Facebook's helicopter drone project got grounded: Report
San Francisco, July 10 : Facebook discontinued last year a small helicopter drone project that could temporarily replace cellular services in emergency situations, The Verge reported.
The project was discontinued a few months after being shown off at the F8 developer conference in May of 2017, said the report on Monday.
"Tether-tenna was a proof of concept project we were evaluating when we discussed it at F8 in early 2017," a spokesperson for Facebook was quoted as saying.
The idea was to send a helicopter equipped with telecommunications equipment hundreds of metres up in the air to be able to tether to fiber and power lines in places where wireless capacity was compromised due to disaster or other factors.
"It wasn't something we pursued further as we chose to focus our efforts on continued development and advancement of our Terragraph, millimeter-wave, and HAPS (high altitude platform station) programmes," the Facebook spokesperson added.
The Tether-tenna is, however, not the only aerial Internet project that Facebook has abandoned in recent times.
In June this year, Facebook announced it decided to abandon its plan to develop high-flying solar-powered drones called Aquila that was aimed to deliver Internet to nearly four billion people in remote parts of the world.
A high altitude platform station (HAPS) system, Aquila's mission, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, was to connect the world and help people who do not have online access all the opportunities of the Internet.
Facebook began Aquila project in 2014. In 2017, the solar-powered drone successfully completed the second full-scale test flight.
Tether-tenna was a much smaller scale idea compared to Aquila.
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Horror at Mysuru Dasara: 10-year-old balloon seller found dead; rape, murder suspected
Mysuru: A horrifying incident has shaken Mysuru during the ongoing Dasara festivities, after the body of a minor girl who sold balloons at the Dasara Exhibition was found on the exhibition grounds on Thursday morning. Police and locals suspect the child may have been raped and murdered.
The victim, believed to be around nine to ten years old, was a native of Kalaburagi. She had been living with her parents in a temporary tent at Doddakere Maidan and earned her livelihood by selling balloons to visitors at the fair.
According to police sources, the girl had accompanied her parents to the ‘Theppotsava’ at the Sri Chamundeshwari Temple on Chamundi Hills on Wednesday night. After returning, she reportedly slept beside her mother in the tent. The next morning, she was found missing.
A brief search by her family ended in tragedy when her body was discovered near a mound of mud, about 50 metres away from the tent. Police officers at the scene said the circumstances indicate the possibility of sexual assault followed by murder.
A police team, along with a dog squad and forensic experts, visited the spot and began collecting evidence.
