, flood insurance, donations and other possible forms of funding, the school district's share of the costs is expected to be in the $25 million to $28 million range.

Follow Ellyn Couvillion on Twitter, @EllynCouvillion.

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Third flood-damaged Ascension Parish public school ready for bid, if the district can find $6.7 million - The Advocate

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Ascension Parish Health Unit and St. Elizabeth Community Clinic … – Weekly Citizen

Posted: at 6:30 am

Three weeks ago, completed renovations at the Ascension Parish Health Unit resulted in newclinical space for the St. Elizabeth Community Clinic. Now, in one location, premium healthcare and wellness services can be provided to Ascension Parish residents.

Ascension Parish President Kenny Matassa oversaw the renovations at the Health Unit whichresulted in four exam rooms and one lab room for the St. Elizabeth Community Clinic.

Ourpartnership with St. Elizabeth is a treasure, said Matassa. Weve renovated a section of thehealth unit so that our partnership can grow even stronger through direct referrals and a closeworking relationship.

The St. Elizabeth Community clinic offers routine treatment for uninsured patients with commonshort-term health problems or long-lasting illnesses that can be managed on an outpatientbasis. Patients must be at least 10 years of age.

Some of our folks have visited the emergency room twenty times in a year, because that wastheir only source of medical care, said Robert Burgess, President and CEO of St. ElizabethHospital. Instead they come here in a much more pleasant environment and get the care theyneed.

The Ascension Parish Health Unit offers WIC nutritional services, immunizations, pregnancytesting, family planning services and sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment.Additionally, the Ascension Parish Counseling Center, a subset of the Health Unit, offersindividual and group counseling and treatments for addictive disorders.

Our mission is to serve those most in need, said Burgess. This partnership that we havehere is a great example of how to do that.

We are blessed to have a well-funded health unit and our great partnership with St. ElizabethHospital, added Matassa.

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NASA: AI Will Lead the Future of Space Exploration – Futurism

Posted: at 6:29 am

In BriefNASA scientists have predicted the pivotal role AI will playin the future of space travel. While we already use rudimentaryforms of AI on our probes, deep space AI will need to be far moresophisticated. AI-LeadMissions

Steve Chien and Kiri Wagstaff of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratoryhave predicted thatin the future, the behavior of space probeswill be governed by AI rather than human prompts from earth.While humanity has made great strides in exploring the galaxies beyond our own, in order to learn even more about our universe, we may need to hand the controls over to robots.

That said, there will be challenges to the hand off, and the difficulties of micromanaging probes in deep space fall into three main categories:

First, probes may fall outside communications range, which means they will have to continue without instruction on their journey. That also means that eventually theyll have towork out when, and how, to return with the data they have collected. A key aspect of this is knowing which data to document, and how to identify it: for example, deciding if weather is due to a storm or is normal for theplanet being observed.

Second, because they will be traveling to areas of space that we know very little about, they will also have to be able to learn in order to adapt to environmental factors, such as unforeseen asteroids, temperatures, or gravities.

Third, because of the time required totravel to those distant parts of the universe, generations of scientists will die before probes return, leaving the probes somewhat to their own devices so to speak.

The benefits of using AI to control space-exploring robots have been demonstratedby missions that are alreadyunderway. Both the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which were launched back in 2003, had an AI driving system called Autonav that allowed them to explore the surface of Mars.

In addition, Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) has been used by the NASA Mars rover, Curiosity, since May in order to select which aspects of Mars are particularly interesting and subsequently take photos of them. Chien and Wagstaff said the system has substantially reduced lost time on the mission and markedly increased the pace of data collection.

Therefore, any AI that we use in the future of space exploration will allow us to retrieve data from the places we send probes to, as well as allow us to explore them further, and collect better data. Since humans arent yet able to traverse these locales ourselves, unless were willing tohand at least some of that responsibility over to AI, its unlikely any of thesemissionscouldhappen.

Hiro Ono, another NASA engineer, gives the example of a spacecraft on a Jovian moon Europa, which is covered by a 10km thick Icy Crust: The probe might be trapped in ice if it waits for the instruction of human operators. Without an advanced autonomy, exploration of such a remote world would be severely limited, if not impossible.

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