What caught your eye this week? (China chips, Rotating pad, ESA rover)

The Electronics Weekly team share some fingerposts – their picks of the week, in terms of announcements, developments, product releases, quotes or anything else in the wider world that caught their eye…

David Manners, components editor

What caught my eye is the USA still cranking up the pressure to curb China’s chip ambition.

Steve Bush, technology editor

While the drawback is that display area is ridiculously expensive as mounting panel, I can’t get over what a simple idea this is, and how it offers so many for-the-look-of-it opportunities. Physical rotary knobs have a serious safety advantage too: drivers can reach for them and adjust them without taking their eyes off the road.

Alun Williams, Web editor

ESA’s Interact rover… in a role-played version of a mission to the Moon involving the collection of some rock samples. During a test campaign on Mount Etna it chose rock samples and brought them to the DLR German Aerospace Center’s RODIN lunar lander. This activity was overseen from 23km away by ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter.

Around the web…

Northrop Grumman contracting Airbus U.S. Space & Defense as the commercial provider of satellite platforms for its LEO constellation. Airbus will supply 42 satellite “bus” platforms, as well as support vehicle assembly, integration and testing.
Virgin Galactic selecting a Boeing subsidiary, Aurora Flight Sciences, to build its new motherships. These are air launch carrier aircraft that carry its spaceships (suborbital spaceplanes) to their release altitude of approximately 50,000 feet.
Mission teams for NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) have re-established contact with the spacecraft through NASA’s Deep Space Network. Data received shows the spacecraft is in good health and operated safely on its own while it was out of contact with Earth (right).