July 19, 2020

NASA Photographer of the Year (Source: Air & Space)
Most of the time, all you see in the credit is “NASA.” Whether they’re capturing a spectacular launch, the intricate engineering of a Mars rover, or the emotions of an astronaut’s family saying goodbye, the professional photographers who take pictures at the space agency’s dozen or so centers remain mostly anonymous to the millions of us who enjoy their work daily. Click here. (7/15)

National STEM Innovation Partnership Solicitation (Source: NASA)
NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement is looking to increase collaborators during the 2020-21 school year. Paragon TEC, as a support service contractor to NASA, is soliciting proposals from eligible organizations, corporations, or public and private institutions including 1) STEM Networks or 2) STEM Influencers. STEM Networks include school districts, university systems, museums, science centers, and private organizations that are organized to provide high-quality STEM experiences direct to students through educator networks. Click here. (7/19)

Potentially Hazardous Asteroid Bigger Than the London Eye Approaching Earth (Source: Chronicle Live)
NASA has warned that an asteroid believed to be one and a half times the size of the London Eye is approaching Earth. The space rock has been branded "potentially hazardous" by space experts in the US due to its predicted proximity to Earth. The space agency has given the asteroid the name Asteroid 2020ND. It will make its closest approach to Earth on Friday, July 24, at just 0.034 astronomical units (AU) from our planet. (7/16)

SpaceX to Revive Polar Launch Trajectory From Florida, a First in 60 Fears (Source: Teslarati)
SpaceX is set to make history by returning southern trajectory polar corridor launches to Florida’s Space Coast with the launch of the Argentine SAOCOM-1B radar observation satellite, currently planned for July 25. The mission has suffered delays ranging from hardware processing and integration to pandemic travel restrictions. In February the satellite arrived at the Cape Canaveral Spaceport. It was expected that launch and processing teams from Argentina’s National Commission for Space Activities (CONAE) would quickly follow to meet a March launch timeline.

However, international travel restrictions meant that SpaceX would have to wait an indeterminant amount of time to attempt the historic polar launch from Florida. The satellite was put into storage to await the arrival of its launch team. The satellite was initially thought to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) in California just as its twin predecessor, the SAOCOM-1A was 2018. However, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station announced the option to re-open a southern polar orbit launch corridor from Florida in 2017, a launch trajectory that hadn’t been used in over half a century.

The option of polar trajectory launches from Florida increased SpaceX’s capacity to streamline its launch manifest to the company’s dual launchpad locations on Florida’s East Coast. In 2019, SpaceX formally requested to move the launch of the SAOCOM-1B satellite from VAFB to Florida utilizing a southern, coast-hugging dog-leg trajectory over Cuba to a final polar orbital inclination. (7/18)

The Pest Plant That Could Be Astronauts’ New Superfood (Source: Daily Beast)
Current industrialized food systems were optimized for a single goal—growing the maximum amount of food for the least amount of money. But when room and supplies are limited—like during space travel—you need to optimize for a different set of goals to meet the needs of the people you are trying to feed. NASA and the Translational Research Institute for Space Health asked my lab to figure out how to grow an edible plant for long-term space missions where fresh, nutritious food must be produced in tight quarters and with limited resources. To do this, we turned to a plant called duckweed.

Duckweed is a small floating plant that grows on the surface of ponds. It is commonly eaten in Asia but is mostly considered a pest plant in the U.S. as it can quickly take over ponds. But duckweed is a remarkable plant. It is one of the fastest-growing plants on Earth, is the most protein-dense plant on the planet and also produces an abundance of important micronutrients. Two of these micronutrients are the inflammation-fighting antioxidants zeaxanthin and lutein. Zeaxanthin is the more potent of the two, but is hard to get from most leafy greens since fast-growing plants accumulate zeaxanthin only under extremely bright lights.

I proposed to the Translational Research Institute for Space Health that in addition to maximizing nutritional, space and resource efficiency, we also try to optimize the production of these antioxidants. With just a little bit of experimentation, our team determined that under relatively low-intensity light—less than half as intense as midday sun on a clear summer day—duckweed accumulates more zeaxanthin than other fast-growing plants do in full sunlight while still maintaining the same incredible growth rate and other nutritional attributes that make it the perfect plant for a space farm. (7/17)

Why Can’t You Use a Rope to Rescue a Person From a Black Hole? (Source: Medium)
Imagine a space elevator. It takes you up as slow or fast as it wants out into space. Eventually, if you want to stay in space, you’ll have to exceed the escape velocity but only the escape velocity up there in space, not the one down here on Earth. So why can’t you use the same approach to escape a black hole? Just use an elevator or a rope to get above the event horizon and rocket away. It turns out that if gravity worked the way that Isaac Newton thought, you could do that. Newton said gravity was a force. Any force can always be countered by a greater force. So, on a Newtonian black hole, you can escape just by exceeding the black hole’s force of gravity.

But gravity doesn’t work the way Newton thought. It works the way Einstein thought. A black hole doesn’t just pull on things with a strong force. It actually bends space and time. And it is that bending, not the force itself, that makes it impossible to escape a black hole. In Einstein’s physics, every object has a pair of imaginary cones called light cones. An object’s past lightcone shows all the parts of space that object could have come from without exceeding the speed of light and all the parts of space where something else could have affected it. The object’s future lightcone is all the parts of space it could reach likewise and all the parts of space it could affect.

The absolute rule in Einsteinian physics is that nothing can go outside its lightcones, and nothing can affect or be affected by anything outside them either. When you are far away from a black hole, your lightcone is pretty much like everybody else’s. It points into the future and past. But, as you approach the black hole’s event horizon, your lightcone starts to bend. It bends towards the black hole’s center, the singularity. When you reach the event horizon, nothing special happens to you, but at this point your entire future, represented by your future lightcone, lies within the event horizon. At this point, you cannot leave it and you cannot affect anything outside of it. You are trapped. (6/26)