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NASA engineers will be holding their breaths Sunday, as a digging robot attempts a precarious landing on Mars’ surface.

NASA’s Phoenix Lander was launched in August and has traveled 122 million miles to Mars. It is a $457 million robotic spacecraft — equipped with a backhoe, cameras and a compact chemistry lab — that will attempt to find out whether the cold, forbidding surface of Mars could once have been warm enough for microbial life to exist on the planet.

Phoenix is scheduled to land Sunday evening at 7:38 p.m. ET. It must first separate from its rocket and then survive a harrowing seven-minute descent at 12,600 mph. It will then slow down to 5 mph to land in one piece on the planet’s unexplored north pole.

Mars has attracted more space missions than the rest of the solar system’s planets, but nearly two-thirds of all Mars missions have failed in some way.

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I’ve read or heard somewhere that the 2/3 value is true but the encompasses more than just the American attempts, whereas the American attempts are more of a 50-50 shot, still not the average you’d have high hopes for but better than 33%.

Honda’s child-sized ASIMO robot will conduct the Detroit Symphony Orchestra when it performs “Impossible Dream” from “Man of La Mancha” during a special performance on May 13.

The concert featuring famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma is part of the DSO’s youth music program.

The bubble-headed ASIMO looks like a child in a white spacesuit. Honda Motor Co. designed it to help people and hopes it someday will assist the elderly and disabled in their homes.

The robot is being used today to encourage and inspire young students to consider studies in math and science.

ASIMO can walk, even jog, wave, avoid obstacles and carry on simple conversations.

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Burlington’s iRobot Corp. said today that its Army contract to develop next-generation portable battlefield robots now totals $63 million.

That total includes $6 million to accelerate delivery of 25 Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle, or SUGV, robots to the Army’s Future Combat Systems program for testing.

To date, iRobot said it has delivered more than 1,400 PackBot robots to military and civilian customers; the PackBot can scout hostile terrain without putting soldiers at risk.

Modeled after the PackBot, the SUGV features a rugged, lightweight body that enables a single soldier to carry and deploy the robot, the company said.

Aside from military robots, iRobot also makes robots that do household chores; the Roomba, for example, will vacuum floors and rugs.
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)

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A new bot can crack defenses erected by Microsoft to keep spammers from creating large numbers of accounts on its Live Hotmail service within seconds, a security researcher said Friday.

Dan Hubbard, vice president of security research at Websense, said the bot broke Live Hotmail’s CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) within six seconds, on average. CAPTCHA is the name given to the distorted, scrambled characters that many Web services require users to decipher and type in to create a new account; the tests are meant to block automated account registration by spammers and malware authors.

The bot, Hubbard acknowledged, is similar to one Websense uncovered in February.

“In the past, though, it was kind of questionable whether the CAPTCHA breaking was automated,” Hubbard said Friday, noting that there had been some evidence that spammers were paying people to decode and type in the CAPTCHA characters. “But the bot’s breaking [CAPTCHA] in six seconds, so it’s definitely automated.”

In a long post to the Websense blog Thursday, Sumeet Prasad — “our CAPTCHA expert,” said Hubbard — provided technical details of how the bot automatically registers Live Hotmail accounts and then immediately begins using those accounts to spew spam.

The bot’s total response time — how long it takes the program to grab a CAPTCHA image, analyze it and return with the correct code — is considerably shorter than that of earlier such bots, said Prasad in the blog.

One in every eight to 10 attempts to create a Live Hotmail account is successful, added Prasad, meaning that the success rate is 10% to 15%.

Officials at one eastern Kentucky hospital say their patients soon won’t have to travel to see a specialist.

That’s because they’re bringing the specialists to them with a robot.

Officials at Saint Joseph Hospital in Martin say the robot is controlled wirelessly from a computer with a joystick.

They say their robot will allow doctors from anywhere in the Saint Joseph System to see patients at the Floyd County hospital.

Hospital officials say doctors have to first get credentials before they can see patients wirelessly from the robot.

All seven Saint Joseph facilities in the state now have a robot doctor.

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Sarah Connor would likely destroy TERRI the robot and all of its creators but the people of Honolulu, Hawaii visiting the Mad About Science Festival absolutely loved the fully integrated interactive robot.

The undisputed star at yesterday’s Mad About Science Festival at the Bishop Museum’s Great Lawn, Watumull Planetarium, and Science Adventure Center was a mobile robot with blinking baby blue eyes, an inquisitive manner, a helium voice, and the gift of gab.

Kids and adults flocked around TERRI the Robot throughout the morning and afternoon. The gabby robot sang songs, charmed onlookers, and challenged anyone to ask him a question he couldn’t answer. If no one had a question, TERRI would supply one himself.

“What’s Luke Skywalker’s favorite car?” he asked Randy Gillin, 10, of Kailua, before answering his own question. “A toy-Yoda.”

With TERRI the phrase “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” does not apply. That’s because there’s no one behind a curtain. Unlike shopping mall robots with voices supplied by some secret, nearby human with a remote microphone, TERRI speaks for himself, or herself if you prefer. Gender seemed to be a question. But TERRI did ask one girl for a date and her phone number, and just about everyone refers the robot as “he.”

TERRI stands for The Educational Resource Robot Initiative, and is a Conceptual Visions Corporation robot sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to promote science education.

The technical description: “A fully integrated interactive robotic device that can be put into a fully automatic mode so that it can interact without any outside intervention or telemetry.”

That’s fancy talk for a robot with a personality and smarts.