Hayabusa2 lands on an asteroid and sends back amazing pictures to prove it

Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission to the asteroid Ryugu is an ambitious one to begin with, and the team recently made the decision to up the stakes with a second touchdown on the space rock’s surface. Not only did all go as planned, but we now have the best shots of an asteroid’s surface ever to be sent back to Earth.

Hayabusa2 is a very, very cool mission. The basic idea is this:

1. Fly to nearby asteroid
2. Land and sample the surface
3. Blast a crater into it with a space gun
4. Land and sample the crater
5. Send the resulting samples back to Earth

Fabulous, right? And the intrepid spacecraft has just completed step 4 earlier today, touching down and snapping some amazing pictures while it did its science. This one was taken at the very moment it hit the surface:

There was no guarantee this would happen, the JAXA team running the Hayabusa2 mission noted in a recent blog post. Any number of things could have resulted in a second touchdown being either too risky or not worth the trouble. Fortunately they concluded that the risk was acceptable and that this would be an important feat in more ways than one.

Japan’s Hayabusa 2 mission lands on the surface of a distant asteroid

The previous sample was taken from the undisturbed surface of Ryugu, more or less as it’s been for many years. But then came the space gun — a 2-kilogram copper bullet propelled by a shaped explosion to some 4,400 miles per hour. It made a crater, all right! The probe flew clear around to the other side of the asteroid so it wouldn’t be hit by any debris.

What was exposed is a surface that has never been sampled before by human or robot hands — the soft underbelly of an asteroid. It could tell us much, which is why the team decided to go for it. That and it’s just fundamentally awesome and historic.

In a brief update, JAXA provided a handful of pictures of the successful touchdown: 4 seconds before, the moment of impact, and 4 seconds after. It doesn’t stay for long, more bounces off the surface than “lands.” I assembled those into the gif you see above. A couple other shots show the area before the craft descended.

There isn’t much more information than this for now, as a more detailed breakdown will follow, the Hayabusa2 mission site explains. For now just savor the look on the team’s faces after this amazing feat:

Trump says cryptocurrencies including Facebook's Libra are "not money", need to be regulated, citing their high volatility and facilitation of unlawful behavior (Richard Lawler/Engadget)

Richard Lawler / Engadget:
Trump says cryptocurrencies including Facebook's Libra are “not money”, need to be regulated, citing their high volatility and facilitation of unlawful behavior  —  Just hours after a “social media summit,” the president's Twitter account posted a thread aimed at, of all things, cryptocurrency.

Flipkart is emptying Jabong’s wardrobe into Myntra’s

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Language as a service for the next billion

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Consumer cos look to advertise on WhatsApp through stickers and GIFS

In China, GIFs and stickers have been very popular on applications like WeChat. In India, as the trend is still picking up, most brands are experimenting with the format as it is yet to be proven. https://ift.tt/2JsURhY https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

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An incubator for tech focused products and solutions for disabled

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Sources: Postmates has had talks with DoorDash, Walmart, Uber, and others about being acquired, is still considering following through with its much-delayed IPO (Vox)

Vox:
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Steam Labs lets you peek into Valve’s experimental projects

Like most companies, much of what Valve (the company behind the hugely popular Steam game store) tinkers with behind the scenes never sees the light of day. Concepts are born, torn apart and rebuilt, and sometimes tossed away without anyone outside the company ever seeing a hint of it.

Seems Valve is trying to change that, giving users an opportunity to provide feedback on potential new features before they’re fully baked. The company has just debuted a new project it calls “Steam Labs”, which will give super-early adopters an early peek at concepts that may or may not eventually make it into Valve’s Steam game store.

You can find the new Labs page right here.

The first three “experiments” are all focused around helping users find new games:

1. Micro Trailers: Six second looping video trailers that start playing when you hover over a game’s in-store graphic
2. Interactive Recommender: Since the Steam client is used to launch most games you purchase through the Steam store, Valve has a good idea of what you’re playing, and for how long. This experiment takes that data and uses it to find other games you might like based on which ones you’ve played the most. Want something no ones ever heard of? You can filter out the popular stuff, limiting results to just the lesser knowns.
3. Automatic Show: An automatically generated “shopping channel”-style show of sorts, highlighting footage of the latest releases. In time, they hope to have auto-generated narration that tells you a bit about what you’re seeing; for now, though, it’s mostly just game footage over music.

Valve is quick to point out that all of these experiments are just that — there’s no promising that any of the stuff that hits the Labs will make it all the way to the official client. They also say that even “Steam Labs is itself an experiment”, which will probably change and evolve a bunch over time. If you particularly like/dislike a feature, Valve’s also put up a forum for user comments and suggestions.

Now if someone at Valve could go ahead and classify Half Life 3 as a Steam experiment and give us a look into what the hell is going on there, that’d be great.

Interview with Neal Mohan, YouTube's chief product officer, on whether YouTube is a media company, content moderation, demonetization, and more (Richard Nieva/CNET)

Richard Nieva / CNET:
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India’s top internet cos to submit detailed reports to the Government

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The Great Hack was one of the wildest movies I saw at Sundance

The trailer is out for Netflix doc The Great Hack, an early cut of which was screened at Sundance this year. I saw that cut during the fest and it was one of the wildest of a second wave of films trying to make sense of what the hell happened with Facebook and the election. A year ago, the tone was different. It was more shock and awe and impressionist art pieces. The Great Hack is part of a new breed that is making a serious attempt to put things into a narrative that normals can understand.

The film anchors itself mostly on two figures, Parsons School of Design Professor David Caroll and ex-Cambridge Analytica employee and ostensible whistleblower Brittany Kaiser, with a cast of other touchstone figures like Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr.

One of the major weaknesses of this kind of story is that it is likely best told in minutes of product meetings and repo commits, rather than attached to human narrative. But that’s not how most humans think and the past ten years have proven that even the people charged with protecting users from these systems have very little idea about how they actually work or how vulnerable they were and continue to be to manipulation. So The Great Hack takes an earnest stab at laying out the basics of how Facebook and other online platforms were manipulated and compromised in order to fuel Cambridge Analytica’s manipulation machine and, by extension, election campaigns and other public sentiment scenarios.

The version I saw did its best to connect these topics with tissue that (mostly, but not always) feels like it is linking the events with human counterparts involved. It does paint some of the journalists and figures in the piece with a bit of a golden brush, and never goes much further than ambivalence when featuring Kaiser, who was by her own admission, right alongside Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, (who plays the villain of the piece (IRL as well as in the doc)) through CA’s most controversial period.

But, if you’ve been following the whole saga and reading news obsessively, not much in here is going to feel like brand new information. It is likely, though that there will be plenty that is new to a broader Netflix audience. If they were able to fix some of the pacing issues and land some of the ‘revelations’ with more punch in the final version I think it may have legs.

The doc hits Netflix on July 24th. You should check it out for yourself.

 

You can now register for the Minecraft Earth closed beta

Take the real-world exploration of Pokémon GO and mash it up with the building elements of Minecraft, and you get Minecraft Earth.

While there’s no launch date for the game, Mojang has been saying for a while now that a closed Beta would go live sometime “this summer”. If you’re looking to get in there early, good news: they just opened up registration.

You can find the Beta registration page here.

Alas, since it’s a closed Beta, registering doesn’t guarantee you access — but in its FAQ about the Beta, the team notes that they’re planning to open it up to “hundreds of thousands of players” eventually, so your odds of getting in probably aren’t too bad. You’ll need to be over the age of 18, have a device running iOS 10/Android 7 or newer, and a Microsoft or Xbox Live account to get registered.

TechCrunch’s Devin Coldewey got a super early look at the game back in May — you can find his thoughts on it right over here.

Mojang also released a video teaser this afternoon, wrapping up much of what the game will offer in just under 3 minutes: