Georgia Institute of Technology

Earlier this week, NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft suffered a hardware failure; a device that allows the observatory to maintain its position in space malfunctioned. Bobby Braun, professor of space technology, discusses what went wrong and whether this is the end of the Kepler mission.

NASA’s Kepler mission has been a tremendous success. By staring intently at a portion of space, Kepler has proven the existence of a diverse treasure trove of planets around other stars. Fusing scientific curiosity, engineering creativity and cutting-edge technology, the Kepler project has pushed the boundaries of the possible, opening our eyes and minds to the depths of the universe.

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Yesterday, during a conference in Washington D.C., NASA Administrator Charles Bolden once again made it clear: a human mission to Mars is currently the ultimate destination in the solar system and a priority for NASA. Assistant Professor James Wray, a member of the Curiosity science team, thinks it's possible to land humans on the Red Planet in 20 years...if we get started now and increase the budget.

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Multinational manufacturers are leaving China and flocking to Cambodia, the New York Times reported this week. Ben Wang, executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, comments on how rising wages and the waning number of young factory workers in China are causing manufacturers to look elsewhere.

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President Barack Obama today has announced a new research initiative to map the human brain, starting with a proposed $100 million investment in fiscal year 2014. Craig Forest, assistant professor of bioengineering at Georgia Tech, is one of 100 top neuroscientists invited to the White House for the announcement. Forest explains this unprecedented effort to understand how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact.

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A large cyberattack targeting an anti-spam group is causing Internet delays for users collaterally affected by the attacks. Paul Royal, associate director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center, explains the attack on Spamhaus and how such attacks are likely to occur more often in the future.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a well-understood attack, but the scale of the DDoS on Spamhaus is larger than we have seen before. This type of attack overwhelms a target server with traffic in an attempt to render it unreachable. The way in which this attack was executed also amplifies the amount of data sent from any one computer nearly tenfold.

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