News & Events

As drones take off, Prof. Missy Cummings is at the controls.

Specs for SPHERES - MIT microsatellites get "glasses."

Distractions alleviate boredom, improve drone operators’ performance.On its surface, operating a military drone looks a lot like playing a video game: Operators sit at workstations, manipulating joysticks to remotely adjust a drone’s pitch and elevation, while grainy images from the vehicle’s camera project onto a computer screen. An operator can issue a command to fire if an image reveals a hostile target, but such adrenaline-charged moments are few and far between.

Paintballs could deflect an incoming asteroid.If a giant asteroid is headed toward Earth, you’d better hope that it’s blindingly white. A pale asteroid would reflect sunlight — and over time, this bouncing of photons off its surface could create enough of a force to push the asteroid off its course.How might one encourage such a deflection? The answer, according to an MIT graduate student: with a volley or two of space-launched paintballs. -more-