NASA enlists student help with Mars mission design challenge

Are you a college student? Want to be a part of NASA’s mission to send astronauts to Mars? Well, you’re in luck. The space agency has announced the Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Challenge that aims to get design help from university students. The challenge is to create a solution for slowing NASA’s massive payload with inflatable spacecraft heat shields or hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator (HIAD) technology. While NASA managed to successfully land the Curiosity rover on Mars, a spacecraft with a crew on board would weigh between 15-30 tons — slightly heavier than the rover’s one-ton load. Couple that weight with the planet’s thin atmosphere and you can understand why NASA needs to develop a new system to slow the vehicle’s approach. What’s more, NASA hopes that the HIAD tech could be used on other missions, too.

Interested students have until November 15th to submit initial concepts. If chosen, they’ll hand in a detailed paper on their systems next spring, and based on those, four finalists will be selected to present to a panel of judges at Langley. Oh yeah, they’ll also be awarded a $6,000 stipend. The winners will be offered paid internships at Langley, where they’ll work with the Game Changing Development Program (GCD) folks. And there’s a possibility of putting the winning concept through its paces with a test flight.

Via: Geek

Source: NASA

Dropbox Teams will offer a host of business features to free users

Dropbox for Business is an increasingly important part of the company’s revenue stream — there are more than 130,000 businesses using the service — but there are many more people out there using the company’s more consumer-focused free service and its $9.99 monthly subscription plan. Millions of those users are in fact using their personal Dropbox accounts to get work done, as well — so now Dropbox is going to offer a set of tools to make it a lot easier for individuals and smaller businesses to use Dropbox with a team of co-workers. In fact, that’s the name of the new service that launches tomorrow: Dropbox Teams.

Anyone using Dropbox will now have the opportunity to create a team. When you start the process, Dropbox will even suggest users it thinks you should invite based on what documents you share with what people or whether you’re all using the same email address domain. Once your team is set up, everyone will have access to the same shared folder, which Dropbox expects teams will use to share documents that the whole group will need access to. Fortunately, you can also set up sub-groups (like a marketing team, or the specific people involved with a specific project) — that’ll keep everyone on the team from having files they don’t need taking up space in their Dropbox.

Dropbox Teams will also give administrators granular control over what different users will have access to — you can limit what files and folders they can see, and you can also decide whether files can be shared or not. Another sharing option is the ability to determine whether folders and files can be shared with people who aren’t on your team. If files are confidential, you can keep them only within your team, but other files will be able to be freely shared with anyone using Dropbox. (Of course, that won’t stop anyone from downloading the file and sharing it via email, but there’s only so much you can expect from a free offering.)

The last major feature here is pulled directly from Dropbox for Business. If you happen to have created Dropbox accounts for separate work and personal accounts, Dropbox will let you link them together so you can see them both while logged in, rather than have to log in and out to jump between them. All in all, it’s a pretty generous set of free features: it lets the many people out there already using the popular Dropbox Basic and Pro services for work have more control over how they do that. And it just might help the company sell more Dropbox for Business subscriptions as those small companies start growing up.

Source: Dropbox

Dropbox Teams will offer a host of business features to free users

Dropbox for Business is an increasingly important part of the company’s revenue stream — there are more than 130,000 businesses using the service — but there are many more people out there using the company’s more consumer-focused free service and its $9.99 monthly subscription plan. Millions of those users are in fact using their personal Dropbox accounts to get work done, as well — so now Dropbox is going to offer a set of tools to make it a lot easier for individuals and smaller businesses to use Dropbox with a team of co-workers. In fact, that’s the name of the new service that launches tomorrow: Dropbox Teams.

Anyone using Dropbox will now have the opportunity to create a team. When you start the process, Dropbox will even suggest users it thinks you should invite based on what documents you share with what people or whether you’re all using the same email address domain. Once your team is set up, everyone will have access to the same shared folder, which Dropbox expects teams will use to share documents that the whole group will need access to. Fortunately, you can also set up sub-groups (like a marketing team, or the specific people involved with a specific project) — that’ll keep everyone on the team from having files they don’t need taking up space in their Dropbox.

Dropbox Teams will also give administrators granular control over what different users will have access to — you can limit what files and folders they can see, and you can also decide whether files can be shared or not. Another sharing option is the ability to determine whether folders and files can be shared with people who aren’t on your team. If files are confidential, you can keep them only within your team, but other files will be able to be freely shared with anyone using Dropbox. (Of course, that won’t stop anyone from downloading the file and sharing it via email, but there’s only so much you can expect from a free offering.)

The last major feature here is pulled directly from Dropbox for Business. If you happen to have created Dropbox accounts for separate work and personal accounts, Dropbox will let you link them together so you can see them both while logged in, rather than have to log in and out to jump between them. All in all, it’s a pretty generous set of free features: it lets the many people out there already using the popular Dropbox Basic and Pro services for work have more control over how they do that. And it just might help the company sell more Dropbox for Business subscriptions as those small companies start growing up.

Source: Dropbox

Samsung plans to implement a financing option just like Apple

Apple took the carrier contract subsidies into their own hands by offering their own financing option on their new iPhone 6s devices, and now according to a new report Samsung are looking to do the exact same thing.

Sources that are citing an industry executive who are familiar with Samsung’s plans claim that the company will launch a smartphone leasing program in the next several months. This will make it easier for consumers to spread the cost of their Samsung phone over a number of months without being tied into carrier contracts.

Samsung have already offered a program to customers that paid users cash for trying and switching to Samsung devices so this is the next step in enticing potential customers to the Galaxy lineup.

The post Samsung plans to implement a financing option just like Apple appeared first on AndroidGuys.

Fast in-flight WiFi is coming to Europe

While in-flight WiFi is now pretty common in the US, connectivity in Europe is a little harder to come by. But that could soon change if a new joint-venture between UK satellite company Inmarsat and operator Deutsche Telekom gets off the ground. The two companies today announced the launch of the European Aviation Network, a new framework that combines LTE and satellite networks to deliver high-speed internet across the continent.

The network will work a lot like Gogo’s air-to-ground service. The multi-beam satellites rely on Inmarsat’s 30MHz (2 x 15MHz) S-band spectrum, which covers all 28 EU member states. Deutsche Telekom, on the other hand, will utilize 300 specially-modified LTE sites that range up to 80 kilometers (normal masts offer around 10 kilometers) and can efficiently deal with the speed of a plane travelling at 10,000 feet.

While British Airways was believed to be in early talks to be a launch customer, Lufthansa will be the first European airline to trial the European Aviation Network system in 2017. Its aircraft will be fitted with equipment that can connect to both the S-band satellite and the high-speed broadband ground network. Those systems will automatically switch between the two, ensuring passengers receive reliable WiFi speeds — Inmarsat says they’ll be “similar to the comfort of high-speed broadband at home” — whether their plane is above land or water.

Source: Inmarsat