Tag Archives: space

What Jellyfish Taught us About Microgravity

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Think for a minute about your grandkid’s grandkids. Where are they living? Perhaps you momentarily considered the possibility of your intrepid descendants dwelling in outer space. You’re not alone: since 1991, when the  Space Life Sciences 1 mission was launched (SLS-1), there has been intensive research into the physiological effects of microgravity and space travel on the human body. However, studying the effects of space travel on human development and physiology can be expensive and dangerous. For example, NASA cannot send babies to space to study human development in microgravity (despite the fact that this might be one giant gurgle for mankind). To circumvent the challenges associated with rigorously studying physiology in space, innovators like Dorothy B. Spangenberg and her research team found a way to address whether growing up in space changes how we sense gravity. How? Jellyfish.

Jellyfish at the New England Aquarium living its best life. Photo Credit: Nicholas Payne

Jellyfish at the New England Aquarium living its best life.
Photo Credit: Nicholas Payne

Jellyfish aren’t actually fish at all, they are  simple invertebrates, found in the same phylum as sea anemones and corals. Jellyfish are such weak swimmers that they are often at the mercy of ocean currents, which they rely on to move them around the ocean. However, like most organisms,  jellyfish require a way to spatially orient themselves, especially with respect to Earth’s gravitational field. In order to sense which way is up, jellyfish develop sensory structures called rhopalia at the base of their bells as they mature. These sensory organs contain heavy calcium sulfate statolith crystals. As the jellyfish rotates with respect to the force of gravity, the heavy crystals tumble in the direction of the gravitational force, a movement which is sensed and interpreted by sensory cells in the rhopalia.

These jellyfish gravity sensors are not so different from our own. Our ability to orient ourselves is governed by the vestibular system, located within our inner ears. Similarly to the jellyfish, we sense linear acceleration (such as the acceleration due to the force of gravity) through an otolithic membrane. This membrane picks up the movements of otoconia, small protein/calcium-carbonate particles, in response to gravity. Though the human vestibular system develops during late embryonic stages, jellyfish develop their rhopalia over only five days. This makes jellies a useful organism for studying the effects of microgravity on the development of gravity sensors. Information about the development of gravity sensors in jellyfish in space could give us insight into an astronaut’s otoconia and even how our grandkid’s grandkid’s vestibular system would develop in response to growing up in microgravity.

To perform this experiment, Spangenberg and colleagues sent 2,478 immature jellyfish polyps into space in containers of artificial seawater. By injecting hormones into the seawater bags, the researchers could force the jellyfish to advance to the next step of development: the ephyrae phase where rhopalia (gravity sensors) are developed. They created two populations of ephyrae: jellies that were induced to develop their gravity sensors on Earth and jellies that were induced to develop gravity sensors in space. The physiology of the statoliths and the movements of these two populations of astronaut jellyfish were then compared with jellies that developed normally on Earth. Spangenberg and her team found that the jellyfish who developed gravity sensors on earth and then were subsequently sent to space lost statoliths in space more rapidly than the jellies who never went to space, which may have implications for Earth-born astronauts. Jellyfish induced to develop gravity sensors once they were already in space had no trouble pulsing and swimming in space, and had typical numbers of statoliths. What happened to the space-developed jellies when they came back down to Earth? The researchers reported that 20% of the microgravity jellyfish had trouble pulsing and swimming once back on the Blue Planet, despite having seemingly normal statolith development. Therefore, we should proceed with caution when dealing with how other organisms, including human beings, might develop in space.

Although more experiments are needed to determine whether the findings in jellyfish can translate to human development in space, these studies indicate the potential impact space travel can have on how we sense gravity. Jellyfish who developed in space appeared to experience intense vertigo once they were back on earth — so don’t be too jelly of their all expenses-paid trip into space!

Authors note: I found out while writing this that a group of jellyfish is called a “smack” of jellyfish, a fact which is far too cute not to share here.

Peer edited by Bailey DeBarmore

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“GEER”ing up for Planet Simulation

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Image credit: NASA

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see the surface of another planet up close? Well, NASA researchers in Cleveland are making this possible right here on Earth. The Glenn Extreme Environments Rig (GEER) is a chamber capable of regenerating temperatures, pressures and gaseous contents of a chosen environment. In 2014, researchers at NASA used GEER to recreate the conditions found on Venus for 24 days. This is quite a feat because the surface of Venus can reach temperatures greater than 460°C (860°F) and pressures more than 1385 psi, which is about the strength of a pressure washer! In comparison, the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere is around 14.7 psi at sea level.  The clouds on Venus are also made of highly corrosive materials, including sulfuric acid and hydrogen fluoride. Not exactly a place you’d like to visit.

Although the GEER chamber seems small, with only three by four-foot dimensions, it weighs in at twelve tons. GEER is capable of injecting up to nine different gasses with an accuracy equivalent to being able to count the drops of water in a 10-gallon fish tank.

Image source: WikipediaSo, what is the use of such a heavy duty device? By simulating the conditions on Venus, we can design and test materials better able to handle the dangerous atmosphere, which will better allow us to generate probes, like Curiosity on Mars. Previously built probes have only lasted on the surface of Venus for a few hours!

In the future, the scientists working with GEER are planning to add viewing windows, real time gas analysis, and a chamber to generate clouds. We are coming close to creating “Venus in a bottle”!

Peer edited by Christina Parker. 

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Understanding the Space of Space

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Image credit: NASA

Image of Earth taken from lunar orbit during the Apollo 11 mission. Mars is also faintly visible to the right of Earth.

In the past, the largest obstacle that separated humans was distance. In the first half of the 20th century, we built machines that made it possible to drive non-stop from Wilmington, NC to San Diego, CA in one and a half days or to fly the same distance in just five hours. As soon as we conquered these terrestrial distances, humans set their sights on the cosmos– but space has a lot of space.
Rockets provide the speeds necessary to send humans to the Moon and rovers to Mars. It seems humans have once again conquered vast distances to reach previously unreachable lands. We can travel from the East Coast to San Francisco in under 5 hours, but that doesn’t mean people in rural North Carolina do it. The Moon is our closest celestial neighbor, but that doesn’t mean you will notice a difference in size between full moons each month. We can travel to Mars in as little as 60 days, but that doesn’t mean it’s close enough to Earth to appear as big as the Moon. Any species with our technology could, in theory, colonize the galaxy in a few million years, but that doesn’t mean it’s been accomplished.
Understanding the space of space not only provides us a cosmic perspective, it gives us the ability to question fantastic memes and eases our disappointment when a celestial event isn’t as spectacular as promised.

Not-So-Super Moon

You may have seen posts on social media telling you to look up at the full moon on November 14th, 2016. At that time, the Moon was the closest that is had been to Earth since 1948. When the Moon approaches the full moon phase and is closest to Earth, we call that a supermoon. It’s not quite as rare as it sounds; there were actually three supermoons in October, November and December of last year. The thing is, while the Moon may be closer to Earth in its orbit, it is still really far away. Travelling at jet plane speeds, it would take you 16 to 19 days to get to the Moon. The Apollo astronauts, however, could reach lunar orbit with their rocket in under 10 hours. Compared to more familiar distances, the Earth-Moon distance is 100 times larger than the Wilmington-San Diego distance.

Image credit: Tanya Hill created this graphic for the Nov 11, 2016 issue of Cosmos magazine.

This graphic takes images of the largest and smallest full moons of 2016 and shrinks them down by the same amount to mimic how big the Moon appears to someone on Earth. The two images are then placed in the same frame for comparison. In the image, one definitely looks bigger, but would you notice the difference 7 months later?

Another way to visualize the distance to the Moon is to look at how big it appears to us here on Earth. At over 2000 miles across, a little less than the Wilmington-San Diego distance, this large body is so far away that it always appears less than an inch wide to us in the sky. During the three full moons in October, November and December, if you were to hold your hand a foot away from your face and try to hold the full Moon between your thumb and pointer finger, the space between your fingers would only change by one-thousandth of an inch each month– less than the thickness of a sheet of paper.
On Friday, June 9, 2017, when the Moon is farthest away from Earth, what is known as a micro moon will occur. On that day, your fingers will be one-hundredth of an inch closer together than during the supermoons– about the thickness of a standard business card. An untrained eye would never notice a difference. So, if you were less than impressed by the supermoon in November, it’s totally understandable.

Distant Warrior Planet

Image credit: Snopes.com

Every summer, this meme pops up in my news feed. It claims that Mars will be so close to Earth that it will appear as big as the Moon. While the distance between the Earth and Mars varies significantly as both planets orbit the Sun, as they move closer to each other it would still take 52 days to get to Mars on one of our rockets. This is because even at their closest, the Earth-Mars distance is ten thousand times the Wilmington-San Diego distance and well over 100 times the Earth-Moon distance. If we think about this in terms of how big Mars looks to us, at two times the width of the Moon, Mars would need to be placed at twice the Earth-Moon distance to appear the same size as the Moon to us Earthlings. Mars’ orbit will never let this happen. Mars will always appear as a red point of light.

No matter how many articles have been written debunking this ‘double moon’ hoax, it’s survived for 13 years. We easily fall for this meme because we’ve heard of probes and rovers being sent to Mars in less than a year’s time but we lack the perspective of how fast these spacecraft are travelling and the distances they are able to cover.

Interstellar Travel: Where are all the aliens?

When we talk about travelling to places beyond our solar system, we immediately think about aliens and enter the realm of speculation. This can be fun, but we have to be careful. The distances we are working with are significantly larger than the distances we cover within our solar system. Travel time becomes a much bigger issue.
The average distance between stars in our galaxy is 4 light years or 23 trillion miles– one million times the Earth-Mars distance and ten billion times the Wilmington-San Diego distance. With our current technology, it would take approximately 100,000 years to travel this distance. We could start by sending one ship to the recently discovered Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Sun. Once there, we would need to establish a community. Less than 500 years passed between Christopher Columbus sailing the ocean blue and the Apollo moon landing. Just to be generous, let’s say it takes 1000 years to settle down and establish a space flight program on a new planet.
So humans would now have two colonies that could send ships out. With this strategy, we could double the number of worlds sending out new ships every 101,000 years. That would mean after just 505,000 years we’d be sending ships out to 32 planets. After 1 million years, 956 planets. And after just 4 million years, 800 billion planets. Astronomers estimate that half of the 200 billion stars in our galaxy have planets. In one thousandth of the time it took for Earth to form and evolve intelligent life, a space-faring species could have colonized all the planets in our galaxy eight times over. This begs the question: where are all the aliens?
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Prosopee.

A representation of the Coral Model of galactic colonization, described in this article.

Although we can calculate an average distance of 4 light years between the stars in our galaxy, our own Sun only has one star with a planet within that distance. The next closest star after Proxima Centauri is 6 light years away. If we were to continue sending out ships as described above from Earth, the travel time would no longer be 100,000 years but 165,000 years. The next closest star is 6.5 light years. Again, increasing our travel time. Astronomers have yet to detect planets around either of these stars, so why would we even go to them? It seems a more realistic approach would be to send out a new ship every 101,000 years from the planet we just colonized. This strategy would require 100 trillion years to visit all 100 billion stars– 100,000 times longer than the age of our solar system and 10,000 times longer than the age of the universe. So while these are a fun exercises, they are not realistic ways for any civilization to conquer the galaxy.
The space of space is huge. Understanding its vastness not only makes you less susceptible to bogus memes, it gives you a better perspective of how far humans have come in our quest to explore and how far we still have to go.

Peer edited by Salma Azam, Holly Schroeder and Leila Strickland.

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The End of A Planetary Road Trip

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Recently, NASA’s JUNO spacecraft slowed down by 1,212 miles per hour in a carefully coordinated 35 minute maneuver. This slowdown is similar to you slamming on the brakes to stop your car on the highway in 2 seconds. Braking to the exact right speed allowed JUNO to be captured by Jupiter’s gravity and start orbiting the giant planet. Just like a long road trip, as spacecraft travel from Earth to their destination, they often cruise at high speed to reach their destination in a relatively short amount of time. But that means if you want to orbit or land on the planet, you must slow down a lot. Here are three ways NASA has dealt with the tricky task of ending a planetary road trip.

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