About 85 percent of the drinking water on the International Space Station has been recycled. How can astronauts be sure it’s sufficiently free from microbes?
When strange fungi grow on the walls inside the station, how can they make sure it’s benign without sending samples all the way back to Earth?
The answer lies in a small DNA sequencer and the Biomolecule Sequencer investigation, which set out to study how well sequencing works in microgravity.
Over the weekend, ISS astronaut Kate Rubins successfully sequenced samples of a mouse, bacteria, and virus, establishing the MinION sequencing device as a valuable new tool for space science.
“Onboard sequencing makes it possible for the crew to know what is in their environment at any time,” NASA microbiologist Sarah Castro-Wallace said in a press release. “That allows us on the ground to take appropriate action — do we need to clean this up right away, or will taking antibiotics help or not? We can resupply the station with disinfectants and antibiotics now, but once crews move beyond the station’s low Earth orbit, we need to know when to save those precious resources and when to use them.”
Housekeeping is vital in a closed environment like the ISS, and the sequencer will mainly be used for testing microbial activity and filtration systems. Bu, when future missions land on distant bodies, the MinION may help astronauts detect signs of alien life.
“The goal is to take a technique widely used here on Earth and test it in a spaceflight environment of the ISS,” said NASA’s Johnson Space Center’s Kristen John, “so that one day it can possibly be used in crew health applications or even in the detection of life on Mars.”
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.