This September, after traveling billions of miles through our solar system, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will cruise past Earth with an extraordinary delivery. As it passes, it will release a mini-fridge size capsule containing a sample of primordial space rock collected from an asteroid located between the orbits of Earth and Mars.

OSIRIS-REx—the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer—is the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid. Scientists hope the pristine material it collected from asteroid Bennu in 2020—about half a pound of rubble and dust from the asteroid's surface—will provide a window into 4.5 billion years ago when the sun and planets were forming.

Before it can do that, the sample's protective capsule will withstand temperatures twice as hot as lava, and the second-fastest velocity ever achieved by a human-made object entering Earth's atmosphere.

After entering Earth's atmosphere at around 36 times the speed of sound, the capsule may eventually encounter wind, rain, and other weather conditions as it drops closer to the surface. Regardless of weather, it will land in the Great Salt Lake Desert, an arid landscape known for its scorching summer temperatures and its salt flats, the remnants of an ancient lakebed where crusty salt deposits coat the ground.

Between now and the mid-2030s, multiple space agencies hope to send crewed missions to the moon. of These plans all involve establishing bases around the moon's southern polar region, including the Artemis Base Camp and the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

These facilities will enable a "sustained program of lunar exploration and development," according to the NASA Artemis Program mission statement. In all cases, plans for building facilities on the surface call for a process known as In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), where local resources are used as building materials.

This presents a bit of a problem since not all lunar soil (regolith) is well-suited for construction. Much like engineering and construction projects here on Earth, builders need to know what type of soil they are building on and if it can be used to make concrete.

China, India and the U.S. have all achieved landing on the moon in the 2020s.

Once there, their eventual goal is to set up a base. But a successful base—along with the spacecraft that will carry people to it—must be habitable for humans. And a big part of creating a habitable base is making sure the heating and cooling systems work.

That's especially true because the ambient temperature of potential places for a base can vary widely. Lunar equatorial temperatures can range from -208°F to 250°F (-130°C to 120°C)—and similarly, from -225°F to 70°F (-153°C to 20°C) on Mars.

In 2011, the National Academies of Science published a report outlining research in the physical and life sciences that scientists would need to do for the U.S. space program to succeed. The report emphasized the need for research about building heating and cooling systems for structures in space.

I'm an engineering professor, and when that report came out, I submitted a research proposal to NASA. I wanted to study something called the liquid-vapor phenomenon. Figuring out the science behind this phenomenon would help with these big questions around keeping structures in space a comfortable and habitable temperature.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has only been operational for just over a year, but this isn't stopping the world's biggest space agency from discussing the next big space telescope that could serve as JWST's successor sometime in the future.