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Ai-Da robot speaks at House of Lords with creator Aidan Meller

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LONDON — A robot sporting dungarees and a sharp black bob took questions in Britain’s House of Lords for the first time in history this week — before appearing to fall asleep and requiring a reset.

Before her public breakdown, the female-featured android — named Ai-Da — spoke to Britain’s Communications and Digital Committee as part of an inquiry into the future of the creative industries, joining a debate on how technology is shaping — and perhaps hindering — the art sector.

It was the first time in the nation’s history that a robot testified in the upper chamber of Britain’s Parliament, where unelected baronesses and lords typically gather to analyze government policies.

“The fact that Ai-Da is giving evidence at one of these sessions is pretty mind-blowing,” Aidan Meller, the robot’s inventor and a specialist in modern and contemporary art, told Sky News ahead of the session.

Branded “the world’s first ultrarealistic humanoid robot artist,” Ai-Da is widely known for creating portraits and poems, using a robotic arm, cameras in her eyes and AI algorithms. She told the house — undoubtedly to her creator’s pride — that the unique features allow her to create “visually appealing images.”

“I am, and depend on, computer programs and algorithms,” Ai-Da told the committee in London on Tuesday, moving her head slowly from side to side and occasionally blinking. “Although not alive, I can still create art.”

Ai-Da admitted she has no idea where the world is headed but told committee members that technology poses both “a threat and an opportunity” for creativity.

“The role of technology in creating art will continue to grow,” she predicted.

Those in attendance appeared intrigued but also joked that they were scared — especially when, following a question from Baroness Lynne Featherstone, a peer from the Liberal Democrats party, the robot fell silent and stared blankly at the floor.

“I’ve sent her to sleep!” Featherstone joked, as Meller, who was on hand close by, hurried across the room to grab a pair of sunglasses to place over Ai-Da’s eyes.

Robot artist Ai-Da answered questions from British lawmakers during a session hosted by the House of Lords Communication and Digital Committee on Oct. 11. (Video: Reuters)

“Excuse me,” he told the room. “Can I reset her? Is that okay?”

It was not immediately clear what caused the robot’s technical failure, and neither Meller nor Ai-Da responded to a request for comment from The Washington Post on Thursday.

“When we reset her, she sometimes can pull quite interesting faces,” Meller explained to those in attendance, who chuckled and waited patiently for the android to wake up.

Created in 2019, Ai-Da has been subjected to backlash at home and abroad during her short, simulated life.

Last year, she was taken into custody in Egypt for more than a week on suspicion that she could be part of an espionage plot, according to Meller.

Meller said Egyptian border guards detained her because of security fears about the cameras in her eyes that enabled her to paint. The British ambassador stepped in to secure her freedom, he said.

“I can’t really gouge her eyes out,” he told the Guardian at the time. “Let’s be really clear about this. She is not a spy.”

She was released in time to take part in an exhibition at Egypt’s pyramids.

A robot is displaying art at the pyramids. Egypt detained it over spying fears, its maker says.

To mark the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II earlier this year, Ai-Da produced a portrait of the late monarch entitled “Algorithm Queen.” Her owner hailed the creation as the first painting of the queen by a robot, while critics said the piece lacked emotion.

Jonathan Jones, the Guardian’s art critic, slammed Ai-D’s portrait as “yet another example of the cynical, transparent con that is AI art.”

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Science

How to Watch NASA’s DART Spacecraft Crash Into an Asteroid

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An artist’s depiction of the DART Spacecraft approaching the asteroid.
Illustration: NASA

The demise of DART is finally upon us, as the NASA spacecraft is on a collision course with the tiny Dimorphos asteroid. Here’s how you can watch this hugely important experiment to deflect an asteroid.

Short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, the DART mission is the first test of kinetic impactor technology as a means of deflecting asteroids that could be headed towards Earth. Although Didymos means no harm to our planet, the epic crash could one day protect our planet from an Earth-bound asteroid. A lot is resting on this astronomical encounter, and here’s how you can watch the action live.

The DART spacecraft is scheduled to impact its target asteroid on Monday at 7:14 p.m. ET. NASA will live stream the event at the space agency’s YouTube channel, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. Or you can stay right here and tune into the NASA broadcast through the feed below.

DART’s Impact with Asteroid Dimorphos (Official NASA Broadcast)

Live coverage of the mission will begin at 6 p.m. ET, and it will feature audio from NASA’s mission control, live commentary, as well as images beamed down by the spacecraft’s onboard high-resolution camera, DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation).

Excitingly, NASA is also providing a silent live feed from DRACO that’s set to begin at 5 p.m. ET on NASA’s media channel. DRACO will keep rolling until it finally smashes into Dimorphos, relaying one image per second back to ground controllers on Earth. You can also tune in to the DRACO feed through the live stream below.

Watch a Live Feed from NASA’s DART Spacecraft on Approach to Asteroid Dimorphos

DART is careening towards the asteroid at speeds reaching 14,000 miles per hour (22,530 kilometers per hour). There may be a slight lag between these images and what’s happening in the control room as it takes about eight seconds for the images to appear on the screen after they’ve been received and processed by mission control, NASA officials told reporters during a press briefing on Thursday. So even if mission control declares “impact ” or “loss of signal,” it may take a few seconds to see that reflected in NASA’s coverage. And by “see it happen” we assume that’ll be the sudden appearance of a blank screen, signifying the destruction of the spacecraft.

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Alexa?
Has an 8″ HD touchscreen which can let you watch shows, stream things, or even make video calls thanks to the 13 MP camera, you can also use it to control other smart devices in your home with ease, and even display photos if you want to as a digital photo frame.

DART is NASA’s first planetary defense test mission. Its target is a tiny asteroid known as Dimorphos, a mini-moon that orbits a slightly larger asteroid called Didymos. The 1,376-pound DART probe is going to smash into Dimorphos in an attempt to alter its orbit around its larger counterpart. The purpose of the test is to experiment with kinetic impactor technology as a means of deflecting asteroids that could be headed towards Earth.

NASA keeps a close watch on 28,000 nearby asteroids. Although none of those asteroids currently pose a threat to Earth, we do need a plan in place should a massive space rock be headed towards our planet in the future. Didymos and its tiny companion Dimorphos pose no threat to Earth, and the test won’t cause the system to threaten our planet. The pair is roughly 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth.

NASA will use ground-based telescopes to monitor Dimorphos’s orbital trajectory after being smacked by the spacecraft, and to also measure the physical effects of the impact itself. At the scene, Europe’s LICIACube will monitor the event with its two onboard cameras, LUKE and LEIA. The Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb Space Telescope, and a camera onboard the Lucy spacecraft, will also attempt to monitor the event.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is planning a follow-up mission to the pair of space rocks; the space agency is scheduled to launch its Hera mission in 2024, which will rendezvous with Didymos by 2026 to study the impact crater left behind by DART, and any other changes made to the asteroid.

For now, DART’s POV will hopefully provide a breathtaking view of Dimorphos as it heads directly into the asteroid. It’ll be a sad end to the spacecraft, but data from the mission could eventually result in the tools needed to deflect a legitimately dangerous asteroid.

Additional reporting by George Dvorsky.

More: NASA’s DART Mission Is Going to Really Mess Up This Tiny Asteroid

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Science

NASA’s DART Deploys Camera Probe Ahead of Asteroid Impact

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Depiction of DART (left) and LICIACube (right).
Image: Italian Space Agency

DART won’t survive its mission to deflect an asteroid, but the recently deployed LICIACube—a tiny probe equipped with cameras—will document the encounter in gory detail.

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is the space agency’s first demonstration of a defense strategy to protect against threatening asteroids. The 1,376-pound spacecraft is scheduled to smash into Dimorphos—the junior member of the Didymos binary asteroid system—on September 26 at 7:14 p.m. ET. Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, but the experiment, should it work, will slightly nudge the moonlet from its current trajectory. In the future, a similar strategy could be used to deflect a genuinely threatening asteroid.

DART will not survive the encounter, but its onboard camera, called DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation), will provide a first-person perspective of the collision. Nearby, LICIACube (pronounced LEE-cha-cube) will use its two onboard cameras to document the impact and its aftermath.

DART team engineers inspecting LICIACube before its installation into DART.
Photo: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman

Controllers issued a command on September 12 for DART to release the 31-pound (14-kilogram) LICIACube, which it had been carrying since its launch on November 24, 2021. A signal confirming the deployment arrived one hour later, much to the delight of Simone Pirrotta, LICIACube project manager for the Italian Space Agency.

“We are so excited for this—the first time an Italian team is operating its national spacecraft in deep space,” he said in a statement. “The whole team is fully involved in the activities, monitoring the satellite status and preparing the approaching phase to the asteroid’s flyby.”

LICIACube, short for Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids, was designed and built by Argotec, an Italian aerospace company, with contributions from the National Institute of Astrophysics and the Universities of Bologna and Milan. The tiny probe—built from a 6-unit cubesat bus—is equipped with two optical cameras, named LUKE (LICIACube Unit Key Explorer) and LEIA (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid). Together, LUKE and LEIA will collect data to confirm the success of the DART mission and to inform future models of similar tests done with kinetic impactors.

Pirrotta and his colleagues are currently calibrating LICIACube by capturing dynamic images of distant celestial bodies. The tiny probe will receive a series of maneuvering commands just prior to DART’s fatal rendezvous with the 520-foot-wide (160-meter) Dimorphos. NASA’s spacecraft, traveling at speeds reaching 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 kilometers per hour), will be annihilated by the impact. LICIACube will travel past the asteroid roughly three minutes after the encounter to confirm the impact, document the spread of the resulting dust plume, attempt to capture an image of the newly formed crater, and document the opposite side of Dimorphos, which DART will never see.

“We expect to receive the first full-frame images and to process them a couple of days after DART’s impact,” Pirrotta said. We’ll then use them to confirm impact and to add relevant information about the generated plume—the real precious value of our photos.”

By looking at the debris plume and impact crater, scientists hope to gain a better understanding of the asteroid’s structure and surface material. Observations of Dimorphos’s non-impacted hemisphere will improve estimates of the moonlet’s dimensions and volume.

NASA and ESA are planning to document the impact from afar. DART, should it be successful, will alter the speed of Dimorphos in its orbit around the 2,650-foot-wide (780-meter) Didymos “by a fraction of one percent, but this will change the orbital period of the moonlet by several minutes—enough to be observed and measured using telescopes on Earth,” according to NASA. Didymos is roughly 0.75 miles (1.2 km) from its larger companion.

Approximately 28,000 near-Earth asteroids have been documented over the years, with roughly 3,000 discoveries made each year. None of these known asteroids pose a risk to us within the next 100 years, but the chance exists that a threatening asteroid will suddenly come into view. The DART test, should it succeed, could equip us with a valuable strategy for mitigating these existential risks.

Related: NASA’s Upgraded Impact Monitoring System Could Prevent an Asteroid Apocalypse.

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Science

NASA Is Going To Try To Re-Direct The Path Of An Asteroid

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Illustration: NASA

If you’re a fan, like I am, of not being crushed to death by a rock that falls from the sky, then you should be interested in the mission NASA launched today with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The spacecraft in the nose of that rocket is called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), and that spacecraft is going to smack right into the asteroid Dimorphos in hopes of redirecting its path.

Now, I’m happy to say this is being done not because Dimorphos is actually threatening to hit the Earth but because it makes for a good test subject. See, Dimorphos is part of a binary pair of asteroids and orbits around the asteroid Didymos, so NASA can tell if the impact of DART into Dimorphos affected its orbit around Didymos. It can then use that information to calculate how a similar strike to an asteroid potentially headed to Earth could be deflected.

The spacecraft is small and boxy, and it will hit Dimorphos at an impressive 14,760 mph, sped along by its NEXT xenon ion thruster engine, which converts solar energy into gradual but persistent thrust.

Illustration: NASA

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An onboard camera and autonomous navigation software will guide DART to its self-sacrifice into the asteroid, which will change the speed of the asteroid’s orbit around the main asteroid by a fraction of a percent. But that should affect the orbital period by several minutes, all of which will be confirmed by observations from Earth.

Illustration: Ted Lopez / Johns Hopkins APL

DART won’t arrive at the asteroid pair until next September or so, which means you have plenty of time to figure out how to get close if you want a ringside seat.

The ability to deflect an asteroid could one day prove to be absolutely crucial to the safety of everything living on Earth. While, so far, NASA does not predict an asteroid of significant size hitting Earth in the next century or so, there have been 1,200 meteor impacts to Earth from asteroids over three feet in length since 1988, and only 0.42 percent of those—five—were actually predicted in advance.

So, it’s not exactly like we have a really solid handle on this whole asteroid-prediction thing, and figuring out a way to be ready to deflect something would really be a great idea. Ideally, if this test works, a similar deflecting spacecraft will be made available and be ready to go, should the situation arise in the future.

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