Careful scrutiny of the debris from the impact of NASA's DART mission into Dimorphos has not found any evidence for water-ice on the asteroid, nor the residue of thruster fuel from the spacecraft, new results from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) show. Space.com reports: However, the data from the MUSE (Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile does indicate differences in the size of particles in the debris, and show how the polarization of the light from the asteroid changed. These could both reveal details about the nature of the ejecta excavated by the impact, the recoil from which gave Dimorphos the biggest push. [...] "Before the impact, we were not really sure what to expect," said Cyrielle Opitom of the University of Edinburgh in an interview with Space.com.

Opitom led a team who used MUSE to go in search of any water on Dimorphos. They observed the Didymos-Dimorphos system on 11 occasions, from just before the impact to about a month afterwards. MUSE is able to split the light from the double-asteroid into a spectrum, or rainbow, of colors, to look for emission at specific wavelengths that corresponds to specific molecules. In particular, Opitom's team searched the ejecta for water molecules and for oxygen that could have come from the break-up of water molecules by the impact. However, no evidence of water was detected. Dimorphos, at least, seems to be a dry asteroid.

There was also no evidence in the ejecta of traces of the hydrazine fuel that was on board DART, nor the xenon from its ion engine, although given their small quantities the non-detection is not a surprise. However, MUSE's observations were able to track the evolution of the cloud of ejecta (debris) thrown up by the impact, and in particular they helped determine the size distribution of the dust particles initially in the ejecta cloud and later in the tail streaming away from the asteroid. The research was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

On March 27th, Nintendo's eShop for its 3DS and Wii U consoles will be shut down. With many of the titles being original to those consoles and not available anywhere else, it's left archivists and historians scrambling to preserve them before it's too late. However, those preservation plans get complicated given Nintendo's litigious nature on matters of intellectual property. Techdirt's Timothy Geigner writes: Preventing the gaming public from continuing to buy games that rely on a company-operated backend infrastructure is one thing. After all, Nintendo can do what it wants when it comes to putting its products into commerce. But what really annoyed a ton of people, myself included, was how this would impact archivists and historians, or anyone else interested in preserving video game history and culture. With the impending shutdown, some of those entities are once again expressing concern: "While it's unfortunate that people won't be able to purchase digital 3DS or Wii U games anymore, we understand the business reality that went into this decision,' the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) tweeted when the eShop shutdowns were announced a year ago. 'What we don't understand is what path Nintendo expects its fans to take, should they wish to play these games in the future.'"

Because Nintendo is litigious, utilizes DRM, and the DMCA exists, all of that combines to make it wildly unsafe for museums and archivists to actually retain copies of these games that will shortly no longer be found anywhere else. And, no, the exemptions built into the DMCA for content such as movies and literature simply don't exist for the video game space. [...] So what can be done? Not a whole lot, honestly, but some hobbyists are at least going to make a go of it: "In an effort to address this -- or at least address it in a single place on as few consoles as possible -- YouTuber The Completionist decided to sit down and spend almost a year of his life (328 days in total) buying his way through both libraries. He's now done, and the statistics are staggering. The dude bought 866 Wii U games and 1547 3DS titles, numbers that include DSiWare, Virtual Console releases and downloadable content. That adds up to 1.2TB of data for the Wii U, and 267GB for the 3DS. Or, for the 3DS purists reading, 2,136,689 blocks."

As part of this effort, The Completionist has said he plans to donate all of this digital media to the VGHF. What they can do with all of that content still remains to be seen. All of the same copyright and DMCA rules still apply, so what access it can grant to researchers, never mind the public, is in question.

Researchers have analyzed samples of the asteroid Ryugu collected by the Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft and found uracil, one of the informational units that make up RNA, the molecules that contain the instructions for how to build and operate living organisms. Nicotinic acid, also known as Vitamin B3 or niacin, which is an important cofactor for metabolism in living organisms, was also detected in the same samples. Phys.Org reports: This discovery by an international team, led by Associate Professor Yasuhiro Oba at Hokkaido University, adds to the evidence that important building blocks for life are created in space and could have been delivered to Earth by meteorites. The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications. The researchers extracted these molecules by soaking the Ryugu particles in hot water, followed by analyses using liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry. This revealed the presence of uracil and nicotinic acid, as well as other nitrogen-containing organic compounds. "We found uracil in the samples in small amounts, in the range of 6-32 parts per billion (ppb), while vitamin B3 was more abundant, in the range of 49-99 ppb," Oba elaborated. "Other biological molecules were found in the sample as well, including a selection of amino acids, amines and carboxylic acids, which are found in proteins and metabolism, respectively." The compounds detected are similar but not identical to those previously discovered in carbon-rich meteorites.

The team hypothesizes that the difference in concentrations in the two samples, collected from different locations on Ryugu, is likely due to the exposure to the extreme environments of space. They also hypothesized that the nitrogen-containing compounds were, at least in part, formed from the simpler molecules such as ammonia, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. While these were not detected in the Ryugu samples, they are known to be present in cometary ice -- and Ryugu could have originated as a comet or another parent body that had been present in low temperature environments.

After five years attempting to make Intel into a competitor for Nvidia and AMD in the realm of discrete graphics for gamers and beyond -- with limited success -- Raja Koduri is leaving Intel to form his own generative AI startup. The Verge reports: Intel hired him away from AMD in 2017, where he was similarly in charge of the entire graphics division, and it was an exciting get at the time! Not only had Intel poached a chief architect who'd just gone on sabbatical but Intel also revealed that it did so because it wanted to build discrete graphics cards for the first time in (what would turn out to be) 20 years. Koduri had previously been poached for similarly exciting projects, too -- Apple hired him away from AMD ahead of an impressive string of graphics improvements, and then AMD brought him back again in 2013.

Intel has yet to bring real competition to the discrete graphics card space as of Koduri's departure. [...] But the company has a long GPU roadmap, so it's possible things get better and more competitive in subsequent gens. It took a lot longer than five years for Nvidia and AMD to make it that far. By the time Koduri left, he wasn't just in charge of graphics but also Intel's "accelerated computing" initiatives, including things like a crypto chip.

schwit1 writes:

Crippled by war and sanctions, Russia now faces evidence that its already-struggling space program is falling apart. In the past three months alone, Roscosmos has scrambled to resolve two alarming incidents. First, one of its formerly dependable Soyuz spacecraft sprang a coolant leak. Then the same thing happened on one of its Progress cargo ships. The civil space program's Soviet predecessor launched the first person into orbit, but with the International Space Station (ISS) nearing the end of its life, Russia's space agency is staring into the abyss.

"What we're seeing is the continuing demise of the Russian civil space program," says Bruce McClintock, a former defense attache at the US embassy in Moscow and current head of the Space Enterprise Initiative of the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. Around 10 years ago, Russian leaders chose to prioritize the country's military space program -- which focuses on satellite and anti-satellite technologies -- over its civilian one, McClintock says, and it shows.

Russia's space fleet is largely designed to be expendable. The history of its series of Soyuz rockets and crew capsules (they both have the same name) dates back to the Soviet era, though they've gone through upgrades since. Its Progress cargo vessels also launch atop Soyuz rockets. The cargo ships, crewed ships, and rockets are all single-use spacecraft. Anatoly Zak, creator and publisher of the independent publication RussianSpaceWeb, estimates that Roscosmos launches about two Soyuz vehicles per year, takes about 1.5 to 2 years to build each one, and doesn't keep a substantial standing fleet.

While Roscosmos officials did not respond to interview requests, the agency has been public about its recent technical issues.

Plus this, which failed to make headlines here: "For crewed launches, Russia has long depended on its Baikonur spaceport in neighboring Kazakhstan. But the nation has charged costly annual fees, and in March Kazakhstan seized Russian spaceport assets, reportedly due to Roscosmos' debt."

Oracle today announced the availability of Java 20, the latest version of the popular programming language and development platform. From a report: The latest version of the 27-year-old language includes thousands of performance, stability and security improvements and features seven enhancement proposals to the Java Development Kit that are aimed at increasing developer productivity and enhancing performance, stability and security. Oracle has coordinated a disciplined rollout of new Java releases on a six-month cadence for the past five years and says it's the top contributor to the open-source project. Java is the world's third most widely used programming language, according to Tiobe Software BV, and is No. 1 in organizational development, according to Oracle. "The innovation pipeline has never been richer," said Chad Arimura, vice president of developer relations at Oracle. "The problem space is changing and developers have higher demands on their programming languages than ever."

An anonymous reader writes: Last week, we learned that Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 graphics chips so that partner OpenAI could train the large language models (LLMs) behind Bing's AI chatbot and ChatGPT.

Don't have access to all that capital or space for all that hardware for your own LLM project? Nvidia's DGX Cloud is an attempt to sell remote web access to the very same thing. Announced today at the company's 2023 GPU Technology Conference, the service rents virtual versions of its DGX Server boxes, each containing eight Nvidia H100 or A100 GPUs and 640GB of memory. The service includes interconnects that scale up to the neighborhood of 32,000 GPUs, storage, software, and "direct access to Nvidia AI experts who optimize your code," starting at $36,999 a month for the A100 tier.

Meanwhile, a physical DGX Server box can cost upwards of $200,000 for the same hardware if you're buying it outright, and that doesn't count the efforts companies like Microsoft say they made to build working data centers around the technology.

Longtime Slashdot reader drwho writes: A new type of propulsion system which uses no propellant, but rather only electricity, will be tested in a satellite to be launched from June 10's Falcon 9 launch. The IVO Quantum Drive utilizes an alternative theory of inertia known as "Quantum Inertia' by its originator Prof. Mike McCullough of U. Plymouth, which seeks to reconcile General Relativity (GR) with Quantum Field Theory (QFT). If successful, this would herald in a new era not only in satellite technology but in space travel as a whole. See this article for more details.

"Mysterious streaks of light were seen in the sky in the Sacramento area Friday night," reports the Associated Press.

The lights lasted about 40 seconds, remembered one witness who filmed the lights while enjoying a local brewery. The brewery then asked on Instagram if anyone could solve the mystery, the report continues: Jonathan McDowell says he can. McDowell is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press that he's 99.9% confident the streaks of light were from burning space debris.

McDowell said that a Japanese communications package that relayed information from the International Space Station to a communications satellite and then back to Earth became obsolete in 2017 when the satellite was retired. The equipment, weighing 310 kilograms (683 pounds), was jettisoned from the space station in 2020 because it was taking up valuable space and would burn up completely upon reentry, McDowell added....

He estimated the debris was about 40 miles high, going thousands of miles per hour. The U.S. Space Force confirmed the re-entry path over California for the Inter-Orbit Communication System, and the timing is consistent with what people saw in the sky, he added.

With all the space junk cluttering our orbits, Popular Science writes, "Lowering costs while also shortening satellite lifespans is important if space exploration and utilization is to remain safe and viable.

"As luck would have it, a group of students and researchers at Brown University just made promising headway for both issues." Last year, the team successfully launched their breadloaf-sized cube satellite (or cubesat) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for the comparatively low production cost of $10,000, with a dramatically shortened lifespan estimated at just five years. What's more, much of the microsat was constructed using accessible, off-the-shelf components, such as a popular $20 microprocessor powered by 48 AA batteries. In total, SBUDNIC — a play on Sputnik as well as an acronym of the students' names — is likely the first of its kind to be made almost entirely from materials not specifically designed for space travel.

Additionally, the group attached a 3D-printed drag sail made from Kapton film that unfurled once the cubesat reached orbit roughly 520 kilometers above Earth. Since tracking began in late May 2022, the students' satellite has already lowered down to 470 kilometers — well below its fellow rocketmates aboard the Falcon 9, which remain around 500 kilometers high.

Long-time Slashdot reader turp182 shares two stories about the new state-of-the-art in very-high-speed imaging. "The techniques don't image captured photons, but instead 'touch' the target to perform imaging/read structures using either lasers or neutrons."

First, Science Daily reports that physicists from the University of Gothenburg (with colleagues from the U.S. and Germany) have developed an ultrafast laser camera that can create videos at 12.5 billion images per second, "which is at least a thousand times faster than today's best laser equipment." [R]esearchers use a laser camera that photographs the material in [an ultrathin, one-atom-thick] two-dimensional layer.... By observing the sample from the side, it is possible to see what reactions and emissions occur over time and space. Researchers have used single-shot laser sheet compressed ultrafast photography to study the combustion of various hydrocarbons.... This has enabled researchers to illustrate combustion with a time resolution that has never been achieved before. "The more pictures taken, the more precisely we can follow the course of events...." says Yogeshwar Nath Mishra, who was one of the researchers at the University of Gothenburg and who is now presenting the results in a scientific article in the journal Light: Science & Applications.... The new laser camera takes a unique picture with a single laser pulse.
Meanwhile, ScienceAlert reports on a camera with a trillionth-of-a-second shutter speed — that is, 250 million times faster than digital cameras — that's actually able to photograph atomic activity, including "dynamic disorder." Simply put, dynamic disorder is when clusters of atoms move and dance around in a material in specific ways over a certain period — triggered by a vibration or a temperature change, for example. It's not a phenomenon that we fully understand yet, but it's crucial to the properties and reactions of materials. The new super-speedy shutter speed system gives us much more insight into what's happening....

The researchers are referring to their invention as variable shutter atomic pair distribution function, or vsPDF for short.... To achieve its astonishingly quick snap, vsPDF uses neutrons to measure the position of atoms, rather than conventional photography techniques. The way that neutrons hit and pass through a material can be tracked to measure the surrounding atoms, with changes in energy levels the equivalent of shutter speed adjustments.

Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid quotes an intriguing new article from the Economist: Imagine a habitable colony on Mars or the Moon and the kinds of structures that come to mind are probably gleaming domes or shiny metallic tubes snaking over the surface. But with no Earth-like atmosphere or magnetic field to repel solar radiation and micrometeorites, space colonists would probably need to pile metres-thick rocks and geological rubble onto the roofs of such off-world settlements. More like a hobbit hole than Moonbase Alpha.

There could be another solution, however, that would offer future colonists safer and far more expansive living space than any cramped base built on the surface. Writing in Acta Astronautica, Raymond Martin, an engineer at Blue Origin, a rocket company, and Haym Benaroya, an aerospace engineer at Rutgers University, explore the benefits of setting up a Moon base inside giant geological tunnels that lie just below the lunar surface.

First discovered during the Apollo programme, these lunar lava tubes are a legacy of when Earth's nearest celestial neighbour was geologically hyperactive, with streams of boiling basaltic magma bursting from the interior to flow across the Moon's surface as lava. Found on Earth (see picture), and identified on Mars, lava tubes form when the sluggish top layer of a lava stream slows and cools, forming a thick and rocky lid that is left behind when the rest of the lava underneath eventually drains away.

Lava tubes on Earth are usually up to 15 metres wide and can run for several kilometres. But the reduced gravity on the Moon makes them hundreds of times bigger, creating colossal cave systems that are up to a kilometre across and hundreds of kilometres long.

The closing keynote at the SCaLE 20x conference was delivered by 80-year-old Ken Thompson (co-creator of Unix, Plan9, UTF8, and the Go programming language).

Slashdot reader motang shared Thompson's answer to a question at the end about what operating system he uses today: I have, for most of my life — because I was sort of born into it — run Apple.

Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious. But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's okay.

And I have come, within the last month or two, to say, even though I've invested, you know, a zillion years in Apple — I'm throwing it away. And I'm going to Linux. To Raspbian in particular.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports new spectroscopic analyses of the surfaces of 42 asteroids. The main result for space enthusiasts is that there is not one "M" class asteroid (metal-rich) surface in the collection.

The imagery that (many) people grow up with from Hollywood and TV "science" "documentaries" is that the Solar system is full of asteroids which are made of metal ready for mining to produce solid ingots of precious metals. That's Hollywood, not reality. This result is about what you'd expect from the proportion of metallic asteroids — otherwise estimated at about 0.5% of the population.

The asteroid mining fraternity dream of taking apart an M-type asteroid like Psyche, which is fair enough as a dream. Even as a dream for "asteroid mining" metal market speculators. But they are relatively rare asteroids. A realistic "ISRU" (In-Situ Resource Utilisation) plan is going to have to expect to digest around 200 silicate mineral (and clay ("phyllosilicate"), and ice) asteroids for every metallic one they digest.
Here's the home page for the project.

The UK Space Agency said Friday it would back research by Rolls-Royce looking at the use of nuclear power on the moon. CNBC reports: In a statement, the government agency said researchers from Rolls-Royce had been working on a Micro-Reactor program "to develop technology that will provide power needed for humans to live and work on the Moon." The UKSA will now provide [around $3.52 million] of funding for the project, which it said would "deliver an initial demonstration of a UK lunar modular nuclear reactor."

Rolls-Royce is set to work with a range of organizations on the project, including the University of Sheffield's Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and Nuclear AMRC, and the University of Oxford. "Developing space nuclear power offers a unique chance to support innovative technologies and grow our nuclear, science and space engineering skills base," Paul Bate, chief executive of the UK Space Agency, said. Bate added that Rolls-Royce's research "could lay the groundwork for powering continuous human presence on the Moon, while enhancing the wider UK space sector, creating jobs and generating further investment." According to the UKSA, Rolls-Royce [...] is aiming "to have a reactor ready to send to the Moon by 2029."

The FCC has officially proposed, and voted unanimously to move forward with, a framework under which satellites can communicate directly with smartphones in a structured and useful way. From a report: The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, circulated earlier this month and formally voted on today, is essentially a complete first public draft of what the FCC hopes to accomplish by establishing rules and guidelines around this emerging area of communication. Apple already made the news with a dramatic rescue made possible by its new emergency satellite feature, and companies like Lynk and AST SpaceMobile are working on providing universally accessible two-way data anywhere in the world.

Qualcomm and Iridium are integrating the capability at the chipset level. T-Mobile and SpaceX have said they plan to test their own Starlink-based system this year, and plenty of others are looking to enter the fray. There's still the matter of how this space-based connectivity would integrate with existing systems. Our mobile networks run on very carefully defined frequencies so that phones and towers don't interfere with one another, including satellites, which have totally different frequencies and signal powers.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Choked by a smog of sulfuric acid and scorched by temperatures hot enough to melt lead, the surface of Venus is sure to be lifeless. For decades, researchers also thought the planet itself was dead, capped by a thick, stagnant lid of crust and unaltered by active rifts or volcanoes. But hints of volcanism have mounted recently, and now comes the best one yet: direct evidence for an eruption. Geologically, at least, Venus is alive.

The discovery comes from NASA's Magellan spacecraft, which orbited Venus some 30 years ago and used radar to peer through the thick clouds. Images made 8 months apart show a volcano's circular mouth, or caldera, growing dramatically in a sudden collapse. On Earth, such collapses occur when magma that had supported the caldera vents or drains away, as happened during a 2018 eruption at Hawaii's Kilauea volcano. Witnessing this unrest during the short observation period suggests either Magellan was spectacularly lucky, or, like Earth, Venus has many volcanoes spouting off regularly, says Robert Herrick, a planetary scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Herrick, who led the study, says, "We can rule out that it's a dying planet."

The discovery, published today in Science and presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, makes Venus only the third planetary body in the Solar System with active magma volcanoes, joining Earth and Io, Jupiter's fiery moon. It means future missions to Venus will be able to study "bare, gorgeous new rock" that provides a sample of the planet's interior, Gilmore says. The discovery of more volcanoes, in old or future data, will also help scientists understand how Venus is shedding its interior heat and evolving. And it will shake scientists out of their long-standing view that a spasm of activity a half-billion years ago repaved the planet's surface -- as evidenced by a relative paucity of impact craters -- and was followed by a long period of quiet.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Have you ever found yourself in a self-imposed jam and thought, "Well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions"? It's a common refrain that exposes a deeper truth about the way we humans understand time and causality. Our actions in the past are correlated to our experience of the future, whether that's a good outcome, like acing a test because you prepared, or a bad one, like waking up with a killer hangover. But what if this forward causality could somehow be reversed in time, allowing actions in the future to influence outcomes in the past? This mind-bending idea, known as retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance, but it is starting to gain real traction among physicists and philosophers, among other researchers, as a possible solution to some of the most intractable riddles underlying our reality.

In other words, people are becoming increasingly "retro-curious," said Kenneth Wharton, a professor of physics at San Jose State University who has published research about retrocausality, in a call with Motherboard. Even though it may feel verboten to consider a future that affects the past, Wharton and others think it could account for some of the strange phenomena observed in quantum physics, which exists on the tiny scale of atoms.

"We have instincts about all sorts of things, and some are stronger than others," said Wharton, who recently co-authored an article about retrocausality with Huw Price, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Bonn and an emeritus fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. "I've found our instincts of time and causation are our deepest, strongest instincts that physicists and philosophers -- and humans -- are loath to give up," he added. Scientists, including Price, have speculated about the possibility that the future might influence the past for decades, but the renewed curiosity about retrocausality is driven by more recent findings about quantum mechanics. [...] While there are a range of views about the mechanics and consequences of retrocausal theories, a growing community of researchers think this concept has the potential to answer fundamental questions about the universe. "The problem facing physics right now is that our two pillars of successful theories don't talk to each other," Wharton explained. "One is based in space and time, and one has left space and time aside for this giant quantum wave function."

"The solution to this, as everyone seems to have agreed without discussing it, is that we've got to quantize gravity," he continued. "That's the goal. Hardly anyone has said, 'what if things really are in space and time, and we just have to make sense of quantum theory in space and time'? That will be a whole new way to unify everything that people are not looking into."

Price agreed that this retrocausality could provide a new means to finally "eliminate the tension" between quantum mechanics and classical physics (including special relativity). "Another possible big payoff is that retrocausality supports the so-called 'epistemic' view of the wave function in the usual quantum mechanics description -- the idea that it is just an encoding of our incomplete knowledge of the system," he continued. "That makes it much easier to understand the so-called collapse of the wave function, as a change in information, as folk such as Einstein and Schoedinger thought, in the early days. In this respect, I think it gets rid of some more of the (apparently) non-classical features of quantum mechanics, by saying that they don't amount to anything physically real."

Virgin Orbit is furloughing nearly all its employees and pausing operations for a week as it looks for a funding lifeline, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. From the report: Company executives briefed staff on the situation in an all-hands meeting at 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, according to people who were in the meeting. The furlough is unpaid, though employees can cash in PTO, with only a small team continuing to work. Virgin Orbit is also moving up payroll by a week to Friday. In the all-hands, company leaders told employees that they aimed to provide an update on the furlough and funding situation by next Wednesday or Thursday, according to the people, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss internal matters.

The rocket-building company developed a system that uses a modified 747 jet to send satellites into space by dropping a rocket from under the aircraft's wing mid-flight. But the company's last mission suffered a mid-flight failure, with an issue during the launch causing the rocket to not reach orbit and crash into the ocean. "Our investigation is nearly complete and our next production rocket with the needed modification incorporated is in final stages of integration and test," Virgin Orbit's spokesperson said.

Logistics startup Zipline unveiled its next-generation delivery drone, dubbed the Platform 2 or P2 Zip. According to CNBC, the new drone is "capable of carrying up to eight pounds worth of cargo within a ten-mile radius, and can land a package on a space as small as a table or doorstep." That number is important because the vast majority of packages shipped in the U.S. "weigh five pounds or less," says Zipline CEO and co-founder Keller Rinaudo Cliffton. From the report: The P2 Zip can travel ten miles in ten minutes, and the company can make a delivery approximately seven times faster than any typical service you may order from today, the CEO said. Rapid deliveries by drone may put an end to "porch pirates," Rinaudo Cliffton said, referring to the theft of packages left on a doorstep while the customer is away from home. While Zipline's original drone, the P1 Zip, features a fixed wing or glider-like design, the P2 employs both lift and cruise propellers and a fixed wing. These help it maneuver precisely and quietly, even in rainy or windy weather.

To deliver cargo to a customer's door, the P2 Zip hovers around 300 feet above ground level and dispatches a kind of mini-aircraft and container called the "droid." The droid descends on a long thin tether, and maneuvers quietly into place with fan-like thrusters before setting down for package retrieval. Zipline's original P1 drones will remain in production and in wide use, says Rinaudo Cliffton. The P1 Zip can fly a longer distance, delivering up to five pounds of cargo within a 60-mile radius, but it requires a larger space for take off, landings and "the drop."

The P1 Zip lets cargo down with a parachute attached, so its payload lands within a space about the size of two car parking spots. After a P1 Zip returns to base, an employee needs to disassemble it, then set up a new one, dropping in a freshly charged battery for the next flight. Zipline's new P2 Zip can dock and power up autonomously at a charging station that looks something like a street lamp with an arm and a large disc attached to that arm. Zipline docks can be installed in a single parking spot or alongside a building depending on zoning and permits.