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VIDEO: Standard refrigerators use vapor compression to cool down your food. But in space, there is no gravity to keep vapors and liquids secure. Purdue researchers have worked with NASA, Air. view more
Credit: Alain Bucio/Air Squared Inc., ZERO-G (www.gozerog.com), Purdue University
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. Astronauts have been going to space since 1961, but they still don t have a refrigerator to use for keeping food cold on long missions to the moon or Mars.
Through experiments conducted in microgravity, a team of engineers from Purdue University, Air Squared Inc., and Whirlpool Corporation has shown that a prototype they developed could potentially overcome the challenges of getting a traditional fridge to work in space just as well as it does on Earth.
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IMAGE: Glaucio Paulino and Emily Sanders, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers, are co-authors on the paper. view more
Credit: Candler Hobbs, Georgia Tech
A mollusk and shrimp are two unlikely marine animals that are playing a very important role in engineering. The bodies of both animals illustrate how natural features, like the structures of their bones and shells, can be borrowed to enhance the performance of engineered structures and materials, like bridges and airplanes. This phenomenon, known as biomimetics, is helping advance structural topology research, where the microscale features found in natural systems are being mimicked.
In a recent paper published by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), a new approach to structural topology optimization is outlined that unifies both design and manufacturing to create novel microstructures, with potential applications ranging
Credit: Pavel Odinev (Skoltech)
Researchers from Skoltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have analyzed several dozen options to pick the best one in terms of performance and costs for the last mile of a future mission to the Moon - actually delivering astronauts to the lunar surface and back up to the safety of the orbiting lunar station. The paper was published in the journal
Acta Astronautica.
Ever since December 1972, when the crew of Apollo 17 left the lunar surface, humans have been eager to return to the Moon. In 2017, the US government launched the Artemis program, which intends to bring the first woman and the next man to the lunar south pole by 2024. The Artemis mission will use a new orbital platform, dubbed the Lunar Gateway, which is going to be a permanent space station from which reusable modules will bring astronauts back to the Moon. This new approach requires a reanalysis of the optimal landing approaches; the private companies contracted by NA
Swab samples of 8 surfaces aboard the International Space Station have led to the identifying of 4 strains of bacteria, 3 of which belong to a newly discovered novel species within the genus Methylobacterium. According to researchers, these new strains might be useful in helping future space missions grow food in extreme environments.
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Credit: Rafael Luis Méndez Peña/Sciworthy.com
A researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is the lead author of a study with proposals for technosignatures -evidence for the use of technology or industrial activity in other parts of the Universe- for future NASA missions. The article, published in the specialized journal
Acta Astronautica, contains the initial conclusions of a meeting of experts in the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, sponsored by the space agency to gather advice about this topic.
In the article, several ideas are presented to search for technosignatures that would indicate the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, from the most humdrum, such as the presence of industrial pollution in the atmosphere or large swarms of satellites, to hypothetical gigantic space engineering work, such as heat shields to fend off climate change, or Dyson spheres for optimum use of the light from the local star. Some of the propo