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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
The cockpit of an old MD-90 aircraft arrived at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, in March 2024. Parts will be used to build a simulator for NASA’s X-66, the demonstration aircraft for the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project.NASA/Steve Freeman NASA’s X-66 aircraft, the centerpiece of its Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, is taking the term “sustainable” to heart by reusing an old MD-90 cockpit as a base for its new X-66 simulator.
When airplanes are retired, they often wind up in “boneyards” — storage fields where they spend years being picked over for parts by manufacturers, researchers, engineers, and designers. That’s where the X-66 team found their new X-66 simulator cockpit, before sending it to NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.
The project will catalog, clean, and disassemble the MD-90 cockpit to use for the simulator. This is where the Simulation Engineering Branch at NASA Armstrong steps in. The team develops high-fidelity engineering simulators that allow pilots and engineers to run real-life scenarios in a safe environment.
The cockpit of an old MD-90 aircraft arrived at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, in March 2024. Parts will be used to build a simulator for NASA’s X-66, the demonstration aircraft for the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project.NASA/Steve Freeman As with any X-plane, a simulator allows researchers to test unknowns without risking the pilot’s safety or the aircraft’s structural integrity. A simulator also affords the team the ability to work out design challenges during the build of the aircraft, ensuring that the final product is as efficient as possible.
To assemble the X-66, the project team will use the airframe from another MD-90, shortening it, installing new engines, and replacing the wing assemblies with a truss-braced wing design.
The Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project is NASA’s effort to develop more efficient airframes as the nation moves toward sustainable aviation. In addition to the X-66’s revolutionary wing design, the project team will work with industry, academia, and other government organizations to identify, select, and mature sustainable airframe technologies.
The project seeks to inform the next generation of single-aisle airliner, the workhorse of commercial aviation fleets around the world. Boeing and NASA are partnering to develop the experimental demonstrator aircraft.
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Last Updated Jul 18, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
5 min read
NASA: Life Signs Could Survive Near Surfaces of Enceladus and Europa
Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, have evidence of oceans beneath their ice crusts. A NASA experiment suggests that if these oceans support life, signatures of that life in the form of organic molecules (e.g. amino acids, nucleic acids, etc.) could survive just under the surface ice despite the harsh radiation on these worlds. If robotic landers are sent to these moons to look for life signs, they would not have to dig very deep to find amino acids that have survived being altered or destroyed by radiation.
“Based on our experiments, the ‘safe’ sampling depth for amino acids on Europa is almost 8 inches (around 20 centimeters) at high latitudes of the trailing hemisphere (hemisphere opposite to the direction of Europa’s motion around Jupiter) in the area where the surface hasn’t been disturbed much by meteorite impacts,” said Alexander Pavlov of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, lead author of a paper on the research published July 18 in Astrobiology. “Subsurface sampling is not required for the detection of amino acids on Enceladus – these molecules will survive radiolysis (breakdown by radiation) at any location on the Enceladus surface less than a tenth of an inch (under a few millimeters) from the surface.”
The frigid surfaces of these nearly airless moons are likely uninhabitable due to radiation from both high-speed particles trapped in their host planet’s magnetic fields and powerful events in deep space, such as exploding stars. However, both have oceans under their icy surfaces that are heated by tides from the gravitational pull of the host planet and neighboring moons. These subsurface oceans could harbor life if they have other necessities, such as an energy supply as well as elements and compounds used in biological molecules.
Dramatic plumes, both large and small, spray water ice and vapor from many locations along the famed “tiger stripes” near the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute The research team used amino acids in radiolysis experiments as possible representatives of biomolecules on icy moons. Amino acids can be created by life or by non-biological chemistry. However, finding certain kinds of amino acids on Europa or Enceladus would be a potential sign of life because they are used by terrestrial life as a component to build proteins. Proteins are essential to life as they are used to make enzymes which speed up or regulate chemical reactions and to make structures. Amino acids and other compounds from subsurface oceans could be brought to the surface by geyser activity or the slow churning motion of the ice crust.
This view of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa was captured by JunoCam, the public engagement camera aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft, during the mission’s close flyby on Sept. 29, 2022. The picture is a composite of JunoCam’s second, third, and fourth images taken during the flyby, as seen from the perspective of the fourth image. North is to the left. The images have a resolution of just over 0.5 to 2.5 miles per pixel (1 to 4 kilometers per pixel).
As with our Moon and Earth, one side of Europa always faces Jupiter, and that is the side of Europa visible here. Europa’s surface is crisscrossed by fractures, ridges, and bands, which have erased terrain older than about 90 million years.
Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill processed the images to enhance the color and contrast.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing: Kevin M. Gill CC BY 3.0 To evaluate the survival of amino acids on these worlds, the team mixed samples of amino acids with ice chilled to about minus 321 Fahrenheit (-196 Celsius) in sealed, airless vials and bombarded them with gamma-rays, a type of high-energy light, at various doses. Since the oceans might host microscopic life, they also tested the survival of amino acids in dead bacteria in ice. Finally, they tested samples of amino acids in ice mixed with silicate dust to consider the potential mixing of material from meteorites or the interior with surface ice.
This image shows experiment samples loaded in the specially designed dewar which will be filled with liquid nitrogen shortly after and placed under gamma radiation. Notice that the flame-sealed test tubes are wrapped in cotton fabric to keep them together because test tubes become buoyant in liquid nitrogen and start floating around in the dewar, interfering with the proper radiation exposure. Candace Davison The experiments provided pivotal data to determine the rates at which amino acids break down, called radiolysis constants. With these, the team used the age of the ice surface and the radiation environment at Europa and Enceladus to calculate the drilling depth and locations where 10 percent of the amino acids would survive radiolytic destruction.
Although experiments to test the survival of amino acids in ice have been done before, this is the first to use lower radiation doses that don’t completely break apart the amino acids, since just altering or degrading them is enough to make it impossible to determine if they are potential signs of life. This is also the first experiment using Europa/Enceladus conditions to evaluate the survival of these compounds in microorganisms and the first to test the survival of amino acids mixed with dust.
The team found that amino acids degraded faster when mixed with dust but slower when coming from microorganisms.
“Slow rates of amino acid destruction in biological samples under Europa and Enceladus-like surface conditions bolster the case for future life-detection measurements by Europa and Enceladus lander missions,” said Pavlov. “Our results indicate that the rates of potential organic biomolecules’ degradation in silica-rich regions on both Europa and Enceladus are higher than in pure ice and, thus, possible future missions to Europa and Enceladus should be cautious in sampling silica-rich locations on both icy moons.”
A potential explanation for why amino acids survived longer in bacteria involves the ways ionizing radiation changes molecules — directly by breaking their chemical bonds or indirectly by creating reactive compounds nearby which then alter or break down the molecule of interest. It’s possible that bacterial cellular material protected amino acids from the reactive compounds produced by the radiation.
The research was supported by NASA under award number 80GSFC21M0002, NASA’s Planetary Science Division Internal Scientist Funding Program through the Fundamental Laboratory Research work package at Goddard, and NASA Astrobiology NfoLD award 80NSSC18K1140.
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Last Updated Jul 18, 2024 Editor wasteigerwald Contact wasteigerwald william.a.steigerwald@nasa.gov Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
Dennis Gallagher (ST13) reports receiving on 3/1/24, one gram of Apollo 16 regolith of 1 mm and smaller dust regolith from the Johnson Space Center (JSC) Apollo Archive. The material request is motivated by the planned NASA Artemis missions to the Moon’s south polar region where the surface is generally expected to be like that found at the Apollo 16 landing site. Electrostatic charging driven by the solar wind and ultraviolet light from the Sun is known to be important for small particles of lunar regolith that must be understood for potentially dust coated struts of the Human Lander System (HLS) that will cycle between the surface and Gateway. Presently, the charging properties of individual dust grains are not adequately characterized for this purpose. The measurements to be obtained by the MSFC Dusty Plasma Laboratory using Apollo 16 dust are intended to fill this knowledge gap are being obtained in support of the Gateway Cis-Lunar Dust Transfer Modeling and Analysis Task and HLS at JSC.
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By European Space Agency
Lunar I-Hab, the next European habitat in lunar orbit as part of the Gateway, has recently undergone critical tests to explore and improve human living conditions inside the space module.
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