First, more bad news about the Mars Global Surveyor from the Planetary Society:
Mars Global Surveyor Update: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Fails to Spot Missing Spacecraft
By Emily Lakdawalla
November 21, 2006As was reported here last week, NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has been missing in action since November 5, three days after the spacecraft first reported a problem with one of its solar panels. In a press conference held today at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mission managers reported that their effort to locate Mars Global Surveyor using several cameras on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has not been successful. “Our preliminary analysis has not so far yielded any definitive sighting,” stated JPL Mars Program Manager Fuk Li.
With this failure to sight the spacecraft, but more importantly with Mars Global Surveyor’s continued silence, hope is now ebbing for its recovery, Li continued. “In the past two weeks we have sent up 800 command files. None have been successful. While we have not exhausted everything we could do, we believe that the prospect of recovery of MGS is not looking very good at all. However, MGS has been a good friend; it has had an illustrious career. We are holding out hope, but we are prepared in our hearts that we may never hear from the spacecraft again.” Still, the recovery efforts aren’t over. Li reported that they are still continuously using a 34-meter antenna at the Deep Space Network stations to send commands to and listen for signals from the missing spacecraft.
related BBCNews article
NASA Press Release
***
Another post at WheelchairJunkie.com provided a link to a Technological Review article on a way cool concept that is becoming real.
Driving a Wheelchair with Your Shirt
Garments printed with flexible sensors could help people with severely limited mobility control assistive devices.
By Emily Singer
Adaptive, sensor-laden garments could provide a new way for quadriplegics to control their wheelchairs. The system, which is still in an early stage of development, identifies the ideal set of movements that can be employed as control commands for each individual user. “We think this will benefit the most difficult patients, such as those who can move only their head or shoulders,” says Alon Fishbach, a scientist at Northwestern who is among those developing the device.
People with high-level spinal-cord injuries often lose control of their hands, but they may still be able to move their shoulders or chests. More and more such patients survive their injuries, thanks to respiratory devices that help them breathe. But these people have limited options when selecting devices to control their wheelchairs or computers. They might use a sip/puff switch, which converts the user’s sip or puff of air into a specific command, or a headswitch, which records head movements via a switch on the back of the wheelchair. “But the disadvantage of these devices is that patients must fit the capacities of the machine, rather than the other way around,” says Ferdinando Mussa-Ivaldi, another Northwestern scientist working on the device. “If a patient can move their right side more than their left, an intelligent interface could pick up on this.” Mussa-Ivaldi directs the Robotics Laboratory of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, where the research took place.