Seeds in space: Plant research on Artemis I mission
Friday, 26 August 2022 16:14
How will we grow food in space? That's one question Michigan State University's Federica Brandizzi has been particularly interested in solving.
Brandizzi, an MSU Foundation Professor in the College of Natural Science and the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, will be sending seeds on the Artemis I mission to better understand how to grow food during space travel.
"This is really about understanding how we can establish and sustain life outside of this planet," Brandizzi said. "We need to have plants that can survive long-term space travel for generations."
But plants grow differently in space than they do on Earth. Over the past few decades, scientists have been working to compensate for those changes by getting a better understanding of plant biology and development away from our home planet.
From previous experiments, scientists have learned that space flight affects organisms' building blocks like amino acids that keep seedlings strong on Earth. The same amino acids would also be nutritious for people who eat the plants.
So Brandizzi's lab has selected seeds that are enriched with those amino acids and is sending those into space along with regular seeds.
How to watch NASA's Artemis I moon rocket launch: TV schedule, streaming info
Friday, 26 August 2022 15:49
Fifty years after the last Apollo mission, NASA is again aiming for the moon. The Artemis I mission will blast off Monday morning from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
"Artemis I will be an uncrewed flight test that will provide a foundation for deep-space exploration and demonstrate our commitment to extend human existence to the moon, and on to Mars," Stephanie Schierholz, NASA press secretary, said at a briefing this month.
Monday's launch will be the first in a series of "increasingly complex" missions that will culminate with a manned moon landing planned for 2025. NASA has said the Artemis missions will include the first woman and first person of color to land on the moon.
NASA workers have spent the past several days staging the massive rocket on its pad and preparing it for launch. The mission will take 42 days, three hours and 20 minutes to complete, according to NASA. The Orion spacecraft is set for splashdown near Baja, California, after it returns from orbiting the moon on Oct. 10.
NASA Artemis I launch schedule
New research sheds light on when Mars may have had water
Friday, 26 August 2022 13:17
Scientists on NASA's Perseverance mission made a surprising discovery about the composition of rock in Jezero Crater, one that will help them get a better idea of when water existed on Mars, and ultimately, help them understand if the red planet was ever habitable to microbial life.
"The SuperCam instrument suite of remote chemical and mineralogical tools on the Perseverance rover has made Quantum Dot instrument enables spacecraft-as-sensor concept
Friday, 26 August 2022 13:17
In NASA's hunt for water and resources beyond Earth, a new technology could coat the "skin" of a satellite, turning its entire surface into a sensor that tallies the chemicals present on distant planets.
Solving the mysteries of our home planet, solar system, and beyond is a key priority for NASA, and the new sensor could be a powerful tool in the investigation. Mahmooda Sultana, an instru Russia's only female cosmonaut says 'ready' for Crew Dragon flight
Friday, 26 August 2022 13:17
Russia's only active female cosmonaut, Anna Kikina, said Friday she was ready for her upcoming flight to the International Space Station aboard Space X's Crew Dragon.
The flight, scheduled for October 3, is set to go ahead despite soaring tensions between Moscow and Washington over Russia's military intervention in Ukraine.
Kikina, a 37-year-old engineer, will be only the fifth professi Lunar mining and Moon land claims fall into a gray area of international law
Friday, 26 August 2022 13:17
It's been 50 years since humans last visited the Moon, and even robotic missions have been few and far between. But the Earth's only natural satellite is about to get crowded.
At least six countries and a flurry of private companies have publicly announced more than 250 missions to the Moon to occur within the next decade. Many of these missions include plans for permanent lunar bases and As early Sun moved through Milky Way Earth's first continents formed
Friday, 26 August 2022 13:17
A new study of zircon crystals from two of Earth's oldest continents indicates that the formation of Earth's continental crust goes through cycles, with periods of increased crust production roughly every 200 million years, corresponding to the solar system's transit through the four primary spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. According to the study published in the journal Geology yesterday, r Radar images from Perseverance reveal underground surprises
Friday, 26 August 2022 13:17
After a tantalizing year-and-a-half wait since the Mars Perseverance Rover touched down on our nearest planetary neighbor, new data is arriving - and bringing with it a few surprises.
The rover, which is about the size of car and carries seven scientific instruments, has been probing Mars' 30-mile-wide Jezero crater, once the site of a lake and an ideal spot to search for evidence of ancie The sands of Mars are green as well as red, rover Perseverance discovers
Friday, 26 August 2022 13:17
The accepted view of Mars is red rocks and craters as far as the eye can see. That's much what scientists expected when they landed the rover Perseverance in the Jezero Crater, a spot chosen partly for the crater's history as a lake and as part of a rich river system, back when Mars had liquid water, air and a magnetic field.
What the rover found once on the ground was startling: Rather th Perseverance Makes New Discoveries in Mars' Jezero Crater
Friday, 26 August 2022 13:17
Scientists got a surprise when NASA's Perseverance Mars rover began examining rocks on the floor of Jezero Crater in spring of 2021: Because the crater held a lake billions of years ago, they had expected to find sedimentary rock, which would have formed when sand and mud settled in a once-watery environment. Instead, they discovered the floor was made of two types of igneous rock - one that for A World of Firsts
Friday, 26 August 2022 13:17
The Mars 2020 Mission is pushing the boundaries of what is possible on Mars. The most incredible part of working on Mars 2020, for me, has been the versatility of both the hardware and the operations team to push our spacecraft to achieve things they were not originally designed for.
The first example of this was the surprise extension of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter's operations. Ingenui The PI's Perspective: Extending Exploration and Making Distant Discoveries
Friday, 26 August 2022 13:17
New Horizons remains healthy from its position deep in the Kuiper Belt, even as it speeds farther and farther from the Earth and Sun by about 300 million miles per year. The spacecraft is about 54 times farther from the Sun than Earth, which is about two billion miles farther out than our first science flyby target, Pluto, and about a billion miles farther out than Arrokoth, the Kuiper Belt obje JWST makes first unequivocal detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet atmosphere
Friday, 26 August 2022 13:17
For the first time, astronomers have found unambiguous evidence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet (a planet outside our solar system).
The discovery, accepted for publication in Nature and posted online August 25, demonstrates the power of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to deliver unprecedented observations of exoplanet atmospheres.
Natalie Batalha, professor ESA Open Day at ESTEC on Sunday 2 October
Friday, 26 August 2022 12:35
Save the date: this year’s 11th annual ESA Open Day at ESTEC in the Netherlands is confirmed to take place on Sunday 2 October. One of a string of ‘ESA Days’ across Member States, this is the day when the gates of the Agency’s technical heart will be thrown open to the general public, to see space hardware and testing facilities and meet space scientists, engineers and ESA astronauts.
Godspeed, Uhura: A bit of Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols will go to space
Friday, 26 August 2022 12:07
Nichelle Nichols, who blazed a trail for Black actors as Lieutenant Uhura on the original "Star Trek," never got to go to space while she was alive—but her ashes and her DNA are due to reach the final frontier as early as this year.
The symbolic samples are scheduled to fly beyond the moon, along with the ashes of other dearly departed Star Trek pioneers such as James Doohan ("Scotty"); Majel Barrett Roddenberry ("Nurse Chapel"); the TV series' creator, Gene Roddenberry; and visual-effects wizard Douglas Trumbull.
To top it all off, Nichols' memorial journey will begin with the launch of a Vulcan rocket. "I'm sure she would have much preferred to go on the shuttle," said her son, Kyle Johnson, "but this was a pretty close second."
The "Enterprise" memorial mission is being organized by Houston-based Celestis, which has been making arrangements to fly its customers' cremated remains for a quarter-century.