Los Alamos Press Highlights

SuperCam instrument integrated on NASA's Mars 2020 rover

SuperCam mast unit undergoes testing at Los Alamos. LANL photo.

The French/American SuperCam instrument was delivered in early June to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and has been integrated this week on NASA's Mars 2020 rover.

Developed jointly by Los Alamos National Laboratory and the French space agency, CNES, University laboratories in France, the instrument is ambitious. It combines different techniques at remote distances: Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) for elemental composition, infrared (IR) and Raman spectroscopy, color imaging, and even sound recording through a microphone. NASA called it a "Swiss army knife" of instruments because of its versatility. (Full Story)

A storage model for the exascale crowd

Gary Grider and the Trinity Supercomputer, LANL image.

One bit of news that almost got lost in the shuffle at the recent ISC 2019 conference was Intel’s announcement that it is bringing DAOS, the Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage platform, to supercomputing.

Gary Grider, head of high performance computing at Los Alamos National Lab, told us DAOS would enable the abstraction of data structures that “happen to live in persistent storage as opposed to memory.” The technology that would make this all possible was burst buffers and solid state storage, more generally, which enables indexed data to be retrieved a lot more rapidly than what’s possible with spinning disks. (Full Story)

New NM law expands labs’ business assistance program

A new state law doubles the cap on the value of services Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories can offer companies seeking help in fields ranging from engineering to material sciences from $10,000 to $20,000 for businesses in urban counties and from $20,000 to $40,000 for businesses in rural counties

In 2000, the Laboratory Partnership with Small Business Tax Credit Act, which designated tax credits to allow Sandia — and later Los Alamos — to partner with New Mexico-based small businesses to solve a wide range of technical challenges. (Full Story)

Rocket Lab Electron launch set for Spaceflight Inc. Rideshare Mission

Prometheus cubesats, LANL image.

Rocket Lab is preparing for its third Electron rocket launch of the year. The seventh flight of Electron, named “Make It Rain,” will carry seven satellites for Spaceflight Inc.

On board are two Prometheus cubesats, developed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory for the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) as technology demonstration satellites. A student built technology demonstration satellite from the Melbourne Space Program named ACRUX-1 is also aboard Electron, as are two SpaceBEE communications satellites for Swarm Technologies. (Full Story)

Computer vision companies and startups to watch

Descartes Labs has an irresistible origin story: After branching off from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the company in 2015 used cloud computing and computer vision to mine satellite images and weather data, then map out an estimate of America's upcoming corn yield. The model proved even more accurate than the Agriculture Department’s own forecast, moving the market three percent. The company has since continued to build out a massive “data refinery” through which users can apply machine learning to produce their own models. (Full Story)

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