Daily Archives: June 23, 2021

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is among space agencies working on automated and AI farming techniques for the coming era of interplanetary human colonies.

DLR

Whether from continent to continent or coast to coast, people have always made their big moves together with plants. Traveling away from Earth would be no different. Our success on other worlds will rest, in part, on the supple stems of plants.

"Plants are things that we take with us as explorers," says Anna-Lisa Paul, the co-director of the University of Florida Space Plants Lab. "They're part of our core heritage whether we think of it or not."

On all the brief forays into space so far, astronauts have sustained themselves almost entirely on packaged food. But if humans ever hope to set up long-term habitats on the moon or Mars, their physical and mental health would benefit from the ability to grow plants.

Space agencies from various countries have spent decades developing the technologies necessary to bring farming indoors, and now the German space agency and NASA are pushing the state-of-the-art of soil-free gardening to its limits with a greenhouse in Antarctica and laying the groundwork for their next act: farming systems where the farmers are optional.

NASA has worked to advance space agriculture, in part because a robust plant collection could serve as the ultimate multipurpose life-support system, producing calories and nutrients to eat, making oxygen to breathe and taking carbon dioxide from the air.

Building on Soviet research, NASA funded a variety of agricultural programs in the 1980s and 1990s. In a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin, researchers discovered that they could replace hot and cumbersome incandescent grow lights with a particular blend of LED lights. Red LEDs, which were more energy efficient, let plants photosynthesize. But plants also needed blue light, or they would grow too tall and spindly. The work led to a patent, and today's indoor farms often feed plants on a similar diet of red and blue photons which is why indoor farms often appear bathed in purple light.

"NASA was genuinely in front of the curve on this, promoting their use for these applications," says Raymond Wheeler, a horticultural scientist who has studied space agriculture at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for decades.

In the late 1980s, Wheeler worked on a KSC team that grew wheat, potatoes, soybeans and other crops with their roots immersed in a nutrient solution, stacked on four rows of shelves inside a large cylindrical chamber likely the first execution of a vertical farming system that has now developed into a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Rows of produce grow at the Bowery Farming Inc. indoor farm in Kearny, New Jersey, U.S., on Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2018. The start-up uses automation, and space-saving vertically stacked crops for a year-round growing season which its says is much more productive per square foot than traditional farms.

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Focusing on ways to sustainably meet the ever-growing demand for food, companies around indoor vertical farming has seen a boom in recent years. New York-based start-up Bowery Farming announced a $300 million funding round in June, the largest in the industry thus far, valuing the company at $2.3 billion. Kimbal Musk, brother of Elon Musk, is the co-founder of Square Roots. Newark-based AeroFarms in April broke ground on a 136,000-square-foot-farm in Virginia set to open in 2022 that it says will be the largest aeroponic indoor vertical farm in the world.

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) sent twin shipping containers to Antarctica in the fall of 2017 in what amounted to a remote dress rehearsal for raising crops on another world.

The EDEN-ISS Antarctic greenhouse, now entering its fourth growing season, continues to prove that you do not need fertile ground or even sunlight to produce vegetables. It builds upon the LED blend pioneered by the early NASA experiments to deliver "recipes" tuned to the needs of each specific vegetable with programmable arrays of red and blue lights.

Roots poke through beds of fibrous minerals and dangle into empty trays below, where automated nozzles spray them with a nutrient-rich mist every few seconds. Water is largely recycled, except when the nutrient solution gets depleted and needs to be dumped and replaced every few months. The entire system plugs into the neighboring German Neumeyer III research station, from which it continuously draws about 10 kilowatts of power comparable to eight U.S. households.

I still need to send [Elon] Musk an email and ask if we can design his greenhouse.

Daniel Schubert, DLR Antarctica project coordinator

The first year, a DLR researcher named Paul Zabel ran the 135-square-foot greenhouse and collected nearly 600 pounds of veggies including cucumbers, lettuces, other leafy greens, tomatoes, radishes and herbs.

But despite the greenhouse's automated lighting, watering, and fertilizing systems, Zabel still spent three to four hours a day just keeping EDEN-ISS functioning, Schubert says. And in space, human labor will be just as precious a resource as water and air.

Having an AI system taking care of the greenhouse is preferred, according to Daniel Schubert, the project coordinator of the Antarctica experiment, "in the case that the astronauts just have no time."

This year, NASA has sent one of their own researchers, Jess Bunchek, to test out the U.S. space agency's preferred strains of space veggies in EDEN-ISS. Another major research goal will be to collect detailed data of what tasks take up the most time. Bunchek will carry an eight-sided programmable timer that she will use to track the hours she spends on eight categories of work.

One of the major time-sinks has been repairing breakdowns, or "off-nominal events" in the doublespeak of space exploration. A burst pipe, for instance, might take all day to fix. Topping the list of lessons learned from EDEN-ISS is that future facilities need to be simpler. "We will definitely scale down the technology complexity for a space greenhouse," Schubert says.

Next in the pipeline, DLR is currently designing a new facility a semi-inflatable, space-rated cylinder with a few new tricks.

One improvement will be advanced remote monitoring. Anna-Lisa Paul and her colleagues at the UF Space Plants Lab are developing software that can take GoPro images and recognize how a plant's appearance changes with stress. When a plant needs water or has been exposed to too much salt, the colors of light it absorbs and reflects shift subtly in ways imperceptible to the human eye. But the lab's system can spot salt stress in just fifteen minutes, and drought stress in about an hour, according to Natasha Sng, a researcher at the Space Plants Lab, much earlier than a human can.

The researchers have been testing their system at EDEN-ISS, but the greenhouse has been running too smoothly to know how well the monitoring system works. "We've been watching a lot of success happen," says Robert Ferl, co-director of the Space Plants Lab.

Soon, the researchers plan to introduce intentional malfunctions and see if the lab's system can catch them.

In another major step toward automation, the DLR is developing robotic arms to be mounted on a rail suspended from the greenhouse roof. These dexterous machines, powered by AI, would photograph the plants from various angles, prune dead leaves and shoots, and even harvest produce, which Schubert estimates are the most time-consuming activities after repairs.

The end goal is a greenhouse that, if not completely autonomous, could at least be run fully by operators on Earth. Such a facility could touch down on the moon or Mars ahead of astronauts and have a basket of cucumbers and tomatoes ready for their arrival. Astronauts would have the option of gardening, which can bolster mental health, but the crops should be able to thrive on their own when astronauts have more pressing tasks.

The DLR's roadmap aims to have their next-generation facility ready to fly by 2030. "I still need to send [Elon] Musk an email and ask if we can design his greenhouse," Schubert said.

And developing the ability to farm in space isn't purely about going to Mars. A two-way street has always connected space agriculture with industrial agriculture. As climate change makes many areas of the globe less suitable for farming, the technology to split food production from weather and natural resources will likely become more essential.

"My dream would be that we all live in ecological biospheres on our own," Schubert says. "We would be completely independent from the planet Earth, and we would leave Earth to its own so it can recover."

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NASA is learning how to farm on Mars and the moon - CNBC

Tapia-Harper said minimizing smells during space missions is important for a couple reasons.

We really want astronauts to be able to focus on their job. she said. If you can imagine if you had to do your homework in a nasty bathroom, it would be hard to concentrate. So thats the kind of situation we want to avoid for our astronauts.

But its not just about astronauts focus or quality of life Tapia-Harper said serious stench can be a safety issue.

If an emergency occurs on any of our space vehicles, like a fire or an ammonia leak, we want our astronauts to be able to have a very sensitive sense of smell so they can detect it immediately and then fix that problem without delay.

Containing smells is especially important for the next big step in space exploration: crewed long-range missions. Case in point, the Orion, which is designed to support future missions that will carry astronauts to Mars. That means managing smells not for days, or weeks, but for many months maybe even as long as a year.

One solution NASA has been working on is new trash bags with a superior ability to stop stench. Tapia-Harper remembers the experience testing one trash bag that was designed for use on the Orion (and was already being tested on the International Space Station.)

As the testing indicates, trash bags on long-range space missions have to work a lot harder than your normal trash bag.

In that test, we included things like food trash moldy food trash that we allowed to mold over an extended period of time. We also evaluated dirty wipes and towels, but that test also included things like pee, like fecal waste in dirty diapers, because our astronauts, in some cases, dont have access to a bathroom and do have to wear some diapers that eventually get dirty, and also vomit. So we put all those lovely things inside of one large trash bag and let it ferment for an extended period of time and took whiffs of that over a couple of months to see how well the trash bag could contain those stinky odors.

To make the testing conditions as authentic as possible, they got a hold of actual astronaut food and served it to their volunteers.

We had volunteers eat the food and then help to introduce their saliva and bacteria into the food packages, and then package them in the exact way that the astronauts might, Tapia-Harper said. So we actually got astronaut directions on how they package their food trash to try to make it as tightly sealed as possible. And then we let that sit around for a long period of time and mold.

Their efforts were similarly authentic when it came to collecting urine and fecal waste.

What we did is we actually received astronaut diapers, Tapia-Harper said. They ship those to us, and we had volunteers wear those and help collect their morning waste so that we could introduce it into the trash bag.

For extra scientific precision, they even weighted the diapers before use and after So we could quantify how much waste they had provided, Tapia-Harper explained.

Then they sealed up the mix of trash and bodily fluids inside the specially designed garbage bags, which were in turn placed inside airtight metallic chambers designed to catch any smells that leaked out of the bags.

As if the ingredients alone werent enough for a gag-inducing smell, they added one other factor heating the trash up.

The reason we heat it is that we also want to replicate the temperature conditions that might be seen in actual flight, Tapia-Harper said. And so for previous tests, weve actually fluctuated the temperature over time to simulate different temperatures that the trash may see, because I think as we all know, when its hotter, things get stinkier. And so we want to simulate that in our actual odor test as well.

Once the trash was nice and ripe, they would crack open the metal chambers to see how they smelled. Enter the labs odor panel members (otherwise known as sniffers,) who were responsible for judging the degree of stink.

To deliver the smell, Julio Padilla said they used 30 CC syringes attached to masks that fit snugly around the sniffers faces.

So what we do is, we draw the atmospheric air from the container, attach the mask to the syringe, and then administer that 30 ccs directly into the face of our odor panel members, Padilla said. And we count down from three, that way theyre ready to breathe and smell. And then I go ahead and just use a plunger to administer the gas to their face directly to their nose.

At that point, its the sniffers jobs to rate the smell according to different categories.

One of them is potency, and that ranges from zero to four: zero being undetectable; one, slightly detectable; two, easily detectable; three, very detectable; and four is extremely detectable. So they rate it from zero to four, and they also provide a general assessment of the odor, whether it was neutral, pleasant, irritating, or revolting.

The sniffers are also asked to describe how the odor is affecting them.

For example, if you smelled, lets say the vomit, Padilla said, you would probably gag. So that would be one of the effects of the sniff.

Padilla said hed never seen sniffers who were overcome by the smell which may be partly because the trash bags were doing their job but Tapia-Harper remembered past tests where the sniffers werent so lucky.

I know that we had a lot of people reporting that they were gagging, and that they had to have the trash can right next to them because they werent sure if they were going to make it to the bathroom after those smells, she said.

Its no wonder that Jason Hutt, the Orion spaceships engineering lead, recently called White Sands sniffers the unsung heroes of the space program.

Which begs a question: Considering how much NASA relies on automation to do some of its most dangerous and dirtiest work, from probes that have been sent to Jupiter, to the rovers exploring the surface of Mars, why are they subjecting actual humans to these disgusting tests? Cant they design robots to sniff trash for them?

According to Tapia-Harper, theres a good reason why they havent.

There are e-noses that have been developed to try to help characterize smells, she said. [But] really, despite all the best efforts to evaluate technologically what smells are, really the human sense of smell is still far superior. We have been equipped with an incredibly sensitive detector in our nose, more sensitive than anything that weve been able to replicate, in our current technology this far.

So really, that is one of the reasons that NASA does odor testing is because we do recognize that the human sense of smell is more sensitive than we can evaluate via our current technology.

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Exploring the space-time-stench continuum, where no nose has gone before - WHYY

As NASA and other space exploration outfits prepare to send missions to Venus, new research suggests that the hot, toxic planet is geologically active, reports Leah Crane for New Scientist.

Specifically, a new paper, published this week in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that the Venusian surface is at least partly made up of massive hunks of planetary crust that may still be bumping up against each other like huge pieces of pack ice floating atop a roiling sea.

This type of activity doesnt constitute true plate tectonics, explains Robin George Andrews for the New York Times, because not all of Venus surface is covered by jostling plates of crust and those plates dont appear to slide over or under one another as Earths do.

Venus 58 pieces of crust are called campifields in Latinand they range in size from about the size of Ireland to Alaska, per the Times.

"We've identified a previously unrecognized pattern of tectonic deformation on Venus, one that is driven by interior motion just like on Earth," Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University and the studys lead author, in a statement. "Although different from the tectonics we currently see on Earth, it is still evidence of interior motion being expressed at the planet's surface."

According to New Scientist, the interior heat driving the Venusian geologic activity appears similar to what researchers think Earth would have been like around 2.5 to 4 billion years ago, which could make it a useful tool for understanding the early Earth.

If you can understand what Venus is like now, that might give us some insight into what Earth used to look like, Byrne tells New Scientist.

The studys findings are based on a new analysis of radar images of Venus surface captured by NASAs Magellan mission. Those images revealed areas of the planets surface that were contorted in ways that suggested it was being stretched, twisted or pushed together by forces from below.

The team then plugged those observations and measurements of Venus gravity field into a computer model to generate geological scenarios that could have produced what they were seeing.

These observations tell us that interior motion is driving surface deformation on Venus, in a similar way to what happens on Earth, Byrne says in the statement. Plate tectonics on Earth are driven by convection in the mantle. The mantle is hot or cold in different places, it moves, and some of that motion transfers to Earths surface in the form of plate movement.

But are these campi still moving today? This is one of the many questions that NASA and the European Space Agencys missions to Venus hope to answer, according to the Times.

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Venus May Still Be Geologically Active | Smart News - Smithsonian

A new study reveals the overwhelming extent of diversity in the South American country of Colombia which is home to approximately 20 per cent of all known butterfly species in the world.

The research, undertaken by the Natural History Museum in London and published on Tuesday comprised ofan international team of scientists. Together, they catalogued 3,642 species and 2,085 sub-species of butterflies, all of which were were registered in a document titled Checklist of Colombian Butterflies.

Blanca Huertas, the senior butterfly collection curator at theNatural History Museum and a member of the research team told AFP that more than 200 species of butterflies are found only in Colombia.

To ascertain this, researchers travelled across Colombia to analyse over 350,000 photographs and tookinto account information collated since the later part of 18th century.

"Colombia is a country with a great diversity of natural habitats, a complex and heterogeneous geography and a privileged location in the extreme northeast of South America," AFP cited the report as saying.

"These factors, added to the delicate public order in the last century in certain regions, has limited until now, the advancement of field exploration, it added.

Also read:How NASA's plans to send detergent to ISS could change space exploration

Over the last century, Colombia has seen intense armed conflict. Some areas in the country remain under the control of leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary groups and in many cases, drug lords. Many parts of the country still have little to no government presence.

Just between 2000 and 2019, Colombia has lost nearly 2.8 million hectares of forest land, according to data from the National Department of Planning.

Forest loss combined with inept governance isnt helping the cause of Colombias diversityand environmentalists in the country are calling for the country to take measures to protect its forests. To this end, Huertas believes starting by protecting butterflies could bethe first step.

Also read:Here's how you can watch the luminous 'Strawberry Supermoon' this Thursday

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Colombia is home to 20% of all butterfly species in the world, study finds - WION

Investment strategies continue as the U.S. and China each vie for dominance in AI and ML.

I was talking to a friend who is an expert in AI and he told me that he thought the U.S. was at a major inflection point, similar to the one we had after the U.S.S.R. launched its Sputnik satellite.

He reminded me that in 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite that took about 98 minutes to orbit the earth. According to Nasa's History Division, "That launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. While the Sputnik launch was a single event, it marked the start of the space age and the U.S.-U.S.S.R space race."

This led President Kennedy, in 1961, to propose that the U.S. should commit itself to achieve the goal, before that decade was out, of landing aman onthe moonand returning him safely to the Earth.

The Sputnik launch was considered an embarrassment to the U.S. and Congress spent $28 billion from 1960-1973 to make the U.S. the leader in the race to the moon and a leader in space exploration.

My friend believes the U.S. needs to have another Sputnik moment, but this time the threat comes from a high-tech challenge from China. China has emerged as a powerhouse in AI and ML research and is raising its tech R&D spending by 7% per year.

I have been very familiar with China's AI prowess and goals since I read a book on AI from Kai-Fu Lee. Kai-Fu Lee is one of the world's leading experts on China's rise in tech and has a deep understanding of China's AI program and leadership goals.

In Kai-Fu Lee's book, AI Superpowers-China, Silicon Valley and The New World Order, he reveals that, China has suddenly caught up to the U.S. at an astonishingly rapid and unexpected pace."

Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle understand this threat from China and are working on a range of legislative bills that could inject as much as $190 billion to target areas like AI, where China is committed to becoming the world leader in this technology.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara, who represents part of Silicon Valley, is a co-author of the 600-page legislation, the Endless Frontier Act, on pushing through a bipartisan effort that has been years in the making. Khanna and his co-authors, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., and Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis, are shepherding the bill through the Senate.

Rep. Khanna would like Congress to authorize $100 billion over five years for critical advancements in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cybersecurity, semiconductors, and other cutting-edge technologies.

According to the San Jose Mercury News,

"The United States still outspends China in R&D, spending $612 billion on research and development in 2019, compared to Chinas $514 billion. But the gap is narrowing. At the turn of the century, China was only spending $33 billion a year on R&D, while the United States was spending nearly 10 times that amount."

When my friend mentioned this Sputnik analogy, I thought he was going to say that it was to get U.S. government officials more focused on climate change, one of the growing threats to the U.S. and the world. But his perspective of this analogy's focus, especially on China's desire to become a world leader in areas like AI, is spot on.

China's interest in becoming the world leader in tech is a major threat to the U.S. and the world. A country that lives by its own rules and not by the rules of the international community unchecked has to be countered.

The U.S. has been the leader in tech and unfortunately, made it possible for China to become a competitive counterpart. The U.S. leadership and Congress must come together to pass the kind of legislation and aggressive budgets to keep the U.S. ahead of China. They need to make sure China cannot gain access to future tech invented here, and as much as possible, thwart China's goal to eventually become even more powerful in AI, ML, and semiconductors.

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The U.S. Wakes Up To Chinas AI Threat - Forbes

A lunar lander with strong San Antonio roots is headed to the far side of the moon, and it could help explain the origins of the man in the moon image thats visible from Earth.

NASA announced that it selected a Southwest Research Institute instrument suite to study the lunar crust, mantle and core in the 200-mile wide Schrdinger basin near the moons South Pole.

LITMS, pronounced litmus, is the San Antonio-based nonprofit institutes shorthand for Lunar Interior Temperature and Materials Suite. Its set to travel to the moon in 2024 or 2025 as part of a NASA program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services, which is rapidly expanding lunar exploration using U.S. companies.

Its one of two missions selected to go to the far side of the moon.

With LITMS, we hope to get a better understanding of the thermal evolution, differentiation and asymmetry of the Moon, said SwRIs Robert Grimm, LITMS principal investigator, in a statement. This will help us interpret how the lunar crust, mantle and core formed. And we can contrast these far-side measurements with those done by the near-side Apollo missions to unravel the origin of the Man in the Moon.

An artist's rendition of Southwest Research Institute's LITMS, pronounced litmus, which stands for Lunar Interior Temperature and Materials Suite. NASA selected the device to land on the far side of the moon.

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The research will help scientists better understand the moon for future exploration.

This can help us figure out how the Earth formed, how Mars formed, how Venus formed all these different planets all these planetary bodies formed, said David Stillman, a SwRI planetary geophysicist and the projects scientist. Just going to the moon and making these measurements at a bunch of different locations and seeing if there's differences.

LITMS will only weigh 20 kilograms, or roughly 44 pounds. The lander wont move once its on the lunar surface. Most of its instruments are designed only to survive the daylight half of a lunar day.

By the time the lander sets up on the moons surface, we're gonna have maybe 12 days of sunlight to do all this science, he said. The coolest part of our stuff is we have booms, and we shoot out electrodes, Stillman said.

LITMS will carry four instruments, also with complicated names and abbreviations.

On ExpressNews.com: UT San Antonio moon rock researchers seeking 'the ideal recipe' to build lunar bases

Texas Tech Universitys Lunar Instrumentation for Thermal Exploration with Rapidity, or LISTER, will measure heat flow on the moon using a pneumatic drill that can reach 10 feet into the lunar surface. The drill is like a stainless steel tape measure, according to Stillman. It uses puffs of pressurized air to move the moon dust away.

It will push its way in as far as it can, and then it will do a little puff of gas, and excavate and throw that stuff out of the hole, he said. Then it will push down as far as it can again and then do the same thing.

SwRIs Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder, or LMS, will measure the moons electrical and magnetic fields.

LMS has four electrodes, and they're kind of like a mortar, Stillman said. We just have a spring with a bunch of wire. And then we heat it up, and as soon as it hits 70 degrees Celsius, it shoots our electrode, which is the size of your fist, more than 20 meters away.

The University of California, Berkeleys Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment, or LuSEE, has booms that reach out from the lander to get accurate readings.

Jet Propulsion Laboratorys seismometer suite will monitor lunar ground noise and moonquakes. Its the only instrument onboard capable of surviving the bitter cold of the 14-day Lunar night.

With temperatures plunging to minus 173 Celsius, or about 343 degrees Fahrenheit, the lunar nights are difficult to survive.

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Besides a harsh environment, landing on the far side of the moon also complicates communicating with the spacecraft.

We're not going to have direct line of sight to where it landed, so in order to talk to your lander, you're going to have to upload that telemetry or comms to a spacecraft that's going around the moon, he said.

NASA has not selected the contractor or timing for the missions commercial space launch. Nor has it selected a contractor to build the lander that will carry the instruments.

LITMS and the seismic package are very complementary in providing a more complete picture of the lunar interior, Grimm said. Together, they are a pathfinder for a future lunar geophysical network, a global array of long-lasting instruments on the surface of the Moon.

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NASAs nod for SwRIs lunar research is the latest sign that San Antonios space exploration industry is growing.

Last month, NASA awarded San Antonio-based Astroport Space Technologies a contract to develop a furnace to liquefy moon dust, and a nozzle that will use the lava-like substance to create interlocking bricks. The goal is to use the bricks as construction materials of lunar landing pads.

Astroports research partner is the University of Texas at San Antonio, where scientists are studying how much energy is required to run the lunar furnaces and which types of moon dust work best for creating bricks.

Sam Ximenes, founder and CEO of Astroport, said the latest NASA and SwRI lunar mission is an excellent example of science leading the way to understanding the lunar environment for informing the engineering missions that would be needed when we begin constructing a longer-term human presence.

The research is once again demonstrating how San Antonio is at the forefront of space exploration, he added.

Brandon Lingle writes for the Express-News through Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. ReportforAmerica.org. brandon.lingle@express-news.net

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Lander with San Antonio roots headed to far side of moon - San Antonio Express-News