This week, the spacecraft Juno successfully enters orbit around Jupiter and a Tesla on Autopilot is involved in a fatal crash. But let’s start with a look ahead to Amazon’s Prime Day 2016.
Amazon Prime Day is next Tuesday, July 12
Amazon’s first ever Prime Day was last year. It was successful enough – the company claims that worldwide, 398 items per second were ordered – that the online retailer is running the campaign again.
It’s a one-day shopping bonanza available to anyone with a Prime membership with Amazon. For an annual fee of Cdn$79, Prime members get free, two-day shipping on many items sold at Amazon.ca. If you do any amount of shopping at Amazon, a Prime membership pays for itself in a couple of months.
The Prime Day sales start at 12:01 a.m., Pacific Time, next Tuesday, July 12.
Every hour, new deals are revealed. Quantities are limited, and the time the deal is available is also limited.
Last year there was quite a bit of junky stuff being sold. But there were some deals to be had, too.
Tesla vehicle on Autopilot involved in fatal crash
Tesla Motors has revealed that one of its Model S vehicles was in Autopilot mode when it was involved in a crash that killed its driver.
Autopilot is the name given to the semi-autonomous driving function of the Model S vehicles. It is not fully automatic.
The accident occurred in May in Florida, and involved a tractor trailer which crossed a highway perpendicular to the Model S. Because of the bright sky, the white trailer was not detected by the Autopilot cameras, and the car didn’t stop, continuing underneath the trailer.
Tesla notes that customers are instructed to always be paying attention while Autopilot is activated, as the system is in a “public beta phase” and not perfect.
In a blog post, the company noted that this is the first known fatality where Autopilot was activated in “just over 130 million miles”. The post claims that “among all vehicles in the U.S., there is a fatality every 94 million miles,” and worldwide the number is one fatality in every 60 million miles.
The claim that Tesla vehicles in Autopilot have logged 130 million miles has been questioned.
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) is investigating the Florida accident.
Juno spacecraft enters Jupiter’s orbit
On July 4, NASA’s Juno mission went into a new phase, as the spacecraft attempted “Jupiter Orbit Insertion”.
Juno was moving fast, and needed to slow down or it would just zip past the solar system’s largest planet. To do that, NASA put the spacecraft into a deceleration burn. The plan was to burn for 35 minutes, slowing Juno down enough that it could be caught in Jupiter’s gravity and in an optimal orbit.
The manoeuvre was designed to slip Juno beneath the Jupiter’s radiation belt. Jupiter has an intense radiation field that is hundreds of times greater than anything on Earth. It also has a massive magnetic field, and rings of debris orbiting it.
Juno is on autopilot, so NASA engineers have no control over its flight. So after flying some 1.7 billion miles, over five years, you can just imagine what could have gone wrong.
But Juno was perfect, burning engines for 2,012 seconds, only one second off.
That mission is to get the first ever look at the surface of Jupiter, to map it and to get answers to questions about exactly what the planet is made of and how it’s constructed. Juno will complete 37 orbits in the next 20 months.
I’m embedding two videos here. The first one shows us, for the first time in real time, what it looks like when multiple heavenly bodies orbit a larger body. We’ve only been able to intuit and animate this movement before. And, as was so eloquently put by principal investigator Scott Bolton, the video shows what Galileo saw through his telescope. Which led to everything we knew being changed.
The second video is the trailer put together by NASA that outlines what the Juno Mission is all about.
