Science

A new type of crystal that absorbs heat when released from extreme pressure could lead to climate-friendly refrigerators and air conditioners

Cracking the chicken-and-egg problem of utilizing resources in space has been a difficult challenge for over half a century. Getting enough infrastructure built up is necessary to collect those resources effectively, but doing so is too expensive without using the resources themselves. Trying to crack that problem has been the focus of a variety of space exploration enthusiasts, and one of them, Don Barker, is currently the Gateway HALO Utilization & Visiting Vehicle Integration Lead at ARES Corporation. He published a paper in 2020 that detailed how the space exploration industry could use a modified version of a framework from the oil and gas industry, which he calls the Planetary Resource Management System (PRMS), to calculate where we should focus on settlement efforts.

PRMS is set up as a two-step process: finding resources and then developing the technology to utilize them. Ideally, those technologies would advance to a point where those resource processes would be commercially viable. Let’s look at the process of finding the resource first.

The most basic level of resource finding is a remote sensing picture around 100m or more per pixel. This can be done with a relatively good camera on board an orbiting spacecraft. Next up would be a remote image between 5m and 100m per pixel, combined with geophysical evidence that a resource is available. Importantly, this would be combined with a resource assessment that includes estimations like economic impact and technological availability.

Fraser discusses what ISRU is and why it’s important.

A final step of the PRMS’s “prospecting criteria” is a remote sensing image of less than 5m per pixel resolution, geophysical evidence of a resource’s presence, and proof that it is accessible using current technology. This would again be combined with an assessment of the economic viability of recovery to ensure that the effort would be supported in the long term.

Technology, such as surface miners or extraterrestrial drilling rigs, enables the accessibility of the resources the prospecting projects would find. Three categories of recoverable resources – possible, probable, and proved – go along with the three categories of prospecting listed above. The framework also uses a metric called Estimated Ultimate Recovery (EUR) to reflect how much of a potential resource deposit could ultimately be mined. 

Calculating the various numbers for a deposit of a given material (such as water ice on the Moon), the framework can be combined with overall mission architecture and human exploration goals to determine the importance of that particular deposit to “mission success.” This is where things get tricky, as “mission success” is primarily defined by whoever pays for that mission.

ISRU would be a critical technology in any crewed Mars mission.

NASA is the largest funder of these types of projects for now, but even they don’t necessarily abide by this framework. Last year, they canceled the one rover project, VIPER, which could have added to our prospecting knowledge of the lunar south pole. Such a lack of foresight frustrated Dr. Barker, who bemoans the lack of structured support for permanently implementing a human presence off the planet rather than scientific outposts similar to McMurdo station in Antarctica. 

For now, that is the best we can hope for in terms of a sustained human presence in space – the main driving force behind Artemis, NASA’s project to get humans back to the Moon, is to set up a scientific outpost rather than start utilizing resources to supply a permanent habitat. However, the agency has done some research on that topic. VIPER would have been a great addition to that research, and the agency claims that other missions will cover its scientific objectives. But suppose it continues to cut funding to programs that could help implement the framework. In that case, a different organization will likely have to take on the mantle of utilizing resources in situ. 

SpaceX seems to be the leader in that area, but it is currently focused, rightfully, on building bigger, better, and cheaper rockets. If and when it is able to more closely focus on its stated goal of making humanity interplanetary, then at least it will have a framework for utilizing the resources needed to do so.

Learn More:
DC Barker – Lunar and off Earth resource drivers, estimations and the development conundrum
UT – What is ISRU, and How Will it Help Human Space Exploration?
UT – NASA Wants to Learn to Live Off the Land on the Moon
UT – Researchers Developed a Test Bed For Separating Valuable Material on the Moon

Lead Image:
ISRU system concept for autonomous construction on Mars.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The post Using an Oil Industry Framework to Map Space Resources appeared first on Universe Today.

A robotic hand uses fingertip sensors and AI to determine how firmly to grip before closing in on an object, overcoming a persistent problem for prosthetics

This is the third and last of a series of posts on the misguided concept of “agency and purpose in biology,” which one can take as the statement that “organisms have goals, and guide their own development and evolution towards those goals”.

In my first post, on December 23, I noted that the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) was spending millions of dollars funding grants on the science of “purpose and agency”. I pointed out one JTF  grant that just ended, which handed out $14.5 million to a consortium of investigators to study this topic.  And the JTF intends to continue funding this area:

Science of purpose. We are looking for experimental and theoretical research projects that will provide insight into the purposive, goal-directed, or agential behaviors that characterize organisms and various components of living systems. Researchers who have familiarity with our ongoing work in this area are especially encouraged to apply.

If you know the JTF, you’ll understand why they keep replenishing a trough full of grant money for such studies, for John Templeton (a mutual-fund billionaire and a believer) funded his Foundation with the intent of showing that science itself gave evidence for “spiritual reality”, aka a god or gods.  Although some of the investigators supping at the trough deny that they’re engaged in teleology, much less giving evidence for divinity, all of their work feeds into the JTF’s mission, and the authors of an article just published online at the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (JEB) agree: the idea of teleology sneaks into many of these papers.

In my second post, on December 26, I analyzed one of the JTF-funded papers often cited to support the idea of agency and purpose in organisms, a paper in BioEssays by Sonia E. Sultan et al. I found it vacuous and intellectually confusing, mistaking “purpose” and “agency” for the results of natural selection and, in the end, making the ID-friendly argument that neo-Darwinism cannot explain the origins of “novel, complex traits”. That assertion alone discredits the paper, for the one paper that actually tried, using conservative assumptions, to mathematically model the origin of a complex trait (the camera eye), did so very successfully. No problems encountered! The purpose-and-agency folks’ view is that “since we don’t fully understand how an eye/wing/brain evolved, there must have been something beyond natural selection involved.”  I suspect you know the fallacy of this argument.

Here are two concepts of agency advanced by Sultan et al and quoted in the paper below:

● “Biological agency—the capacity of living systems […] to participate in their own development, maintenance, and function” (Sultan et al 2022, p. 1);

● “Organisms themselves actively shape their own structure and function” (Sultan et al 2022, p. 4);

Now, a paper by James DiFrisco and Richard Gawne, published in JEB, takes apart the whole misguided notion and program of “agency and purpose” in evolution, and cites a lot of papers that tried to advance misguided ideas similar to those of Sultan et al. The title of the new paper is below, but if you click on it you will go to a truncated version of the article. However, you  can read the entire paper as a pdf file available for free here.

Here are what I take as the paper’s important points:

A.) The idea that organisms direct their own development and evolution through some nebulous, non-neo-Darwinian process is incorrect. Everything touted as “purposeful” and “the results of agency” can be explained by natural selection molding organisms’ responses to a changing environment, both within one lifetime or across generations. As DiFrisco and Gawne say, goal-directedness “is an adaptation due to natural selection.”  In my own example, cats and other mammals often grow longer fur during cold seasons because natural selection has favored genes that give organisms the capacity to put out more fur when their bodies detect cold weather. This is simple natural selection, and there is no “purpose” or “agency” involved.

B.)  Some of the papers on purpose and agency aim to “rescucitate the Aristotelian view of biological purpose and teleology as real rather than merely apparent”, so some authors really do have a teleological bent, one that you can find in some works of the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.”

C.) The agency and purpose trope is, in the end, a metaphor that does no explanatory work nor promotes further research. Only the framework of neo-Darwinism can help us understand the origin of adaptations.

D.) The only “true” purpose and agency we see in biology is that which we see in the cognition of organisms capable of responding to environmental challenges by thinking rather than by a mechanical response.  But even the p&a authors are the first to aver that this is not the sense in which they use these terms. In truth, as a hard determinist I see even cognition as a mechanical process and not something different in principle from a bacterium moving towards food, but this is not so important in this debate since the “cognition” view of purpose isn’t the subject of scientific work by the Templeton-funded authors.

I’ll quote the authors’ own conception of their aims as given in the JEB paper:

Box 1: The central claims of this paper.

1. An organism’s capacity for goal-directed behavior does not itself explain any biological phenomena. Apparently goal-directed behaviors are, instead, something to be explained as an evolved characteristic of biological systems.

2. The capacity for goal-directed behavior (outside of human cognition, which can set arbitrary, novel goals) is explained by Darwinian natural selection acting in populations of individuals.

3. Notions such as self-determination, or the idea that the whole organism is a cause of its own developmental or physiological processes, are either empirically untestable, or restatements of ordinary questions about which causal mechanisms at which scales influence events.

4. Downward causation and context-dependence are “mechanistic” in the sense relevant to experimental biology. They are not mysterious processes that require adopting the teleological form of investigation provided by an agency perspective.

5. Rejection of molecular reductionism or determinism does not necessitate a commitment to the idea of biological agency. Researchers need not embrace the agency perspective in order to acknowledge the importance of multi-level complexity, emergence, and downward causation.

6. The idea that biological goal-directedness is a product of natural selection rather than the inherent agency of organisms does not require commitment to the idea that all traits are adaptations. It is compatible with genetic drift, mutation, and developmental constraints playing an important role in evolution.

7. Agency is a psychological concept with origins in heuristic ascriptions of intentionality. Accordingly, it is applicable only where psychological explanations are useful—i.e., when explaining the behavior of humans and possibly other neurologically complex organisms such as primates.

8. Agency is not an empirically meaningful property, and incorporating the agency concept into experimental practices will not contribute to progress in biology.

And a few quotes that underline their contentions (indented). First, the important of natural selection in explaining adaptations:

It is important to recognize that the attribution of non-fitness-related goals to an organism can only be empirically grounded in the psychological case, where investigators can ask another human being to report on their internal cognitive states. For systems that lack the capacity to report on such states, the attribution of goals is empirically unmoored and arbitrary (see Fig 1). Is it the goal of a given stem cell to differentiate? (Manicka and Levin 2019; Levin 2021; 2022) Or, if the stem cell fails to differentiate and dies, was that really its goal? In order for goal-attributions to explain anything, goals would need to be linked to some empirically detectable feature of the system other than the actual outcomes of its behavior. Otherwise, these explanations would be circular and uninformative. It is not clear that this can be done without reference to natural selection.

The intellectual and biological vacuity of adding “purpose” to already-existing explanations:

Even if one allows explanations based on agency, it is difficult to see how such explanations could be useful for understanding an ordinary biological process—e.g., wound healing. To explain why a wound heals following injury, the statement that it is because the system possesses agency and pursues the goal of healing wounds is not useful from a scientific point of view. This is because agency is not an experimentally meaningful property that can be subjected to tests as to whether its presence or absence influences wound-healing. The “goal” of wound-healing is not something that can be detected or measured, but would have to be inferred and attributed ex post facto based on the system’s actual behavior (see above, “Agency and goal-directedness”). This procedure cannot predict that wound-healing fails in pathological cases (e.g., tumorigenesis), nor can it explain why such malfunctions do or do not happen. In the context of modern biological research, wound-healing is understood to be explainable in terms of complex positive and negative feedback mechanisms in which a wide array of signaling molecules mediate the progression through cell- and tissue-level processes, from wound detection to hemostasis, inflammation, cell proliferation, re-epithelialization, and tissue remodeling (Singh et al 2017; Rodrigues et al 2019). These feedback mechanisms are tuned to parameter values conducive to survival and reproduction because of natural selection.

Between mechanistic explanations and adaptive ones (Tinbergen 1963; Stearns 1982), there is no obvious role for a distinct form of explanation based on agency.

How could you investigate how wounds heal by even considering the idea of “purpose and agency”?  As the authors note, there is no real “goal” here, but merely the sorting-out of genes that have different effects on wounds, with the genes that contribute to healing leaving more copies (their bearers survive and/or reproduce better).  That’s simply natural selection.  Ergo, there is no scientific benefit of JTF giving lots of dollars to study agency and purpose. They could give money for studying neo-Darwinian explanations, which we know are often the way to go, but doing so would simply justify scientific materialism, something anathema to JTF, as it leaves out god.

Finally, one more quote, as you can read the paper yourself (it’s written very clearly and should be accessible to those with a smidgen of biology knowledge):

An initial difficulty with the notion of self-determination centers on the self. It is not clear how to interpret expressions such as “the capacity of living systems […] to participate in their own development.” Development is the process of an organism going through the stages of its life cycle. It is not something separate from the organism. So how can an organism fail to participate in its development? If we suppose that the development of a given organism is fully determined by a set of underlying molecular factors, it is still the development of that particular organism rather than of another entity. It is also difficult to interpret the statement that “typical descriptions […] treat organisms [as] separate from and passive to the conditions under which they develop and evolve” (Nadolski and Moczek 2023, p. 3). If this refers to environmental conditions, it is an ordinary question of the relative causal importance of internal versus external factors. If it refers to internal conditions, however, the statement veers into obscurity. How can an organism be or separate from, or passive to, a process of development of itself?

This quote—and indeed, the whole paper—shows that the “purpose-and-agency” school is either engaged in a semantic rather than a biological argument, they are simply unable to grasp evolution, or they wish to make a name by couching neo-Darwinian mechanisms in “I-have-a-new-paradigm” language. .  Indeed, epigenetics (at least some forms) were not part of the modern synthesis, but neither do they play into notions of agency and purpose. Epigenetic modifications can be evolved features of organisms that are ultimately coded in the genome, or they can be environmentally-induced modifications of DNA that are rarely adaptive and, at any rate, usually disappear in two or three generations at most, making them useless to explain the evolution of adaptations.

The lesson is twofold. Beware when you see biologists banging on about agency and purpose, and think about natural selection instead. Second, the JTF is throwing away its money on misguided projects. I’d like to ask them to give money to fund real biology, as they have over a billion dollars in endowment, but funding real biology would not advance the JTF’s purpose of finding the numinous using science.

Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) are small planetoids that orbit the Sun beyond Neptune and Pluto. Their dark and icy character contains the remnant of the early solar system, and as such, they have the potential to reveal its history. But since they are small, distant, and dim, TNOs are very difficult to study. We know that different groups of TNOs have unique histories based on their surface colors and orbits. A new study has looked at their spectra, and it reveals a rich diversity unseen before now.

The team used observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to capture the spectra of 54 TNOs. They found the planetesimals could be grouped into three categories based on the overall shape of their spectra. Double-dip TNOs have a strong presence of carbon dioxide ice and are the most common of the survey objects. Cliff-type TNOs are reddish and are rich in nitrogen molecules and complex organics. Finally, bowl-type TNOs have dark and dusty surfaces rich in water ice.

The authors argue that these categories formed because of different “ice lines” that existed during the early period of the solar system. That is, beyond a certain distance, temperatures are cold enough for water ice to form. Further out, it becomes cold enough for carbon dioxide ice to form, and so forth. The different categories of TNOs therefore formed at different distances from the Sun, likely before the great migration of the large planets.

This idea is supported by the fact that there is a correlation between the spectral category of TNOs and their orbital types. For example, cold classical TNOs with orbits at the outer edge of the planetary disk are mostly cliff-type TNOs.

The team was also able to connect TNOs to another type of planetoid known as centaurs, which orbit the Sun between Jupiter and Saturn. While the spectra of centaurs differ significantly from those of TNOs, there are enough similar features to identify many centaurs as part of a particular TNO type. The centaur Thereus matches the bowl-type category, for example. On the other hand, some centaurs, such as Okyrhoe don’t fall into any TNO category. This supports the idea that many centaur planetoids were TNOs that migrated inward over time, while others are likely comets that became centaurs after a close approach with Jupiter or Saturn.

In the future, the team would like to gather even more detailed spectra of TNOs. This could tell us the specific histories of each TNO category and how they connect to the early evolution of our solar system.

Reference: Pinilla-Alonso, Noemí, et al. “A JWST/DiSCo-TNOs portrait of the primordial Solar System through its trans-Neptunian objects.” Nature Astronomy (2024): 1-15.

The post The Webb Captures Spectra of Trans-Neptunian Objects, and Reveals a History of Our Solar System appeared first on Universe Today.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “clowns”, came with this note:

Jesus has been reading Gurwinder again. You should too!

Here are the first two of Gurwinder’s 15 posts on “X” giving useful ideas to get us through 2025:

1. Negative Partisanship:
Many people’s political views revolve not around what they support, but what they oppose. They’re always fighting against something rather than for something, and the constant focus on what they hate makes them nasty and miserable.

— Gurwinder (@G_S_Bhogal) January 1, 2025

And so on to Jesus and Mo, who once again are completely unaware of their hypocrisy:

 

Today we have a second batch of underwater photos from reader Peter Klaver (first batch here). Today we have underwater wildlife (corals). Peter’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here is the second batch of photos from scuba diving around San Pedro, Belize earlier this month.

Apart from many animals, the coral reefs there also have a rich abundance of underwater vegetation.

Most of the sea floor in the reefs is covered with various kinds of soft corals.

There are also some hard corals:

. . . including brain corals:

. . .And there are various cylindrical or tubular species whose names I don’t know.

Particle physics is not everyone’s cup of tea.  A team of physicists have theorised the existence of a strange type of particle that behaves differently depending on its direction of travel—massless in one direction but possessing mass when moving the other way! This strange, elusive particle, known as a semi-Dirac fermion or “quasiparticle,” has actually been observed in action. To detect it, researchers cooled a semi-metal crystal to near absolute zero, exposed it to a powerful magnetic field and infrared light, and successfully captured the signal of these unusual quasiparticles.

Particle physics is the branch of physics that studies the fundamental make up of matter and the forces that govern their interactions. It focuses on the smallest building blocks of the universe—particles such as quarks, leptons, and bosons—which make up atoms and everything around us. These subatomic particles interact through fundamental forces like electromagnetism, gravity, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. The study of particle physics often involves high-energy experiments, where particles are accelerated to near the speed of light and collided, allowing for observations of their behaviour and properties.

Particle physics experiments address mysteries at subatomic and astronomical levels. (Illustration by Olena Shmahalo for U.S. Particle Physics)

Discoveries in particle physics are not all that common but a team of researchers from the Penn State University have announced their discovery of a new type of particle known as a quasiparticle. Quasiparticles are a quantum of energy in a crystal structure or other lattice structure that has momentum and position and can in some cases be considered a particle. They have named their new quasiparticle the semi-Dirac fermion, until the announcement it had been 16 years since this strange particle had been theorised. 

Often in particle physics, things can go against every thing your common sense tells you. It’s most definitely the case with the semi-Dirac fermion which was discovered in a ZrSiS crystal (Zirconium silicon sulfide.) When it is moving in one direction it seems to have mass but in the other direction it appears massless! This is possible when a particle derives its energy from its motion and in this case its almost pure energy travelling at the speed of light. 

The discovery is in accordance with Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity that says anything travelling at the speed of light cannot have mass. According to lead researcher Yinming Shao ‘In solid materials, the collective behaviour of many particles, also known as quasiparticles, can have different behaviour than the individual particles, which in this case gave rise to particles having mass in only one direction.’ 

Albert Einstein, pictured in 1953. Photograph: Ruth Orkin/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Ruth Orkin/Getty

The team used the hybrid magnet at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Florida to generate a magnetic field 900,000 times stronger than the Earth’s! They cooled a piece of ZrSiS crystal down to just a few degrees above absolute zero and exposed it to the magnetic field while directing infrared light at it to explore its quantum properties. This enabled them to study how electrons inside the material responded to the light revealing many features that were expected, plus a few more that puzzled the team.

The magnetic field was a crucial element to their experiment which caused the electrons inside the crystal to become quantised into discrete states called Landau Levels that have fixed values. The difference between the levels depends on the mass of the electrons and the strength of the magnetic field. If the magnetic field increases, the energy level of the electrons should increase based on their mass, but they didn’t!

Shao went on to explain their findings ‘Imagine the particle is a tiny train confined to a network of tracks, which are the material’s underlying electronic structure. Now, at certain points the tracks intersect, so our particle train is moving along its fast track, at light speed, but then it hits an intersection and needs to switch to a perpendicular track. Suddenly, it experiences resistance, it has mass. The particles are either all energy or have mass depending on the direction of their movement along the material’s tracks.’

Source : Particle that only has mass when moving in one direction observed for first time

The post This Particle Only Has Mass When Moving in One Direction appeared first on Universe Today.

Although popular AI models score highly on medical exams, their accuracy drops significantly when making a diagnosis based on a conversation with a simulated patient

An incredible image of Mars has been released that captures the relentless activity of dust devils, swirling across the planet’s surface. These Martian whirlwinds form, move across the surface and dissipate before others take their place. The image was taken by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in September 2022 and shows part of the Haldane Crater, where dust devils have left their mark on the landscape. Scientists study the image tracks and the rate at which dust accumulates on Mars, helping them better understand the planet’s atmospheric processes.

Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, is often referred to as the “Red Planet” because of its reddish colour, which results from iron oxide in its soil. Its atmosphere is thin and mostly made up of carbon dioxide which contributes to its cold climate with an average temperature of around -60°C. The surface of Mars features plains, volcanoes (like Olympus Mons) and the vast canyon system Valles Marineris. Geological evidence suggests that Mars had liquid water once and a thicker atmosphere suggesting the potential for past life.

Mars from 2020. Credit: Andrew Symes.

The atmosphere of Mars is thin and made up mostly of carbon dioxide (about 95%.) There are traces of nitrogen, argon, and oxygen too. This sparse atmosphere is only about 1% the density of Earth’s and is unable to support human life without significant technological aid. Despite its thinness, the Martian atmosphere is active, and one of its most fascinating phenomena is the occurrence of dust devils. These swirling columns of dust and air are similar to tornadoes on Earth. 

The atmosphere of Mars

Dust devils are created when the surface heats up and causes warm air to rise rapidly, drawing in dust particles into a rotating column. They can range in size from small, harmless whirlwinds to massive, kilometer-wide spirals that can last for hours. Dust devils on Mars are important for scientists because they help to redistribute dust across the planet’s surface, driving its weather patterns and even the Martian climate. 

A Martian dust devil was captured winding its way along the Amazonis Planitia region of Northern Mars on March 14, 2012 NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

A fascinating phenomenon but a friend and foe to machines on the surface of the red planet; they can both deposit and clear particles of dust from solar panels and other instruments. The swirling nature of these vortex weather events can lift up the fine dust particles, carry them across the Martian surface and over time, they can accumulate on surfaces. When depositing on solar panels, the effect can reduce the efficiency by blocking sunlight, and reduce power output. Their strong winds though can act as cleaners by scrubbing the panels clean. 

An image recently released by NASA JPL shows dust devils tracking across the surface of Mars. Teams of astronomers are studying their fading tracks to calculate the rate of deposition of dust over time. Gaining a better ujnderstanding of this helps to safeguard future space misssions. 

Source : The Art of Dust Devils

The post Crisscrossing Dust Devil Tracks Across the Surface of Mars appeared first on Universe Today.

Groundbreaking cerium oxide-based thermal switches achieve remarkable performance, transforming heat flow control with sustainable and efficient technology.

In 2020, the GBD was all about herd immunity via natural immunity. Today, its defenders censor that.

The post A Challenge For Dr. Edward Livingston: Defend the Great Barrington Declaration Without Censoring the Great Barrington Declaration first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Researchers report that they have invented new nanoscale sensors of force. They are luminescent nanocrystals that can change intensity and/or color when you push or pull on them. These 'all-optical' nanosensors are probed with light only and therefore allow for fully remote read-outs -- no wires or connections are needed.

Researchers report that they have invented new nanoscale sensors of force. They are luminescent nanocrystals that can change intensity and/or color when you push or pull on them. These 'all-optical' nanosensors are probed with light only and therefore allow for fully remote read-outs -- no wires or connections are needed.

Astronomers pinned down the origins of at least one fast radio burst, a brief and brilliant explosion of radio waves emitted by an extremely compact object. The team's novel technique might also reveal the sources of other FRBs.

Getting back to the Moon is the primary goal of NASA’s Artemis program, but what do we do once we get there? That is the challenge tackled by a group of students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who wrote a proposal for a lunar infrastructure module they call the Trans-lunar Hub for Exploration, ISRU, and Advancement – or THEIA, after the proposed object that crashed into the Earth that created the Moon as we know it today. Their submission was part of the NASA Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage project, where teams from various academic institutions submitted papers focusing on the theme of Sustained Lunar Evolution for 2024.

To be clear, THEIA is not meant to serve as the central hub of NASA’s lunar exploration activities. The responsibility would still go to the Artemis base the agency has been working on. It is meant to serve as a hub for four main things that the team believes every long-term lunar mission will need: power, communications, transportation, and In-situ resource utilization (ISRU). 

The project’s mission requirements include providing local positioning, communications, and power to an area surrounding the lunar south pole. Various organizations are developing several pieces of infrastructure to do so.

The UIUC team’s presentation at the NASA RASC-AL challenge.
Credit – NASA Vimeo website

First would be the delivery method to get there—like much of the overall Artemis project, THEIA would rely on delivery from a SpaceX Starship. The team calculated the initial launch requirements to get a basic setup up and running to be around 73 tons, well below the threshold of 100 tons the rocket is expected to be able to carry to the lunar surface.

That first set of equipment would include two other vital pieces of infrastructure – some LUNARSABER poles and robots to set them up. We previously did an entire article on the LUNARSABER project from Honeybee Robotics. Still, as a succinct overview, it is an extendable tower with solar panels along its sides to collect energy. Then, it uses a series of transmitters and receivers at its top to broadcast both power and communication signals. They can also bounce signals between two towers, creating a basic mesh network on the lunar surface.

A LUNARSABER is essential for supplying power and communications, but the UIUC team needs robotic help to deploy it. They suggest using several robotic rovers, including a multilimbed one designed on NASA’s Athlete prototype and a more traditional lunar rover based around the current Lunar Terrain Vehicle contract NASA has outstanding, with several companies still vying to provide the final design.

Fraser discusses how NASA plans to sign up the Moon’s infrastructure.

Other essential infrastructure pieces include ground antennas to transmit data and communications back to the Lunar Gateway and habitats that would allow both scientific experiments to operate and, eventually, crew to live. An essential additional part of THEIA’s design philosophy is that there should be space for experiments to operate inside a semi-controlled environment.

That would still be a long time from now, with original missions to launch THEIA not planned until 2035 and crewed missions to follow years later. However, THEIA was initially drawn up by a group of undergraduates, who presented a technical paper in response to the NASA RASC-AL proposal. It was one of many such proposals that resulted in groups from Virginia Polytechnic, the University of Maryland, and South Dakota University winning prizes. We’ll look at some of the other projects submitted by teams shortly, but congratulations to the UIUC team, who made it through the competition as a finalist, for the effort they put into theirs.

Learn More:
Bojinov et al – THEIA
UT – A Tower On The Moon Could Provide Astronauts With Light, Power, and Guidance
UT – NASA has Plans for More Cargo Deliveries to the Moon
UT – NASA Focuses in on Artemis III Landing Sites.

Lead Image:
THEIA Concept of Operations.
Credit – Bonjinov et al

The post A Long-Term Lunar Infrastructure Hub Named After the Object That Created the Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

We asked our writers to pick their favourite science fiction television series. Here are the results, from Battlestar Galactica to Futurama

Many dates stick in our minds as we reflect on five years of living with covid-19 - here are some of the most memorable ones

Covid-19 is responsible for the deaths of millions of people around the world, but researchers fear the next global outbreak could be even worse, making it vital that we start preparing for that unknown pathogen now

mRNA vaccines have been a long time coming, but were only approved after covid-19 emerged, marking the beginning of a new way of preventing – and treating – various conditions