House committee probing Chinese tech theft from Iowa farmers

August 3, 2023

House lawmakers are digging into the theft of critical technology from Iowa farmers as part of a growing examination of American research stolen by China.

House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party lawmakers visited Iowa on Thursday to learn about China’s agricultural-tech espionage efforts.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, Wisconsin Republican and the committee’s chairman, said America must prioritize protecting technology residing in Iowa’s cornfields as much as it does Silicon Valley’s research labs.

“The U.S. technological ecosystem is a bucket that currently has massive holes in the bottom and we continue to pour billions and billions of R&D dollars into it every year,” Mr. Gallagher said.

“We need to plug these holes, we could do it with export controls, research security, outbound capital restriction, but for whatever reason we’ve chosen not to,” he said.

Mr. Gallagher said China’s theft of research and innovation does not harm CEOs and lobbyists as much as it does farmers, servicemembers, and other Americans going about their daily lives.

While Chinese espionage may more commonly be associated with military targets or disruptive digital hacks, the country’s theft of intellectual property has extended into the agricultural realm.

In 2016, Mo Hailong was sentenced to three years in prison for conspiring to steal trade secrets from American seed corn companies.

The Chinese businessman was spotted digging up hybrid seeds in an Iowa cornfield years earlier and was arrested, while others fled before they could be jailed.

Speaking from Tama County where Mr. Mo was discovered, lawmakers sounded the alarm that China remained interested in agricultural technology.

Rep. Ashley Hinson, Iowa Republican, said China’s theft of seeds harms every Iowa farmer who pays for agricultural research, buys the resulting seeds for fields and then harvests crops to feed and fuel Americans.

“These high-tech seeds are among the most tightly guarded trade secrets in the industry. The Chinese Communist Party has these right in their targets,” Ms. Hinson said at a roundtable event with Iowans.

In the decade since Iowans first spotted Chinese businessmen crawling in their cornfields, farmers have grown more vigilant.

Will Cornelius, the vice president of Cornelius Seed, told the lawmakers people working in the seed industry are aware but the wider public has yet to catch on to China’s interest in America’s farms.

“I learned just the other day that one of our employees was part of that team that found those guys 10 years ago,” Mr. Cornelius said, referring to the Mo case. “It’s just if you see something out of place, say something and speak up.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/aug/3/house-committee-probing-chinese-tech-theft-iowa-fa/

NASA’s Trio of Mini Rovers Will Team up to Explore the Moon

Aug 2, 2023

Working together without direct human input, three rovers each the size of a carry-on bag will map the lunar surface in 3D, using cameras and ground-penetrating radar.

NASA is sending a trio of miniature rovers to the Moon to see how well they can cooperate with one another without direct input from mission controllers back on Earth. A teamwork-minded experiment to demonstrate new technology, the CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) project marks another step the agency is taking toward developing robots that, by operating autonomously, can boost the efficiency of future missions. And, by taking simultaneous measurements from multiple locations, the rovers are meant to show how multirobot missions could potentially enable new science or support astronauts.

Currently slated to arrive aboard a lander in 2024 as part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, CADRE’s three small rovers will be lowered onto the Reiner Gamma region of the Moon via tethers. Each about the size of a carry-on suitcase, the four-wheeled rovers will drive to find a sunbathing spot, where they’ll open their solar panels and charge up. Then they’ll spend a full lunar day – about 14 Earth days – conducting experiments designed to test their capabilities.

“Our mission is to demonstrate that a network of mobile robots can cooperate to accomplish a task without human intervention – autonomously,” said Subha Comandur, the CADRE project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “It could change how we do exploration in the future. The question for future missions will become: ‘How many rovers do we send, and what will they do together?’”

Mission controllers on Earth will send a broad directive to the rovers’ base station aboard the 13-foot-tall (4-meter-tall) lander. Then the team of little robots will elect a “leader,” which in turn will distribute work assignments to accomplish the collective goal. Each rover will figure out how best to safely complete its assigned task.

“The only instruction is, for example, ‘Go explore this region,’ and the rovers figure out everything else: when they’ll do the driving, what path they’ll take, how they’ll maneuver around local hazards,” said JPL’s Jean-Pierre de la Croix, CADRE’s principal investigator. “You only tell them the high-level goal, and they have to determine how to accomplish it.”

Experiments in Teamwork

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The rovers will face several tests – all within view of a monitoring camera on the base station atop the lander. The first is to drive in formation and stay on course using ultra-wideband radios to maintain their relative positions while relying on sensors to avoid obstacles. In a second experiment, the rovers will each take a path of their own choosing to explore a designated area of about 4,300 square feet (400 square meters), creating a topographic 3D map with stereo cameras. The project will also assess how well the team would adapt if a rover stopped working for some reason. Success will indicate that multirobot missions are a good choice for exploring hazardous but scientifically rewarding terrain.

And while CADRE isn’t focused on conducting science, the rovers will be packing multistatic ground-penetrating radars. Driving in formation, each rover will receive the reflection of radio signals sent by the others, creating a 3D image of the structure of the subsurface as much as 33 feet (10 meters) below. Together they can gather more complete data than can current state-of-the-art ground-penetrating radars like the one on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, RIMFAX (Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment).

“We’ll see how multiple robots working together – doing multiple measurements in different places at the same time – can record data that would be impossible for a single robot to achieve,” Comandur said. “It could be a game-changing way of doing science.”

Working Smart

But there’s more to CADRE than testing autonomy and teamwork capabilities: The rovers also need to survive the harsh thermal environment near the Moon’s equator, which poses a challenge for such small robots. In the searing sunlight, the rovers could face midday temperatures of up to 237 degrees Fahrenheit (114 Celsius). Made with a combination of commercial off-the-shelf parts and custom-built components, the rovers must be robust enough to make it through the daytime heat while being compact and lightweight.

At the same time, they need to have the computing power to run the JPL-developed cooperative autonomy software. It’s a difficult balance: The project’s rovers and base station get their brain power from a small processing chip (the next generation of the cellphone-class processor inside NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter), but using the processor contributes to the heat.

To prevent the rovers from cooking, the CADRE team came up with a creative solution: 30-minute wake-sleep cycles. Every half-hour, the rovers will shut down, cooling off via radiators and recharging their batteries. When they simultaneously awaken, they’ll share their health status with one another via a mesh radio network (much like a home Wi-Fi network) and once again elect a leader based on which is fittest for the task at hand. Then off they’ll go for another round of lunar exploration.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-trio-of-mini-rovers-will-team-up-to-explore-the-moon

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XRISM Mission Ready To Explore Universe’s Hottest Locales

Aug 3, 2023

Japan’s XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, pronounced “crism”) observatory, expected to launch Aug. 25 (Aug. 26 Japan local time), will provide an unprecedented view into some of the hottest places in the universe. And it will do so using an instrument that’s actually colder than the frostiest cosmic location now known.

“XRISM’s Resolve instrument will let us peer into the make-up of cosmic X-ray sources to a degree that hasn’t been possible before,” said Richard Kelley, NASA’s XRISM principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We anticipate many new insights about the hottest objects in the universe, which include exploding stars, black holes and galaxies powered by them, and clusters of galaxies.”

A new NASA infographic illustrates the enormous range of cosmic temperatures. At the bottom of the scale is absolute zero Kelvin, or 459.67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 273.15 Celsius).

The detector for XRISM’s Resolve instrument is just a few hundredths of a degree warmer than this. It’s 20 times chillier than the Boomerang Nebula – the coldest-known natural environment – and about 50 times colder than the temperature of deep space, which is warmed only by the oldest light in the universe, the cosmic microwave background.

The instrument, a collaboration between NASA and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), must be kept so cold because it works by measuring the tiny temperature increase created when X-rays strike its detector. This information builds up a picture of how bright the source is in various X-ray energies – the equivalent of colors of visible light – and lets astronomers identify chemical elements by their unique X-ray fingerprints, called spectra.

“With current instruments, we’re only capable of seeing these fingerprints in a comparatively blurry way,” said Brian Williams, NASA’s XRISM project scientist at Goddard. “Resolve will effectively give X-ray astrophysics a spectrometer with a magnifying glass.”

XRISM’s other instrument, called Xtend, developed by JAXA and Japanese universities, is an X-ray imager that will perform simultaneous observations with Resolve, providing complementary information. Both instruments rely on two identical X-ray Mirror Assemblies developed at Goddard.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/xrism-mission-ready-to-explore-universe-s-hottest-locales

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