Monthly Archives: April 2022

You may have seen the story about the Psyche mission, in which NASA is preparing to launch a spacecraft that will travel to an asteroid in search of information that might unlock some of the mysteries of the universe.

But Im going to tell you the story of a different journey. Its about how Luis Dominguez, the son of immigrants from Mexico and Honduras, traveled from South Los Angeles to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he helped build the Psyche spacecraft.

Dominguez, 34, is the eldest of three boys born to Luis and Cecilia Dominguez. His dad is an auto mechanic, and Luis tagged along to his dads shop when he could, pitching in at times. His mom was a housekeeper for a while, and as a boy, Dominguez went on jobs with her, too.

Luis Dominguez is staying at his familys home in Los Angeles before relocating to Florida in the summer for the launch of the spacecraft.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

His education began at Vermont Elementary in L.A. Unified, followed by Audubon Middle School, where, by his account, he wasnt the best student in the building. But when a seventh-grade classmate brought a book to class about flight, he knew what he wanted to do with his life.

I was fascinated, and I said, OK, I want to work on airplanes, Dominguez said. He went on to Westchester High School, which had an aerospace magnet.

Dominguez told me he was up at 5 in the morning, and the bus ride to school took about an hour. Knowing what he wanted to do with his life made him more focused, and his GPA shot up like a missile. On a campus career day, a visiting Cal State professor advised him to consider majoring in mechanical engineering in college rather than aerospace, because it would give him more work options.

Luis walked in the door and it was like, Hey, what can I do? Hey, let me help you with that.

David Gruel, JPL Engineer

And so he did at Cal Poly Pomona. Dominguez lived at home to save money. He commuted to college daily, put in some hours at a convenience store and a sandwich shop in his spare time, also worked as a gardener and helped out at his dads auto shop in Inglewood.

In my junior year we had a career fair and JPL was there, and honestly, I didnt even know what JPL was. I was just giving my resume to everybody, said Dominguez, who had a 3.98 GPA at the time, and was shopping for an internship. I got a call back pretty quickly and was like, whos JPL? I looked it up on the internet and thought, oh, thats the NASA space center. This is pretty cool.

In the fall of 2007, Dominguez was assigned as a part-time student intern to JPL engineer David Gruel, who led the team assembling the Mars Science Laboratory for the Curiosity mission. A lot of student interns are passive or introverted, Gruel said. Not Dominguez.

NASA systems engineer Luis Dominguez is reflected in foil covering the spacecraft that will probe the Psyche asteroid.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Luis walked in the door and it was like, Hey, what can I do? Hey, let me help you with that. You could tell he was excited to be where he was and wanted to contribute, and he was open and willing to doing whatever task we asked him to do, Gruel said. So his first JPL experience was seeing a rover being built, which was going to land on the surface of Mars.

When the internship was done, and Dominguez graduated from Cal Poly Pomona, he had his heart set on a career at JPL. He recalls telling Gruel, Just hire me. Ill mop the floors. Ill do anything.

Gruel had seen Dominguez evolve as an intern from small tasks to doing tech support for Curiosity engineers.

I could tell that Luis was going to be a catch and that JPL would definitely benefit from bringing him on as a full-time engineer, Gruel said.

Dominguez went to JPL straight out of college and has been there since. He was deputy electrical integration and test lead on the Mars Perseverance rover that launched in 2020. Hes now the lead electrical engineer on the Psyche satellite, overseeing a team of five, and hell be in Florida when Psyche launches in August from Cape Canaveral.

Dozens of engineers and support staff are on the Psyche team. Essentially, Dominguez and his crew build the electronic guts of the craft. They take components manufactured at JPL and around the world, string everything together and put it to the test.

In a nutshell, we build the spacecraft, we take it into an environment where we shake it, we bake it, and then blow a bunch of highly pressurized air at it to create the acoustic environment you get during launch, said Dominguez.

Luis Dominguez encourages students to shoot high, take risks, be unafraid to fail, and to live life with courage, curiosity, tenacity and a healthy dose of altruism.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

The craft will travel through space for years, scheduled to arrive at its destination an asteroid known as 16 Psyche in 2026. Asteroid mining is considered a future possibility, Dominguez said, but hes more curious about the primary aspect of the mission.

The cool thing about it is that its the biggest metallic asteroid we know about, and all data point to the fact that it is likely the core of a failed planet, said Dominguez. We can get a better understanding of what the core of Earth might look like, which is something weve never been able to do.

At JPL on Monday, Dominguez and others were putting the finishing touches on the spacecraft. At media day, I bumped into Brian Bone, manager of the assembly, test and launch operations unit.

Luis has been a key player, Bone said. Ive seen few people put in as much work whether you ask them to or not. Hes just all in, and hes always excited to be here.

Dominguez who is engaged to a woman he met years ago when they both worked at a McDonalds will soon move with the JPL team to Florida for the summer. He gave up the lease on his downtown L.A. apartment and moved temporarily into the brown stucco home where he spent much of his youth, in the neighborhood southwest of USC.

When I visited him there, his parents were away, visiting family in Mexico and Honduras, but I got to speak to them by phone.

He was always a smart kid, and he worked hard, said his mother, Cecilia.

I never had a doubt that he was going to make it, said his father, whos proud of all three sons. One of Luis younger brothers is a physician assistant, and the other is a legal assistant intent on becoming a lawyer.

Dominguez told me that during his time at JPL, hes developed another passion.

One of the things that most excites me is the opportunity to do community outreach and talk to kids about the stuff I do especially kids who come from where I came from, he said.

Last fall, Dominguez was the featured motivational speaker in an address broadcast to students, faculty and staff in the Cal State system. The Cal Poly alum told his story from the chancellors office in Long Beach, noting the focus it took for him to become a better student in high school. He credited his parents with showing him the value of sacrifice and hard work.

I never thought Id help put two 1-ton robots and a helicopter on Mars, he told his audience, calling himself a first-generation college student and a proud child of immigrants.

His advice to every student was to shoot high, take risks, be unafraid to fail, and to live life with courage, curiosity, tenacity and a healthy dose of altruism, because those are the tenets that got me where I am today.

Dominguez named in 2017 by CNET en Espaol as one of the 20 most influential Latinos in technology closed with this:

Just like the universe, every human being is filled with infinite capabilities and infinite possibilities, with genius, no matter their background, no matter their ZIP Code, no matter their financial circumstance. It is incumbent upon us as leaders to find that genius, to stoke it and let it shine, because at the end of the day, genius is everywhere.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Continued here:

Column: From LAUSD student all the way to JPL and to Mars - Los Angeles Times

Deliver Us Mars looks bleak. It looks daunting. In the most desperate, isolating and life-threatening sense, it looks terrifying. And these are just some of the compliments I could pay KeokeN Interactive and Frontier Foundry's upcoming sci-fi puzzle adventure at first glance.

That early glimpse of the developer's follow-up to Deliver Us the Moon came during last month's Future Games Show Spring Showcase, when a super moody reveal trailer set the tone. Speaking to GamesRadar+ in the wake of that world premiere, KeokeN's Koen Deetman said we should expect a similarly non-violent, story-driven odyssey this time set on the Red Planet but one that is a "radical step up in narrative and gameplay" terms over its 2018 forerunner.

As is alluded to towards the end of the above trailer, exploration underpins Deliver Us Mars, with the player having crash-landed on the as-yet uncolonized foreign planet. Environmental hazards punctuate the road to safety, which allow for puzzles that are "woven into the game's setting", and merged with action-adventure set-pieces, each of which demands quick-thinking and even faster reaction times.

"Expanding on the narrative in Deliver Us Mars means that we really went the extra mile in getting actual live performances captured, not only voice but body and face, too," explains Deetman. "It deepens the believability of the characters you'll encounter in the game and this story is brought to life by a fantastic cast, who well be able to reveal and discuss at a later date."

"In the Deliver Us series, you don't commit any violent acts, so crafting a natural pressure/conflict resolve method wasn't easy for us. With the climbing ability weve added to this game, players will experience this type of 'hold on or fall' feel of danger plus it enhances the feeling of verticality in our game without us needing to use stairs or elevators."

"Compared to the previous game, the puzzles in Deliver Us Mars have evolved from one-offs to a more elevated connected system with mechanics that give you more engaging and challenging scenarios than before. Sometimes, too, these puzzles have more than just one solution."

Building on the real-world questions posed by its predecessor tied to climate change and preserving planet Earth Deliver Us Mars is set 10 years into the future. And while the climax of Deliver Us the Moon provided a temporary solution to the world's self-destructive ills, Deliver Us Mars aims to offer hope with its learn-by-doing approach and design. In doing so, Deliver Us Mars will adopt a strictly third-person perspective a distinguished step away from its forerunner's variety of fixed and tracking camera shots.

On this, Deetman says: "Both perspectives have their positives and negatives, but the third-person perspective gives the player the ability to see their astronaut in their full glory. Driving an expensive car is nice, but actually seeing it from the outside is where the real magic comes from, right? It's similar when you see our protagonist in her slick high-tech futuristic astronaut suit it's the Ferrari of our game, so to speak."

"Theres another reason we like this perspective, though: in Deliver Us The Moon, there was a sense that this silent astronaut could've been you as a player that is, until late in the game when we finally revealed who the astronaut in the suit was. You could imagine a wholly first-person perspective working well for a completely anonymous main character, but the identity of who youre playing as is important in this series. Players will be very clear from the start of Deliver Us Mars of who their protagonist is, and therefore playing as her from a third-person perspective makes more sense especially when elements like motion-capture come into play."

"Compared to our previous game, the puzzles here have evolved from one-offs to a more elevated connected system with mechanics that give you more engaging and challenging scenarios."

To its credit, the Deliver Us Mars reveal trailer is as atmospheric as they come but we're nevertheless left with more questions than answers. What caused our crash landing? Can our malfunctioning ship be repaired? What is that ominous monolith in the distance? And is that red-handled pick-axe from B&Q or Homebase? Deliver Us Mars is as yet without a concrete release window, but Deetman assures us all will be revealed in due course, and that everything the game proposes with regards to life on the barren Mars sprawl has been researched to the fullest possible degree.

"Youve no doubt noticed that humanity hasnt colonized Mars yet, so we have to make do with what the various Mars rovers and scientists are showing to the world when we try to stick to an authentic representation of this planet. We use that as a basis for our starting point," Deetman adds. "With Deliver Us The Moon, we had astronauts confirm some of the ways the game depicted its real-life setting. Thats obviously not possible to do with Mars, but we studied the behavior of its atmosphere, how the color of the landscape changes through the night, and how its gravity behaves in comparison to Earth and the Moon. This natural character of the planet was important for us to capture."

"Another question we asked was, how would human beings actually colonize a planet like this? Throughout the development of Deliver Us Mars, weve learned a lot about how challenging this would actually be, and it underlined to us just how precious planet Earth really is."

Other, less conceptual challenges faced by KeokeN pertain to new-gen hardware. Having first launched on PC in 2018, Deliver Us the Moon was re-released on desktops the following year, before debuting on PS4 and Xbox One in 2020. Now, two years on, Deliver Us the Moon is preparing for a PS5 and Xbox Series X launch on May 19 a process that Deetman believes has helped both the developer's first game and its forthcoming sequel. From 4K visuals to feeling genuine vertigo from peering over one of the Red Planet's knife-edge gullies, it sounds like Deliver Us Mars is shaping up nicely in its current state. Deetman can't say much more than that currently, but he does promise the wait will be worth it.

He adds: "We've been really fortunate to have had the next-gen hardware at our disposal for Deliver Us The Moon while also developing Deliver Us Mars. It has absolutely benefitted from the knowledge we've acquired getting our previous game to next gen. I've seen players ask what that 'next-gen feeling' is, but I can assure you Deliver Us Mars will bring players that sensation this game really looks and sounds the part."

Read more about Deliver Us Mars on the game's official website.

Love indie games? Here's all the best new indie games that're out now or coming soon.

View original post here:

Deliver Us Mars devs on going the extra mile to create a credible alien world - Gamesradar

The Monegasque group announced the launch of Venturi Lab, a new Swiss entity that designs and manufactures mobility solutions that are capable of coping with the extremely harsh environmental conditions on the Moon and Mars.

We are already aware of Venturi and its automotive exploits, Venturi and its speed records, Venturi and its polar exploration vehicles. Now, Venturi is, dare we say it, Venturi-ng into space.

SEE ALSO: Behind the scenes of the Venturi Antarctica, the first electric polar exploration vehicle

With the aim of further expanding its business, the group chaired by Gildo Pastor is setting off in a new direction by extending its expertise to the challenges of space.

Build a rover to transport astronauts over very rugged terrain where temperatures drop to -160C

Along with Dr. Antonio Delfino, former head of the chemistry and physics department and Fellow at Michelin, Gildo Pastor has co-founded Venturi Lab, an entity that invents and designs mobility solutions capable of coping with the extreme conditions that can be found on the Moon and Mars.

Venturi Lab is working closely with Venturi in Monaco and Venturi North America in Columbus (Ohio, USA) to develop the required technology. But also with a 100% American-owned company, based in California: Venturi Astrolab.

Its main objective is the construction of a rover for SpaceX and NASAs upcoming lunar missions. With the support of Venturi Monaco and Venturi North America, Venturi Astrolab hopes to supply NASA with its vehicles in the future.

Discussions with Gildo Pastor on the possibility of sending a multifunctional electric rover to the Moon and then to Mars began in 2018, Antonio Delfino reveals.Thanks to teams from Venturi in Monaco and Venturi Astrolab in Los Angeles, we will study, develop and build a rover to transport astronauts on very rugged terrain, where the temperature is -160C.

I want to raise the Monegasque flag even higher

Further down the line, Venturi Lab also intends to develop technologies that will reduce land, sea and air pollution.

SEE ALSO: Wattman, the famous electric motorcycle, now even faster

Since 2001, we have created high-performance two- or four-wheeled and even caterpillar-track vehicles capable of travelling in -50 C temperatures, or up to 549 km/h depending on the model,Gildo Pastor explains. Today, I am committing our know-how and resources to space research. I want to raise the Monegasque flag even higher.

Read the original post:

A Venturi rover on the Moon and Mars soon? - Monaco Tribune

go big or go home with Mars Campers

Australian company Mars Campers has launched its latest all-terrain camper, the Space X Air. Designed for those who enjoy a little bit of luxury in the great outdoors, the hybrid pop-up camper travels as a flatbed trailer then inflates to create a spacious living area all at the touch of a button. Mars Campers is calling it Australias first automatic opening, automatic stabilizing and automatic inflating dual fold camper.

The off-road beast can accommodate four adults and two children. It measures 5900mm L x 2340mm W x 1560mm H when closed and has a 650kg payload. The tent construction on top of the trailer spans 6000mm x 2100mm and is made from heavy duty 16oz waterproofed close weave canvas with double stitching and reinforced stress points.

Watch how quickly and easily the camper inflates:

When it comes to features, Mars Campers hasnt left anything out. The camper is equipped with a pull-out kitchen complete with 3 burner stove and sink, space for a fridge, an external pantry, waterproof speakers, a TV bracket, and two toolboxes. The trailer also boasts integrated jerry can holders and gas cylinders storage. Meanwhile, external control panels let you operate the camper with ease.

Inside, thecamper features cozy lounge seating, which also doubles as storage, a minibar, a media player, speakers, USB inlets, as well as two double beds on either side with high density foam mattresses.

As for its off-road specs, the Space X Air has 6 stud 15 tires plus a spare and independent suspension that Mars Camper says is proven to tackle Australias toughest terrain.

images and main video courtesy of Mars Campers

the trailer before inflation

the pull-out kitchen includes a 3 burner stove and sink

thecamper features cozy lounge seating and two double beds

project info:

name: Mars Campers Space X Air

company: Mars Campers

Excerpt from:

the mars space x air blow-up camper inflates at the touch of a button - Designboom

Mars procession in Dhaka on Bengali new year (Photo: India Today)

The traditional Mars procession of the Bengali New Year 1429 has been held in Dhaka under the slogan 'Nirmal Karo Mangal Ke Malin Marm Mushaye'. The procession was filled with people of different classes and professions dressed in Baishakhi, holding colourful masks in their hands.

The people gathered in the procession sang - 'Purify, do good and wipe away the filthy heart'.

The new year celebrations in 2020 were cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic and the Mars procession did not take place. In 2021, despite an improvement in the situation, there was no opportunity for everyone to participate. The restrictions have been lifted this year after the decrease in the spread of the virus.

The Mars procession organised by Dhaka university on the first Baishakh has been a part of the new year celebrations in the city for a long time. The program is also seen as a tool in the fight against bigotry.

The procession was started in the 1980s by the faculty of the fine arts department of Dhaka university on the first Baishakh with the call to break the shackles of military rule. The procession was later named 'Mars procession'. The program was recognized as a cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2016.

ALSO READ | BSF arrests cattle smuggler along Indo-Bangladesh border

Read the original here:

Traditional Mars procession held in Dhaka on Bengali new year - India Today