First images of the Bennu asteroid sent by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft

The first images of the Bennu asteroid, target of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft mission, have been shared by NASA. The craft, fully titled the “Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security – Regolith Explorer” (OSIRIS-REx), set out on September 8 2016 and is currently around a month out from its destination. It will collect a sample from the Bennu asteroid and bring it back to Earth for scientists to study, in order to answer questions about the early solar system and to learn about both the hazards and the resources that exist in near-Earth space.

The Bennu asteroid was chosen for study for reasons both practical — because it is relatively close to the Earth and is large enough to spin slowly, making it easier to touch down on — and scientific — because the asteroid is very old, potentially even older than the solar system itself, and is well preserved. Scientists believe that it could be a kind of time capsule, showing conditions of the early solar system, and that it could even give clues about the origin of life.

Bennu is around 500m in diameter, making it a little larger than the height of the Empire State Building, and is believed to be a fragment of a catastrophic collision between two larger asteroids that occurred between 1 billion and 2 billion years ago. The asteroid is rich in carbon, which is critical for life-forming compounds on Earth, and it is thought to contain organic molecules like adenine, guanine, hypoxanthine, and more. Most importantly for the potential formation of life, there could also be water trapped in the minerals that make up the asteroid.

The OSIRIS-REx craft is on course to touch down on Bennu’s surface in July 2020, when it will collect between 60 and 2,000 grams of dirt and rocks from the asteroid, depending on the conditions there. If the probe is successful in gathering 2,000 grams of material, it would be by far the largest sample collected from a space object since the Apollo Moon landing brought back moon rocks. The sample will be packed up safely into a capsule inside the craft and will be sent back to Earth, where it should be dropped into the west desert of Utah in 2023.

The sixteen images of Bennu released this week show the OSIRIS-REx craft approaching the asteroid at the rate of one image per day, starting at 27,340 miles out from Bennu and ending at just 200 miles out.

Editors’ Recommendations

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• Kepler telescope shuts down, but endows all its data to the public

Bentley claims connected car bragging rights with super-fast in-car Wi-Fi

Whether driving or riding in the back, you can have the fastest in-car connectivity on the highway in a Bentley, thanks to Bentley Advanced Connectivity — an option for all 2019 Bentleys.

Bentley partnered with Viasat, a global communications company that provides high-speed satellite broadband service and secure networking systems, to create the Bentley Advanced Connectivity setup.

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Accessible via the dedicated Bentley Advanced Connectivity smartphone app, passengers can communicate with Bentley Skype and other business and entertainment applications while traveling at highway speeds. Without leaving your car, you can participate in multiple meetings, make presentations, and access and edit productivity applications.

Whether you seek a whisper-quiet mobile office for on-the-go productivity or multiple fast connections while traveling with your family, Bentley and Viasat designed the high-speed Wi-Fi system for performance and privacy.

Bentley’s super-fast connectivity entails a multi-channel virtual private network (VPN). Signals from up to three mobile network operators can be aggregated into a single channel. The Bentley Advanced Connectivity router is installed in the car’s trunk where it connects to the vehicle’s DC power supply.

The router picks up its network signal from a broadband hub at a static, or fixed, site. Mobile network operators connect to the hub, which sorts out the signals for reliable and secure Wi-Fi service.

When you configure a 2019 Bentley, now you can specify Bentley Advanced Connectivity for your car as well as the colors, wheels, hides, veneers, and luggage.

Headquartered in Crewe, England, Bentley Motors manufactures four luxury performance vehicle lines: the Continental, Flying Spur, Bentayga, and Mulsanne. Bentley, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary in January 2019, has been a subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group since 1998. There are 65 Bentley dealers in and near the U.S.

Volkswagen Group brands operate separately. As international demand grows for reliable, secure, and fast in-car connectivity, however, other group members sold in the U.S. including Audi, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, and Volkswagen also will need high-performance networking. Trickle down technology within brands and brand families is common, so similar in-car Wi-Fi systems may be available for other VW group members in a few years.

Viasat, headquartered in Carlsbad, California focused originally on secure communications on government aircraft and for military applications. The company also provides commercial aviation networking, and more recently has expanded to business and home satellite internet services in the U.S and globally. It will be interesting to watch for competing technologies as the demand for premium in-car internet increases.

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Privacy is becoming obsolete, but not everyone thinks you should fear its demise

“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

It was an argument we heard a lot in the years following Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s famous claim that privacy was no longer a social norm. A lot has changed in the eight years since. The web has evolved, new tools make it easier to protect our privacy online, and scandals with social networks and other online entities have made privacy itself a hot topic once again.

And yet, as the second decade of the 21st century edges towards its conclusion, we continue to sacrifice our privacy in the name of progress, often without our knowledge. But do we care enough about it to slow down the pace of technological innovation? To halt the development of more powerful interconnected services? Well, it all depends on who you ask.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

In the name of progress

In his 2014 Ted Talk titled, “Privacy is dead and that’s great,” Richard Aldrich highlighted some of the exciting benefits of a privacy-free future. He suggested that through smartphones and cameras, the general public could help solve high-profile crimes, corporations wouldn’t be able to dodge tax obligations through shady accounting, and tracking people’s biometrics could lead to great advances in healthcare.

His idea of the future relies on such transparency extending to everyone, including the wealthy and politically connected. But the promise of living longer by having health data on tap for analytical services and artificial intelligences, could be an easy sell in comparison to the seemingly ever more nebulous concept of privacy.

If we’re going to have a real shot at fixing the problems caused by Facebook's dominance, it needs to give users meaningful control of their own data. https://t.co/AwVn7lJ42j

— EFF (@EFF) August 5, 2018

In a talk at dConstruct 2014, Tom Scott took a step further. He suggested that by 2030, privacy could become something that only grandparents remember. Such an age of pervasive surveillance would create a socially manned, digital panopticon he said, helping to bring crime levels to historic lows, making everyone accountable to their actions, not just of today, but of everything they ever did.

In many ways, we’re seeing the first hints of such a future right now.

If the 2000s were a decade of advancements in compact computing and processing power, the 2010’s have been driven by data. With ever expanding free services offered by companies like Google and Facebook, big data and the analytics that followed, have lead to huge profits for those companies, but also exciting new products. Translation tools, image and speech recognition, have all improved enormously in the past few years thanks to the collection of data on a hitherto unheard of scale.

Smart assistants like Siri and Cortana take those tools and improve them further through personalization by learning behaviors based on information gathered on the user(s). Smart speakers like Amazon’s Alexa driven Echo devices are increasingly offering more data driven functions with voice support.

These are all ideas that on paper sound like they would open up the world to a beautiful, data-driven tomorrow. As Google’s Sundar Pinchai explained, this vision of the future is”AI-first” and allows us to live alongside this augmented reality in a manner that is more personalized, if less anonymous.

Google CEO Sundar-Pichai Getty

It sounds like the trade is worth it then, right? Well, not to everyone. Rising to counter these utopian ambitions is a growing movement that doesn’t want to see such a future come about, especially if it’s not willingly instigated. That’s proved a very real concern too, since companies like Google have been found to effectively disregard user preference in their ever hungrier quest for data. There’s a disturbing perspective on where this is leading, and the stakes rise by the day.

Looking forward through dystopian lenses

One expert waving a red flag is Lotte Houwing. She’s a privacy enthusiast who works on strategic litigation in the field of human rights in the Netherlands. For her, it’s all about data and who controls it.

“I share different data with my employer than with my mother, and it is important for me to have that control,” she told Digital Trends.

Houwing suggested that too much surveillance, combined with a willingness to accept it as the norm, could lead to a society built around compliance to an arbitrary digital authority. Such a world, she argued, would cater to a select few and reward falsehoods and conformity above all else.

“The social justice implications of [facial recognition…] people of color are so disproportionately impacted by the collection and use of this information”

To help imagine how this philosophy of privacy could play out in the real world, Houwing drew upon the wealth of dystopian fiction we have. In a particularly illuminating episode of  Black Mirror (“Nosedive”), it shows how every aspect of a person’s life could be affected by their numerical stature in a digital application. How they interact with people in their personal life, how bright their smile is, and perhaps most disturbingly, their adherence to societal norms, all have an affect on their rating. That rating in turn affects their ability to take out loans, to live in certain neighborhoods or to work for certain companies.

You don’t need a system like that too prove the point. There has always been more privacy afforded to those with privilege than those without, if that’s what they desire. Historically, the powerful could afford houses with multiple rooms and larger plots of land. The same is true today, as Mark Zuckerberg showed when he purchased four houses around his own to improve his personal privacy.

There are always limitations to that kind of privacy, though, because it’s grounded in the real, physical world. In digital spaces there is arguably no limit to the amount of space the privileged few can put between their data and that of less wealthy or connected internet users.

A display showing a facial recognition system for law enforcement during the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

That’s the greatest concern of Gennie Gebhart, a researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In her chat with Digital Trends, she suggested that certain technologies like facial recognition, have the potential to widen the gap between the haves and the have nots like never before.

“The social justice implications of this – people of color are so disproportionately impacted by the collection and use of this information – that’s a real dystopia,” she said.

It’s that interconnected, privacy-less world Google imagines — flipped on its head.

“It’s a technology that’s advancing rapidly and in particular when it comes to law enforcement,” she said. “Different kinds of regulations have not been able to keep up […] It’s something that affects more people than they’re aware of.”

That’s something we’re already seeing play out in some parts of the country, with facial recognition and analytics being used to even predict crimes before they happen, raising questions about the role law enforcement plays in society.

Were such a system to become commonplace, some believe that what it could mean a fundamental change in what it means to be human. That might sound overstated, but data collection always come at a price – and in this case, it’s at the privacy of the users. That’s not a far-off dystopia. It’s happening today.

Trading in privacy for a profit

The difficulty with privacy and the laws that protect it for individuals, is that privacy means something different to different people and some are more comfortable with less of it than others. Indeed the very concept of privacy is a modern one, with many historical examples to suggest that privacy is less of a social norm than proponents of it may suggest.

“Privacy can be part of our law and in the U.S. in that tradition, it’s the right to be left alone.”

“The notion of privacy that we are most familiar with comes straight from Aristotle in a lot of ways,” Gennie Gebhart told Digital Trends. “Privacy can be part of our law and in the U.S. in that tradition, it’s the right to be left alone. The right to a private space for self expression, exploration and growth. The right to control information about oneself – who else can have access to it and when.”

But it was only in the middle of the 20th-century that the concept of privacy was fully embedded in modern society and protected by law. Roman societies bathed and went to the bathroom in public and the concept of having a bed and “bed chamber” exclusively for individuals, even among the wealthy, was alien until the 17th century. Everyone else simply slept on one large mattress with their whole family – often with animals in the same room.

Getty

But many people today willingly give up their right to privacy for the sake keeping friends and family updated on what they’re doing in their lives. Others turn it into a business. Everyone from mommy vloggers and Twitch streamers to Instagram celebrities, make a living from their existence in virtual space by sharing their data with others. To some this is a crude example of a cultural shift towards the death of privacy, whereas others see it as a way to profit from something companies have been doing for decades.

British satirist, Oli Frost is most known for creating the fake social media enhancing company, LifeFaker. He famously attempted to sell his Facebook data on Ebay. While initially unsuccessful, he still considers his personal and private life unimportant enough to warrant protective privacy measures.

“The biggest companies in the world spend huge amounts of money and employ the most brilliant minds to make you click on the buttons.”

“I’m not doing much that’s interesting most days anyway,” he said. “Mostly I come home from work too exhausted to [deal] with the existential issues with my life, and so decide to watch Netflix instead.”

For the EFF’s Gebhart, though, this apathetic response to the concept of privacy isn’t born of a lack of care about it, but a feeling of helplessness in a world that seems designed to cater to those who discard it.

“I absolutely don’t blame consumers if they fall into the attitude of ‘I might as well share it,’ this security nihilism,” she said. “It’s easy to get dispirited or frustrated like that. Particularly when the biggest companies in the world spend huge amounts of money and employ the most brilliant minds to make you click on the buttons, make you continue sharing. The odds you’re up against as a consumer are really hard. I think that that attitude is really common.”

Giving the power of privacy back to the people

Almost a decade on from Mark Zuckerberg’s inflammatory comments on privacy, Facebook’s public-facing stance is quite different. When asked for comment, the social network sent Digital Trends a quote from its deputy chief privacy officer, Rob Sherman.

“When it comes to privacy, there are a few things we know to be true. First, everyone has a basic right to privacy,” he said during a recent talk. “Second, because privacy means different things to different people at different times, the only way to guarantee it for everyone, all the time, is by putting people in control.”

Statista via YouGov/Handelsblatt

He went on to refute the paradigm that people of the future will need to opt for privacy or functional services.

For privacy proponents like Gebhart and Houwing, this is all very encouraging, because as they see it now, the future is not as rosy as it could be.

Legislative changes like the GDPR and major privacy scandals like the Cambridge Analytica data theft have shown that there is still a real appetite for privacy in the modern day. Flipping the coin on their concerns for the future, we asked our sources to give us their idea of a privacy utopia and they all suggested the same thing: It should be one driven by choice.

“The right to informed decision-making and consent, not only in a meaningful way, but in an ongoing basis would be a must,” Gebhart explained. She went on to suggest that companies would need to be frank and open with people about the information they collected and stored on them, giving users complete control over how it was used, how long it was stored for, and when it was ultimately deleted.

For that to be possible though, she highlighted that more competition for top-tier services was needed. Right now, she said, Facebook has no viable competition – no other service has the number of users it has. That’s something Lotte Houwing was keen to see happen too, highlighting that in the future, we’ll need to see a lot more alternatives to the existing status quo.

Wherever you stand on the spectrum of the privacy debate, it seems hard to argue that we aren’t going through a transitory phase

“It might be a mixture between some cool privacy nerds taking privacy by design and privacy by default to the next level and develop a lot of alternative apps for the things people like to use on an open source basis” she said. “Reclaim technology thereby enabling themselves to set the standards and the requirements for what technology will be used.”

Wherever you stand on the spectrum of the privacy debate, it seems hard to argue that we aren’t going through a transitory phase as a burgeoning digital society. The early days of the internet and its services provided anonymity in a fashion that hadn’t been possible before, but the veil is gradually being lifted. It’s becoming a more personal space, but not one that the people in it have much control over.

If we can instead build digital services and products that let the people who use them decide what happens to their data and what the limits of its use are, then everyone wins. If we don’t, then we risk stifling progress in all sorts of exciting fields, or giving ourselves over to a world where the technology that was designed to set us free, imprisons us a digital panopticon of our making.

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The Kingdom Hearts: All-in-One Package has the most value for fans

Best answer: For fans of the series or those looking to experience everything, the All-in-One Package is the way to go.

PlayStation: Kingdom Hearts: All-in-One Package ($100)

What are my options?

There are quite a few Kingdom Hearts bundles out on the market, but the ones most relevant are The Story So Far and the upcoming All-in-One Package. Though you do have the option to purchase a bundle of Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX for $20, it’s an older bundle that contains less content.

Why not purchase The Story So Far and Kingdom Hearts 3 separately?

The simple answer just comes down that it won’t be worth it to most people to buy them separately. Whether you decide to purchase The Story So Far and Kingdom Hearts 3 or go for the entire bundle in the All-in-One Package, you’ll be paying the same price of around $100. There’s no price advantage either way. The biggest difference is the convenience of purchasing one package. Why bother buying multiple items when you can get them all in one place?

Kingdom Hearts: All-in-One Package gives players instant access to Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5+2.5 ReMIX and Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue since its a digital package and tied to your PlayStation account. If you needed to wait until Kingdom Hearts 3 released to access them, I’d say pick up The Story So Far instead in a heart beat. But since you can jump into the older games right now if you pick up the All-in-One Package, there’s no drawback. Plus the All-in-One Package also includes an exclusive PS4 theme and PS4 keyblade for Kingdom Hearts 3.

Is there any reason to purchase them separately then?

Sure. Buying them separately is absolutely still a viable option without any major drawbacks. Not everyone’s financial situations are the same, and you’ll know what’s the best purchase to make depending on your individual circumstances. If spending $100 all at once on a pre-order is too much, or you decide that you want everything included in The Story So Far but also want the Deluxe Edition of Kingdom Hearts 3, you’re better off buying them separately.

Or maybe you’ve never even played the series and aren’t sure if you’ll enjoy it. Pick up The Story So Far to give it a shot. If you aren’t happy with it, you can always return it or trade it in depending on where you bought it. You won’t be stuck with the knowledge that you paid an extra $60 for Kingdom Hearts 3 when you won’t end up playing it. Think of The Story So Far as a way to test the waters.

Our Pick

Kingdom Hearts: All-in-One Package

$100 at PlayStation

The best there is

This is by and large the best bundle that fans can pick up. You get instant access to remastered classics and can jump into Kingdom Hearts 3 right when it launches in one convenient place.

An alternative

Kingdom Hearts: The Story So Far

$40 at Amazon

An appealing bundle

This bundle contains won’t get you access to Kingdom Hearts 3, but it’s perfectly suitable if you’re looking to test the waters to see if you’ll actually enjoy the series.

An alternative

Kingdom Hearts 3

$60 at Amazon

The next chapter

Kingdom Hearts 3 is the much anticipated entry in the acclaimed franchise, and it’s better to get it with the All-in-One bundle unless you’re looking to buy a more expensive edition of KH3 separately.

Kepler telescope shuts down, but endows all its data to the public

After a nine-year mission into deep space to hunt for planets, the Kepler space telescope has finally been decommissioned. Having discovered more than 2,600 planets outside of our solar system, the telescope has finally run out of fuel and will cease operations.

The telescope was launched by NASA back in 2009 and was originally intended to be on mission for just three and a half years. It continued operating past that, but at the four year mark there was a mechanical failure of the craft that temporarily halted operations. Fortunately the NASA scientists were able to come up with a workaround in which they switched the telescope’s field of view every few months, which enabled them to continue collecting data for another five years. But in March 2018, NASA announced that the craft was running out of fuel and would soon stop broadcasting entirely.

Now that time has come and the telescope will no longer send any data back to Earth. But the telescope leaves an amazing legacy: data collected on thousands of planets outside of our solar system, all of which is now publicly accessible. The data is available in the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, where scientists from around the world can download and study it to learn more about the galaxy we live in.

When it was launched in 2009, the Kepler telescope had the largest digital camera ever outfitted for outer space observations, and with this powerful technology it was able to begin its explorations by observing an area of 150,000 stars in a dense area of the Cygnus constellation. It was the first NASA mission to detect Earth-sized planets outside of our solar system and gave researchers crucial information on the behavior of stars and the planets that orbit them. The data collected by the telescope has also been used to study the history of the Milky Way and to learn about how stars begin to go supernova — where a star explodes in a bright burst of light as it dies.

Overall the Kepler mission was a huge success that “wildly exceeded all our expectations“, according to associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate Thomas Zurbuchen. Now scientists can continue benefiting from the trove of data acquired by this remarkable telescope.

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Acer Chromebook Spin 15 vs. Acer Aspire E 15

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

With the growing popularity and improving functionality of Chrome OS, choosing a budget notebook has become more difficult than ever. The choice isn’t made any easier by a general improvement in Windows budget notebooks, which get better with each generation.

One of our favorite budget Windows 10 notebooks is the Acer Aspire E 15, which offers an impressive combination of performance and battery life for only $600. Enter the Acer Chromebook Spin 15, which leverages the efficiency and cost economies of Chrome OS to offer a bona fide 2-in-1 for just $450. So, which of these two budget machines is worth the (relatively minimal) investment?

Design

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Acer’s Chromebook Spin 15 is a rather large take on the 360-degree convertible 2-in-1, particularly in its width and depth thanks to rather massive bezels on the 15.-6 display that buck the modern trend. It’s reasonably thin, though, at 0.79 inches and it’s heavy but not inordinately so at 4.63 pounds. That latter metric is thanks to a mostly plastic build that’s sturdy enough — although if you press on the lid, you’ll see some give, along with a “whoosh” of air. The aluminum keyboard deck adds to its rigidity. Aesthetically, the Chromebook Spin 15 sports a silver color and a crosshatch pattern on the cover that’s not unattractive but still won’t win any beauty contests.

The Acer Aspire E 15 is also a rather massive notebook with equally large bezels on its 15.6-inch panel, and it’s also thicker at 1.19 inches and more substantial at 5.27 inches. The Aspire E 15 doesn’t pretend to be a thin and light notebook, and its display doesn’t flip around. It’s also mostly made of plastic, with an aluminum keyboard deck that also adds some extra rigidity. All of that extra space allows for a rarity in notebooks today: A DVD-RW drive. Considering its looks, the Aspire E 15 doesn’t even try to be pretty but instead gives off an air of conservative minimalism.

You’ll find the keyboards and touchpads on these two Acer notebooks to be quite similar, although Windows 10 does build in some additional multitouch gestures that Chrome OS doesn’t support. Connectivity is better on the Aspire E 15, with a mix of USB-A, USB-C, and HDMI ports, compared to just USB-C and USB-A on the Chromebook Spin 15. Neither offers Thunderbolt 3 support, unfortunately.

We have to give the win to the Chromebook Spin 15 here for not only being thinner and lighter but also for offering a display that flips around. You won’t want to use it as a tablet, but it’s nice for binging Netflix when in media mode with the screen flipped around.

Performance

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

The Chromebook Spin 15 uses a dual-core Intel Pentium N4200 that’s much less powerful than the 8th-gen Intel Core i5-8250U that’s utilized by the Aspire E 15. Chrome OS is a less demanding operating system and so the Chromebook Spin 15 runs fast enough for productivity work, but the Aspire E 15 still benefits from its faster CPU, which provides a speedier experience. Also, the Windows 10 machine benefits from a SATA solid-state drive (SSD) that’s much faster than the eMMC storage used in the Chromebook.

In addition, the Aspire E 15 enjoys an entry-level discrete GPU, the Nvidia GeForce MX150, that means it can tackle some older gaming titles and even newer titles with the settings turned down. That’s much more than the Chromebook Spin 15 can manage, given that it stumbles running relatively simple Android games.

It’s difficult to compare the displays on these two notebooks given that we can’t use our colorimeter on Chrome OS machines. Subjectively, then, we think the Aspire E 15 has the better display, offering surprising contrast and higher brightness even though colors are just as muted as on the Chromebook Spin 15.

Overall, the Aspire E 15 wins out on performance, offering a speedier take on a more demanding Windows 10 environment and a display that’s more pleasant in day-to-day use.

Portability

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

As we mentioned earlier, both of these notebooks are rather large, and they’ll both stuff your backpack. But the Chromebook Spin 15 is thinner and lighter, and so it’ll be easier to lug from place to place.

But battery life also, and Chrome OS helps out a great deal in this regard. We’re not sure how many watt-hours of battery capacity are packed into the Chromebook Spin 15’s hefty chassis, but however much it is, it provides some serious longevity.

Whether we’re talking about our most aggressive Basemark web benchmark (five and a half hours), web browsing (11 hours), or looping a local video (13 and a half hours), the Chromebook Spin 15 lasted long enough to promise all-day battery life. The Aspire E 15 was also a strong performer, but it came in at least an hour less on each of our tests.

And so, while it’s kind of funny to call one of these large notebooks “more portable” than the other, the Chromebook Spin 15 is going to weigh you down just a little less and it’s going to last you at least a little longer on a single charge.

The Aspire E 15 is just a lot faster

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

You can pick up the Chromebook Spin 15 for just $450 with its Pentium CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of eMMC storage. That’s currently the only configuration, but it’s more than good enough to power Chrome OS.

The Aspire E 15 is just slightly more expensive at $600 for a Core i5, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SATA SSD. That also comes with a discrete GPU and four times the storage space. You can spend $150 more and upgrade to a Core i7.

Either of these large notebooks will meet your basic productivity and media consumption needs. But speed matters and the Aspire E 15 is simply a faster notebook. It deserves the win in a very close contest.

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Sun sets on NASA’s Dawn spacecraft after 11 years studying asteroid belt

NASA’s Dawn mission, which aimed to study the largest bodies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has come to an end. After 11 years in space and a journey of 4.3 billion miles, the craft has run out of fuel and has now gone silent. Without the hydrazine fuel that the craft uses, it is no longer able to turn its solar panels towards the Sun to recharge or to keep its antennae pointed towards Earth, which means it can no longer send data back to mission control.

The Dawn spacecraft set out to study two particular bodies in the asteroid belt: the dwarf planet Ceres and the giant asteroid Vesta. Its fly-over of Ceres not only produced detailed images of the surface including craters and mountains but also provided evidence that the dwarf planet may still be active. Its discoveries on Vesta were equally intriguing, with findings of landslides on the asteroid that suggest the possibility of hidden ice under the surface.

The craft also achieved several firsts in space exploration, such as being the first space mission to orbit two destinations, the first spacecraft to orbit an object in the main asteroid belt, the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet, and the first mission to visit Ceres and the first mission to visit Vesta.

Launched by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the data collected from the Dawn mission has been used to study how our solar system was formed in its early years and has shown that dwarf planets could have had oceans on them at some point in their history. The mission was a personal one for the JPL researchers too, as Mission Director and Chief Engineer Marc Rayman shared: “The fact that my car’s license plate frame proclaims, ‘My other vehicle is in the main asteroid belt,’ shows how much pride I take in Dawn.”

Now that it is without fuel, the Dawn spacecraft will stay in orbit around Ceres where it has been located since 2015. Scientists took care to ensure that the craft could be disposed of safely and that it would not harm the dwarf planet, so it will remain a new “moon” for Ceres for many years to come.

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• We’re going to the Red Planet! All the past, present, and future missions to Mars

“LarvalBot” underwater drone will reseed coral reefs damaged by climate change

Since August 2018, the Great Barrier Reef in the ocean off Australia has had a special protector — an autonomous underwater drone called RangerBot that has monitored the status of the reef and protected the corals from the predatory crown-of-thorns starfish. But now researchers at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia have announced that the RangerBot has a new mission: it is to be rechristened “LarvalBot” and will be repurposed to spread coral babies.

Scientists have collected hundreds of millions of coral spawn from the surviving corals of the Great Barrier Reef which have not yet succumbed to coral bleaching. These spawn are then reared into baby corals in special floating enclosures, and once they have grown large enough to survive on their own, they are delivered by the LarvalBot to a designated location in the reef. If necessary, many coral larvae can be distributed at once in a “larval cloud” that can blanket an entire damaged area of a reef. This technique is called larval restoration and may be reef’s best hope for the future.

The next large-scale spawning of the coral is planned for late November, and with the help of LarvalBot, the coral larvae should be able to spread up to 100 times faster than they could alone. Two or three robots will carry a combined 1.4 million larvae which they will disperse over an area of 1,500 square meters per hour per robot. This intervention is necessary because of the huge damage inflicted on coral reefs due to climate change, which has lead to massive deaths of reefs around the world and in Australia in particular. Especially concerning is the phenomenon of coral bleaching, where rising sea temperatures cause corals to lose their symbiotic algae and therefore lose their color, killing the corals outright if left unchecked.

The leader of the robotics team at QUT, Professor Matthew Dunbabin from the Institute for Future Environments, is optimistic about the possibilities of the bot technology. “This has the potential to revolutionize coral restoration on reefs worldwide,” he said in a statement shared by the university. “Whilst this is new, we have trialled the different technologies and are confident of its success.”

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Apple aims to make Face ID even better for 2019 iPhones

Apple will further improve the Face ID technology in next year’s iPhones, declared famed Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in an investor note.

The iPhone XR, Apple’s third 2018 model, was just released, but the rumor mill is already churning with information for the 2019 iPhones. Kuo adds to the speculation with the claim that Apple is working on an upgraded Face ID camera system.

The Face ID system of next year’s iPhones will come with a new and more powerful flood illuminator, according to Kuo, as reported by MacRumors. The feature will improve the facial recognition technology by decreasing the impact of invisible light from the user’s surroundings.

Kuo added that the upgraded Face ID sensor will be equipped in all 2019 iPhone models, which will follow this year’s lineup of two OLED iPhones and one LCD iPhone.

The news is actually not a surprising one, given Apple’s history of making marginal improvements on iPhone features over time. What is unexpected, however, is how much we already think we know about the 2019 iPhones, when 2018 has not even ended.

Rumors surrounding next year’s iPhone include the removal of the 3D Touch feature, the integration of three camera lenses, and the possibility of the notch being ditched.

It appears, however, that 5G technology will not arrive for iPhone users next year. A recent report claimed that Apple has chosen Intel to supply the modems for the first 5G iPhone, which will be launched in 2020.

In addition to the improved facial recognition system for next year’s iPhones, Kuo also wrote in his investor note that a Time of Flight 3D camera will be incorporated in iPad models by late 2019 or early 2020. The camera system will be able to figure out the distance between objects by measuring how long it takes for light or lasers from the iPad to reach the subject. This will allow the iPad to capture 3D models, which can then be edited using the Apple Pencil.

The Time of Flight 3D camera is expected to expand to iPhones in the second half of 2020, which will then allow for improved picture quality and new experiences through augmented reality.

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Apple will accept some of your old iPhones, MacBooks, and Macs for repairs

Apple will soon accept some old iPhones, MacBooks, and Mac computers for repairs under a new “Repair Vintage Apple Products Pilot” program, 9to5Mac reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The new program will initially cover the following Apple devices:

• iPhone 5 (GSM/CDMA), released 2012
• 11-inch MacBook Air, released mid-2012
• 13-inch MacBook Air, released mid-2012
• 21.5-inch iMac, released mid-2011, for U.S. and Turkey only
• 27-inch iMac, released mid-2011, for U.S. and Turkey only

If the last two devices look familiar, it is because they are part of a pilot program by Apple in the U.S. that ran from March 31 and August 31. There was speculation that if the program proved popular, it would be expanded to include other products. It looks like that is exactly what is happening here.

Apple will then be adding more to the line-up of devices included in the new program over the year, starting with the following on November 30:

• iPhone 4s, released 2011
• 15-inch MacBook Pro, released mid-2012

Then, on December 30, Apple will add the following devices:

• 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, released late 2012
• 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, released early 2013
• MacBook Pro with Retina display, released mid-2012
• Mac Pro, released mid-2012
• iPhone 5 (GSM), released 2012

The new program focuses on products that Apple has tagged as “vintage,” which are devices that have not been manufactured for more than five years and less than seven years ago. All Apple Store and authorized service providers will start offering repairs for the aforementioned devices once the program is launched.

But just because an Apple device appears on the list, it does not mean that service is guaranteed. Repairs will only be offered depending on the availability of parts, but that is an upgrade from Apple’s previous stance of completely discontinuing repairs once a product is tagged as “vintage.” At the very least, the new program gives old Apple products a chance at being fixed, instead of being disposed of once they encounter issues.

The “Repair Vintage Apple Products Pilot” program comes after reports on Apple’s crackdown on third-party repairs for the iMac Pro and 2018 MacBook Pro. The computers must pass certain Apple Service Toolkit 2 tests for successful repairs, but only Apple’s authorized service providers have access to the software.