2026-11-11 19:00:02
This article is brought to you by Innomotics.
In the annals of industrial history, few innovations have demonstrated such remarkable staying power as the dynamo-electric principle. Discovered by Werner von Siemens in 1866, this groundbreaking principle remains fundamental to modern electrical engineering more than a century and a half later – and continues to shape the technology portfolio of Innomotics, a globally leading provider of electric motors and large drive systems. What began as a breakthrough in electromechanical energy conversion has evolved into a cornerstone of global industry – powering everything from brewery operations in Qingdao to high-voltage drive systems in petrochemical plants.
The year 1866 marked a decisive turning point, not only in the broader arc of industrial transformation but specifically in the realm of electric motion. At a time when Europe was entering a new phase of industrial transformation, Werner von Siemens pioneered the dynamo-electric principle – a breakthrough that enabled electric machines to generate their own magnetic field through self-excitation. This innovation transformed electric machines from laboratory curiosities into practical power sources, enabling the widespread electrification of industry and infrastructure that defined the late 19th century.
This electric motor from Innomotics was installed in the early 1900s at the historic Tsingtao Brewery in China and supported production processes for more than 90 years, operating continuously under industrial conditions.Innomotics
The principle itself is elegantly simple: an iron core generates a stable magnetic field; a rotating coil is placed within this field; movement in the magnetic field induces an electric current; part of this current strengthens the magnetic field; and electrical energy is continuously converted into motion. This self-reinforcing cycle made efficient and reliable electric motion possible – and it remains the foundation of modern motors today.
More than 160 years later, the same fundamental idea continues to power industrial applications around the world. Millions of motors operate reliably under demanding conditions, keeping production running across generations. The dynamo-electric principle made it possible for electric machines to convert electrical energy into motion (and motion back into electrical energy), creating the technological foundation for modern electric motors and drive systems.
Active Vibration Control System (AVCS) enhances stability and reliability by actively reducing vibrations.Innomotics
Perhaps no example illustrates this longevity better than the electric motor from Innomotics at the historic Tsingtao Brewery in China. Installed in the early 1900s during the early electrification of industrial brewing, this motor supported production processes for more than 90 years, operating continuously under industrial conditions. It became a powerful example of long-term reliability in real-world applications – a testament to how engineering ensures reliable motion across decades.
Continuity, however, does not mean stagnation. Sixteen decades after the original breakthrough, innovations continue to emerge that build upon this proven foundation. Two recent developments – the Active Vibration Control System (AVCS) and oil-lubricated rolling bearings (OLRB) – carry this spirit of innovation and ingenuity forward, a commitment that has been recognized with the German Innovation Award.
Innomotics’ patented Oil-Lubricated Rolling Bearing (OLRB) technology enhances reliability and reduces maintenance requirements.Innomotics
AVCS helps optimize high-voltage motor performance by actively decoupling motors from their foundations to reduce vibration issues. OLRB helps prevent rolling bearing failures from the start with continuous lubrication, supporting higher availability, less downtime, and long-term cost savings. These innovations demonstrate how the basic principle of 1866 can be enhanced through modern engineering to meet contemporary demands for reliability and efficiency.
For three decades, with over 25,000 units driving performance globally, Innomotics’ Perfect Harmony GH180 medium-voltage drive platform has supported reliable operation across industries. Its modular architecture enables efficient power control, high availability, and long-term performance. With thousands of installations worldwide, Perfect Harmony GH180 continues to build on a proven technological foundation, minimizing downtime and ensuring stable production.
Keeping critical motors running requires the right expertise and innovation spirit throughout the entire lifecycle. With Innomotics Customer Services, operators and plant managers gain the insights they need to maintain reliability and optimize maintenance strategies. Winding Lifetime Analysis (WLA) combines operating history, machine measurements, and physics-based modeling to assess the condition of the winding insulation and estimate its remaining useful lifetime. This enables informed maintenance decisions, reduces uncertainty, and helps minimize the risk of unplanned downtime.
The Perfect Harmony GH180 delivers efficient, reliable and flexible medium-voltage drive performance.Innomotics
What began as a breakthrough in 1866 still brings its value to modern industry. The dynamo-electric principle made efficient and reliable electric motion possible – and it remains the foundation of modern motors today.
As industries worldwide grapple with challenges ranging from energy efficiency to operational resilience, this 160-year-old principle continues to prove its relevance.
Video: Innomotics
For plant managers and engineers seeking long-term performance in demanding applications, the message is clear: the foundation laid in the 19th century remains as solid as ever. What has changed are the tools and services built upon it – from vibration control systems to predictive analytics – all designed to extract maximum value from a principle that has, quite literally, powered the modern world for a century and a half.
Innomotics, carrying forward a legacy that spans the full arc of this history, continues to move industry forward with innovations that create real progress. The dynamo-electric principle may be 160 years old, but as the company’s portfolio demonstrates, it is far from obsolete. It is, in every sense of the word, still running.
Discover how Innomotics is driving the future of industry: https://www.innomotics.com/hub/en/company/about-innomotics/dynamo-electric-principle
2026-11-11 03:00:02
Bishnu Saroop Atal
Acoustics and signal processing pioneer
Life Fellow, 93; died 19 August
Atal was an acoustics and signal processing researcher at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., and later at AT&T’s Shannon Laboratory, in Florham Park, N.J. His pioneering work on voice-coding techniques became the foundation for efficient, high-quality voice transmission over cellular networks. He received the 2013 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal for “fundamental and pioneering contributions to speech coding.”
He joined Bell Labs in 1961 as a communications researcher, and his early work there focused on speaker identification technology. During the 1960s he helped develop linear predictive coding, a powerful method for analyzing and compressing speech. LPC is now the most widely used method for encoding speech at a low bit rate.
Atal developed increasingly sophisticated low-bit-rate speech-coding techniques. They included multipulse LPC, which improved the quality of compressed speech.
Bishnu Saroop AtalNokia Bell Labs
He also worked with his colleague Manfred R. Schroeder to develop code-excited linear prediction, a method for producing high-quality speech at very low bit rates. CELP became a foundational technique in modern speech coding, letting digital communications systems carry voice using less bandwidth. The extra efficiency expanded cellular capacity, allowing wireless networks to handle more simultaneous calls.
Later in his career, he led the acoustics and speech research departments at Bell.
The company named him a Fellow in 1994. When AT&T Bell Laboratories split into separate research organizations in 1996, Atal continued his career at the AT&T Florham Park headquarters, and he was named a Fellow the following year.
He retired in 2002 and became an affiliate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington, in Seattle. There he continued his research in speech processing, speech recognition, and high-dimensional computing.
Atal was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. He received numerous awards including the 2018 International Speech Communication Association Medal for Scientific Achievement and a 2003 medal from the Franklin Institute.
He received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1952 from the University of Lucknow, in India, and a master’s degree in 1955 in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, in Bengaluru. While working full time at Bell he earned a Ph.D. in EE in 1968 from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now New York University’s Tandon engineering school), in New York City.
Darryl Palmer Jr.
Chair of the IEEE Central Illinois Section
Senior member, 55; died 30 August
Palmer was a dedicated IEEE volunteer, serving as chair of the Central Illinois Section and as the government relations chair of Region 4. He was a member of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society and its industrial activity committee. He also served as associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.
In 1986, at age 16, Palmer completed a summer internship at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, in Cleveland. He helped develop FoilSim, an interactive educational software program that introduces aerodynamic engineering to preuniversity students.
While studying computer science at Cleveland State University in 1996, he joined the university’s Allen-Bradley PLC lab as a research assistant. He designed hardware and software systems for the Glenn Research Center to collect and process thermal wave imaging data. He also designed software for General Motors’ North American robotic and welding division.
In 1999 he completed a second internship at the research center and helped develop EngineSim, an educational software program that models jet engine design and testing.
For his work, NASA recognized him with a Space Act Award.
In 2000 he earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and became a software engineer at the Danfoss Drives manufacturing facility in Loves Park, Ill. He worked on embedded control systems for variable-frequency drives and high-power equipment. He also developed sensorless control technology for beam pumps used in the oil and gas industry.
In 2014 Palmer and his wife, Alexandra “Sasha” Goodwin, founded Janus Choice, a health technology platform that matches hospital patients with post-acute care facilities. He served as its CEO until the company closed in 2020.
From 2018 to 2023, he was a lead software engineer at Adept Coalescence, a startup in Rockford, Ill., focused on developing front-end software for control systems. He then worked in Peoria, Ill., as a control systems team lead at Caterpillar, a manufacturer of construction and mining equipment.
Henry Leopold Richter
Telecommunications engineer
Life senior member, 99; died 12 August
Richter was a spacecraft engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif., before starting his own public safety communications consultancy.
He earned a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. at Caltech in 1952 and 1956, respectively. In 1955 he joined JPL as an engineer and supervisor of its new circuit elements group. Later, he was assigned to NASA’s Explorer program as project manager for satellite design, serving as a liaison between the organization’s satellite instrumentation group and its operations and data groups. Since 1958 the program has launched more than 90 missions for physics, geophysics, and astrophysics research.
As NASA prepared to launch Explorer 1 in January 1958, Richter worked with the San Gabriel Valley Radio Club in Los Angeles to set up stations across the United States to track the satellite.
He eventually was named JPL section chief and was responsible for scientific instruments on the lunar Ranger, Surveyor, and Mariner programs. He also helped develop NASA’s Deep Space Network, an international tracking and communications system.
Richter left NASA to become vice president and technical director of Xerox Electro-Optical Systems, in Pasadena, Calif.
In the mid-1970s, he joined the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as a communications engineer, overseeing the department’s microwave and mobile radio networks.
He later ran a telecommunications consulting practice for more than 20 years. His clients included federal, state, and local government agencies, school districts, universities, and organizations. His work covered strategic technology planning and the design and implementation of public safety radio, microwave, CCTV, and paging systems.
He wrote several books including America’s Leap Into Space: My Time at JPL and the First Explorer Satellites (2015), a personal account of his experience working on the Explorer 1 and America’s space program.
In 2019 the Radio Club of America presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award for “significant achievements and a major body of work that has advanced the art and science of wireless technology.”
Raymond L. Giordano
Former RCA engineer
Life member, 91; died 19 July
Giordano was an electrical engineer who designed integrated circuits and defense electronics at companies including Harris, Intersil, and RCA.
After earning his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1956 from the Newark College of Engineering (now the New Jersey Institute of Technology), Giordano joined RCA in Moorestown, N.J., as an engineer. He helped develop a video formatter for the company’s missile and surface radar division, and he taught in-house engineering courses, eventually attaining the rank of senior technical staff member.
Later he developed technologies for General Electric (which acquired RCA in 1986), Intersil, and Harris. He designed the circuitry for Kodak’s Cameo cameras and one of its laser printers.
Giordano was awarded several patents for his designs including a smoke detector chip for Siemens, a speed control chip for Ford, an engine control system for Delco Remy, and a control component for Chrysler.
He earned a master’s degree in EE in 1964 from the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.
Delano D. Wilson
President of Power Technologies
Life Fellow, 92; died 26 May
Wilson was president and CEO of Power Technologies, a consulting firm in Schenectady, N.Y., that specialized in electric power systems.
He was a director of R&D at General Electric in Schenectady until he joined Power Technologies in 1974 as a principal engineer. He developed utility systems and software for the company.
Wilson authored six books and 65 technical papers, and he held two patents.
Outside of his engineering work, he served on the boards of several hospitals, YMCAs, Rotary clubs, and chambers of commerce.
After returning to his hometown of Great Falls, Mont., in 1995, he volunteered as a court-appointed advocate, a trained community volunteer appointed by a judge to represent the interests of children in foster care.
Daniel I. Amey Jr.
Electronic packaging engineer
Life Fellow, 84; died 12 March
Amey was an electronic packaging engineer, working at several companies including General Dynamics, Sperry Univac, and E.I. du Pont de Nemours (now DuPont). His research interests included connectors, chip packages, and high-frequency materials.
He began his career in 1963 as an engineer in the General Dynamics electronics division, where he designed military electronic hardware including analog and digital support equipment for aerospace applications.
In 1967 he joined Sperry Univac in Blue Bell, Pa. From 1972 to 1981 he was engineering manager of packaging techniques, responsible for interconnection hardware for small and medium computer systems. His work focused on large-scale integration packages, hybrid circuits, connectors, and printed wiring board processes.
He left the company to serve as director of electronics technology at Thomas & Betts of Raritan, N.J. He led research and development of packaging and interconnection products there.
In 1986 he became a director of Elco, an electrical component manufacturer in Huntingdon, Pa., where he was responsible for the design and development of connector and packaging hardware.
In 1988 he joined E.I. du Pont de Nemours as director of its electronics and communications technology group in Research Triangle Park, N.C. He worked on packaging technology development, high-frequency materials characterization, and applications engineering. He retired from there as a research fellow.
Amey wrote or cowrote more than 70 technical papers and held more than 14 patents. He developed courses on electronic packaging and printed wiring technology for education companies McGraw-Hill and Cobblestone (formerly the Center for Professional Advancement).
He received the International Microelectronics Assembly and Packaging Society’s 2004 Wagnon Technical Achievement Award and the Electronic Industries Association’s 1984 Distinguished Engineering Contribution Award.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in engineering science from Pennsylvania State University, he earned an MBA from Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, Pa.
2026-11-10 19:00:02
Learn how guided virtual shock and drop analysis helps engineering teams identify reliability risks before physical testing, reduce qualification iterations, optimize packaging designs, and accelerate electronics product development.
What you will learn about:
2026-11-10 00:25:06
This article is brought to you by Queen’s University Belfast.
Several teams around the globe are leveraging AI by creating a task force of agents managed by an orchestrator and creating applications to support risk assessment, client profiling, match making, and information yield with a slight overview of decision making. One of the important components for these agents is to ensure that the logs are managed and historic relevance is not being used to avoid skewing towards same decision making. Thus, the system is expected to keep checkpoints in place where agents are prompted to delete such historic relevance.
However, despite such methodology in place, a future prompt could make the agents bring forward the information that was supposed to be deleted and can be tricked into revealing more information, which is a classic case of context recovery attack. So, the question raised here is: How can we trust that our instructions have been followed? And where is the proof?
There is an element of utilizing zero-trust architectures (ZTA) for orchestrating and managing agentic activity, which simply means all agentic interactions use the core principle of “never trust,” “always verify.” ZTA components include a policy enforcement point (PEP) that has to be trusted to maintain trust across the system, so the question that remains is where is the component of zero-trust, and shall we trust the policies enforced by PEP?
Having a pro-agentic approach and utilizing agents could be helpful with the right guardrails in place. Opening our systems to random agents that are being trained on off-the-shelf models and blindly relying on them can pose significant cyber risks. For example, vibe coding by using an AI model to help develop software, giving away the entire codebase to an untrusted entity outside the organization can lead to vulnerability sweeping across multiple surfaces.
Vibe coding by using an AI model to help develop software, giving away the entire codebase to an untrusted entity outside the organization can lead to vulnerability sweeping across multiple surfaces.
This opens critical discussions towards how vibe coding could interfere with the positioning and implementation of trusted execution of the agentic queries. Consider an autonomous web of agents that relies on agents’ inputs to drive the operations. When the system is operating under low tolerance of failure and with non-tracking based agentic workflows, it could be computationally expensive to trust and verify each query in real-time that leads to the common trade-offs of memory vs execution.
Another risk to consider is the zero-day attack. When it happens, how will the system react? Would such an event be manageable without a total infrastructure breakdown? The scale of impact can be observed from over reliance on agentic ecosystems with only one trusted layer. This could mean that when failure occurs, the entire ecosystem could be exposed, just like there will be no autonomy if the backbone network is not available, which essentially means no layer to place trust.
An in-house experiment done at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) provided an initial understanding of how the scale of agentic attacks could mean a lower window of vulnerability. The team focused on very popular de-authentication attacks and with agentic orchestration, the swift rate to do de-authentication attacks could go as low as 2 to 3 seconds. This gives little to no time to react and decide on patching the system.
There is another aspect of the large-scale agentic system, which establishes trust under asynchronous autonomy. Trust serves as a critical foundation for traceability. How would you ensure that all the agents operating towards a common goal are aligned and understand the delays associated with their goals?
Our team worked around this space, which at first involved demonstrating that the problem exists, and its impact and scale can be huge when you must prove trust under boundaries of asynchronous autonomy. Solutions towards such problems can be simplified by keeping things like AI-bill of material or leveraging distributed ledger technology that can provide underlying infrastructure of trust via traceability and immutability and keep the agentic activity and associated trust vectors agnostic to the platform.
Within trust, another factor that is not well explored but needs a thorough investigation is the concept of horizontal anomalies. It defines how agents interact differently with various sources under different settings. As agents behave correctly and align themselves with the architectural expectations for one specific task or application, that does not necessarily mean these can be trusted for their operations across all associated components. How to identify such anomalies and what methods can be employed without complying with such agents remain open questions and topics for further exploration.
The critical aspect is that utility of agents with semi to low trust governance offer short-term high benefits, but the cost of recovery when the system fails is yet to be explored, and this will not be a contained issue. We are looking into the system where agents are already sweeping into different entities and may not allow complete recovery. For example, a mere supply chain issue because an agent going rogue is now not a containable small task but needs sweeping across all the touch points of those affected agents. This essentially means despite the number of agents and their ability to trigger proxy-agents, which may not be directly linked to the wider ecosystem, there is a need to ensure that computationally expensive trackers are in place for all the agents.
Other relevant PhD works carried out in our research group are towards sovereignty of AI, exploring aspects of trust and accountability. Our hypothesis is that sovereignty and trust need to be governed together as onus of provenance is high on the host of agents. Thus, it needs understanding of laws governing trust-based executions of AI. The important challenge here is that there is a vital difference between missed information and missed instructions, and both have different impacts when it comes to trusted accountability.
The real-world issue with these systems lies in the failure to adopt approaches that historically have relied on state-based modeling when governing trust. In stateless systems where agentic autonomy is high, the convergence and reliability towards trust-provenance decreases significantly. Thus, it brings us back to the original question – does a true zero-trust even exist?
Can policies be trusted? If so, how should these be managed without falling into the trap of policy-based accessibility and control issues? Despite the argument that PEP can help manage access between the agents, placing a single entity and expecting it to scale towards all agentic interactions is underestimating the problem space.
Formal verification of trust is another part of a trust-based agentic ecosystem. When dealing with AI models, understanding the robustness helps to put trust in place for these models.
To build our case and settle around the challenges of trust embeddings in Agentic AI, within Cyber AI hub, we are exploring opportunities to help companies scale up as well as build their pipeline of agentic applications for commercial viability. However, the element that governs our regular work and decision making are scale of problem and number of agentic deployments, anomaly detection across the agentic workflows, continuous evaluation of the attack surfaces and vulnerability assessment, exploring differences in the pure agentic AI and task-driven multi-agent system.
We are working with industries where trust is a pre-requisite, and these organizations put trust as a guardrail managed via internal policies with a pure focus on securing the systems through policies rather than trusting the third-party agentic service providers. Additionally, trust in services is presented by ensuring constraints around their service models where agentic activities are tracked and managed via logs including management of their token revocation list to avoid replay attacks depending on the type of application. Formal verification of trust is another part of a trust-based agentic ecosystem. When dealing with AI models, understanding the robustness helps to put trust in place for these models. Things like balancing the adversarial accuracy along with certified adversarial robustness can help to determine how much the model can be trusted.
But the question is, can we settle for anything less than foolproof when it comes to deployment of agents in the real world? And if so, how much impact can be controlled, and who is responsible for the remaining component?
Wickremasinghe G, Sandjaja FR, Rafferty K, Sharma V. State-verification in asynchronous blockchain-driven agentic AI systems. 40th International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN) 2026 Jan 14 (pp. 139-144). IEEE.
Sandjaja, F. R., Abdul Majeed, A., Abdullah, A., Wickremasinghe, G., Rafferty, K., & Sharma, V. (Accepted/In press). Policy design in zero-trust distributed networks: challenges and solutions. In Industrial Networks and Intelligent Systems: 12th EAI International Conference, INISCOM 2026: (to appear in proceedings).
Melis M, Del Rincon JM, Sharma V. Improving Certified Robustness via Adversarial Distillation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.31653. 2026 Jun 30 (Accepted to appear in BMVC’26).
2026-11-06 23:00:02
Last August, looking up from the edge of an ancient river delta on Mars, the Perseverance rover’s electronic eye spied an oblong shadow crossing the distant, glowing Sun. Phobos, the Martian moon named for the Greek god of fear and panic, was transiting the solar disk. Too small to darken the pale, dust-tinged sky, but orbiting close enough to eclipse a significant fraction of the Sun, Phobos passed in less than a minute.
NASA’s Perseverance rover captured Phobos passing in front of the Sun from the surface of Mars.ASU/MSSS/SSI/JPL-Caltech/NASA
The tiny moon, with its murky origins, is an enigma, and one whose makeup and history could tell us much about Mars and the wider solar system. And now the international Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission, which successfully launched on 20 October, seeks to explore that mystery with an unprecedented series of landings on the unknown surface of Phobos.
This mission brings unusual challenges—for example, designing an orbit to study a microgravity moon orbiting a much larger planet. Engineers also had to figure out how to assess and land on this low-gravity pile of loosely assembled dirt and rock, how a rover might rove across it, and how the spacecraft might take samples and return them to Earth.
“I often say that landing on Phobos is like trying to land a balloon,” says Yasuhiro Kawakatsu, project manager of MMX at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). “It’s very difficult to drop a balloon to the ground and prevent it from tilting or bouncing.”
Phobos is one of two small Martian moons; the other is Deimos, named after the Greek god of dread and terror. Their cosmic origins are unknown, though there are two prevailing theories. One holds that the moons were once asteroids from the belt between Mars and Jupiter, captured by the smaller planet’s gravity. In the other theory, Phobos and Deimos formed when a large celestial body slammed into Mars, sending debris into orbit. Some models suggest the pair are the last survivors from a cluster of satellites.
The enormous Stickney crater, roughly 9 kilometers across, dominates this view of Phobos taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.University of Arizona/JPL-Caltech/NASA
Scientifically speaking, Phobos is considered a rubble pile, a loosely consolidated aggregate of rock and dust. Far too small to become spherical under its own mass, it’s shaped like a lumpy potato, roughly 27 kilometers in length, with only 1/1,800th of Earth’s gravity. On Phobos, a typical adult would weigh about as much as a tennis ball does on Earth.
More than 10 years in the making, MMX launched on Japan’s flagship H3 rocket from Tanegashima spaceport on 20 October local time. It will arrive at Mars in 2027 carrying scientific payloads from several space agencies, including NASA, and a new rover called Idefix developed by the French and German space agencies (CNES and DLR) in collaboration with JAXA.
Engineers assembled MMX’s modules at Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center before the spacecraft’s October 2026 launch.JAXA
MMX consists of three modules: a propulsion module to power its journey to Mars and apply the brakes to enter orbit around the red planet; an exploration module carrying the rover, sampling gear, and other scientific instruments; and a return module, attached to the exploration module, that harbors the capsule destined for a high-speed reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. After collecting samples on Phobos, the exploration and return modules will lift off together. The exploration module will then be jettisoned while the return module sets a course back home.
If all goes according to plan, MMX will deliver a 10-gram sample to Earth in the second half of 2031. But the mission will face a series of daunting challenges to reach that end point, including navigating complex orbits around Phobos and landing on its surface while Mars periodically blocks communications with Earth.
The MMX’s modular design includes the propulsion module [left] and the exploration and return modules [right].Kyodo News/Getty Images
“It’s the most complex mission I have ever seen,” says Patrick Michel, director of research at CNRS (the French National Center for Scientific Research) and co-principal investigator on Idefix.
An H3 rocket carried MMX into space on 20 October 2026, beginning the mission’s five-year journey to Phobos and back.The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images
Once MMX reached low Earth orbit, its propulsion module’s engine fired, kicking off a nearly year-long deep-space cruise to Mars. On arrival, the spacecraft will need to fire its engines in an extended, carefully timed burn to slow down enough to be captured by Mars gravity. The propulsion module will then be jettisoned, leaving the exploration and return modules to orbit Mars.
“If something doesn’t go according to plan, MMX will fly by Mars and get catapulted into the solar system,” says Nicola Baresi, an astrodynamicist who coauthored a paper on specially designed orbits for MMX.
From that initial orbit, MMX will transition into a specially designed quasi-satellite orbit that allows it to keep pace with the small moon but also move around it. Since Phobos is too small to orbit in the conventional sense, the spacecraft will orbit Mars alongside the moon, following a clever egg-shaped path that slings MMX alternately ahead of and behind the moon. “When you’re closer to Mars, you’re accelerating with respect to Phobos, and when you’re farther from Mars, you’re decelerating. So you essentially go back and forth,” explains Baresi.
The best existing images of Phobos, from spacecraft such as NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ESA’s Mars Express, have resolutions of only a few meters per pixel. That’s larger than Idefix, the mission’s rover, itself about the size of a microwave oven. To map the surface in greater detail, MMX will loop in front of and behind Phobos at distances ranging from 200 kilometers to less than 20 km from the surface.
During its two-year remote sensing campaign, the exploration module will use several cameras and a laser altimeter to map the surface in high resolution and look for candidate landing sites. When Mars passes behind the Sun as seen from the Earth, causing a roughly two-week communications blackout, MMX will retreat into a larger, stable orbit. After communications resume, MMX will prepare to send its first visitor down to the surface.
Before the exploration and connected return modules attempt to land, Kawakatsu says, MMX will send a scout that in Japanese is called “the first penguin,” leaping into unknown waters. For this mission, the first to leap will be the Idefix rover, named for the canine companion to Obelix in the French comics series Asterix. The exploration module will release the rover during a low-altitude pass of between 40 and 100 meters above Phobos’s surface in 2028 or early 2029.
MMX will use its TENGOO camera [left] and LIDAR laser altimeter [right] to map Phobos’s terrain.JAXA
It will be a tense moment that calls back to 2005, during Japan’s Hayabusa mission to explore the asteroid Itokawa. In a similarly designed drop, the MINERVA rover was released from an orbiter, but erroneously at 200 meters instead of the intended 70 meters. The rover missed the asteroid and, without propulsion, drifted off into deep space.
Idefix will get a slight nudge out of the exploration module toward its negligible-gravity target, freefalling and likely tumbling as it goes. It’s expected to touch down with a velocity of less than 1 meter per second. Unlike rovers that have landed on other surfaces with airbags or dedicated landing legs, Idefix will land without protection, apart from some extra padding on the solar panels due to their critical nature. The barely-there gravity of Phobos should allow the 23-kilogram rover to land softly, though exactly how this landing will play out is hard to predict.
The Idefix rover will travel to Phobos with its wheels tucked in and solar panels folded.DLR
“It will bounce probably several times,” says Stephan Ulamec, Idefix’s co-principal investigator and project manager at DLR. “It will come to rest somehow in some position.” Once it’s still, four retracted legs will deploy to right the rover autonomously, regardless of its orientation. It will then unfold its solar panels to charge its batteries for exploration tasks ahead.
A simulation shows how Idefix is expected to tumble onto Phobos, right itself using its articulated legs, and begin exploring the moon’s surface. DLR
Once operational, Idefix will roll at a snail’s pace, topping out at one millimeter per second. Its metal wheels have protruding blades like a paddle wheel, designed to gain traction in Phobos’s microgravity. “If we were to drive our rover faster, then it would actually be more like we were swimming through instead of driving across the surface,” says Cecily Sunday, a doctoral student involved in testing Idefix’s WheelCams at the Institut Superieur de l’Aeronautique et de l’Espace (ISAE-Supaéro) in Toulouse, France.
The WheelCams, a pair of cameras placed on the underside of the rover, will observe the wheels and their tracks during Idefix’s planned 100-Earth-day primary mission. The images will help researchers study the size and distribution of grains in Phobos’s regolith and how cohesive they are. How much or how little the grains stick together will greatly impact how Idefix moves. Sunday likens this to the difference between driving on dry and wet sand. “Think of trying to build a sandcastle with dry sand,” she says. “You can’t. Add water, and suddenly you can.”
The Idefix rover was mounted between the MMX spacecraft’s landing legs for the journey to Phobos.DLR
The team tested the rover’s nine-bladed wheels on a variety of materials, including Phobos regolith simulants provided by JAXA and DLR, lunar simulants, glass beads, quartz sand, and clay pebbles. “We characterize the mechanical properties of each simulant precisely, then test across the full range, with varying grain size, angularity, and even color, so we can map what we see in the WheelCam images back to actual surface properties,” Sunday says.
Despite the microgravity and Phobos’s rubble-pile nature, Sunday says Earth-based tests can approximate the rover’s motion on the surface of the small moon fairly well. While Phobos’s reduced gravity lowers the rover’s effective weight, there is also reduced pressure between the grains beneath its wheels. “As long as you’re moving very, very slowly and using the same materials and the same weight of the system, they should be representative,” Sunday says.
With four paddle-like wheels and deployable solar panels, Idefix is designed to crawl across Phobos.Ardan Fuessmann/Imago/Alamy
Idefix’s interactions with its new home will offer “sub-millimeter resolution and information on porosity, on grain size, on surface strength, on how hard is the material,” Ulamec says. “It fills a gap between remote observations from orbit and detailed observations of the return samples back on Earth.”
What Idefix finds on this rocky, rugged world will help determine how and where JAXA attempts to land the main spacecraft. Michel says the touchdown will provide ground truth for understanding of Phobos. When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touched down on the asteroid Bennu to collect a sample, its sampling arm surprisingly sank nearly half a meter into the loose material. But Ulamec doesn’t think Idefix will sink deep into Phobos, noting that Bennu is very different and much smaller, with a diameter of 500 meters.
Once Idefix has investigated the surface, MMX will face an even greater challenge: landing its much larger exploration module on Phobos. The spacecraft will make a controlled descent to roughly 10 meters above the surface, then drop the remaining distance in free fall. With so little gravity to pull it downward, even a small sideways motion could cause the lander to tip or bounce away. A successful, upright landing would mark the start of up to two hours on Phobos for the crucial sampling phase.
The MMX mission draws on the experience and technologies of Japan’s two Hayabusa sample-return missions, which landed on the asteroids Itokawa and Ryugu. But this mission has many more moving parts. MMX’s exploration module will use two sampling devices—a coring sampler developed by JAXA and a pneumatic sampler provided by NASA and fabricated by Honeybee Robotics, a subsidiary of Blue Origin. Data from these tools, and those carried by the Idefix rover, could answer questions about the origin of Phobos and how the Mars system has evolved.
The coring sampler uses a robot arm and a cylindrical corer designed to reach at least 2 centimeters below the surface. The arm can maneuver to find the best site for digging. “That by itself is a challenge because we’ve never done it,” Michel says. “You never know what can happen at the very sampling site itself, where you might have a boulder and the arm cannot move.”
Probing beneath the top layer will be valuable because solar radiation, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorites have battered and weathered the surface. The material below should offer a better record of the moon’s origins, and JAXA aims to collect at least 10 grams of it.
MMX will carry both the Idefix rover [bottom] and a robotic coring sampler [top] designed to dig beneath Phobos’s weathered surface.JAXA
The pneumatic sampler takes a different approach. Mounted on one of the lander’s legs, it will inject pure, non-reactive nitrogen gas into the surface and capture the grains stirred up. This sample could illuminate the changes Mars and its moons have undergone over time. The dual system also adds redundancy in the face of Phobos’s unknowns. “If the surface of Phobos proves to be very hard, [the coring sampler] may struggle to penetrate the ground. [The pneumatic sampler] would not experience this issue and still be able to gather material,” Kawakatsu says.
One of the most intriguing aspects of MMX is the additional possibility of collecting material from the planet below. It’s likely that Phobos has been peppered by Martian ejecta thrown into space by meteor impacts, so MMX also provides an opportunity to return the first Martian samples to Earth. Michel estimates that the samples could contain “a few hundred grains coming from Mars.” Scientists can distinguish those grains from native Phobos material by analyzing their oxygen isotopes.
That possibility raises a planetary-protection question. A direct Mars sample-return mission would have to follow strict rules to ensure that potentially living biological material from Mars doesn’t contaminate Earth. But those protocols don’t apply to MMX, even if its sample does collect grains of Martian soil. A panel of experts concluded that any microbes blasted off Mars wouldn’t survive the violent impact and ejection or the intense radiation exposure on the way to Phobos. This saved MMX from implementing expensive and time-consuming quarantine and containment protocols for the returning sample.
After landing on Phobos, MMX will have roughly two hours to collect samples from the moon’s surface before lifting off again.JAXA
During the brief surface operation, the robotic arm will deposit the samples in a storage unit, from which they’ll be transferred into a capsule aboard the return module and sealed in a vacuum. After that, lift off.
Once back in Mars orbit, the exploration module will resume its observations of Phobos and make several flybys of Mars’s other diminutive moon, Deimos, to gather data on its surface, structure, and composition. In November 2030, during a favorable alignment of Mars and Earth, MMX will begin the homeward leg of its trip. The return module will separate from the exploration module and power the voyage home, its sole objective to bring the dust of Phobos to Earth.
MMX’s sample return capsule will carry material from Phobos through Earth’s atmosphere in 2031.JAXA
Finally, in 2031, the 60-centimeter-wide sample capsule will plunge into Earth’s atmosphere at roughly 12 kilometers per second. Assuming it survives the extreme heat of reentry and lands safely in Australia, scientists will begin to tease out clues about Phobos and the early solar system. JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science will receive and curate the samples, which will also be shared with mission partners.
“We have macroscale measurements from the spacecraft, microscale measurements with the rover, and then sample analysis,” Michel says. “So we can relate the three kinds of scales together because we have all of them.” The insights gleaned from orbital images, close-up images of the regolith, and the chemical analysis of the samples could have wider implications for our understanding of our solar system.
“MMX is a mission to understand the Mars system and shed light onto how terrestrial planets like the Earth, and maybe Mars, develop a habitable environment,” Kawakatsu says. “We strongly suspect that our terrestrial planet region formed dry, and water and organics were scattered inwards from the icy-rich outer solar system.” Mars, he says, sits at the gateway between the inner and outer solar system, making its moons valuable witnesses to the processes that shaped potentially habitable worlds.
2026-11-06 03:00:02
Now in their third year, the IEEE TryEngineering educator sessions continue to empower preuniversity teachers with specialized professional development programs on engineering topics and classroom-tested lessons.
This year’s sessions, held across the United States, have focused on educating teachers about artificial intelligence and semiconductor technology. One session was held in Egypt.
In all, 54 educators learned about the engineering design process this year. They received an overview of TryEngineering resources including the Making of a Microchip and Train Your Tree lesson plans.
Workshops are scheduled this year in Greece and Guatemala.
The TryEngineering program is administered by IEEE Educational Activities.
These teachers and guest speakers attended the two-day session held at the Florida Semiconductor Institute and SkyWater Technology chip manufacturing facility.IEEE Educational Activities
Central to the educator session program’s success is its university network. Host campuses welcome teachers into their facilities, where faculty provide background information about some of the technologies being taught, as well as possible engineering career paths and job opportunities for students.
This year’s sessions involved the educators in hands-on projects. Facilitators at each location were selected based on their experience in engineering education, and they worked with the TryEngineering staff on their presentations.
Sixteen teachers from nine schools participated in the session, held in Cairo. It was facilitated by Marwa Soudi, an IEEE member, and Senior Member Stamatis Dragoumanos. Both are past chairs of the IEEE preuniversity coordinating committee. GEMS provided outstanding STEM facilities for teachers, Saudi and Dragoumanos said. Participants received an overview of the Working With Wind Energy and Tall Tower Challenge lesson plans.
Another educator session is scheduled for later this year.
Educators from across the state gathered at the university’s Florida Semiconductor Institute, headquartered in Gainesville, and FSI’s NeoCity high-tech manufacturing campus near Orlando. The session was hosted by Roseanne Perez, an FSI workforce development program specialist, and Sophia Watson, FSI’s assistant director of workforce development. The two-day experience featured an inside look at microelectronics through a guided tour of a SkyWater Technology chip manufacturing facility.
Engineering instructor Mary Acken facilitated hands-on lesson demonstrations for the 15 attending teachers.
Reflecting on the workshop’s impact, one participant said the SkyWater tour was excellent, the instructors were great, and the teachers enjoyed learning from like-minded educators.
Michael Kozicki, an IEEE member, and Stefan Myhajlenko from the university’s engineering school welcomed 11 Arizona teachers to the Tempe campus.
The session was facilitated by Janet Hartkopf, an Arizona school leader and a former TryEngineering educator session participant. Hartkopf highlighted collaborative learning, the need for diverse perspectives in engineering education, and career paths.
The teachers received instruction on how to implement the hands-on lessons in their classrooms, and they toured the university’s NanoFab facility to observe microelectronics research.
“This training was amazing!” said a participant who leads an elementary after-school STEM club. “I loved the hands-on lessons and e-books, which I will definitely be using with my students. I am excited to explore all the resources on the TryEngineering website. The experts from ASU were great.”
Sixteen STEM educators attended this session, held at the university’s International Institute for Biosensing in Minneapolis. Its director, Patricia Khashayar, an IEEE member, introduced participants to the capabilities of the university’s Supercomputing Institute and Nano Center.
Under the guidance of Claire Dietz, an education and outreach coordinator, and Pam Schumacher, an instructor at St. Paul College, the teachers completed classroom-ready lessons including a photonics experiment using the Nano Center’s equipment. Schumacher attended last year’s TryEngineering educator session.
Nano Center Director Sarah Swisher, an IEEE senior member, provided an overview of semiconductor operations and highlighted growing job opportunities for the state’s young people.
The experience inspired all 16 teachers to plan student field trips to the Nano Center during the upcoming academic year, they said.
“Great class!” one participant said. “I’m excited to bring some of the TryEngineering materials back to our school.”
This year’s sessions built on the momentum from last year when, with financial support from Onsemi’s Giving Now program, nearly 80 teachers attended sessions across five U.S. states and Mexico.
Driven by that success and the demand for more, the IEEE Educational Activities Board continued its support. Upcoming global sessions are expected to expand the program’s international footprint.
“I appreciated the time to collaborate with peers on how to implement hands-on lessons,” one participating teacher this year said. Some participants said they planned follow-up visits with the experts and campus tours.
You can learn more about the sessions by emailing TryEngineering.