Reliance Communications launches Coolpad handset for data subscribers

KOLKATA: Reliance Communications on Thursday announced the launch of Coolpad CDMA handsets based on Android 2.1 OS tagetting the data traffic in the eastern region.

Mitash Chatterjee, circle head of RCom in Kolkata, said this was the first launch of Chinese Coolpad handsets in the country, which would be followed by other cities soon.

Hong Kong-listed Coolpad CommunicationsManaging director Sami Al-Lawati said the company was expecting sales of 1 lakh handsets per month in India.

He said the company was planning to set up a R&D centre in India at a cost of Rs 100 crore.

"Depending upon the market response, we can think of setting up a manufacturing unit in the country," he told reporters here.

He said the proposed R&D centre would not only cater to Indian requirements but also help in the global expansion footprint of the company.

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NASA Has 2 Months to Decide on Abandoning International Space Station

NASA and Russia have about two months to decide whether to abandon the International Space Station (ISS) and possibly have ground controllers run the research outpost remotely from Earth.

NASA mission managers in Houston, Texas, are currently working on contingency plans, as both Russiaand the U.S. have said that temporarily abandoning the $100 billion ISS is a possibility.

Ron Garan and Mike Fossum, two Americans aboard the ISS, told reporters in a video press conference from space that they've started minimal preparations.

The space station, a joint project of the U.S., Russia, Canada, Europe and Japan, has been continuously staffed since November 2000. Six people ‑- three Russians, two Americans and one Japanese astronaut ‑- typically staff the research station on six month rotations.

"We haven't started anything specific up here pertaining to that except for maybe documenting some of the things that we do on video so we that can use video products for part of the training for the next crew," Fossum told the media. "The teams in Houston are in the preliminary stages of deciding everything from what ventilation we are going to leave running, what lights we are going to leave on... every tank, every valve, every hatch."

But the astronauts on board may need to temporarily abandon the research facility this fall after the Soyuz rocket recently failed to send a supply ship into space.

The unmanned Russian cargo ship Progress 44 malfunctioned shortly after its Aug. 24 launch, and the ship crashed in Siberia. It was supposed to carry 2.9 tons of supplies to the orbiting lab.

Russian space vehicles are the only means of transporting crews and supplies to the station now that the U.S. space shuttle program has ended. The U.S. space shuttle flew its last mission in July.

Fossum said it is possible that the station will be without people for hopefully a short period of time, as reported by the Agence France-Presse.

Russia has said that a malfunctioning gas generator in the Soyuz carrier rocket's third stage engine has been identified by members of the emergency commission as the reason the supply ship didn't make it to the ISS.

The Russian Federal Space Agency had established a commission to assess the root cause of the failure, to develop a plan of corrective action and to determine any implications for the launch of crews to the station on similar Soyuz rockets.

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Sony launches world's lightest 6" touchscreen e-reader

tSony is now the proud maker of the world’s lightest 6" touchscreen e-reader, the Reader Wi-Fi. The device was announced during Sony’s IFA press conference and is the first e-reader to offer wireless public library access for users that want to borrow e-books from their public library.The

device is based on Sony’s previous 6" e-reader but is smaller (measuring 8.9mm thin) and lighter (at 168 grams) than its predecessor.

"At under 6 ounces and with a 6" E-Ink Pearl V220 touch screen, Reader Wi-Fi is smaller than an average paperback book," said Sony.

"As part of Sony's continued effort to support the Public Library System, Reader Wi-Fi will also be the first eReader to offer wireless connectivity to the public library system in the US and Canada via a dedicated icon on the device to allow easy and convenient borrowing of free e-books with a valid library card," explained Sony. "Readers can access and download over 2.5 million titles via a Wi-Fi connection from Reader Store or shop from a wide range of bookstores and other websites that provide books in digital formats compatible with Reader Wi-Fi, such as EPUB, PDF and TXT."

A special version of the e-reader has been created for Harry Potter fans in conjunction with the Pottermore website. Fans who purchase the Sony Reader Wi-Fi with Pottermore promotion (PRS-T1HBC) will be able to download the first Harry Potter e-book for free from Pottermore when it first becomes available.

E-reader maker Kobo was also at IFA to launch an e-reader for the German market. The localized German Touch eReader comes with all-German menus and settings and will be available for €149 starting October 1, 2011.

The Sony Reader Wi-Fi (PRS-T1) and Reader Wi-Fi with Pottermore promotion (PRS-T1HBC) will be released in October 2011 for $149.

Source Hinduatan Times

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Infants a model for robots?

Washington: Now, coming soon a robot which will easily find their way round in new environments and manipulate objects - for example, it would be able to handle a particular set of dishes and put them in a particular rack, thanks to an Indian-origin scientist-led team. "Robots still have a long way to go to learn like humans. We would be really happy if we could build a robot that would even act like a six-month-old baby," said Professor Ashutosh Saxena who is leading the team at Cornell University.

In their research, the scientists have found that placing objects is harder than picking them up, because there are many options. A cup is placed upright on a table, but upside down in a dishwasher, so the robot must be trained to make those decisions.

"We just show the robot some examples and it learns to generalise the placing strategies and applies them to objects that were not seen before. It learns about stability and other criteria for good placing for plates and cups, and when it sees a new object -- a bowl -- it applies them," Saxena said.

In early tests they placed a plate, mug, martini glass, bowl, candy cane, disc, spoon and tuning fork on a flat surface, on a hook, in a stemware holder, in a pen holder and on several different dish racks.

Surveying its environment with a 3-D camera, the robot randomly tests small volumes of space as suitable locations for placement. For some objects it will test for "caging" -- the presence of vertical supports that would hold an object upright. It also gives priority to "preferred" locations: A plate goes flat on a table, but upright in a dishwasher.

After training, their robot placed most objects correctly 98 percent of the time when it had seen the objects and environments previously, and 95 per cent of time when working with new objects in a new environment. Performance could be improved, the researchers suggested, by longer training.

In fact, the scientists have developed a system that enables a robot to scan a room and identify its objects.

Pictures from the robot's 3-D camera are stitched together to form a 3-D image of an entire room that is then divided into segments, based on discontinuities and distances between objects. The goal is to label each segment.

The team trained a robot by giving it 24 office scenes and 28 home scenes in which they had labelled most objects.

The computer examines such features as colour, texture and what is nearby and decides what characteristics all objects with the same label have in common. In a new environment, it compares each segment of its scan with the objects in its memory and chooses the ones with the best fit.

"The novelty of this work is to learn the contextual relations in 3-D. For identifying a keyboard it may be easier to locate the monitors first, because the keyboards are found below the monitors," Saxena said.

In tests, the robot correctly identified objects about 83 percent of the time in home scenes and 88 percent in offices. In a final test, it successfully located a keyboard in an unfamiliar room.

Source Zee. News

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Private space station cargo ship arrives at launch site

A private U.S. rocket company building robotic spaceships to carry space station supplies for NASA has delivered the first of its cargo ships to its launch site in Virginia.

The company Orbital Sciences Corp. delivered the first cargo module for its Cygnus spacecraft fleet to NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., on Aug. 23 to prepare for a test flight to the International Space Station in February.

"This is one more important step in our partnership with U.S. private industry to build safe, reliable and cost-effective cargo transportation systems," said Philip McAlister, acting director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a statement. "We are pleased that Orbital has made this accomplishment and look forward to the company

flying the Cygnus spacecraft in 2012." Private spaceship takes shape

The Dulles, Va.-based Orbital Sciences is currently working on three major projects simultaneously: readying their Taurus 2 rocket (the booster for Cygnus flights) for its inaugural flight later this year; preparing the unmanned Cygnus cargo freighter for its own demonstration flight; and wrapping up the necessary construction and certification at a new NASA launch site.

"There are basically three development tracks going on," Orbital spokesman Barron Beneski told Space.com. "The pacing item on the schedule is the launch site. You'd think it would be the high-tech stuff like the rockets and satellites, but certifying the launch site is the real pacing item. Once that is done, then we can really move into full operation."

Orbital Sciences' Cygnus spacecraft consists of two major components, a cylindrical pressurized cargo module designed to carry up to 4,400 pounds of supplies, and a service module containing the spacecraft's solar panels and propulsion system.

The pressurized module was delivered to Wallops from Turin, Italy, where it was built for Orbital Sciences by Thales Alenia Space.

Rocket test flight ahead

In late July, Orbital's chief executive, David W. Thompson, announced that theTaurus 2 rocket's debut flightwould be postponed about two months to December to allow enough time to wrap up construction and certification of facilities at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility.

The construction process is coming to an end, Beneski said, but the certification process, which is overseen by NASA, is expected to take about six to eight weeks. During this time, Orbital will need to demonstrate that the facilities that have been built work properly and safely.

Once the launch facility is deemed ready, the next major milestone for the commercial spaceflight company is the inaugural test flight of the Taurus 2 rocket in December.

Orbital's Taurus 2 and Cygnus cargo ship are being developed in partnership with NASA, as part of the agency's Commercial Orbital Transportation System(COTS) program, which is aimed at boosting private sector development of vehicles to carry cargo, and eventually crew, to

the International Space Station.

NASA retired its 30-year space shuttle program in July, so the agency is banking on commercial spaceships such as the Cygnus to deliver American cargo to the space station. The space agency is also supporting a separate effort for new private spaceships to carry astronauts into orbit.

Currently, NASA depends on unmanned spacecraft built by Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency to deliver cargo to the space station. The latest Russian cargo ship Progress 44 crashed just after its Aug. 24 launch due to a failure on its Soyuz rocket.

Cygnus' flight debut

Following a successful completion of the Taurus 2's test flight, Orbital will next tackle a demonstration flight of the rocket carrying a Cygnus freighter. This test flight is currently slated for February.

"Our first COTS demonstration flight will carry a Cygnus, which will be launched into orbit and rendezvous and berth with the space station," Beneski said. "Actual operational cargo delivery missions will commence about three months later."

As Cygnus approaches the station, a sophisticated guidance and navigation system will bring the spacecraft within close proximity to the complex before the station's robotic arm reaches out and attaches the cargo ship to the exterior of the outpost.

This requires complex onboard software and rigorous testing, Beneski said.

"Since we're rendezvousing with a manned outpost, (Cygnus) has to be very, very robust in terms of its design and its performance," he explained.

For Orbital, their nearly 30-year history of building commercial satellites has helped speed up these efforts.

"It's all being done in the same facility where we built commercial satellites," Beneski said. "The fact that we are one of the world's leading satellite manufacturers before we even started on Cygnus has definitely helped us a lot in designing and developing a new spacecraft to carry cargo to the space station."

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SMA Solar Technology AG forays into India

NEW DELHI: German based SMA Solar Technology AG, a solar energy equipment supplier has announced setting up of its wholly owned Indian subsidiary, SMA Solar India Pvt Ltd in Mumbai, reiterating the growing interest of global players in the Indian solar sector.

The company already has 200 MW of business in India since 2010 across all sectors from Off Grid, Roof tops and utility scale Power plants.

SMA is the world's largest manufacturer of inverters for solar photovoltaic modules and has presence in over 19 countries of the world. In India, SMA Solar would set up two service hubs in Ahmedabad and Mumbai and would look to invest significantly in Research & Development.

"Our strong global presence, and expertise in this space spreads to more than 18 countries across the world and the company's India expansion is consistent with its overall growth strategy for increasing global market share. We see India will become one of the top markets in PV industry", said Mr. Marko Werner, Chief Sales Officer and Board Member, SMA Solar Technology AG

" Encouraging policies both by central government as well as state government are in place to enhance the adoption of renewable energy including Solar. An estimate is that India will have more than 20GW of solar power by 2020. These numbers are likely to be upwardly revised during the next 5 year country planning cycle from 2012-2017", said Mr. Rakesh Khanna, General Manager, SMA Solar India Pvt. Ltd.

India has become an important market for renewable and alternative energy companies. The country has set an ambitious target for development of solar energy with installed capacity of 20,000MW by 2022.

PV inverters and monitoring systems form the most important technological component of every solar power plant. The inverters are sought for their high efficiency of up to 98.7% which allows for increased electricity production.

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