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Category: space travel – Page 365

By Amy Woodyatt, CNN—Wed August 7, 2019

Thousands of tardigrades—also known as ‘water bears’ or ‘moss piglets’—were on board the Beresheet spacecraft when it crash landed on the moon in April.

(CNN)You’ve heard of men on the moon — but what about moss piglets?

Thousands of tardigrades – also known as “water bears” or “moss piglets” — were on board the Beresheet spacecraft when it crash landed on the moon in April.
The tiny creatures are incredibly hardy and can survive extremely low temperatures and harsh conditions– and The Arch Mission Foundation, which sent them into space, believes some may have survived.
Tardigrades are pudgy little animals no longer than one millimeter. They live in water or in the film of water on plants like lichen or moss, and can be found all over the world in some of the most extreme environments, from icy mountains and polar regions to the balmy equator and the depths of the sea.
Tardigrades live all over the world in some of the most extreme environments.

Tardigrades live all over the world in some of the most extreme environments.
In an attempt to create a “Noah’s ark” or a “back-up” for the Earth, non-profit organization The Arch Mission sent a lunar library — a stack of DVD-sized disks that acts as an archive of 30 million pages of information about the planet — to the moon. Along with the library, Arch Mission sent human DNA samples and a payload of tardigrades, which had been dehydrated, into space.
“We chose them because they are special. They are the toughest form of life we know of. They can survive practically any planetary cataclysm. They can survive in the vacuum of space, they can survive radiation,” Nova Spivack, co-founder of the Arch Mission Foundation, told CNN.
Bill Nye's experimental spacecraft that sails on sunlight declares mission success

Bill Nye’s experimental spacecraft that sails on sunlight declares mission success
Tardigrades have eight legs with claws at the end, a brain and central nervous system, and a sucker-like pharynx behind their mouth, which can pierce food.
The Arch Mission put the creatures into a state of “suspended animation,” where the body dries out and the metabolism slows to as little as 0.01% of its normal rate.
The Arch Mission also sent a 30 million-page library along for the ride.

The Arch Mission also sent a 30 million-page library along for the ride.
“In that state you can later rehydrate them in a laboratory and they will wake up and be alive again,” Spivack explained.
Although the animals won’t be able to reproduce or move around in their dehydrated state — if they have survived the crash — if rehydrated they could come back to life years later.
“We don’t often get a chance to land life on the moon that we decided to seize the day and send some along for the ride,” Spivack added.
Researchers hope that along with the tardigrades, the majority of the information from the lunar library survived the impact of the crash — and could be used to regenerate human life in millions of years.
“Best-case scenario is that the little library is fully intact, sitting on a nice sandy hillside on the moon for a billion years. In the distant future it might be recovered by our descendants or by a future form of intelligent life that might evolve long after we’re gone,” Spivack said.
“From the DNA and the cells that we included, you could clone us and regenerate the human race and other plants and animals,” he added.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/07/world/water-bear-space-intl-scli-scn/index.html

My regular readers appreciate the fact that NASA is partnering with a number of commercial space businesses to permanently expand the human frontier into cis-Lunar space. While $20 billion in federal funding drives NASA’s amazing programs, the agency doesn’t get that money without strong public support. NASA has also long been supported by the National Space Society, a group founded by Werner von Braun. I’m proud to represent NSS as their Vice President of Space Development and to have chaired their International Space Development Conference this year. I’m also a huge fan of the Moon Village Association, which is helping to pave an international path for lunar settlement. The Southern California Commercial Spaceflight Initiative, which I direct at USC, hosted both those groups in a fantastic event last year. I’m excited to note that we will bring in the Mars Society this fall. That organization, founded by Robert Zubrin, leads the push for our next step, colonizing the Red Planet. You may however, be less familiar with the small group of aspirational space visionaries already working on conquering the stars, or with Tau Zero, the foundation dedicated to achieving that most audacious goal.

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In the last week alone, SpaceX’s twin orbital Starship prototypes have made some truly jaw-dropping progress. Onlookers have witnessed Florida’s Starship push through a rapid growth spurt, while the company’s Texas team has begun to install propellant tank bulkheads and work on a triple-Raptor thrust structure.

Meanwhile, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has suggested that one or both of the orbital-class Starship prototypes could be “almost ready to fly” by August 24th, the date of the CEO’s next official update on Starship (formerly BFR and ITS). Although the actual challenge of building a massive, orbital-class launch vehicle is far subtler than the visible steelwork needed to build its primary structure and pressure vessels, the veritable leaps forward made in both Texas and Florida in the last 7–10 days are extremely encouraging signs.

Starting off in Boca Chica, Texas, SpaceX’s team of engineers and technicians have been simultaneously handling Starhopper’s first untethered flight test (completed on July 25th) and building the facility’s orbital-class Starship prototype. Most significantly, after a few days of preparation, what is likely the Texas Starship’s first bulkhead was lowered inside its ~25m-tall (80 ft) barrel section, composed of the spacecraft’s propulsion section and propellant tanks.

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Like a misshapen potato chip, our home galaxy is warped. A new 3D map brings the contorted structure of the Milky Way’s disk into better view, thanks to measurements of special stars called Cepheids, scientists report in the Aug. 2 Science.

Making 3D measurements of the galaxy requires estimating how far away stars are from Earth, typically a matter of guesswork. But unlike other stars, Cepheids vary in brightness over time in a particular way that can be used to determine a precise distance to each star.

Although the Milky Way’s disk is usually depicted as flat, previous observations had revealed that the galaxy is curved at its edges. The new study shows that that the Milky Way is even more warped than scientists had thought, says astronomer Dorota Skowron of the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw. If you took a spaceship into deep space and looked back at our galaxy, says Skowron, “you could see by eye” that it’s misshapen.

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A number of NASA scientists are currently researching the feasibility of warp drive (and EMdrive and a number of other modes of faster than light travel); however, most scientists think that such forms of space travel simply aren’t viable, thanks to the fundamental physics of our universe.

“Routine travel among the stars is impossible without new discoveries regarding the fabric of space and time, or capability to manipulate it for our needs,” says Neil deGrasse Tyson, the “Cosmos famous” astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, said “By my read, the idea of a functioning warp drive remains far-fetched, but the real take-away is that people are thinking about it — reminding us all that the urge to explore continues to run deep in our species.”

There have been hints the past few years that NASA may be on the path to discovering warp bubbles that could make the local universe accessible for human exploration. NASA scientists may be close announcing they may have broken the speed of light. According to state-of-the art theory, a warp drive could cut the travel time between stars from tens of thousands of years to weeks or months.

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