On Thursday morning, NASA is scheduled to launch its new Mars rover, Perseverance, on a six-month journey to the Red Planet. The car-sized rover will be boosted into space atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket departing from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It's the third and final Mars mission to depart Earth this summer; earlier in July, China and the United Arab Emirates also launched their first Martian explorers. Perseverance is essentially an alien-hunting self-driving car. It's primary mission is to find possible signs of ancient life hidden in the Martian soil and bottle them up so they can be returned to Earth by another robotic mission later this decade.

Last February, President Trump signed an Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence (AI). It prompted federal agencies and offices to build out their AI capabilities by employing new tools and methods of adoption. This hour long video webinar will will bring together thought leaders from federal civilian agencies -- and their counterparts in the private sector -- to discuss how AI is being used to reduce cybersecurity risks, adopt modern identity strategies, and enable security models based on zero trust. CART Captioner Professional Certifications Our CART services are provided by Home Team Captions. All of our CART captioners hold, at minimum, the CCP (Certified CART Provider) certification, or higher, from NCRA (National Court Reporters Association.) To view the CART feed for this webinar: Register for this webinar, login from the link provided, and click on the CART Tab and click the link to begin using CART.

Deep down, our drive to explore Mars has always been about figuring out the story of life in our solar system. Or is life on Earth descended from Martian progenitors? NASA is now on the verge of launching its most ambitious effort ever to chip away at those questions, in the form of a high-tech rover called Perseverance and a scheme to return some of the samples it finds back home. If all goes well, Perseverance will lift off on July 30, and by February it will join a small fleet of Martian landers and rovers whose close-up study of Mars's surface has, in many ways, led to this moment. Each of the other three rovers NASA has launched in the 21st century have been concerned with investigating the potential for the Red Planet to harbor ancient or current biology.

Five astronauts living in space are preparing to welcome a new shipment of supplies after a successful evening launch from Kazakhstan of an uncrewed Russian Progress cargo vehicle.The mission, dubbed Progress 76, blasted off on a Russian Soyuz rocket today (July 23) from Russia's workhorse launch site, Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan at 7:26 p.m. local time (10:26 a.m. EDT, 1426 GMT). The capsule carried 2.7 tons (2,500 kilograms) of supplies for the two Russian cosmonauts and three NASA astronauts currently working on the International Space Station."The Progress is now in its preliminary orbit, having completed a flawless climb to orbit following an on-time launch," NASA spokesperson Rob Navias said during a live broadcast of the launch. "Everything went by the book in this morning's launch of the Progress to the International Space Station."Related: How Russia's Progress spaceships work (infographic) Image 1 of 9 A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying an uncrewed Progress cargo spacecraft packed with supplies blasted off from Kazakhstan on July 23, 2020.

NASA is set to launch an SUV-sized rover to Mars on Thursday, July 30 with the hopes of answering one question – is there life on the Martian planet? Perseverance will take flight aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 7:50am ET from Cape Canaveral, Florida and is scheduled to arrive on the Red Planet in February 2021. The descend to Mars has been described as'seven minutes of terror,' but if the rover makes a successful landing it will travel to Jerzo Crater - a region scientist speculate was home to a lake 3.5 billion years ago. Here Perseverance will hunt for'biosignatures' of past microbial life and collect rock core samples in slender, metal tools that will be cached on the Martian surface to be retrieved for a return trip to Earth. The prized rover is not making the journey alone, as it will be accompanied by a helicopter named Ingenuity. NASA is comparing this mission'to the Wright brothers moment,' as it will be the first time in history an aerial vehicle has flown on another world.

Nasa is firing a rover towards Mars in a launch that should liftoff this week. The rover, Perseverance, has the job of looking for evidence of ancient life that may have once called the Red Planet home. And it will do so using a suite of technology that makes it the smartest and strongest of the numerous rovers that have been sent by Mars to look across the surface. It also sets a number of other records. The sample return tubes that the space agency hopes will one day be used to bring parts of the Martian surface back to Earth are the cleanest items that have ever gone to space, and it is carrying a helicopter that will make the first ever flight on another world.

The U.S. intelligence community released artificial intelligence principles and an ethics framework on Thursday to ensure that intel organizations are safely and legally developing AI systems as the technology quickly evolves. The long-awaited principles and framework, released in two separate documents by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, are meant to outline the intelligence community's broad values and guidance for the ethical development of AI. The accompanying six-page framework, with 10 stated objectives, is meant to put "meat on the bones" of the stated principles, Ben Huebner, chief of ODNI's Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency, said Thursday on a call with reporters. Huebner said there are a series of questions that practitioners within the 17 intelligence agencies should consider when developing AI. It's a tool, and it's a tool that provides the intelligence community with a consistent approach" to artificial intelligence, Huebner said. The intelligence community is a massive conglomerate of agencies, each tasked with a specific intelligence mission, making it difficult to verify the implementation of these ethics considerations. To ease oversight challenges, a critical piece of the framework calls on AI users in the intel community to adequately document information about the AI technology under development. That would include explanations on the AI's intended use, its design, its limitations, related data sets and changes to its algorithm over time. Asked how ODNI will verify that AI projects at intelligence agencies under its purview are following the framework and principles, Huebner pointed to the documentation guidance that could then be accessible by legal counsels, inspectors general, and privacy and civil liberties officers. By giving us your email, you are opting in to the C4ISRNET Daily Brief. "One of the things I think you see throughout particularly the ethics framework is the incorporation of best practices to allow the folks [in] the oversight community ... the tools they'll need to conduct that oversight," Huebner said. The framework is just the first iteration of ODNI's ethics framework. Huebner told reporters to expect further iterations of the framework as the intel community learns more about the use cases for AI, and as the technology itself matures. Dean Souleles, who runs ODNI's Augmenting Intelligence through Machines Innovation Hub, told reporters that within ODNI's working groups, they are "actively" developing different standards for future use cases. "It is too early to define a long list of dos and don'ts," Souleles said. "We need to understand how this technology works.

NASA's newest Mars rover is called Perseverance, and it has already lived up to the name. Weighing in at just over a ton and loaded with the most sophisticated instruments ever sent to the red planet, the six-wheeled vehicle has already survived a hurdle no previous rover has had to face: a global pandemic. After overcoming months of uncertainty, Perseverance is at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, awaiting the start of the 309-million-mile journey that will take it to an ancient lake bed that may contain evidence of extraterrestrial life. Despite the unprecedented challenges, the $2.4-billion space robot is expected to blast off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station as early as Thursday -- right on schedule. The rover traveled across the country from its birthplace at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge in February.

While most of China was quarantined and Mount Everest was closed to climbers due to COVID-19, a herd of nearly 50 yaks made their way up the snowy north slopes of the world's highest mountain in temperatures that dipped below zero degrees Fahrenheit. On their backs were loads of equipment--metal beams, cables, and solar panels strapped down with cord--that would be used to build 5G antennas on rocky moraines scattered across the mountainside. Chinese tech giant Huawei and state-owned network provider China Mobile teamed up for this project to bring the latest in wireless data to Everest, which previously had very little cell coverage above base camp. Now, data speeds in the "death zone" on Everest, where the altitude is too high and the air is too thin to support life, are faster than in most American neighborhoods. In a press release, Huawei stated that the new super-fast data speeds on Everest will be used for "smart tourism"--with high-definition video streaming and virtual reality experiences for digital tourists to "visit" Everest from anywhere in the world.

Aquicore, an information tech startup offering cloud-based software for asset operations, today secured $14 million in financing. The company says it'll use the funding to advance its platform and expand into European markets. The buildings sector accounts for about 76% of electricity use and 40% of all U.S. primary energy usage and associated CO2 emissions, but the bulk of commercial real estate management teams monitor their energy and facilities with antiquated operations and maintenance routines, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. This makes it difficult to know how buildings are performing and where to invest resources, as well as how to coordinate project execution across portfolios. Aquicore claims to solve this with a combination of AI, machine learning, and rules-based automation.