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Another Mars robot is settling in for a long, long sleep.

With dust caking its solar panels, InSight has been losing the ability to recharge for months — in the spring, it was operating at just one-tenth of its landing power. Now, the thick layers of dust might have doomed InSight for good. NASA announced on December 19 that its InSight lander had not responded to communications from Earth, and “it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations.”

InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport, landed on Mars on November 26, 2018. Its mission was to study the interior structure and composition of Mars over a period of 709 Martian sols, or 728 Earth days, primarily through seismographic recordings. Like many of NASA’s other Mars robots, the lander has far exceeded the planned mission duration — as of December 20, 1,445 sols (local Martian days) have elapsed.

InSight’s demise by dust was not unexpected. Because of space and weight considerations, the lander was not equipped with dust-removing instruments, relying upon the capricious Martian wind to clean its solar panels.

In an April 22 press release announcing the extension of eight planetary science missions, including InSight, NASA wrote of the Mars lander: “The extended mission will continue InSight’s seismic and weather monitoring if the spacecraft remains healthy. However, due to dust accumulation on its solar panels, InSight’s electrical power production is low, and the mission is unlikely to continue operations for the duration of its current extended mission unless its solar panels are cleared by a passing ‘dust devil’ in Mars’ atmosphere.”

Less than a month after extending InSight’s mission, NASA announced the anticipated timeline of the lander’s slowdown and eventual end of mission: December of 2022, a very accurate prediction. “InSight has transformed our understanding of the interiors of rocky planets and set the stage for future missions,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division said in the press release. “We can apply what we’ve learned about Mars’ inner structure to Earth, the Moon, Venus, and even rocky planets in other solar systems.”

Because power levels were so low this summer, the InSight team turned off all science instruments except for its seismometer, which collected data through at least Oct. 22.

NASA intends to attempt to contact InSight again, but if the lander misses two consecutive communications, the team will officially declare the end of mission. “After that, NASA’s Deep Space Network will listen for a time, just in case,” wrote NASA in a November 1 statement.

Before we say our last goodbyes to the lander — you can even send a virtual postcard to InSight and its team to celebrate their success — we’re taking a look back at the mission’s highlights.

Cubesats

When InSight launched atop an Atlas V rocket on May 5, 2018, there were two other robots onboard: CubeSats nicknamed “WALL-E” and “EVE.” Part of the Mars Cube One (MarCO) mission, these briefcase-sized satellites demonstrated the ability of CubeSats to survive deep space. They successfully relayed data from InSight as it landed on Mars back to Earth, then ceased contact shortly after.

The sound of Mars

Shortly after landing, InSight collected what its researchers called an “unplanned treat”: using the lander as a giant microphone to listen to the sound of the Martian surface. It’s very quiet (as expected in a thin atmosphere) and mostly just wind (also as expected) but it was thrilling just to hear the surface of another world. Since then we’ve also heard recordings made by the Perseverance rover of the Ingenuity helicopter. You can listen to the InSight-captured wind below:

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/mars-sound-from-insight-1.mp3

Marsquakes

On April 6, 2019, InSight took the first-ever recording of a marsquake — the Mars version of an earthquake — using its Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument. Since then, it’s measured more than 1,300 marsquakes, including a magnitude 5 temblor on May 4, 2022, which is the largest ever recorded. In studying the marsquake, researchers have established the composition of Mars’ interior to include 12 to 23 miles (20 to 37 kilometers) of crust, a 969-mile (1,560-kilometer) thick mantle, and a molten core with a radius of 1,137 miles (1,830 kilometers). Useful if we ever plan on doing any mining operations there.

Magnetic “ghosts”

InSight carried the first magnetometer to Mars, using it to study rocks both at the surface and several miles beneath it. In them, it discovered traces of the planet’s former magnetic field, which no longer exists. Those rocks demonstrated powerful magnetism some 10 times stronger than scientists expected based on previous satellite data.

Martian weather

Insight also served as a little Martian weather station, recording all kinds of atmospheric phenomena. It took the first audio recording of Martian wind on December 1, 2018, and it recorded numerous pressure drops from passing “dust devils,” or whirlwinds. The public could even read InSight’s daily weather reports, which were published online until October 25, 2020.

Fighting till the end

Even though InSight was operating at extremely low power levels due to the dust accumulations on its solar panels, the lander continued to monitor Mars’ seismic activity throughout the summer and into the fall. The SEIS instrument was the last operational instrument on the lander, collecting data through at least October 22. From that date, InSight still had enough power to continue communications with Earth, but now, it has gone silent.

“The lander’s power has been declining for months, as expected, and it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations,” wrote NASA in an update.

On December 19, a NASA Twitter account for the lander posted what might be the robot’s last photograph with the following message: “My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send. Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will – but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me.”

After two or three decades of collecting more and more dust, perhaps InSight will once again meet humans, as astronauts land on Mars.

NASA’s InSight mission is winding down — look back at the Mars lander’s many accomplishments by Stefanie Waldek originally published on TechCrunch

We’re going to have to wait a little longer for Rocket Lab’s American debut. The company, which is headquartered in Los Angeles, was due to launch a trio of satellites for radio-frequency analytics customer HawkEye 360 to orbit from the company’s new site at Virginia Space’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport. It would’ve marked the first time a Rocket Lab vehicle has taken off from U.S. soil. But the company said late yesterday that strong upper-levels winds made today — the final day in the launch window — a no-go, pushing the launch to January.

It’s certainly a bummer. The mission was due to have a handful of firsts: Not only marking the first time Electron takes off from U.S. soil, but also the first time a rocket flies with novel flight safety software that Rocket Lab and NASA say is a gamechanger for American launch plans. That software, an autonomous flight termination system, will reduce range costs and prime Rocket Lab to serve the launch needs of the U.S. defense agencies.

“This flight just doesn’t symbolize another launch pad for Rocket Lab,” CEO Peter Beck told reporters in a media briefing last Wednesday. “It’s a standing up of a new capability for the nation.”

That capability is called the NASA Autonomous Flight Termination Unit (NAFTU), a key component of the Pegasus software, which was jointly developed by Rocket Lab and the space agency. Autonomous flight termination capabilities will be required on all Department of Defense launches by 2025.

It took a number of years — and more than a few delays — to get NAFTU certified, David Pierce, director of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, told reporters. He said that NASA discovered “a number of errors in the software code” in 2020, but even after they were fixed, the unit had to undergo a lengthy independent testing and certification process. These delays prevented Rocket Lab from conducting launches from the new launch complex, LC-2, until now.

“I can’t stress enough how significant this moment is in time for launch ranges and the launch industry,” Pierce said. He estimated the unit could reduce launch range cost by as much as 30% and help providers boost launch cadence.

Once the rocket returns to the pad in January, it will carry three HawkEye 360 satellites to orbit, where they will eventually fly in formation and collect radio-frequency data; HawkEye downlinks the data and analyzes it for customers. This is the first of three launches the company has purchased from Rocket Lab, and it will bring the total number of HawkEye satellites in orbit to 18.

Rocket Lab will not attempt a booster recovery for this mission, Beck said. The company has developed a technique to catch a booster returning to Earth using parachutes and a helicopter, which snatches the drifting parachute in mid-air. Beck said there was no fundamental reason why the company wouldn’t attempt a booster recovery at the Virginia launch site, but he added, “We need to get it right, and using our own range in New Zealand to do that is by far the most efficient way to do that.”

Rocket Lab isn’t just using Virginia as a launch site. The company is also pouring significant capital into the development of the heavier-lift Neutron rocket, including a launch site and manufacturing and refurbishing facility. The company’s investment in Wallops is a departure from other launch companies, like SpaceX, Relativity and Blue Origin, which have all set up shop at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida.

Beck said it was “the quietness of the range and the ability of the range to increase capacity” that drew Rocket Lab to Wallops over the sites in Florida.

“KSC is an amazing range but I think everybody has to agree, it’s pretty busy,” he said. “The [Wallops] range is not nearly as busy and there’s a lot of room to grow.”

Wallops is working with the FAA to accommodate an increased launch cadence from the mid-Atlantic region, Pierce said. For Rocket Lab’s part, Beck added that the company has the flexibility to switch between the two launch sites — LC-2 and LC-1 in Mahia Island, New Zealand, which is a fully private launch facility — to meet customer needs.

Rocket Lab’s first mission from Virginia delayed until 2023 by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

When Broadcom announced it was spending an eye-popping $61 billion for VMware in May, it seemed only a matter of time before the deal caught the attention of regulators, especially in Europe and the U.K.

And sure enough this week, the EU announced that it was officially investigating the deal. In an official statement, EU’s executive VP in charge of competition policy, Margrethe Vestager worried that the deal would have an adverse impact on competition:

“Broadcom, a major supplier of hardware components, is acquiring VMware, a key server virtualization software provider. Our initial investigation has shown that it is essential for hardware components in servers to interoperate with VMware’s software. We are concerned that after the merger, Broadcom could prevent its hardware rivals to interoperate with VMware’s server virtualization software. This would lead to higher prices, lower quality and less innovation for customers and consumers,” Vestager said in an official statement kicking off the the deal.

It’s an interesting concern. Broadcom is a chip company, but it’s also spending a lot of money to get the company. It would seem that limiting the market for VMware’s services would not be in the company’s best interest, and leaving it independent would be the smartest way forward (similarly to the way IBM and Red Hat operate).

Certainly this is something that Dell recognized when it bought the company as part of the$58 billion EMC acquisition (which was announced as $67 billion) in 2015. VMware operated as a separate company as part of EMC when it was acquired. And Dell continued that way of running, allowing VMware sell to a broad variety of customers instead of limiting it to its own hardware offerings because it understood that the company operated best as an independent and neutral vendor.

Dell eventually spun out VMware as a separate company in 2021, a move that left it more vulnerable to acquisition overtures. In fact, at the time we speculated who might buy the company. Broadcom was not on our radar, although another chip company, Intel, was. We speculated that one of the cloud companies could buy it or an old school company like IBM or Oracle. But when the news came down, it was Broadcom, and for a hefty amount of money.

The EU isn’t the only one looking at this deal. Just last month, The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced that it was beginning an investigation into the deal too. The U.S. FTC is also reportedly probing the acquisition, per CRN.

Deals of this size are facing increasing stringent review, and we have seen some large deals break down over this kind of investigation in recent years. Visa scuttled the deal to buy Plaid at the beginning of 2021 after the Justice Department took a close look at the transaction and the companies decided that a protracted legal battle wasn’t worth the effort.

Nvidia walked away from a $40 billion deal to buy ARM earlier this year for similar reasons. If it looks like these watchdog organizations are going to have a closer look that could get expensive to fight, sometimes the easiest thing to do is call the whole thing off.

We’ll see if that what happens with this deal, or if it’s just a bump in the road before the two companies come together next year.

EU to probe $61B Broadcom-VMware deal over competition concerns by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

In August, Drop announced its first new in-house mechanical keyboard in quite a while: the 75% Drop Sense75. On paper, the $349 gasket-mount keyboard looked like a winner, with an understated but classy design, Drop’s DCX keycaps, in-house stabilizers and its Holy Panda X tactile switches. The final result is a bit of a disappointment, though.

Early reviews of the prototypes that Drop sent out after the first announcement were rough. Those prototypes sounded hollow, the stabilizer rattled and both the switches and the board itself had issues with ping noise. Drop took some of that feedback to heart and made some changes.

The company recently sent me a pre-built review unit (there is also a $249 bare-bones option). I did not experience any case ping, and, while the board still sounds a bit hollow, the company added a second layer of thin foam that seems to have helped. But I also don’t understand how in 2022, Drop can ship a pre-built board with rattling, dry stabilizers. To make this board sound anything like what you’d expect from a modern mechanical keyboard, you have to completely disassemble it, lube the stabilizers and reassemble. But if you have to go through all of that, what’s the point of buying an expensive pre-built? Who is the audience for this?

The Holy Panda X switches are also a bit scratchy out of the box. Some Krytox and break-in time can fix that, but I’m not a huge fan of tactiles and I prefer a slightly lower sound, but that’s my personal preference. A lot of people love these switches.

In its pre-built version, the aluminum board come with an aluminum plate and an aluminum weight underneath (with a small Drop logo on it). If that’s too much aluminum for you, Drop also sells a $39 carbon fiber plate and a $25 FR4 plate is currently available as a preorder. Both should make the board a bit more bouncy, something it could use, because despite the gasket-mount system, this felt like a pretty stiff board. Drop says that “it took painstaking care to choose the perfect materials, proportions, and placement areas to create a typing feel that was neither too mushy nor too stiff — but just right.” I’m not sure that worked out as planned.

As for the RGB, the south-facing sockets are pretty standard at this point and the addition of the diffuser should make for a nice underglow. In reality, you can see exactly where each LED sits — and if there’s one thing that really feels cheap about the Sense75, it’s that diffuser layer, which I was always afraid I’d break every time I opened the board.

All of this comes down to the fact that I can’t recommend this board. Sure, after a bunch of work you can make it sound quite nice, but there are plenty of other options on the market that are more affordable. The Keychron Q1 is well under $200, fully assembled. A bare-bones Akko Mod 007 will set you back less than $150. A black Sense75 is $350 and a white one $400, with the bare-bones $100 less. But it doesn’t offer the premium typing experience you’d expect at that price.

Drop has been listening to feedback from the community and I hope they opt for a v2 of the Sense, because with some work, it can be a good board — just not in its current state and not at this price.

The Drop Sense75 is not the keyboard you’ve been waiting for by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand on Tuesday in a hearing about Meta’s acquisition of Within, the VR company that makes the fitness app Supernatural. In July, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Meta in an attempt to block the deal, which the government agency alleges is anti-competitive.

The hearing comes at a tenuous time in Meta’s corporate history. As Meta struggles to realize its dreams of bringing VR into the mainstream, its corporate stock is plummeting while the company recovers from a layoff of 11,000 people, or 13% of its workforce.

Meta is losing billions of dollars per quarter on its virtual reality projects, and investors have voiced concerns about Zuckerberg’s plans as the company’s revenue declines.

During the seven-day hearing, one of the FTC’s witnesses, economic expert Hal Singer said that “fitness is the linchpin to owning VR.” He went as far as to add that this is what “keeps Mr. Zuckerberg up at night,” Law360 reported from the courtroom (later, Zuckerberg testified that he does not, in fact, lose sleep over VR fitness competitors).

The FTC has argued that Within’s Supernatural app is a direct competitor to Beat Saber, a popular VR rhythm game that some people use to work out.

Meta bought Beat Games, the studio behind Beat Saber, in 2019. Even Oculus, the hardware company that powers Meta’s flagship Quest headsets, came aboard via a $2 billion acquisition in 2014. The terms of the Beat Games deal were not disclosed, nor were the terms of Meta’s potential purchase of Within.

But while Beat Saber is a fun game that just so happens to get you to work up a sweat, Supernatural was actually built from the ground up as a fitness app, featuring daily workouts that are led by professional trainers and accompanied by popular music.

Under the leadership of Lina Khan, the FTC alleged that it would violate antitrust laws if Meta’s deal with Within goes through.

“Instead of competing on the merits, Meta is trying to buy its way to the top,” said FTC Bureau of Competition Deputy Director John Newman in a statement about the lawsuit. “Meta already owns a best-selling virtual reality fitness app, and it had the capabilities to compete even more closely with Within’s popular Supernatural app. But Meta chose to buy market position instead of earning it on the merits.”

When the FTC called Zuckerberg to the stand, the government lawyers presented email exchanges from March 2021 — before Meta rebranded from Facebook — that proposed the idea of a partnership between Beat Saber and Peloton. Zuckerberg said that this idea was promising in 2021, when Meta had some money to invest in fitness, but ultimately the company decided to buy Within. A partnership between Beat Saber and Peloton would now be impossible, Zuckerberg testified, since Meta is now in a lesser financial situation (in part due to changing Apple policies, he said).

Zuckerberg also said that fitness is not his priority in the VR space — rather, he’s focused on social, gaming and productivity use cases. Meta even just released its Quest Pro, a powerful headset that’s specifically designed for remote work.

Initially, Meta wanted to wrap up its acquisition of Within by the new year. But in a court filing spotted by Reuters, Meta said it will delay the deal’s close until January 31, 2023, pending the court’s ruling on the legality of the deal.

FTC puts Zuckerberg on the stand over Meta’s plan to acquire Within by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Amid 2021’s record-breaking funding activity, it wasn’t uncommon to see startups raise rounds composed of numerous small checks from a large number of firms and angel investors. But now that said companies are looking to raise extension financing, they’re realizing that more investors doesn’t always mean more future money.

Last year, FOMO was running high, and investors were doing seemingly everything to get into rounds: taking a secondary stake instead of a primary, forgoing a board seat, writing a tiny check just to get into a hot deal.

Many founders leaned into this, and how can you blame them? Investors wanted to put more money into their companies, and each investor brings their own value-add and network to the table. In theory, that looks like a good thing. But, the pros of raising party rounds dry up quickly when the market turns — and a lot of companies are starting to realize that.

More investors, more problems by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch

Cruise has soft-launched its robotaxi service in Phoenix and Austin, making its own deadline to enter two new markets before the end of 2022. The GM-backed company has until now only operated its ridehail service in San Francisco, where it launched a fully driverless commercial service over the summer.

“In both Phoenix and Austin we completed our first paid rides for members of the public,” tweeted Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt. “Just like in SF, we’ve started with a small service area and will expand gradually. But since we’ve already done this in SF it will happen much faster in these new cities.”

Those members of the public will be “friends and family” of Cruise employees, who are the only ones to have access to the company’s ride-hail service to start. Members of the general public will get a turn, but Cruise didn’t provide a timeline for opening up the service. Cruise opened a waitlist for Austin and Phoenix in late October and should start offering rides once it has enough vehicles to meet demand, a spokesperson told The Verge.

Cruise has not disclosed its starting service areas in either city, nor what times of day it will operate. It’s also not clear if the rides Cruise offers initially will be fully driverless, or if they’ll put a human safety operator behind the wheel to start.

The AV company will have to contend with Waymo in Phoenix, which recently doubled its service area in the downtown area and opened up driverless rides to the airport to members of the public. Waymo has been operating a commercial robotaxi service in the Phoenix area, specifically Chandler, since 2018.

Vogt was eager to celebrate how it took years to launch in San Francisco, but only weeks to expand into new territory.

“In Austin, we went from zero infrastructure (no maps, charging facilities, test vehicles, etc.) to fully functional driverless ride hail service in about 90 days,” he tweeted. “We invest heavily in tools for engineering efficiency at Cruise, so it took just a few weeks to collect data to retrain our [machine learning] models and see performance meet our targets. This process is becoming increasingly automated, in some cases requiring no engineer intervention.”

Excitement for technological advancements aside, no autonomous system is yet perfect, and Cruise has been struggling with roadblocks — literally.

Videos and images have surfaced on social media showing Cruise robotaxis blocking traffic, stuck at intersections and having strange interactions with law enforcement. Last week, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration opened an investigation into the company after learning of incidents when Cruise’s robotaxis “may have engaged in inappropriately hard braking or became immobilized while operating on public roads.”

Cruise soft-launches robotaxi rides in Phoenix and Austin by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

The knotty issue of how Ukraine’s now-critical Starlink satellite internet should be paid for has been at least temporarily resolved, according to the country’s minister for digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov. It appears that a few European Union nations have decided it’s in everyone’s interest to keep the country online as the Russian invasion persists.

In October it was revealed that apart from an initial burst of funding to get Starlink terminals on the ground in Ukraine, there was no real arrangement in place to pay SpaceX for the service it was providing. At retail value the approximately 22,000 terminals sent to Ukraine would cost tens of millions of dollars — though this is only an estimate of both the actual cost and the number of active terminals.

SpaceX sought funding from the U.S. military but ultimately decided to press on without it — although this was framed as a charitable act at the time, it is possible that negotiations with other stakeholders were beginning to bear fruit.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Fedorov (who is also deputy prime minister) explained that “as of now all financial issues have been resolved.”

He declined to be more specific, saying only that several E.U. countries had pledged support at least through the spring. With winter coming and infrastructure already strained, having funding in place for decentralized internet access is one less thing the war-torn country will have to worry about.

In fact there is a new arrangement for more than 10,000 terminals to be sent down: “We have got a nod for another shipment that will be used to stabilize connection for critical situations,” Fedorov said. “There is no alternative to satellite connections.”

SpaceX recently expanded into the defense contractor world with Starshield, but that is more for U.S. government contracts. The Ukraine Starlink terminals seem to be from the professional and consumer side of the business.

Ukraine lines up 10,000 more Starlink terminals as funding issues are ‘resolved’ by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

Ah, the end of the year. The perfect time to settle into the couch in a food coma and read.

In honor of our love of reading and the fact that giving books as gifts is a cliche for a reason — people love it! — TechCrunch has compiled several lists of great reads for you.

We started with a series of recommendations from TechCrunch staff. But we know that you want more perspectives, so your friends at TechCrunch+ collected myriad recommendations from both venture capitalists and founders alike. Here we have investor favorites, and we’ll follow up with notes from founders tomorrow.

You can check out the 2021, 2020and 2019 recommendations if you need even more. Enjoy, and may your holiday respite be filled with words.

This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission.

Venture book favorites, 2022 edition

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

Recommended by Brian McCullough, GP at Ride Home Fund; Aziz Gilani, managing director at Mercury Fund, who added it as a textbook for his VC class at Rice; and Arvind Purushotham, head of Citi Ventures, who made this comment:

“‘The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future’ does an excellent job highlighting the importance of discovery and learning in the venture capital and startup world. Mallaby perfectly illustrates the laws of power that control which points of discovery succeed in venture capital and which ones don’t. His analysis of the highest highs and lowest lows adds color to the venture world and how it dictates how we see our future.”

The best books that venture capitalists read in 2022 by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups.

This week Darrell and Becca caught up with Alice Albrecht about her early-stage AI startup re:collect. Alice talked about why she founded the company that uses machine learning algorithms to help creatives brainstorm and recall information without breaking focus. She also talked about why the algorithms re:collect is building will have guardrails from the start and also what it is like building an AI company in a time when interest in the category has recently exploded.

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Augmenting creativity with Alice Albrecht from re:collect by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch