Thriving in Space Ensuring the Future of Biological and Physical Sciences Research: A Decadal Survey for 2023-2032 (2023) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
2 Current State of Knowledge in the Biological and Physical Sciences
2 Current State of Knowledge in the Biological and Physical Sciences
Pages 34-85
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Technological advances have led to giant leaps at the level of platform infrastructure, research campaigns, experiments, and data analysis. Indeed, the past decade of the International Space Station (ISS)
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has been probed. The new physics encountered by life in these environments entwines this research with that of the physical sciences in soft and condensed matter physics, as new routes to high-quality crystallization of otherwise recalcitrant proteins have been discovered and how the impact of hydrodynamic forces that are different in space affect biofilms, organ printing, and phase transitions in newly discovered membraneless organelles in cells has been studied.
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FIGURE 2-2 NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson storing blood samples in the International Space Station's (ISS's) ultra-cold freezer for eventual return to Earth.
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That knowledge gained from combustion far from equilibrium can in turn be applied to enable cold fire combustion, reignition in microgravity, and plasma-assisted combustion and material synthesis that affect feasibility and technical risk of future space exploration modes. ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY ADVANCING BIOLOGICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE RESEARCH New technologies have led to improvements in testing and techniques, without which scientific progress is slowed for any research community or nation.
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. Bioprinting is a subset of additive manufacturing, implying printing of biologically compatible materials and/ or inclusion of living biological cells in the printed structure.
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With potential to impact production of propulsion system components or to repair space-deployed components faster and with lower upmass, safe adaptation of additive manufacturing for metals in space environments will require innovation in the coming decade. Such anticipated advances will leverage the physical science data repositories and insights gained from prior years of research on metal solidification in microgravity (Fredriksson 2022)
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Biological Sciences Development of a microbial observatory on the ISS was a high priority in the 2011 decadal survey, Recapturing a Future for Space Exploration: Life and Physical Sciences Research for a New Era (NRC 2011)
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Development of platforms and capabilities is very dynamic. CLPS, commercial lunar payload services; DLR, German Aerospace Center; HALO, Habitation and Logistics Outpost; HLS, Human Landing System; iHab, international habitation module; ISS, International Space Station; MELiSSA, Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative; MSSF/KSC, Microgravity Simulation Support Facility at Kennedy Space Center; PPA/KSC, Plant Processing Area at Kennedy Space Center.
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2015) , confirmation of the fundamental hypothesis that survival of plants in the spaceflight environment requires adaptive changes that are both governed and displayed by alterations in gene expression (Paul et al.
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Indeed, development of tissue chip–based research in space environments has made remarkable progress in the past decade, and included
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The Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE) , which began in 2001, continues to collect data about how exposure to the LEO space environment affects material properties and performance.
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JAXA's Cell Biology Equipment Facility (CBEF) FIGURE 2-7 NASA astronaut and Expedition 66 Flight Engineer Mark Vande Hei sets up components for the MVP-Plant-01 space botany study and nourishes Arabidopsis plants grown on Petri plates.
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FIGURE 2-8 European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers, Expedition 30 flight engineer, prepares to insert biological samples in the Minus Eighty Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI-1) in the Kibo laboratory of the International Space Station.
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Biology is also part of effective life support systems in space travel. Therefore, the biological sciences in space span a wide range of microbes, animals, and plants -- all in service of effective space exploration and habitation.
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Human and Animal Biology This section is organized by physiological systems for clarity; however, multi-system research is a growing area that could be incorporated to an even greater degree in the coming decade. Some key topics that are also relevant to NASA's Human Research Program are presented to frame some of the fundamental biology functions and advances in knowledge over the prior decade.
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Cardiovascular The major findings and research tools to help define these cardiac and cardiovascular pathologies that have been developed since the last decadal survey (NRC 2011) are the NASA Twins Study (Garrett-Bakelman et al.
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changed in Scott while in space (low Earth orbit [LEO] on the International Space Station [ISS]
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Work by NASA's Human Research Program (HRP) does not address changes at the molecular and cellular level; instead, such studies focus on functional risks to humans with noninvasive techniques to quantify blood flow, ocular pressure, and intracranial pressure changes.
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function was more prominent in astronauts who underwent their first flight compared to experienced astronauts. Simulated microgravity changes tumor cell behavior and metabolism, leading to the acquisition of an aggressive and metastatic stem cell–like phenotype (Masini et al.
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A key challenge to space exploration is the effects of radiation on genes that maintain life-forms and ultimately on those that are passed on to progeny. Drosophila was the first organism to be flown in space (in a 1947 non-orbital rocket mission)
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While personnel onboard the ISS enjoyed the fresh greens provided by Veggie, NASA's Vegetable Production System, model plant experiments continued to decipher the microgravity response data to aid in modification of plants and growth practices to enable long-term plant production to support human exploration. (See Figure 2-10.)
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. The zinnias are part of the flowering crop experiment that began on November 16, 2015, when NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren activated the ISS Vegetable Production System (Veggie)
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Signaling A wide array of signaling components have been implicated in the plant gravity response -- calcium, ethylene, ROS, and cyclic AMP, among others, including nitric oxide (NO)
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2020) , showed different skewing behavior and markedly different patterns of gene expression in the spaceflight environment, indicating unique and opposite contributions to physiological adaptation to spaceflight and suggesting that proper function of both genes is important to spaceflight adaptation.
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2021; FIGURE 2-12 International Space Station Vegetable Production System (Veggie) hardware.
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Whole genome sequencing, analysis, and sequence comparison to FIGURE 2-13 Diseased zinnia plants on the International Space Station (ISS)
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Regolith collected from the Apollo 11, 12, and 17 spaceflights were used to grow plants on Earth. Plant growth was delayed and underdeveloped as plants faced the stresses of the ionic and oxidationinducing lunar regolith.
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SOURCE: Courtesy of NASA/Isaac Watson, https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasakennedy/ 52829925346, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. crop cultivation in space, and generally instrument development has been required of plant science advances in space environments.
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Since then, novel findings have been reported for numerous model microorganisms grown under spaceflight or spaceflight analog conditions, including Gram-negative bacteria, Gram-positive bacteria, and fungi. The collective research to date has repeatedly demonstrated that spaceflight and/or spaceflight analog culture environments modulate a range of microbial characteristics, including growth, metabolism, gene expression, stress responses, biofilm formation and structure, motility, and host-microbe interactions.10 Given these widespread observations, the 2018 mid-term assessment reiterated high prioritization of microbiological studies to support deep-space exploration.
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The ISS is a unique built environment: occupied by only a limited number of inhabitants at any given time and subject to microgravity and exposed to increased radiation. Recapturing a Future for Space Exploration recommended setting the stage for the use of the ISS as a microbial observatory.
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(B) His brother, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, gave himself a flu shot while onboard the International Space Station (ISS)
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While still in its infancy in comparison to more established fields of biology and physics, as highlighted by the omission of biophysics in Recapturing a Future for Space Exploration (NRC 2011) , there have been a number of key findings in microgravity and LEO with respect to biological physics that indicate opportunities for new science and medicine that are both enabled by the space environment and also enable future space exploration.
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While gravitational forces may have limited direct effect on biological systems below a certain length scale, reduced gravity impacts a number of other phenomena, including reduced bulk fluid flow generated by buoyancy-driven natural convection that can have significant physical effects on biological systems, as can be observed by analysis of non-dimensional numbers (Rayleigh and Grashof numbers that reflect approximate ratios of forces)
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. Since Recapturing a Future for Space Exploration and the mid-term report, there have been several publications indicating that protein crystals grown in the space environment are larger and have fewer defects than those grown on Earth, aligning with the results of past work.
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PHYSICAL SCIENCES The physical sciences comprise a wide array of phenomena and materials properties that are potentially altered by the spaceflight environment. Some of these phenomena are very practical, such as the behaviors of the fluids and materials that support space exploration.
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With respect to materials science research, Recapturing a Future for Space Exploration focused on the overarching topics of advanced materials for extreme environments (including low-density materials, high-temperature materials, and smart/stimuli-responsive materials) , in situ resource utilization, materials science fundamentals, materials synthesis and processing to control microstructure and properties, and computational materials science.
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The two new levitators operating on the ISS have already provided an array of new capabilities for determining thermophysical properties, as well as enabled studies of nucleation, crystal growth velocity and phase selection over a wider range of conditions than is achievable on the ground. In addition, the highly controlled conditions of directional solidification have long been a particularly valuable tool for studying solid/liquid interface behavior and microstructure formation during freezing or solidification of metals and metallic alloys, with space providing the necessary long duration, purely diffusive environment.
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participation in partner-led investigations using facilities from international partners. Such research in space environments can contribute to knowledge used in processing science and manufacturing on Earth and is also key to enabling space-based repair of built environments and manufacturing in the locations targeted for space exploration by the United States in the coming decade.
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; or as components of structural materials. In fact, a recent, rapidly growing area of research is in the use of lunar regolith as building material for habitats and other structures, particularly via additive manufacturing.
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In particular, newly developed forms of active matter that can give rise to unique bulk material properties and perform useful tasks are envisioned to transform manufacturing, medicine, and robotics. Given the relatively weak forces that can both form and destroy the mesoscopic structure of these materials, space -- reduced gravity environments in particular -- presents a unique workspace to explore the interactions, physical properties, and transport phenomena of colloidal suspensions, gels, foams, granular materials, and liquid crystals.
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. Access to the space environment has proven key to advancing understanding of such complex fluids and soft matter in non-equilibrium in the past decade, particularly because reduced gravity conditions for sufficiently long times is required to understand the role that gravitational forces play in phase transitions.
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Fluid Physics Two-Phase Thermal Management of Space Systems Although a capable option for any thermal management challenge, systems capitalizing on phase change heat transfer are particularly attractive for utilization in space thermal-fluid systems where their orders-of-magnitude improvement in heat transfer coefficient allows for appreciable reductions in size and weight of hardware. Because of this potential, there is a push by space agencies worldwide to develop the technology further and allow implementation in both space vehicles and planetary bases.
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. As a two-phase process that uses the heat to boil a moving liquid until it changes it into a moving vapor, flow boiling is an effective heat transfer method.
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Routinely, thermal/fluid design codes such as GFSSP and SINDA/FLUINT are used to design cryogenic propellant transfer systems; these are lumped node codes that use correlations to model both single-phase and two-phase flow, heat transfer, and pressure drop. However, it has been shown recently that the existing correlations used in these two models do not agree well with available cryogenic flow boiling data in the quenching configuration (Hartwig et al.
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. The last decadal survey, Recapturing a Future for Space Exploration (NRC 2011)
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experiment onboard the International Space Station. Following a series of preparations, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy (out of frame)
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in the past decade resulted in a surge in research that was not only driven by the goal of developing fundamental understanding of the phenomena, but also by its implication in the development of fire safety protocols, because low-temperature cool-flame combustion cannot be visibly observed. Onboard the ISS, the Multi User Droplet Combustion Apparatus (MDCA)
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This section summarizes both quantum technologies and their fundamental physics applications, as well as recent space deployment of modern quantum technologies. Fundamental Physics Research Since the 2011 Decadal Survey The past 15 years have seen revolutionary developments in quantum technologies, particularly those related to the ability to precisely control quantum states of photons, atoms, molecules, and even solids.
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Lunar or martian bases would enable seismographic and other studies of these celestial bodies, their magnetic fields, and atmospheric phenomena. These bases would also provide platforms for large telescopes, and could furthermore become stable, long-term laboratories for reduced gravity experimentation.
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Here, Expedition 65 Commander Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency installs a Joint Station Local Area Network router and its associated components inside the International Space Station's U.S. Destiny laboratory module.
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Furthermore, the reduced gravity can unmask phenomena that are often hidden by gravitational convection, such as Marangoni convection. The limited proof of concept studies of ISRU enabled by advances in additive manufacturing will transform in-space fabrication and maintenance tasks.
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Yet for BPS disciplines, research in space offers unique opportunities to advance space exploration and make fundamental discoveries not possible in any other way. Surprising discoveries in the past decade demonstrate the importance of such fundamental research and bring into focus new questions to be answered in the next.
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