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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: drmorgan who wrote (10668)	12/14/1997 8:50:00 PM
From: Moonray	Respond to of 22053

Bot Lives: Scientists plan mini-robots to invade space Scripps Howard News Service LONDON -- Scientists are planning to produce the smallest space invaders of all. Intelligent robot probes weighing no more than half an ounce could one day be scurrying about the solar system, boldly going where no satellite could go before. Until now, engineers have designed satellites to withstand the harshest environments. But Kurt Moore and Mark Tilden of the Los Alamos national laboratory in New Mexico have another idea: they will give their probes a rudimentary brain and let them work out how best to survive in a lethal planetary radiation belt. Nearly half of all satellite failures are because of loss of radio contact with mission control, usually because the radiation wrecks dainty microprocessors. ''We are working on satellites that have no microprocessors or fixed algorithmic behaviors,'' Moore told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. ''These satellites are.. . . designed from the bottom up and domesticated by their sensors and control payloads into performing high reliability tasks.'' The control systems, which the team call ''biomorphs'', are modeled on the simplest ''twitches'' of animal neurons, and are almost immune from electrical or mechanical faults. The robots have been tested at a US military firing range full of unexploded ordnance: if a leg gets blown off a robot, it works out how to carry on with three, or two, or even one. With a simple network of these ''nerves'', a little satellite could occupy the high ground of research. Clouds of them could drift in the electrically-charged wind from the Sun, firing data back to a communications micro-satellite which could send the big picture to Earth. o~~~ O