Daily News Briefs

Story Musgrave, a 30-year NASA veteran astronaut on six Space Shuttle flights, will speak June 20 at 7 p.m. at the Cradle of Aviation Museum, in Garden City, N.Y. The lecture is sponsored by the Astronomical Society of Long Island (ASLI) and made possible by a grant from the Optical Society of America. Corporate sponsors include Spectrum Thin Films, of Bohemia, N.Y., and Universal Photonics, of Hicksville. Tickets can be purchased in advance by ASLI members and will be made available to the public at the 14th annual Northeast Astronomy Forum and Telescope Show, April 16-17 at Suffolk Community College, in Suffern, N.Y. For more information, visit: www.endeavour.zoomshare.com . . . Kuka Robotics Corp, a Michigan maker of industrial robots, announced it has joined the North American Die Casting Association (NADCA), an organization representing die casters and suppliers, which it said will be a focus of its North American sales effort. The company will exhibit four robots designed for foundry tasks at CastExpo, a joint exposition of the American Foundry Society and the North American Die Casting Association, being held this week in Saint Louis. Kuka Robotics and its parent company, Kuka Roboter GmbH (Augsburg, Germany), make robots for industries including appliances, automotive, aerospace, consumer goods, logistics, food, pharmaceutical, medical, foundry and plastics in applications such as material handling, machine loading, assembly, packaging, palletizing, welding, bending, joining and surface finishing. . . . Matrix Vision GmbH, of Oppenweiler, Germany, has appointed Digital Network Vision, of Waltham, Mass., as its distributor for North America. Matrix Vision is a supplier of vision-related hardware and software, including its BlueLynx intelligent cameras and BlueFox USB CCD cameras. Digital Network Vision is a distributor of vision hardware and software focused on the machine/industrial vision, image analysis/biomedical imaging and security markets.