Category Archives: Space Exploration

The Emirati-made Rashid Rover for the Lunar Mission. Image Credit: MBRSC/Seyyed Llata

Dubai: Two optical cameras that will provide high-resolution images in full high definition (HD) will be installed on Rashid Rover, which is set to land on the moons surface next year, the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) announced on Monday.

MBRSC has partnered with French space agency CNES (National Centre for Space Studies) for the Emirates Lunar Mission. Under the Emirati-French-agreement, CNES will provide MBRSC with two Caspex (Camera for space exploration) that can withstand vibrations during launch or landing.

Using microlenses and colour filter array, Caspex is based on the last generation of image sensors and has a dedicated high dynamic range (HDR) method to provide high-resolution and high-quality coloured images.

Panoramic visibility

According to MBRSC, one Caspex will be installed on top of the rovers mast to provide panoramic visibility of the rover surroundings while the rear-mounted CASPEX camera will deliver images of the lunar soil with high spatial resolution.

The latters images of the drive tracks will be analysed to determine wheel sinkage and to investigate the detailed wheel-soil interaction. Such data will be important to design the mobility systems of future rovers, MBRSC noted.

Yousuf Hamad AlShaibani, MBRSC director-general, said: The UAE aims to lead an innovative and sustainable exploration of the moon through the Emirates Lunar Mission. Our partnership with CNES is a continuation of the already great collaborative effort with France and we will continue to strengthen it further. We believe that collaboration is the way forward for space exploration, and the more we work together to tackle challenges for the good of humanity, the greater our collective prospects for the future.

Philippe Baptiste, chairman and CEO of CNES, added: I am glad to add today a new milestone and a new destination to the longstanding partnership between France and the UAE. With MBRSC we have developed a fruitful and mutually beneficial cooperation. It will allow us not only to take French technology to the Moon and bring back data for our scientists but most and foremost to strengthen the relations between our respective technology and scientific ecosystems.

Emirati rover

Rashid, an Emirati-made lunar rover named after the late Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, is the smallest and lightest rover to be deployed on the surface of the moon. Its height is 70cm, length is 50cm and width is 50cm. Its weight is approximately 10kg with payload.

Rashid will be launched next year, two years ahead of the original schedule. The exact landing site is yet to be revealed, but the rover will travel to a part of the moon that has never been reached before. Its mission is to better understand how lunar dust and rocks vary across the moon.

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Rashid Rover to have two full-HD cameras for space exploration - Gulf News

Investors approaching funds like the ARK Space Exploration ETF (ARKX)typically focus on space exploration and tourism.

While those are undoubtedly captivating concepts, ARKX offers more tangible appeal in the form of exposure to providers of satellite broadband services a complex market, but one that holds long-term potential for some ARKX holdings.

As ARK analyst Sam Korus points out, satellite broadband providers face several challenges, including bandwidth as a constraint on how many users a satellite system can adequately support, oversubscription scenarios, and costs consumers are willing to pay. For investors considering ARKX, the good news is that the satellite broadband market could be split into a pair of segments as it evolves.

ARKs research suggests that satellite broadband will evolve into two market segments, creating a global revenue opportunity of roughly $17 billion annually with a constellation of 12,000 satellites, says Korus. Ultimately SpaceX hopes to launch 42,000 satellites and the addressable market could grow to over $40 billion as bandwidth increases with more satellites.

As an actively managed fund a methodology that could prove particularly fruitful with space investing ARKX isnt constrained by an index, meaning it has some industry-level flexibility. Currently, the fund is positioned to capitalize on four space-related segments. That quartet includes orbital aerospace companies, where satellite firms reside.

Orbital aerospace firms are companies that launch, make, service, or operate platforms in the orbital space, including satellites and launch vehicles, according to the issuer.

Among publicly traded satellite broadband providers, Iridium (IRDM) is the fourth-largest holding in ARKX at a weight of 6.13%. Other companies with robust satellite industry exposure include Trimble (TRMB), which is ARKXs largest holding at 9.23%. Aerospace and defense contractors, several of which reside on the ARKX roster, also have satellite exposure.

As for the consumer side of satellite broadband, Elon Musks SpaceX, which is not yet a public company, is a player in this space. The companys ability to lure customers at varying price points could be telling with respect to the medium-term fate of satellite broadband service.

We believe one customer segment will pay roughly $75-$100 per month, and another $10-$20 per month, said Korus. Early adopters will be at the high end of the market, giving SpaceX the opportunity to drive costs down the satellite broadband learning curve and setting it up to tap into the low end of the market.

For more on disruptive technologies, visit our Disruptive Technology Channel.

The opinions and forecasts expressed herein are solely those of Tom Lydon, and may not actually come to pass. Information on this site should not be used or construed as an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy, or a recommendation for any product.

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Investing in the Potent Satellite Broadband Market - ETF Trends

Turkey plans to send a rover to the moon by the end of the decade using a domestically built rocket engine that will first fly to the moon in a test mission in 2023.

Speaking at the Global Space Exploration Conference (GLEX) 2021 in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Tuesday (June 16), Serdar Hseyin Yildirim, president of the Turkish Space Agency (TUA), discussed details of the country's space program, which was officially unveiled by Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in February this year.

The rover, which will be launched in 2028 or 2029, according to Yildirim, will land softly on the moon and collect scientific data on its surface.

Related: The United Arab Emirates' Hope mission to Mars in photos

The rocket that launches the moon rover will be domestically built, using a hybrid engine that is currently being developed in Turkey, Yildirim said. To help make sure it's ready for the rover launch, a prototype of the rocket will fly to the moon in late 2023, if all goes according to plan.

"We intend to use our own engine to reach the moon," Yildirim said. "But for this phase, our spacecraft will be brought to low Earth orbit with an international collaboration."

According to a report by the Turkish Anadolu Press Agency, the 2023 mission will make a rough landing on the moon, which will help Turkish engineers to gather data for the soft landing in the late 2020s.

Turkey also plans to send a Turkish citizen to the International Space Station in the coming years to conduct scientific experiments.

"We are trying to finalize our negotiations with the parties," Yildirim said. "In a few months they will be finalized, and we'll start the training process."

Turkey's National Space Program, published in February this year, also foresees the establishment of a local Turkish spaceport and the development of a domestic regional positioning and timing satellite system.

Turkey launched its space agency in 2018. According to the website of German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, the move was criticized at the time, as it took place amid an economic crisis. Supporters, however, claim the space program can motivate researchers and scientists to stay in the country instead of seeking opportunities abroad.

Details of the space program's budget have not yet been revealed.

The space program will allow Turkey to join an exclusive club of only a handful of countries capable of pulling off complex space exploration projects on their own. The announcement of the space program in February took place on the same day that the Emirates Mars Mission, of regional rival United Arab Emirates, successfully entered orbit around the Red Planet.

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Turkey aims to send rocket to moon in three years, land lunar rover by 2030 - Space.com

China's Chang'e 5 spacecraft returned fresh moon rock samples late last year, but the main science of the mission is still just getting underway.

Applications to borrow lunar samples delivered to Earth by Chang'e 5 in December are under review and will be decided soon, according to Jing Peng, deputy chief designer of the Chang'e-5 spacecraft system at the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST).

"There was a conference one week ago in China regarding the applications for lunar samples," Peng said, speaking on Thursday (June 17) at the Global Space Exploration (GLEX) conference held last week in St. Petersburg, Russia. The June 11 meeting reviewed 85 applications from 23 universities and scientific research institutes in China, according to China's Lunar Sample Management Office. International applications will also be considered.

Related: The latest news about China's space program

Samples available for loan can also be viewed and requested online at the Lunar Sample Information Database, hosted by the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC). Available samples include breccias, which are made of various fragments cemented together, as well as fine-grained soil, volcanic basalts and glass beads.

Peng said that while he has not been involved in analyzing the samples, colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have told him that the "age of the samples may be younger than the samples returned by the Apollo program. I think there will be more results in the near future." Confirming that rocks from this region are much younger would provide valuable new insights into the history of our nearest neighbor. Although Apollo moon rocks have allowed scientists to decipher the moon's early history in detail, without younger samples on Earth, more recent lunar activity is something of a blur.

In his presentation, Peng described the Chang'e 5 mission as China's most sophisticated space project to date. Peng detailed the exactly challenges of the complex, 23-day mission, including getting to and from the moon, landing in the targeted area in Oceanus Procellarum, blasting off from the lunar surface, docking two spacecraft in orbit around the moon, and executing a "skip" reentry, in which the return capsule first bounced off the Earth's atmosphere to slow down before reentering and landing.

Other key technologies Peng highlighted included automatic sampling using a scoop and a drill, transferring samples between spacecraft, and developing miniaturized, lightweight and durable components capable of performing exacting tasks.

The mission was also demanding in terms of the large amounts of fuel needed to overcome gravity to escape bodies like the Earth and the moon. The Long March 5 that launched the 18,078-lb. (8,200 kilograms) spacecraft weighed more than 940 tons (850 metric tons). However the final payload delivered by the Chang'e 5 return capsule was just 3.82 lbs. (1.73 kgs) of lunar samples.

While science is being conducted on the ground, the Chang'e 5 orbiter which released the return capsule just before arriving back to Earth is also still in action. Instead of reentering the atmosphere, the spacecraft headed to a gravitationally balanced area in space.

The spacecraft is now orbiting a region known as Sun-Earth Lagrange point 1, which is about 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth in the direction of the sun where it is carrying out observations and tests.

Asked if there are further plans for the orbiter, Peng said that the spacecraft may not have enough propellant to travel to destinations such as Venus.

"I don't think there will be many opportunities for the orbiter to perform more complex orbit maneuvers with other bodies," he said. "I think it will stay in Lagrange point 1 or the Earth-moon system."

Next, China is planning a sample return mission to near-Earth asteroid 469219 Kamo'oalewa (2016 HO3). That mission will build on Chang'e 5 technologies. Meanwhile, the Chang'e 5 backup mission, Chang'e 6, will launch around 2024 to collect more lunar samples, possibly from the lunar far side or south pole.

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China's moon rocks are ready to be loaned out for science research - Space.com

AfterAmazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced on June 7 that he would be flying to space, multiple petitions have been signed to prevent thebillionaire's return to Earth. Two of these petitions have collectively gathered over 56,000 signatures.

Bezos announced he would be going to space with his brother Mark Bezos when his space exploration company Blue Origin launches its first flight carrying humans. The rocket will take flight on July 20. "Ever since I was five years old, I've dreamed of traveling to space. On July 20, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend," Bezos said in a video onInstagram.

While Blue Origin has not divulged its pricing strategy for future trips, a Reuters report in 2018 suggested that the space company was planning to charge passengers at least USD 200,000 for the ride, based on a market study and other considerations.

Bezos is the founder of the space exploration company Blue Origin, which built New Shepard. The rocket is reusable and has a capacity for six passengers in its capsule. The Bezos brothers, one auction winner with USD 28 million to spare, and a fourth person will become the first crew aboard the reusable rocket for its 11-minute voyage to space.

After the announcement, multiple change.org petitions have already emerged and garnered thousands of signatures, in order to stop the billionaire from returning to the planet.

A user called 'Ric G' started a petition titled 'Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth' on change.org, a popular US-based petition website. "Billionaires should not exist on earth, or in space, but should they decide the latter they should stay there," reads the opening statement.

The petition, which was started two weeks ago, has received over 75,000 signatures and has become one of the top-signed petitions on the website.

Another petition that echoes the same sentiment has accumulated almost 20,000 signatures.

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Thousands sign petition to stop Jeff Bezos from returning to Earth from space trip, reason will leave you in - DNA India

Turkey is in talks with three countries as it seeks help in developing a space port in Somalia and a rocket to carry out lunar landings, according to the head of its space agency.

Serdar Huseyin Yildirim, head of the Turkish Space Agency, made his comments to the Sputnik news agency on the sidelines of the Global Space Exploration Conference, held in St Petersburg between the 14 and 18 of June.

Although he did not say which countries were involved, his remarks suggested Russia was one of them. We could work with Russia in many areas, on the spaceport, on rocket engines. We discussed the possibility of Russia providing assistance in the construction of our spaceport. They have a great deal of experience in this area, both in launch pads and spaceports themselves, Yildirim commented.

It was reported in February that Ankara was considering the construction of a spaceport in Somalia as part of a $1bn plan to develop a space exploration programme.

According to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, this is aimed at carrying out a hard landing on the Moon in 2023, the centenary of the founding of modern Turkey. This mission would allow Turkish scientists to gain experience for a soft landing in 2028 followed by the carrying out of scientific experiments and the deployment of an exploration vehicle.

Yildirim added that Turkey had held talks with the Centre for Operation of Space Ground-Based Infrastructure, a subsidiary of Russian space agency Roscosmos, and more detailed planning may begin in the next year, once the location of the spaceport is finalised.

Turkey launched its space agency in December 2018. In 2020, it announced the testing of a rocket developed by defence contractor Roketsan.

It is also planning to send a Turkish astronaut to the International Space Station, and launch satellites to set up its own global positioning system.

In an interview with Sputnik last year, Yildirim indicated that the country's space agency was working on nearly 30 separate projects, and that it has held talks with about 20 countries on space cooperation, including Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, Japan, China, Pakistan, India and Azerbaijan.

Image: President Erdogan announced Turkeys $1bn space programme in February (Dreamstime)

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Turkey in talks over Somalia space station and missions to the Moon - News - GCR - GCR

Explore to realise: Space development in Japan

National Research and Development Agency JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), was born through the merger of three separate institutions; the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), the National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan (NAL) and the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA). It was designated as a core agency to successfully support the Japanese governments overall aerospace development and future utilisation, be it anything from conducting basic research and development to the implementation of programmes.

The JAXA corporate slogan is Explore to Realise, which reflects its management philosophy of utilising space and the sky to work towards a safe and affluent society. JAXA states that Explore indicates the original point of our activities and is also part of our agencys name, while Realise expresses our philosophy of becoming an agency of realising a safe and affluent society.

YAMAKAWA Hiroshi, the President of JAXA, believes that everyone within the organisation should share the following five key principles to continue challenging the frontiers of human knowledge, both in Japan and worldwide:

It is these five principals that enable the agency to remain at the forefront of space exploration. The biggest challenges of space science are to unravel the many mysteries of the structure and evolution of the universe, the processes of planet formation, and the origin of life. JAXA is currently implementing a number of major Research and Development Projects working towards this, such as GREAT: GRound station for deep space Exploration And Telecommunication, and the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), just to name a few.

It is important to promote space and aeronautics as an integral part of society by making them more valuable and connected with daily life. Satellites are one way in which space research and technology can benefit our day to day. Japanese satellites now in orbit are performing missions in a wide range of areas, such as playing an important role in assessing and analysing abnormal weather patterns.

Moreover, JAXA project Global Change Observation Mission (GCOM) uses satellites to observe all the Earths environmental changes for present and future generations. GCOM aims to construct, use, and verify systems that enable continuous global-scale observations (for 10 to 15 years) of effective geophysical parameters for elucidating global climate change and water circulation mechanisms. The GCOM mission consists of two satellites:

JAXA truly values international cooperation, and currently, most of their projects have been conducted through international cooperation. A recent example of this is the KiboCUBE Programme, a collaboration between JAXA and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). Launched in 2015 and recently extended until the end of December 2024, it provides developing countries with opportunities to deploy CubeSats from the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo of the International Space Station (ISS). Through KiboCUBE cooperation programme, JAXA and UNOOSA together aim to contribute to the capacity building of space-related technology in developing countries.

Furthermore, international cooperation between the United States and Japan began in 1969, when The Japan-U.S. Joint Communique on cooperation in space development was exchanged. Since then, JAXA has been participating in international projects, which have been mainly led by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) such as the International Space Station, by dispatching Japanese astronauts on Space Shuttle missions, earth observations and scientific satellite missions.

JAXA aims to continue exploring the future for economic development, improvement of the quality of life, and safety and security for Japan, and furthermore, for sustainable development of mankind, expanding knowledge, as well as to exploring new fields.

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Explore to realise: Space development in Japan space development - Open Access Government

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.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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