World’s largest commercial satellite in orbit

The world's largest commercial satellite was launched into space Wednesday, with a mission to provide phone service to cellular "dead zones" in North America.

The satellite, owned by TerreStar Corp. of Reston, Va., blasted off from Kourou in the South American territory of French Guiana atop an Ariane 5 rocket shortly before 2 p.m. ET, carried through pink clouds.

Half an hour later, French satellite launcher Arianespace announced that the TerreStar-1 had separated successfully from the rocket, on its way to an orbit 22,000 miles (35,200 kilometers) above the Earth.

There, the satellite is designed to unfurl an umbrella-like antenna of gold mesh 60 feet (18 meters) across, so it can pick up and relay signals from phones that are not much larger than regular cell phones.

TerreStar has shown prototypes of the phones, which are similar to BlackBerrys. Like BlackBerrys, the phones would have access to data and e-mail. The phones aren't on sale yet. TerreStar plans to have the system running before the end of the year.

To connect to the satellite, the handsets will need a clear view of the southern sky, just like a satellite dish. When that's not available, the sets will be able to connect to regular ground-based cellular networks. TerreStar has a roaming agreement with AT&T Inc.

The TerreStar 1 satellite, built by Loral Space & Communications Ltd., was originally scheduled to launch in 2007, but was delayed several times because of manufacturing problems.

The satellite is due be followed next year by two similar, even larger ones from a competitor, SkyTerra Communications Inc.

TerreStar and SkyTerra are hoping to avoid the fate that met two pioneers in satellite telephony. Iridium and Globalstar filed for bankruptcy at the beginning of the decade, wiping out billions in investor capital after launching extensive satellite systems. They are still in operation, providing last-resort communications for the military, forest wardens and others who can afford to buy dedicated, bulky satellite handsets for $1,000 and up.

Lasers to seek, but not destroy, subs

Shooting laser beams at a submarine won't destroy it, but new technology being tested by the U.S. Navy could help find enemy subs.

"Instead of dumping hardware (into the ocean) you could shoot a light pulse into the water and generate acoustic signals," said Ted Jones of the Naval Research Laboratory, who presented his results at a recent meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

"With this, you could do communications, acoustic navigation beacons or sonar."

The Navy scientists induce sound waves with lasers using two distinct, but similar techniques. Both techniques employ machines to create pulsed green lasers.

Both techniques penetrate the water anywhere from a few millimeters to about 66 feet deep. Once the laser reaches the desired depth, both techniques flash boil a tiny area of water, which expands to the size of a BB.

The manner in which this reaction is created is what separates the two techniques. The first technique spreads energy over time. The second spreads energy over space.

The first method blasts several different wavelengths of light. Each wavelength travels at a slightly different speed through air and water. When all of the wavelengths catch up with one another, the concentrated energy boils the water.

The second methods shoots the same wavelength of light, but over a wide area. The water acts like a lens, focusing the laser beams onto one specific area, which then boils.

The shock wave created by either method can travel several miles and can be used for several purposes. One would be for one-way communication with underwater vessels. Triggering pressure waves in a specific order could allow a plane to communicate with underwater vessels via basic Morse code, or, more likely, says Jones, with a complex, encoded pattern of pulses.

Another use for laser-induced sound waves would be for mapping the ocean floor. When they hit a submerged object, the pressure waves bounce back. A nearby submarine or buoy could detect the pattern of those waves and create a map of the ocean floor, or the location of other submarines in the area.

All of this could be possible with laser-triggered sonar, if it is ever used in the field. For now though, Jones' experiments are limited to the laboratory.

Although Vogel thinks there are still several issues that would need to be resolved before the technique could be used in the field, "this may be a unique approach that could achieve something that you cannot achieve by other means."

Superbots are the real-life Transformers

NASA wanted a robot that could start as 100 blocky modules dropped from an airplane to a desert, reconfigure into a rover that could drive to a sand dune, and then change again to "grow" legs and climb up it. Once the blocky robot reached the top, it would transform into a greenhouse that could protect a group of seeds for two weeks.

Only 20 of the modules were built during an ambitious project more than two years ago. But together, they are known as Superbot.

"You could build a lot of different robots where each does different things, but that would be too expensive," said Wei-Min Shen, director of the Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory at the University of Southern California.

Superbot cannot transform into trucks or F-22 fighter jets, like the gargantuan robots in the new "Transformers" movie. Yet researchers hope that modular robots similar to Superbot could one day decide when and where to shape-shift and adapt to their environments, depending on the job at hand.

Walk and roll
So far, Superbot has managed to form combinations with two, four or six legs, move like a robotic snake using a slithering or sidewinding motion, and even inch along like a caterpillar. Six of its modules can form a rolling track, and some combinations can even shimmy up ropes.

"If it needs to climb things, it can grow literally legs," Shen told LiveScience. "If it needs to go downhill, it can turn into a ball and simply roll."

Such self-configuring robots have existed in the world of academic labs for some years now. Last year, a research group at the University of Pennsylvania caught attention with their walking modular robot that slowly reassembled itself after being kicked apart.

USC's Superbot can also demonstrate similar types of self-repair and self-assembly, because each module represents an independent robot that "talks" to other modules using infrared and radio communication. The modules constantly assess the situation see what other modules are nearby, and whether they should act as an arm or a leg for the combined Superbot.

"One of our demonstrations is that you can have a robot and cut it in half, so it becomes two independent snakes," Shen said. "There's no fixed central brain."

Four-legged Superbot may instantly become a pair of two-legged robots when cut in half. The two-legged robots sometimes use a "butterfly stroke" move similar to what swimmers use, Shen noted.

To build a 'living' robot
Several U.S. military branches and government agencies besides NASA have also shown interest in the idea of shape-shifting, self-repairing robots. Shen's work has received funding from the military's DARPA research branch, not to mention the U.S. Air Force, Army, and National Science Foundation.

However, a number of steps remain before Superbot can act as a fully autonomous being that makes decisions on its own. Creating artificial intelligence (AI) that can make higher-level decisions in traditional robots has already proved challenging, and modular robots have the added complexity of deciding what represents the best shape or size in any given environment.

"You have to tell the modules what shape to become," Shen noted. "The next step is let them decide, 'OK, I need three more legs.'"

One solution may involve looking to biology. Shen's lab has put forth the idea of "digital hormones" that would simulate the way in which hormones affect the mind and body. Some modules could flood certain signals to all the others, in order to communicate instructions such as whether to transform into a walking or rolling Superbot.

The biology analogy has come up before. Shen and his colleagues sometimes refer to Superbot's modules as "robotic stem cells," capable of morphing into a variety of roles.

Robots on the future frontier
A Superbot descendant might even achieve NASA's wildest dreams by forming a fully self-assembling space station, and help eliminate the need for expensive, time-consuming spacewalks conducted by human astronauts.

Shen and USC colleague Peter Will demonstrated such a concept on an air hockey table to simulate microgravity in space, with two robot modules that could use cable lines to grab other pieces, reel them in and dock.

Self-assembling space stations or Transformers may still be a long ways off, but Shen remains confident about building a better robot — or perhaps better robots that can build themselves.

"I have a strong belief in these things," Shen said. "Of course one person does not make much difference, but I do believe this is the future."