A HACKER REPORTEDLY GAINED ACCESS TO TESLA’S ENTIRE FLEET

Big Hack

A new Electrek story details the saga of Jason Hughes, a whitehat hacker who says he managed to gain a flabbergasting level of access to Tesla’s internal servers — managing to seize control of the company’s entire fleet of electric vehicles.

The alleged hack took place back in March 2017, and Hughes immediately alerted Tesla’s security team, which quickly patched the security hole. Still, it’s a fascinating glimpse at the perils of connected vehicles.

Security Breach

Hughes told Electrek that he pulled the hack off by discovering an escalating series of weaknesses in Tesla’s fleet management systems. Eventually, he gained access so deep that he could look up the location of individual Tesla vehicles and even activate their “Summon” feature, causing them to drive remotely. Electrek‘s Fred Lambert, who apparently knew about the hack at the time, said that Hughes was able to provide the precise location and other information about his own Tesla.

Because of the gravity of the situation, Hughes said that he contacted the company’s head of software security directly, who asked him to prove the hack by activating the Summon feature on a car in California. After Hughes did so successfully, and submitted a vulnerability report that he has now shared online, he says that Tesla paid him an unprecedented $50,000 bug bounty.

Electric Gravy

Surprisingly, Electrek pointed out, Musk appeared to allude to the secret hack onstage at an event, just a few months after it happened.

“In principle, if someone was able to say hack all the autonomous Teslas, they could say — I mean just as a prank — they could say ‘send them all to Rhode Island’ — across the United States… and that would be the end of Tesla and there would be a lot of angry people in Rhode Island,” he said during a 2017 event in Rhode Island.

INDIA’S SPACE CHIEF: WE FOUND OUR LANDER MONTHS BEFORE NASA

Taking Credit

Back in September, the Indian Space Research Organization announced that it had found its Vikram lander, which it had lost contact with days earlier as it prepared to land on the Moon — and said it was trying to reestablish contact with the lost lander.

Months later, NASA made a similar announcement: that it had spotted the wreckage of the lander, with the help of amateur space enthusiast Shanmuga “Shan” Subramanian, who analyzed images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Now, it seems as though ISRO’s leadership feels that NASA is getting too much credit for the discovery.

“After the landing date itself, our website had given that our own orbiter has located Vikram,” ISRO chief Kailasavadivoo Sivan told reporters on Wednesday, as quoted by India Today. “Our own orbiter had located Vikram lander. We had already declared that on our website, you can go back and see.”

Located Again

Is that a fair analysis? It’s open to interpretation.

NASA didn’t claim it was the first to spot the lander, and to be fair, India seemed pretty hazy in September about whether its lander had crashed or landed but lost contact.

The clearest takeaway: India’s crashed lander was a disappointment, so maybe its leadership is looking for distraction.

NASA STILL HASN’T FOUND THE DAMN LEAK ON THE SPACE STATION

Deflating

NASA is still struggling to find the leak in its segment of the International Space Station.

The good news is that the air is leaking out of the segment very slowly, and NASA is downplaying the risk. But the bad news is that they still haven’t found it yet — forcing the NASA crew to spend yet another night in the Russian segment of the station.

Fresh Air

The news comes after NASA evacuated its segment of the station late last week, directing its crew to spend the weekend in the Russian segment while the space agency tries to identify and patch the source of the leak.

A little bit of leakage is normal, as NASA has emphasized in both press releases it’s issued about the problem. In fact, it says that it first became suspicious that air was leaking at an elevated level back in September 2019, though it wasn’t able to confirm the issue until recently due to the slow rate of pressure loss.

HISSsssss

By sealing all the segment’s hatches, NASA’s mission control is hoping it can isolate the source of the leak so personnel on the station can patch it up..

AIR FORCE ONE’S SUCCESSOR COULD GO 5X THE SPEED OF SOUND

Nyoom!

A coming iteration of Air Force One, the high tech plane reserved for shuttling the President of the United States around the world, may be able to reach nauseatingly-fast speeds up to Mach 5.

The U.S. Air Force just awarded a contract to the aerospace startup Hermeus, Business Insider reports, which calls for the first hypersonic version of Air Force One. The company already has a prototype engine built and tested, and now it’s just a matter of building the rest of the plane.

Drawing Owls

Hermeus has been working on its hypersonic engine for over a year and completed tests in March, Business Insider reports. But now that it has this Air Force contract, it will need to make sure that its Mach 5 plane also meets certain rigorous standards.

Hermeus thinks it can all be done with existing technology.

“We want to do engineering, not science,” COO Skyler Shuford told Ars Technica last year.

Distant Vision

For better or worse, Hermeus’ hypersonic Air Force One is at least ten years down the road, Business Insider reports. Boeing is already set to deliver the next Air Force One in 2021, and Hermeus’ model would serve as that plane’s eventual replacement.

That means that unless American democracy utterly collapses, we’ll never get to see what Mach 5 would do to President Trump’s notoriously unusual hairstyle.

NASA Astronaut Jeanette Epps Joins First Operational Boeing Crew Mission to Space Station

NASA has assigned astronaut Jeanette Epps to NASA’s Boeing Starliner-1 mission, the first operational crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft on a mission to the International Space Station.

Epps will join NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Josh Cassada for a six-month expedition planned for a launch in 2021 to the orbiting space laboratory. The flight will follow NASA certification after a successful uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2 and Crew Flight Test with astronauts.

The spaceflight will be the first for Epps, who earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1992 from LeMoyne College in her hometown of Syracuse, New York. She completed a master’s degree in science in 1994 and a doctorate in aerospace engineering in 2000, both from the University of Maryland, College Park.

While earning her doctorate, Epps was a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Project fellow, authoring several journal and conference articles on her research. After completing graduate school, she worked in a research laboratory for more than two years, co-authoring several patents, before the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recruited her. She spent seven years as a CIA technical intelligence officer before her selection as a member of the 2009 astronaut class. 

NASA assigned Williams and Cassada to the Starliner-1 mission in August 2018. The spaceflight will be the first for Cassada and third for Williams, who spent long-duration stays aboard the space station on Expeditions 14/15 and 32/33.

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is working with the American aerospace industry as companies develop and operate a new generation of spacecraft and launch systems capable of carrying crews to low-Earth orbit and to the space station. Commercial transportation to and from the station will provide expanded utility, additional research time and broader opportunities for discovery on the orbital outpost.

For nearly 20 years, the station has served as a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight. As commercial companies focus on providing human transportation services to and from low-Earth orbit, NASA will concentrate its focus on building spacecraft and rockets for deep-space missions

Follow Epps on social media at -

https://www.instagram.com/jeanette.epps/

NASA: A fridge-size asteroid is headed toward Earth one day before the November election

• 

  A photo of Earth taken by NASA's imaging camera

• An asteroid has a slim chance of the Earth's atmosphere November 2.

• That's one day before The Us Election.

• Because of it's small size,the asteroid,dubbed 2018VP1,would birn off while hurting toward the planet.

An asteroid has a slim chance of entering the Earth's atmosphere on November2,oneday before the US election,according to NASA.

Named 2018VP1,the aseroid is pretty tiny,according to ,according to NASA data .

Its has only a0.41% likelihood of entering Earth's atmosphere,but celestial object that size tend to burn up anyway before reching the ground;NASA told Business Insider.

"Asteriod 2018Vp1 Is very small, approximately 6.5feet, and poses no threat to Earth"a NASA representative told Business Insider.That's about 2 meters long,like a refrigerator."If it were to enter our planet's atmosphere, it would disintegrate due to it's extremely small size."

2018VP1 has had a few close encounters with Earth before,dating back to 1970.It most recently visited in November 2018,roughly when it was discovered at California's Palomar Observatory.

it would disintegrate due to its extremely small size," NASA said in a statement. "NASA has been directed by Congress to discover 90% of the near-Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters (459 feet) in size and reports on asteroids of any size."

NASA says that, "based on 21 observations spanning 12.968 days," the agency has determined the asteroid probably -- phew! -- won't have a deep impact, let alone bring Armageddon.

"It's quit an accomplishment to find these tiny close-in asteroids in the first place, because they pass by so fast,"said Paul Chodas, the director of the Center for Near-Earth Object studies at NASA's JET propulsion Labortory in southern California.

"There's typical only a short window of a couple of days before or after close approach when this small of an asteroid is close enough to Earth to be bright

enough but not so close that it moves too fast in the sky to be detected by a telescop,"he said.

Between the covid19 pandemic,a reckoning with racial justice,sky high depression and anxiety,election season and other recent events,people are joking about the asteroid's perceived embodiment of 2020.

INDIA WANTS TO SEND THIS LEGLESS HUMANOID ROBOT INTO SPACE / ISRO

Meet Vyommitra

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has unveiled a legless robot called “Voymmitra” that it wants to send into space on an uncrewed mission later this year. The eerily humanoid robot can reportedly speak two languages, according to Business Insider.

“Vyommitra will simulate human functions, will interact with the environmental control and life-support system,” ISRO chairman K Sivan told the Times of India. “Our robot is like a human, and will be able to do what man can do, although not as extensively,” Sivan added.

Gaganyaan 2022

The humanoid will be launched on the first uncrewed test flight of India’s planned Gaganyaan crewed orbital spacecraft.

“I can be a companion of the astronauts, recognize them and respond to their queries,” Vyommitra can be heard saying in a clip uploaded to Twitter.

But its own movement will be limited.

“It’s called a half humanoid because it doesn’t have legs,” ISRO scientist Sam Dayal told India Today. “It can only bend side wards and forward.”

The Humanoids

The mission is part of India’s greater ambitions to send Indian astronauts to space by 2022 — if all goes according to plan — first announced by prime minister Narendra Modi in 2018.

It wouldn’t be the first time a nation has sent a humanoid robot into space. Russia sent its gunslinging humanoid robot FEDOR to the International Space Station in August

TESLA ASKS USA FOR PERMISSION TO AUTOMATICALLY DETECT KIDS LEFT IN HOT CAR

No Child Left Behind

Tesla is seeking approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to market a sensor that could tell if a child has been left in a hot car, Reuters reports.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 52 children died of heatstroke in cars alone in 2019.

To stop that from happening, the Elon Musk-led company wants to use millimeter wave sensors at power levels that aren’t allowed under current laws

Scanning… Scanning…

According to filings obtained by Reuters, Tesla’s device would use seven of these sensors. Such a radar-based system “provides depth perception and can ‘see’ through soft materials, such as a blanket covering a child in a child restraint.”

It would also be able to tell if it’s just an object as opposed to a child by detecting “micromovements like breathing patterns and heart rates, neither of which can be captured by cameras or in-seat sensors alone.

Safety First

The same system could also be used to improve current seatbelt detection technology and even “optimize airbag deployment in a crash — more effectively than existing weight based, in-seat sensor systems,” according to the filing.

Existing Tesla features, such as the Dog Mode that keeps the AC on for any dogs left behind in a car, also make use of interior and exterior sensors.

As The Verge reports, Nissan previously attempted to address the issue of children left behind in hot cars by including sensors in its 2018 Pathfinder SUV.