Human research was the prime area of study today aboard the International Space Station. Results are helping NASA and its international partners keeps astronauts safe and healthy on long term space missions.
Flight Engineers Michael Hopkins and Victor Glover took turns today exploring how weightlessness impacts their hand-eye coordination. The GRASP study, sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA), explores how microgravity affects a crew member’s central nervous system. That experiment has been under way at the orbiting lab since 2016, providing researchers critical data and insights on how astronauts adapt to living and working in space.
Image above: A pair of docked Russian spaceships, (from left) the Soyuz MS-17 crew ship and the Progress 76 cargo craft, are pictured as the International Space Station orbited above the Atlantic Ocean during an orbital sunset. Image Credit: NASA.
Commander Sergey Ryzhikov and Flight Engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, the two Expedition 64 cosmonauts, participated in a Russian exercise study today. The duo worked out on a treadmill in the Zvezda service module while attached to a variety of sensors. Observations could lead to improved crew training techniques and more effective work outs on the way to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
NASA Flight Engineer Kate Rubins readied an external exposure experiment this morning that will be placed outside Japan’s Kibo laboratory module. Afterward, she resumed her work exploring the behavior of water droplets that may lead to more advanced fuel and life support systems.
International Space Station (ISS). Animation Credit: ESA
Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, on his third space mission, set up hardware for a fiber optics study then organized stowage space in the Kibo lab. Flight Engineer Shannon Walker of NASA spent most of Tuesday on maintenance servicing spacesuit batteries and working on stowage tasks in the Tranquility module.
NASA and SpaceX managers conducted a Flight Readiness Review (FRR) Monday, Nov. 23, for SpaceX’s 21st Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-21) mission to the International Space Station.
To enable additional time to evaluate flight data from Crew-1 and close out certification work ahead of this first flight of the cargo version of Dragon 2, teams are now proceeding toward a planned liftoff at 11:39 a.m. EST on Saturday, Dec. 5, from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with the Dragon spacecraft arriving to autonomously dock at the orbiting laboratory on Sunday, Dec. 6, at approximately 11:30 a.m.
Image above: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and cargo Dragon spacecraft stand ready for liftoff at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida on March 6, 2020, for NASA and SpaceX’s 20th Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-20) mission to the International Space Station. Liftoff occurred at 11:50 p.m. EST. Photo Credits: NASA/Tony Gray and Tim Terry.
The science to be delivered on this mission includes a study aimed at better understanding the effects of microgravity on cardiac function in human heart tissue, research into how microbes could be used for biomining on asteroids, and a tool being tested for quick and accurate blood analysis in microgravity. The first commercially owned and operated airlock on the space station, the Nanoracks Bishop Airlock, will arrive in the unpressurized trunk of the Dragon spacecraft. Bishop will provide a variety of capabilities to the orbiting laboratory, including CubeSat deployment and support of external payloads.
Two NASA centers on opposite sides of the countries are finding new ways to work together to support the agency’s mission to develop quiet supersonic technology, in spite of thousands of miles of distance and a global pandemic.
Image above: A NASA F/A-18 is towed to the apron at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California during sunrise over Rogers Dry Lake. The F/A-18 was used to test a transmitter for an air navigation system, called the Airborne Location Integrating Geospatial Navigation System, or ALIGNS. This system, designed to allow pilots to position their aircraft at precise distances to each other, will be critical for acoustic validation efforts of NASA’s next supersonic X-plane, the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology. Image Credits: NASA Photo/Lauren Hughes.
Using their available labs, Kennedy Space Center in Florida is building tools in collaboration with Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, which NASA will use in support of the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology X-plane, or QueSST.
Flying at faster-than-sound speeds over communities around the U.S., the X-59 will demonstrate technology to reduce the loud sonic booms, typically heard below aircraft flying at supersonic speeds, to a quieter noise similar to a car door closing in the distance. The X-59 will demonstrate to regulators through collected data that quiet supersonic flight is possible.
However, before the X-59 begins community overflights, NASA researchers need to validate the X-plane’s acoustic signature through tests.
A project under NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate called SCHAMROQ, which stands for Schlieren, Airborne Measurements, and Range Operations for QueSST, is preparing the tools and test techniques to execute these tests at Armstrong. When a reduced capacity to develop these tools materialized during the COVID-19 pandemic, Armstrong turned to Kennedy to provide a helping hand, and to help ensure the project’s progress.
Image above: A 2019 design of the Shock Sensing Probe, a cone-shaped aeronautical test instrument, extends from the nose of a NASA F-15 aircraft. As the aircraft flies through the shockwaves of a nearby F/A-18 aircraft, the probe, designed to capture high-quality measurements of shock waves created by supersonic aircraft in flight, used five “pressure ports” to measure the pressure on the surface around the instrument, which is shaped like a cone. This method will help NASA validate the acoustic signature of the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology X-plane. Image Credits: NASA Photo/Ken Ulbrich.
“It’s neat working with a space center,” said Matthew Moholt, deputy project manager for SCHAMROQ. “Their willingness and eagerness to help out a sister center is welcomed and appreciated. When you have another center willing to help out and do critical work that’s critical to your schedule, that’s really significant.”
During supersonic flight, planes create shockwaves that merge together as they travel through the air to produce the sonic boom. Moholt says SCHAMROQ aims to build and test multiple tools to help researchers observe and validate these same shockwaves during quiet supersonic flight.
These tools include the Shock Sensing Probe, a device that will evaluate the characteristics of the X-59's shockwaves while in flight, a schlieren photography technique to visualize the X-59's shockwaves as they distort light through a camera, and a navigation software that will allow pilots to fly accurately during X-59 tests.
Moholt said all of this technology will be placed on a NASA F-15 research aircraft, which will take on the role of a chase plane, following the X-59 in the sky during flight tests to collect data.
“We have this big effort to instrument and put all the research systems into the F-15 that allows it to fly all of these technologies,” Moholt said. “As the pandemic hit, it was right in the peak of getting instrumentation wiring put through it so that all of our instrumentation systems could get put in, and our electronic fabrication shop was impacted by that.”
This SCHAMROQ technology needs to be tested to ensure it can withstand the demands of supersonic flight while onboard NASA’s F-15. Deputy instrumentation lead Matthew Waldersen said part of the testing process requires the usage of a network switch with cables – similar to an ethernet network, but for airplanes.
Image above: NASA’s X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology X-plane, or QueSST, will fly over communities in the United States to demonstrate quiet supersonic. X-59 is designed so that, when flying faster than the speed of sound, people on the ground will hear nothing more than a quiet sonic thump – rather than a loud sonic boom. Scientifically valid data gathered from these community overflights will be presented to U.S. and international regulators, who will use the information to help them come up with rules based on noise levels that may enable new commercial markets for supersonic flight over land. Image Credit: Lockheed Martin.
Waldersen explained that, to help ensure the project remained on schedule, Kennedy Space Center was contacted to build cables for the network switch.
“We reached out to their branch chief, and they said ‘yeah, we want to take this work on,’” Waldersen recalls. “‘We have the capacity, we’ve got the staff, we’ve got the ability to do it’, so this is fantastic.”
Jeff Crisafulli, branch chief of testing and design in Kennedy Space Center Engineering, said Kennedy identified onsite subcontractors capable of building these cables.
“These are highly skilled technicians, with 25-30 years of experience fabricating and designing, the NASA way,” Crisafulli said. “They’re considered part of the team.”
Crisafulli said each center at NASA has their own unique skillsets that they bring to the table, and that it is good to share knowledge. This collaboration between an aeronautics center like Armstrong and a space center like Kennedy reinforces one of NASA’s goals – working together for the benefit of the future.
“This is a unique opportunity to help out our buddies at Armstrong by providing this fabrication service,” Crisafulli said. “It goes back to the ‘One NASA’ idea – we are ‘One NASA’. This is a good example of pathfinding and opening up the door to some potential future work together.”
The Long March-5 Y5 launch vehicle launched the Chang’e-5 lunar probe from the Wenchang Space Launch Center, Hainan Province, China, on 23 November 2020, at 20:30 UTC (24 November, 04:30 local time).
Long March-5 Y5 launches Chang’e-5 lunar mission
Chang’e-5 (嫦娥五号) is China’s first mission to attempt to collect samples from the Moon and bring them back to Earth.
Chang’e-5 (嫦娥五号) mission diagram
Currently, Long March-5 Y5 is scheduled to launch Chang’e-5 “in late November 2020”.
Chang’e-5 (嫦娥五号) mission, takeoff from Lunar surface
A Chinese Long March 5 rocket launches the Chang’e 5 mission to return samples from the moon. It is the first lunar sample return mission attempted since 1976. Delayed from November 2019.
Five Expedition 64 astronauts had their day packed with microgravity research while the two cosmonauts had a light duty day aboard the International Space Station following last week’s spacewalk.
All seven crew members started the day measuring their body mass with an instrument that follows Newton’s second law of motion to account for the lack of gravity. Known as SLAMMD, or Space Linear Acceleration Mass Measurement Device, it applies a known force to an astronaut with the resulting acceleration used to calculate the person’s mass.
Image above: Expedition 64 Flight Engineer Shannon Walker of NASA installs an airborne particulate monitor in the Tranquility module. Image Credit: NASA.
New station Flight Engineers Michael Hopkins and Victor Glover continued studying how microgravity impacts dexterous manipulation today. Their inputs for the Grip study could help scientists and engineers develop safer, more advanced spacecraft systems and interfaces.
Astronaut Soichi Noguchi of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) removed a CubeSat deployer from the Kibo laboratory module’s airlock during Monday morning. During the afternoon, he configured life support hardware in the Harmony module.
NASA Flight Engineer Shannon Walker relaxed Monday morning before spending the rest of the afternoon exploring how to manufacture high quality, next generation fiber optic cables in space. Kate Rubins, on her second station mission, studied how water droplets behave in space to help engineers design improved spacecraft fuel and life support systems.
Animation Credit: ISS HD Live
The two station cosmonauts worked on a pair of docked Russian Progress cargo ships, but otherwise relaxed Monday. Commander Sergey Ryzhikov and Flight Engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov are winding down several days of cleaning their spacesuits and stowing their tools following Wednesday’s six-hour and 48-minute spacewalk.
As many Americans prepare for a socially distanced Thanksgiving meal, some may be aware that NASA helped develop the tiny, highly efficient video cameras in the devices that will allow virtual family dinners, and a few may know it was the space agency that first modernized conference calling. But there’s an even more important contribution from NASA on the table: food that’s safe to eat.
Today, outbreaks of illness from packaged food are exceedingly rare, in part because the industry has almost universally adopted a system created for astronaut food in the early days of the Apollo program.
All the companies putting food on your Thanksgiving table use this approach – called the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) system – and cite it as a major reason for the reduction in foodborne illness.
“It’s one of these things where we maybe don’t appreciate the benefits, we just take them for granted now, because HACCP is so ingrained in how we produce food,” said Alice Johnson, vice president of food safety and quality at Butterball Turkey LLC.
How the Moon Landing Led to Safer Food For Everyone
Analyze Hazards, Establish Control
The effort began at the Manned Spacecraft Center, now NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, in the early 1960s. Leading the way was Paul Lachance, whose background in nutrition at the Air Force’s Quartermaster Food and Container Institute was complemented by that of Howard Bauman, a microbiologist at Pillsbury, which partnered with NASA in this mission to provide safe food for the astronauts on the Gemini and Apollo missions.
Whereas earlier efforts focused on thoroughly testing end products, the Apollo Program Office placed a heavy emphasis on identifying and controlling any potential points of failure. The guidelines were written with space system hardware in mind, but food was also deemed mission-critical.
Animation above: The Apollo missions were humans’ longest and farthest voyages in space, so food for the astronauts had to be guaranteed safe for consumption hundreds of thousands of miles from any medical facility. Animation Credit: NASA
The approach Lachance and Bauman came up with at NASA’s direction was to identify points in the food production process where hazards could be introduced, determine how those hazards could be prevented, and monitor these critical control points with frequent measurements. NASA also required the team to keep meticulous records, which became another critical aspect of HACCP.
No one in the Apollo Program Office could have imagined they had set in motion a system that would improve food safety around the world – and it took decades for that to happen. But Bauman liked what he saw. He went on to become one of the most outspoken advocates for HACCP’s widespread adoption.
Pillsbury presented HACCP to the world at the first National Conference on Food Protection in 1971. Following two deaths from botulism, a serious food-borne illness caused by bacterial toxins, that summer, the National Canners Association and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agreed to make low-acid canned food manufacturers the first to be subject to HACCP regulations. In 1993, an outbreak of food poisoning at a fast-food chain caused the meat and poultry industries to lobby for regulation to restore consumer confidence. Within a decade, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had HACCP regulations in place for meat and poultry, and the FDA required the system for all seafood and juice producers.
Image above: An astronaut on the Apollo 12 mission in November of 1969 gathers lunar soil, while another astronaut is reflected in his visor. Unable to risk astronauts getting sick so far from home, NASA and commercial partner Pillsbury came up with a system to eliminate hazards from the food production process. The food industry around the world has now adopted and built on that system. Image Credit: NASA.
Then came the 2011 FDA Food Safety Modernization Act. Although it doesn’t mention HACCP by name, the law phased in HACCP-like requirements across the remaining U.S. food producers that register with the FDA and also requires importers to verify that foreign manufacturers comply with these requirements. The last businesses were phased into the requirements in 2018.
“It basically mandates HACCP on steroids for all other FDA-regulated food products,” said Jenny Scott, senior advisor in the FDA’s Office of Food Safety, although many producers had long before put HACCP-like systems in place voluntarily and required their suppliers to do likewise.
“Brainstorming What Could Go Wrong”
Because the system is intended to target the specific hazards in a given production line, every HACCP plan is different. At a Butterball plant, Johnson said, control points for a HACCP plan likely include a checkpoint to look for any “farm residue” like pesticide, refrigeration that has to be below a certain temperature, and antimicrobial sprays or dip tanks.
Katy Latimer, vice president of research and development for Ocean Spray, said critical control points for cranberry sauce include the washing area where berries are first received, filtration and metal detection points where any foreign materials are removed, a heat treatment pasteurization area, and acidity checks, among others.
Image above: This Apollo-era astronaut turkey sandwich kit might not seem like much of a Thanksgiving dinner, but it was a major improvement over NASA’s earlier astronaut food, mostly squeezed from tubes. In addition to making the food more palatable, NASA also had to develop a system to guarantee its safety. Image Credit: NASA.
By requiring producers to analyze and address the risks of each product line individually, HACCP has changed the relationship between companies and regulators, Johnson said. “Instead of going to the government and saying, ‘We’ve got a problem, what do you think we should do?’ it’s up to us to decide what to do and justify why we’re doing it.”
“It takes a team of quality assurance folks, engineers, and scientists to identify critical control points for safety and quality,” said Latimer, calling it a process of “brainstorming what could go wrong.”
While it takes time and money, Mark Fryling, vice president of global food safety and quality at General Mills, which now owns Pillsbury, said it costs far less than a product recall and the resulting damage to a brand name.
By mandating meticulous records, HACCP also makes inspections more effective, said Scott at the FDA. Before, inspectors only saw a snapshot of plant conditions on the day of their visit, she explained. Now, “We still poke and sniff, but records give a better picture of whether they’re consistently in control of their processes.”
The result, said Scott Seebohm, deputy director of the policy development staff for the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, is a marked improvement in food safety. It can be difficult to quantify this improvement, because while industry has gotten better at preventing outbreaks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have gotten better at detecting them. Nevertheless, despite an increase in known outbreaks caused by Salmonella, for example, through the late 1990s and early 2000s, the total number of people infected dropped.
Meanwhile, this spinoff from the Apollo program has gone global: much of Europe took up HACCP many years ago, and many other suppliers around the world use HACCP-like systems to be allowed to export to countries that require it.
Image above: Thanks to the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system, invented at Johnson Space Center in the 1960s to ensure the safety of the Apollo astronauts’ food and now adopted around the world, you don’t need to worry about the safety of eating the mashed potatoes and all the rest of the food on your Thanksgiving table. Image Credits: Renee Comet, National Institutes of Health.
Latimer at Ocean Spray said deaths from botulism, linked to unsafe practices, had initially gave rise to the packaged-food industry, and “it’s really cool to see how the space program moved that along.” A small NASA program helped the industry make good on its most basic promise – that of safe, worry-free meals, on Thanksgiving and all year round.
NASA has a long history of transferring technology to the private sector. The agency’s Spinoff publication profiles NASA technologies that have transformed into commercial products and services, demonstrating the broader benefits of America’s investment in its space program. Spinoff is a publication of the Technology Transfer program in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.
To learn more about this NASA spinoff and how NASA brings space technology down to Earth, read the original article or visit: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/
For decades, NASA has used the vantage point of space, combined with airborne and ground-based field campaigns, to decipher the impact of air pollution and help other agencies protect people when unhealthy air threatens the places they live, work, and play. Now, government agencies in Thailand are harnessing the power of NASA air quality data and expertise through a unique partnership with SERVIR.
SERVIR, a Spanish word meaning “to serve,” is a joint initiative between NASA and the United States Agency for International Development to boost environmental resilience and decision-making in developing regions around the world. Through its network of regional hubs, SERVIR puts publicly available satellite imagery, geospatial data, and analysis tools into the hands of local decision-makers to help solve their most pressing environmental challenges. The SERVIR-Mekong hub, located at the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center in Bangkok, serves countries in the Mekong River Basin.
Image above: SERVIR-Mekong launched its new Air Quality Explorer app with Thailand's pollution control department and space agency Nov. 23 in Bangkok. Image Credits: NASA/USAID/SERVIR-Mekong.
To improve air pollution monitoring in Thailand and the lower-Mekong River region, SERVIR-Mekong brought together experts in air quality measurement, technology design, atmospheric modelling, and civic engagement. They include the Royal Thai Government’s Pollution Control Department and Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency–Thailand's space agency. Together, they developed a web-based platform for tracking and forecasting air quality in the region.
"Through SERVIR we’re proud to support the Royal Thai Government’s Pollution Control Department in using satellite observations and model outputs to monitor and forecast air quality in Thailand," said Lawrence Friedl, director of NASA's Applied Sciences Program. "Partnerships and collaboration are how we create greater on-the-ground impacts that benefit lives on Earth."
SERVIR-Mekong's new Air Quality Explorer tool, introduced Nov. 23 at an event in Bangkok, features some major advances over past pollution monitoring systems. The new app combines NASA satellite data, ground-sensor data, and machine-learning techniques to enable large-scale monitoring and forecasting of air quality for the first time in Thailand. Previous systems relied heavily on ground-based technology.
While sensors on the ground can pinpoint local sources of pollution, satellites have proven essential for filling in missing data to provide consistent, near-real time, maps of pollution hotspots that would otherwise be invisible. Satellite observations help scientists and decision-makers see the bigger picture of how air pollution is distributed across the region and how it changes over time.
"Poor air quality is a seasonal problem in Thailand that has persisted for over a decade," said Steven Olive, mission director of USAID's Regional Development Mission for Asia. "In addition to providing Thailand with more accurate air pollution readings, this tool also has the potential to address the transboundary challenges that air pollution poses to the region."
Some of the major sources of pollution, including agricultural burning and forest fires, are a pervasive problem for much of Southeast Asia. Particle pollution becomes worse each year during the dry season, when monsoon rains retreat and colder temperatures and calm winds create favorable conditions for particles to accumulate and linger in the air for a longer period.
South East Asia seen by satellite. Image Credit: NASA
Intense smog resulting in unseasonably poor air quality in early 2019 revealed a need for readily available, reliable, and accessible pollution data. Since then, SERVIR-Mekong has put their user-driven development and science expertise to work to improve both monitoring and public awareness. In addition to launching the new tool, the team has held trainings to equip users and even challenged student-innovators to become part of the solution.
"We have stepped into the world of technology," said Athapol Charoenshunsa, director general of Thailand’s Pollution Control Department. "We look at and understand the world from space through satellite technology. Not only the past and the present, we shall also tell everyone in the future to prepare for environmental pollution properly and effectively."
Building on the success of the Air Quality Explorer in Thailand, SERVIR-Mekong aims to expand the effort to cover other countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the future.
More about SERVIR
NASA and USAID launched the SERVIR-Mekong hub in 2015 at the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center to serve the countries of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The partnership chiefly supports the development of services to address challenges related to regional water, food security, weather and climate, and land cover and land use.
Established in 2005, SERVIR is also improving awareness, increasing access to information, and supporting data-driven decision-making to help people in West Africa, Eastern and Southern Africa, Hindu Kush-Himalaya, and South America manage environmental challenges.
