Tag: moon

Is the Moon Driving My Cat Insane?

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Like many pet owners, my partner and I have a long list of nonsensical nicknames for our 10-year-old tabby, Ace: sugarplum, booboo, Angela Merkel, sharp claw, clompers, night fury, poof ball. But we reserve one nickname for a very specific time each month, when Ace is more restless than usual in the daytime hours, skulking around from room to room instead of snoozing on a blanket. Or when his evening sprints become turbocharged, and he parkours off the walls and the furniture to achieve maximum speed. On those nights, the moon hangs bright in the dark sky, almost entirely illuminated. Then, we call him the waning gibbous.

I don’t remember when I first decided to draw a connection between Ace’s zoomies and the moon, but pet websites bolstered my belief, even if they read like feline horoscopes. Besides, cats are mystical creatures of the night, the supernatural companions of witches, and all-around spooky. Ace’s wildness didn’t always match up with a waning gibbous, but it happened enough for me to keep the joke going, and start to wonder whether there might be a slice of truth in it. Other animals on Earth eat, grow, and live in tune with the moon. What about my eight-pound sugarplum?

The moon has long been falsely blamed for all sorts of odd human behaviors. Researchers have firmly debunked claims that a full moon causes more crime or emergency-room visits as pseudoscience. But veterinarians, cat researchers, and feline-behavior experts told me that the relationship between felines and the moon has barely been studied. No concrete evidence has definitively linked changes in feline behavior to the phases of the lunar cycle, but the sheer absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. “I wouldn’t say the case is closed,” Mikel Delgado, a cat-behavior consultant in California and the author of Play With Your Cat!, told me.

Play With Your Cat! – The Essential Guide To Interactive Play For A Happier, Healthier Feline

By Mikel Maria Delgado

Among people who work with animals, fears of the full moon persist. “It was very common, and it still is common, for people who work in veterinary hospitals to start feeling anxious around a full moon and make comments to each other—Don’t jinx me; we’re going to see some crazy stuff,” Raegan Wells, an emergency-room veterinarian in Arizona, told me. Back in the 2000s, Wells and her colleagues at Colorado State University analyzed the cases of nearly 12,000 dogs and cats treated at the school’s veterinary-medicine center; their study found that the risk of emergencies was highest on days when the moon was mostly illuminated—during the waxing-gibbous, full, and waning-gibbous phases. But the researchers couldn’t say whether those additional emergencies were caused by lunar zoomies or were merely a statistical artifact.

Cat experts have a couple of theories for how the lunar cycle could, potentially, affect feline behavior. The extra glow of a full moon could embolden cats to explore more, “taking risks and doing things they normally wouldn’t do,” Britt Florkiewicz, an evolutionary psychologist and professor at Lyon College in Arkansas who studies facial signaling in cats and other animals, told me. A new moon could encourage them in a different way; when the night is darker, cats’ vision gives them an advantage. A study of outdoor cats, published last year, found that the animals were most nocturnally active around the time of a new moon. But it’s unclear whether indoor cats like mine could exhibit a similar tendency from their vantage point on the windowsill. Carlo Siracusa, a veterinary behaviorist at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine, told me that his cat, Elsa, often stares at the full moon from the top floor of his house, where the window provides a lovely view. Perhaps other cats do the same because the moonlight casts shadows on the walls of their home, Siracusa said. Cats are suckers for shadows.

Cats might be no more responsive to the specific waxing and waning of the moon than they are to any other changes in their environment, Siracusa said. In fact, he said, discovering something new in their vicinity is one of the two main triggers for cats to engage in zoomies. (The other is when they sense that they’re about to be fed.) During the pandemic, Siracusa saw an uptick in cats exhibiting aggression, a change he attributes to their owners suddenly working from home. “Spaces and times that were before pretty consistently predictable suddenly became very unpredictable,” Siracusa said. His patients’ owners propose all kinds of explanations for their cats’ behavior, and he always takes them seriously. “There are so many factors that can influence the behavior of a cat that just dismissing what someone says and saying, No, that’s just fantasy—I don’t think that’s appropriate,” he said.

Read: A sort-of-common, very strange cat trick

Humans have a natural tendency to draw associations and spot patterns, which makes pet owners masters of projection. When Wells and I spoke last week during a full moon, she reported that her cat Roy “has gotten into a lot more mischief this last 24 hours than is typical for him.” But she suspects that she noticed only because she had been thinking about our interview, and she had checked the moon phase. Plus, her family had just put up Halloween decorations, introducing novelty to the cat’s surroundings—perhaps that was why. Or maybe Roy, who is only a year old, is “just being a stinker,” Wells said.

Ace is the king of the household whether the moon is glowing or not. I like to watch him when he’s dozing in one of his favorite spots: on top of a small ottoman that we brought home last year from a yard sale so that we could finally put our feet up in front of the television, and that now serves as a literal pedestal for our fluffy boy. Moonsplaining, too, can create a sort of awestruck distance between cat owners and our pets; it casts them as mystifying creatures, not of this world, their true nature determined by celestial forces that mere mortals can only hope to comprehend. But it is fundamentally an attempt to better understand the inner lives of these small animals we share our lives with. “Humans are really bad at not anthropomorphizing and allowing our pets to be the species that they are,” Delgado said. Still, we are fantastically good at loving the animals that live with us, even in ways that defy logic. Maybe my cat is a little moon-crazy, or maybe I am. Either way, Ace will always be a waning gibbous to me.

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October 21, 2024
NASA’s Moon suit gets runway treatment in Prada partnership

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In one of the strangest partnerships we’ve come across, Axiom Space and Prada (yes, that Prada) have teamed up to produce the space suits NASA astronauts will wear when they return to the Moon as part of the space agency’s Artemis program.

NASA has not had a new space suit since 1982 when the current EVA suits were made, and there have been no new Moon suits since the Apollo program that ended in 1972. To fill this gap, the agency awarded Axiom US$228 million in 2022 to come up with an improved modern version of the Apollo suit. In turn, Axiom partnered with fashion house Prada to work on the design of the outer shell of the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) suit, as well as details like materials used, production methods, and even the stitching.

At first glance, there’s something surreal about bringing in a fashion designer on what is essentially an engineering project. In engineering, the rule is that form follows function and many incredibly beautiful machines and infrastructure projects have been created where their beauty derived from how they were designed to do their job.

Axiom Prada

Concorde, for example, is one of the most gorgeous aircraft ever built, but no one considered the aesthetics when making it. The same is true of the bridges built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel during the Victorian Era that are spread across Britain. They wouldn’t look out of place in an art gallery, except that they’d never fit, yet they were all designed for the mundane task of carrying trains over rivers and the like.

On the other hand, this isn’t the first space suit that had aesthetics on its requirements list. The suits worn by its SpaceX Dragon astronauts were originally drawn up with the help of Jose Fernandezm, who is a Hollywood costume designer and thought the suits were meant for a film wardrobe.

If there was a third hand available, it should also be pointed out that the Apollo suits were made by International Latex Corporation, which brought the company’s experience making brassieres and girdles to the problem of making space suits out of latex and specialized textiles. In that light, there is a method to the Prada madness.

The Axiom sit has anti-abrasive patches on the knees and elbows
Axiom Space

The formal unveiling of the AxEMU suit last week at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan isn’t the first glimpse of the design the public has been afforded. However, Axiom points out that on previous occasions the outer shell of the suit was rendered in a special dark cover layer to protect proprietary secrets from prying eyes.

Now, the suit is in the white livery with dark knee and elbow patches. The white is to reflect sunlight away to shield the astronaut against heat while the patches provide protection against abrasion – an important point because, unlike the Apollo suits, these are intended for indefinite reuse.

According to Axiom, the new suit is designed for both exploring the lunar south polar region and for EVAs in space. Unlike the Apollo suits, which were custom tailored, and the current one used on the International Space Station, which come in interchangeable modules in only a few sizes, the new suit will fit 99% of males and females. This suggests that the AxEMU suit is highly adjustable and likely comes in men’s and women’s models.

The Axiom suit has a rear entry hatch
Axiom Space

The suit has a carbon dioxide scrubbing and cooling technology that is probably a refinement on the sublimation system used for Apollo. The heating system can keep an astronaut comfortable in the freezing lunar shadows for up to two hours and life support can be used for Moonwalks and spacewalks for up to eight hours. There are advanced materials in the suit itself, redundant systems and self-diagnostic capabilities for safety, and camera-equipped helmets that provide a wide viewing angle.

Axiom claims that even the gloves have been improved – which will please many astronauts because the current ones are very cold to wear and tend to rip off fingernails.

The suit is currently undergoing testing without anyone inside as it approaches the final development stage and its critical design review next year.

“We are pioneering a new era in space exploration where partnerships are imperative to the commercialization of space,” said Russell Ralston, Executive Vice President of Extravehicular Activity, Axiom Space. “Partnerships build a strong, cohesive team, enabling industry experts to provide cutting-edge technology, specialized products and services to drive innovation. For the first time, we are leveraging expertise in other industries to craft a better solution for space.”

Source: Axiom Space

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October 21, 2024
SpaceX’s Dramatic Rocket Catch Brings Interplanetary Travel One Step Closer

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This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

SpaceX has reached an important milestone in testing Starship, the spacecraft it wants to use for crewed missions to the Moon and Mars. Following a test launch yesterday, the Super Heavy booster that launches Starship returned to Earth and landed at its “Mechazilla” launch tower, succeeding in the first ever attempt at this maneuver. This success brings SpaceX a step closer to its ambition of making Starship a fully reusable spacefaring system.

After detaching from Starship post-launch and burning most of its fuel, the 70-meter-tall Super Heavy used 13 of its 33 engines for a controlled descent, before shutting off all but three and maneuvering itself onto two metal arms on its launch tower in Boca Chica, Texas. The whole process, from launch to landing on Mechazilla’s “chopsticks,” as SpaceX has dubbed the arms, took seven minutes.

Meanwhile, the Starship spacecraft continued to fly for about an hour after detaching from Super Heavy, propelling itself using its six engines, before splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

Starship is the largest and most powerful space carrier ever built, and its purpose is to take astronauts to the Moon and Mars. After a series of increasingly complex test flights—which began in 2019 with brief tests on a vehicle dubbed Starhopper that initially lifted just a few meters off the ground—SpaceX has moved on to more ambitious tests of the Starship capsule and Super Heavy rocket.

The most recent test before yesterday’s was in June, when both the rocket and the spacecraft managed, despite some serious issues, to survive reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and practice ocean landings, with Super Heavy simulating its future return to the launch tower by maneuvering in a controlled descent to a specific spot over the Gulf of Mexico.

Landing rockets after flight is a feat that SpaceX has already managed to accomplish many times with its smallest rocket, the Falcon 9, which is a staple of its current operations. Starship, however, is a much more powerful and complex system than Falcon 9. With its 33 engines, which are more powerful than those used on the Falcon, the Super Heavy booster offers about 10 times as much thrust at takeoff, and is a much larger piece of machinery, making the landing feat more difficult.

Although SpaceX is still in the testing stages with Starship, the aim is to use Super Heavy and Mechazilla tower to avoid having to build new rockets for each launch, thus greatly reducing the cost of launches and, consequently, making them more frequent. Rapid reuse will be essential if SpaceX wants to reach its goal of dramatically reducing the time and cost of getting cargo and people into orbit and to deep space. The ultimate aim with Super Heavy, SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk told CNN, is to return the rocket to the launch pad within minutes of its return, allowing the vehicle to take off again once refueled, in as little as 30 minutes after landing.

With the success of the Super Heavy landing, SpaceX can now move on to its next challenge: refueling a Starship while it is in orbit, which will be necessary for getting one of these spacecraft to the Moon.

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October 14, 2024
NASA thinks it found a moon light-years away spewing gas

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Scientists have never actually seen a moon orbiting a planet other than the ones in this solar system. An exomoon, a companion to an exoplanet, likely would be too tiny and far away for telescopes to resolve.

But a new NASA study may have found a clue that one is orbiting a planet some 635 light-years from Earth. The inference comes from a vast sodium cloud spotted in space. Whatever is causing it produces about 220,000 pounds of sodium per second.

The research suggests a rocky moon circling exoplanet WASP-49 b, a Saturn-sized gas giant discovered in 2017, is the source. That could mean the distant world is accompanied by a moon like Jupiter’s Io — a highly volcanic place, blasting out its own massive cloud of gasses 1,000 times wider than Jupiter.

“The evidence is very compelling that something other than the planet and star are producing this cloud,” said Rosaly Lopes, a planetary geologist who co-authored the study, in a statement. “Detecting an exomoon would be quite extraordinary, and because of Io, we know that a volcanic exomoon is possible.”

SEE ALSO:

Webb telescope finds first clear evidence of a ‘steam world’

An exomoon could be the source of a bewildering sodium cloud found around an exoplanet.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech illustration

This is not the first time astronomers have suspected an exomoon was lurking in their data. There have been exomoon candidates discovered in the past, though confirming their existence is much more difficult. Scientists such as Apurva Oza, once a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, are interested in finding unconventional ways to detect them for what they could represent: Moons throughout the galaxy could also potentially offer habitable conditions for life, even if their host planets don’t.

That’s why Oza wanted to return to studying WASP-49 b to further investigate the source of its bewildering cloud. Researchers used a ground-based telescope to observe the silhouettes of the cloud and the exoplanet as they passed in front of the host star.

Mashable Light Speed

At one point, they noticed that the cloud was moving faster than WASP-49 b and away from Earth. If the cloud were coming from the exoplanet, they figured they would have seen it moving toward Earth. The observation led them to conclude that the cloud was coming from a separate source, according to the paper recently published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Exoplanet WASP-49 b could have an exomoon similar to Jupiter’s Io, a highly volcanic world pumping gasses into space.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech illustration

“We think this is a really critical piece of evidence,” said Oza, a staff scientist at Caltech and the lead author, in a statement. “The cloud is moving in the opposite direction that physics tells us it should be going if it were part of the planet’s atmosphere.”

The team’s research provided other clues that an exomoon was making the cloud. Both the planet and the star are mostly made of the lightest elements, hydrogen and helium, with hardly any sodium. Seemingly neither has enough to be responsible for the cloud. Scientists also used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to see that the cloud hovers high above the exoplanet’s atmosphere — just like the cloud Io envelops around Jupiter.

Next the team developed computer models to see if an exomoon could be the cloud’s catalyst. Their simulations found that a moon with a snug eight-hour orbit around the planet could explain the cloud’s motion — the way it seemed to sometimes drift in front of the planet and how it didn’t appear to be tied to any particular region of the alien world.

Jupiter’s moon Io, seen in multiple views above, is the most volcanically active world in our solar system.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS

Scientists can’t say anything definitive about the exomoon because it’s just a candidate. But here’s what astronomers know about Io, the third-largest Jovian moon out of 95. Io is the most volcanic world in the solar system. Astronomers believe hundreds of volcanoes spew fountains that reach dozens of miles high.

Jupiter’s gravity squeezes Io‘s core as the moon moves closer, then slackens as it moves farther away. This swelling and contracting causes Io’s interior to heat up, triggering tidal volcanism.

Scientists will need to continue observing this cloud to confirm its behavior, so the team is likely a long way from knowing with certainty if they have proof of an exomoon. Still, the results are thrilling for Oza, who believes looking for gas clouds — perhaps an order of magnitude larger than their source — could be an indirect method of finding habitable moons in other star systems.

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October 12, 2024
The space suit Chinese astronauts will wear on the Moon

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China is planning to put people on the Moon around 2030 and is showing off the new space suits they’ll be wearing. At a media event, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) had two astronauts put the suits through their paces for the cameras.

According to current plans, the CMSA intends to land on the Moon somewhere near the lunar south pole by the end of the decade using its Mengzhou crewed spacecraft and the Lanyue crewed lunar lander. However, getting to the Moon isn’t much of an achievement if you can’t step outside for a stroll, so space suits are as important as the spacecraft and lander.

It’s a big challenge because, outside of experimental and development projects, there haven’t been any lunar space suits used since the Apollo era that ended with Apollo 17 in 1972. Today, space suits are divided into emergency suits designed to protect the crew during launch and reentry in the event of a loss of air pressure, and more complicated EVA suits that are made of more robust materials and more flexible joints to allow astronauts to leave the spacecraft in orbit and protect them against the harsh environment of open space.

Chinese Moon Suit

Moon suits are a completely different animal. Not only must the suit protect the wearer against vacuum, the heat and cold of the lunar surface, and the impact of micrometeorites, it has to ward off the clinging, highly abrasive lunar dust and the heat of the ground that can be as hot as boiling water when in the sunlight and can melt boot covers, as happened during Apollo. Added to this, the joints of the suit must provide enough flexibility so the wearer can walk and do practical work and it has to have an efficient, self-contained life support system that makes a space suit a human-shaped spaceship.

Unveiled at the third Spacesuit Technology Forum at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality, the new suit was walked out by astronauts Zhai Zhigang and Wang Yaping on a stage marked by an expansive video screen, starry sets, and a fog machine. Meanwhile, Yang Liwei, deputy chief designer of China’s manned space program and China’s first astronaut handled the speaking part.

The suit, made distinctive by the red stripes on the arms inspired by traditional Chinese art and the ones on the legs inspired by rocket flames, was put through its paces before the audience as the astronauts bent, squatted, walked, went on one knee, and climbed a ladder to demonstrate its mobility. From the umbilicals trailing from the suits and the ease with which the pair moved, it’s likely that the life support system was left out to reduce weight under Earth’s gravity, which is six times that of the Moon.

Views of the new Moon suit
Xinhua/Wang Quanchao

There weren’t a lot of technical details about the suit beyond its having a multifunctional integrated control panel, flexible and reliable gloves, cameras, and a panoramic glare-proof helmet visor. However, we can make a few deductions from the general layout of the suit, which is obviously based on the Chinese Feitian space suit that was based, in turn, on the Soviet/Russian Orlan space suit that was originally flown on the Salyut space station missions and the latest variant of which is still used on the International Space Station (ISS).

Like the Orlan, the new Chinese suit likely has a solid torso and soft limbs, with entry through a back panel that also includes the life support system. The similarity derives from China importing Orlan-M suits around 2000 as part of its Shenzhou crewed orbital program. If the new suit has similar specs, it should weigh in around 120 kg (260 lb) when fully equipped, have a duration of eight hours on its internal systems, and be good for at least 15 uses.

The unnamed suit will get its moniker after a call for public submissions.

Source: Xinhua

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October 2, 2024
Swing-away hitch tent base camps like a fabric moon lander

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We’ve watched the rooftop tent (RTT) take off as a popular camping alternative, but the hitch-mounted tent just hasn’t caught on the same way. It has attracted the enthusiasm of several startups and even one of the true kings of the vehicle hitch, but it’s faced some tough sledding gaining traction. The latest take on the genre looks to prove itself with a swing-out design similar to that used on bike racks, allowing campers to create a vehicular base camp with full tailgate access. Is it worth the premium price?

Despite myriad well-established options like the ground tent, rooftop tent, cot tent, Australian swag and tent trailer, some business minds continue to try to thread the needle a little further with a full-blown RTT that rides and camps just above ground level behind the car. Comparing it to a regular RTT, they reckon it’s easier to mount and remove; easier to climb in and out of, especially for older campers, young children, pets and other groups that might have difficulty with a ladder; and much more convenient for middle-of-the-night nature calls. It also promises to cut the drag of a rooftop tent by riding in the vehicle’s shadow.

On the other hand, hitch tents have always appeared to us to be an awkward mash-up of roof tent and ground tent. If they were priced comparably, the advantages would even out a little better, but they tend to be more considerably expensive compared to the same size/style of RTT, which itself is already way more expensive than a basic ground tent. Plus, they don’t pitch quite as quickly as the fastest rooftop tents and threaten to block visibility out the rear window.

While hitch tents do offer some raised height and leveling advantages over ground tents, we’d think the latter with a cot and/or cushy mattress would be equally or more comfortable, and at a fraction of the price.

The swinging action gives the Swing Away Tent the advantage of full tailgate access
Escapade 4×4

British startup Escapade 4×4 applies a slightly more evolved design to its Swing Away Tent to try to nudge that pros/cons breakdown in the hitch tent’s favor. Much like a swing-away bike rack – the Yakima Exo double-stacker, for instance – or tire carrier, its tent rides on a hinged hitch mount that swings to the right, rather than sitting stationary directly behind the bumper.

The advantages of the Swing Away design really start long before reaching camp. The tent should be easier to mount to the vehicle than a rooftop tent, since you don’t have to lift it all the way to roof level. Escapade includes wheels with the design for more easily getting it to and from the hitch.

Once installed, the swing-away allows travelers to access the tailgate without having to completely unhitch the tent. That will prove a huge advantage if they need to quickly access something like a cooler or luggage during the drive to camp. It could also mean the difference between having to mount and remove the tent for every camping trip and leaving it on for longer periods of time like an RTT.

Swing Away Tent packed up and ready to drive; it can also swing away in packed position for tailgate access
Escapade 4×4

The swing-away may or may not be as handy once one arrives at camp, since he or she might end up unhitching the tent anyway and leaving it behind while using the vehicle. But for those who want to keep the tent hitched, the swing-out function allows them to get into the tailgate to unload, access a slide-out kitchen, etc. It then creates a more compact, cohesive vehicular base camp, complete with a tent that’s easier to step in and out of than a roof rack-mounted one.

To set up, the Swing Away tent lowers down off the hitch and folds out. Unlike other hitch tents with folding legs, the Swing Away uses a set of six removable height-adjustable legs to stand level on the ground. Removable disc feet are included to better distribute weight on softer ground – the configuration that reminded us of a lunar lander’s legs.

The removable legs appear to add a little bit of extra setup time and work compared to fold-outs, but Escapade still reckons you can get the whole tent set up in three minutes. The company doesn’t list a capacity, but with a total floor area of 208 x 122 cm (82 x 48 in), the tent should comfortably sleep two adults and maybe a dog at their feet. An integrated 5-cm-thick (2-in) mattress provides a cushioned night of sleep.

The Swing Away legs adjust in height for leveling and include optional disc feet for use on softer mud and sand
Escapade 4×4

Now, the dreaded price: It’s actually quite easy to compare the Swing Away Tent to a comparable rooftop tent because Escapade sells the same tent in both forms. Technically called the Thre360 (we’re only writing that mishmash once), the rooftop version wears an MSRP of £1,850 (approx. US$2,300) while the swing-away variant just over doubles that price to £3,750 ($4,950). We suppose if you have to buy an expensive platform rack or pickup bed rack to carry an RTT, the difference won’t be so drastic, but otherwise, it seems a steep premium for a 50/50 raffle of pros and cons.

Much like the Cinch x Wild Land Kitchen Cruiser, the Escapade Cookbox is a portable standalone kitchen system that packs small and unfolds at camp
Escapade 4×4

Escapade has taken the smart approach by simply adapting its rooftop tent for the hitch so it can sell the same tent in both forms. The company also offers a variety of other interesting base camp gear, including a cool little expandable kitchen box with both a dual-burner gas stove and a wood-burning stove. That kitchen box, and the company’s squarish pots and kettles, also fit nicely with the strategy of trading out round gear for square gear that packs neatly.

The video below shows the Swing Away Tent in its element.

Swing-Away tent: We found the perfect replacement to Rooftop Tents?

Source: Escapade 4×4

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August 25, 2024
Starpath accelerates moon water mining plans with $12M seed funding

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NASA and the space industry are in agreement: if we want to establish a permanent human presence on the moon, we’ll need to make use of every native resource we can — and none are as important as water ice.

Starpath Robotics is one of a handful of startups planning for this future. The startup is betting that there will be a thriving market for liquid oxygen (LOX) refined from lunar water ice, and that harvesting this resource will be key to humanity’s expansion throughout the solar system. LOX is a crucial component of propellant for some vehicles like rockets and spacecraft like lunar landers, and its used as the oxidizer alongside a combustible fuel such as hydrogen, kerosene, or methane.

The company came out of stealth last September with an ambitious water harvesting architecture, involving mining rovers, refineries and LOX storage systems. Starpath wants to launch a demo mission “as quickly as we possibly can,” CEO Saurav Shroff said in a recent interview. To ensure the hardware will be ready whenever a launch vehicle is available, the company announced today that it has closed a $12 million seed round, co-led by 8VC and Fusion Fund, with participation from Day One Ventures, Balerion Space, and Indicator Ventures. The new funding brings the total capital raised to date to over $14.5 million.

Much of the architecture has remained the same since Starpath originally unveiled its plans last year: essentially, the company wants to use fleets of mining rovers that dig up hundreds of tons of lunar dirt and return it to autonomous lunar processing plans that extract the water, splits those molecules into their constituent atoms, and then liquifies the oxygen. The entire system would be powered by a massive solar array that’s being designed in collaboration with space solar startup Solestial.

There are some changes, however. Shroff said the 10-person team has made improvements on the mining rover hardware such that it will take far fewer rovers to produce a 1,000-ton annual harvesting scale (the company originally estimated it would take 50 rovers to hit that rate). Rover development also got a boost with $800,000 in NASA grants, as part of the space agency’s Break the Ice challenge to private industry. There is still no doubt much to develop, including the solar array and refineries, but with the basic architecture is essentially planned out. With that in place, the company’s been turning its attention to the final interaction between its hardware and the customer’s vehicle.

Figuring this out means solving a few problems, namely how to transport the LOX to the vehicle, which could be some distance away. The other problem, of course, is how to actually load the vehicle with the product.

For the first issue, Shroff says the company is simply configuring its dirt-hauling rover to carry pressurized cryogenic propellant tanks instead. For the second, while he declined to go into specifics, he said the rover would be equipped with a specialized refueling instrument, that in all likelihood will be designed on a customer-by-customer basis.

As of right now, there are few prospective customers for lunar LOX, but those that are planning moon missions could prove to be prolific buyers. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have contracts with NASA to land on the moon before the end of the decade; Shroff estimates that Starship would consume around 100-300 tons of oxygen on the moon per flight, and something like Blue Origin’s Blue Moon would consume tens of tons of oxygen per flight.

Given that Starpath is aiming to produce around 1,000 tons of LOX per year, regular Starship flights to and from the lunar surface alone could be enough demand to support this production capacity. At that rate, Shroff says, any operator would be able to fly a vehicle to the moon and trust they will be able to refuel it while they’re there.

By the end of this year, the company is aiming to conduct an end-to-end, full-scale demonstration of its system in a simulated lunar environment, which they’ll build out at their 12,000-square-foot premises. After that, they’ll embark on a series of test campaigns before launching their first demonstration mission. The goal for that first mission is to harvest the equivalent of around 100 tons of liquid oxygen per year. It’s incredibly ambitious: scientists have confirmed that water ice is on the moon, but no government or company has ever harvested it, let alone refined it in-situ.

Starpath is currently at ten full-time employees, and the new capital will primarily go toward doubling or even tripling that number at a fast pace. The payoff for getting this technology online could be enormous, the company is betting, with the moon just the first stepping stone to expansion through the solar system. Starpath already has its eyes on developing processing plans and rover harvesting fleets for Mars, which would be augmented from their lunar counterparts, to convert CO2 in the Martian atmosphere into methane.

“Life can be multiplanetary in a very short period of time,” Shroff said. “If you make 1000 tons of liquid oxygen on the moon, your path to making a million-person city on Mars is hard, but it’s now possible.”

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August 20, 2024
Saturn’s Ocean Moon Was Hiding in Plain Sight

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This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine.

The outer solar system is awash with liquid water. A briny ocean is concealed beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, Europa—with more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. A subsurface sea on Saturn’s moon Enceladus spews plumes of water vapor into space. And there are tantalizing hints that oceans could exist on Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, and other distant moons, too.

Now another moon appears to be secretly flooded. Saturn’s moon Mimas, known for its uncanny resemblance to the Death Star in Star Wars, might harbor liquid water beneath its icy shell. If that’s true, similar seas could be hiding in plain sight, and the outer solar system may be far more habitable than previously thought.

In 2014, astronomers first published evidence that Mimas might be a watery world—submerging the community in a decade-long debate. Many, including Alyssa Rhoden, a planetary scientist now at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, were highly skeptical of the possibility. Their reasoning was simple: Mimas’s heavily cratered surface showed no signs of an internal ocean. As with Enceladus, Saturn’s gravity should churn any potential ocean waters within Mimas, causing large cracks to appear in the surface ice. No such fractures have been seen.

The tides might now have turned. Two studies—one by Rhoden and colleagues and another by Valéry Lainey of the Paris Observatory and colleagues—make a stronger case for an ocean and even explain the conundrum at the surface. Together, the research suggests that Mimas may have a young and changing ocean. If so, it raises the prospect of an outer solar system rife with activity. That possibility is what most excites Rhoden, who spoke with Knowable Magazine about the potential ocean and why it could be such a boon for scientists.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Shannon Hall: What do we know about these hidden oceans?

Alyssa Rhoden: In many ways, they look like our own—at least in that they’re likely made up of salt water.

We know that these ocean worlds have icy surfaces from their overall bright appearance, as confirmed by telescopic and spacecraft measurements that detect signatures of water ice. Some ocean moons even have low enough densities that they probably have water ice mixed into the rock in their interiors. With heat, that water ice melts into liquid water, which will erode rock to create salt water. On Enceladus, salt water is conveniently spewing out into space.

Hall: Given how cold it is in the outer solar system, what generates the heat?

Rhoden: Distant oceans might at first seem out of the question. Heat to melt ice is hard to come by so far from the sun. But thanks to a gravitational quirk, the outer solar system can be quite balmy.

Consider Jupiter and its moon Europa. Jupiter exerts a strong gravitational force on Europa, elongating Europa in the direction of Jupiter. Because Europa’s orbit is eccentric—it swings close to Jupiter before swinging farther away—Europa gets stretched and released over time. This creates friction in the interior that provides the heat necessary to sustain a liquid ocean.

We first saw hints that Europa might host a subsurface ocean when the Voyager mission swung past Jupiter in 1979. Europa doesn’t look like our moon or even most bodies in the inner solar system. Its icy surface doesn’t have a lot of craters but is instead covered with crisscrossing lines and broken pieces that have shifted around. You don’t have to look at it very hard to imagine that something different is going on there.

Hall: You mention surface features. What other evidence do we rely on to detect a hidden ocean?

Rhoden: One way is to look at magnetic fields. Because salt water is electrically conductive, it can create a magnetic field around the moon that disrupts the planet’s magnetic field. That is a leading piece of evidence for Europa’s subsurface ocean.

But that alone is not enough. It’s the combination of evidence that leads us to conclude there’s an ocean. We might also consider, for example, measurements of salt on the surface and how the moon’s gravity tugs on a spacecraft. Because the densities of rock or liquid metal differ from the density of liquid water, the size of those tugs offers clues to the material, as well as where within the moon it is concentrated.

Or we might simply imagine how the moon’s face changes direction throughout its orbit. Generally, these small moons always show their same face to their parent planet, much like our moon. But as a moon moves through its orbit, the direction it points can shift a bit back and forth—creating a shimmy in the visible portion. The extent of that shimmy depends on the interior. An ice shell over an ocean can move more freely than an ice shell on top of rock, so the changes tend to be larger. That’s how the ocean was detected at Enceladus. And it’s one of the best lines of evidence for an ocean at Mimas.

Hall: Let’s talk about Mimas. How did you end up studying this moon?

Rhoden: I had spent a decade or so working on Europa and other icy moons when the 2014 Mimas paper came out. That paper measured that shimmy, or libration, as the visible portion of the moon shifts, suggesting Mimas hosted either a subsurface ocean or an oddly shaped core.

But an ocean seemed impossible. Mimas looks much like our moon, with a heavily cratered surface. It didn’t host any crisscrossing lines or broken pieces like Europa. And it certainly wasn’t spewing geysers like Enceladus. So I took one look at Mimas, and I said, “There’s no way that is an ocean moon.” Yet I realized I couldn’t refute the idea.

I kept Mimas in my mind over the years, eventually putting together a paper for the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences in 2023. That paper ruled out several ocean scenarios and left only one option: an ocean that formed recently, well after Mimas itself. A young ocean could be stealthy. But it was still just a hypothesis.

Hall: How has the most recent work changed the picture?

Rhoden: Early in 2024, Valéry Lainey and his group reported new observational evidence in favor of an ocean on Mimas. They looked not at the libration but at changes in Mimas’s orbit through time—changes that depend on the interior structure. They found that those changes could not be explained by an oddly shaped core, leaving an ocean as the most viable option.

My team’s research, published in June, has gone on to explain the lack of visible surface fractures. We argue that the ocean is so young—merely 10 million years old—that it has only recently stopped growing. We think that the tidal stresses of a young, churning ocean may not be enough to crack the ice above. Instead, what’s needed is the stress that comes when the ocean eventually refreezes. Because Mimas is losing heat as its orbit becomes less eccentric over time, refreezing—which is only just beginning on Mimas—will cause the overlying ice to crack.

The research suggests that eventually Mimas is probably going to lose its ocean, which is a little sad, since it is just being recognized. But on the flip side, Mimas may become the new Enceladus—the new coolest moon of Saturn—with deep cracks and maybe even jets of water.

Hall: What are the big-picture implications of this research?

Rhoden: I’m interested in this from a geophysical standpoint. We think of the earliest epochs in our solar system as the hot times, when all the activity happens; then everything evolves toward a quieter state. Pluto’s moon Charon might have lost an ocean. And Europa’s and Ganymede’s oceans are pretty old. That a moon could form a new ocean well into its history, and that we could watch? That’s exciting! It opens up the possibility that any world, including one with an old, cratered surface, may be going through a similar transition.

There’s also interest in habitability—whether these oceans are suitable for supporting life. We don’t currently know whether any of the solar system’s oceans, other than our own, are habitable, have been inhabited, or are currently inhabited. But if Mimas truly has an ocean, we could have a window into how these worlds develop and even how habitats are created and lost. It is exciting to be able to see these processes as they occur—instead of always viewing the end states of things that happened long ago.

Hall: What upcoming missions could tell us more?

Rhoden: The European Space Agency has already launched the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice, which will make detailed observations of Europa, and the moons Ganymede and Callisto, which show hints of oceans. And in the fall of 2024, NASA will send the Europa Clipper into orbit around Jupiter to determine if Europa has conditions suitable for life.

The Uranus system, high on NASA’s agenda for a future mission, is where I see the most implications for this recent work. It’s surprisingly similar to the Saturn system, including hosting ice-rich, midsize moons similar to Mimas and Enceladus. If there’s a young ocean on Mimas, it is not a huge leap to consider that water worlds might exist among the Uranian moons, too.

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August 17, 2024
Statue of Liberty-sized streetlights form Moon power grid

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If you’re on the Moon and your phone is about to die, there aren’t many places to plug in the charger. But Honeybee Robotics has outlined a plan to build a kind of power grid up there, with a network of Statue of Liberty-sized towers containing solar panels and batteries that provide power and communications, and even act as streetlights.

Humans haven’t set foot on the Moon in more than 50 years, but NASA’s Artemis mission plans to send them back soon. And this time, we’re there to stay – the program aims to set up a permanent presence on the lunar surface and orbit, laying the foundations to eventually journey to Mars.

Building a human colony on the Moon will of course require some infrastructure. Companies like Nokia are helping set up 4G networks for communication, and Northrop Grumman is developing a lunar railway concept for transporting astronauts, materials and equipment.

The latter is part of the 10-Year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) Capability Study, and Honeybee Robotics has been selected as part of that same initiative to develop a new infrastructure technology it calls LUNARSABER. Of course, this is a classically clumsy acronym, apparently standing for “Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution.” You’re allowed to give stuff cool names like LUNARSABER if you want, guys! You don’t have to pretend it stands for anything.

Each LUNARSABER would be a deployable package that unfolds into a 100-m (328-ft) tall tower, by way of another terrible acronym – Deployable Interlocking Actuated Bands for Linear Operations, or DIABLO.

LUNARSABER would be made up of self-deploying towers containing solar panels, batteries, power and communication transmissions equipment, and other gear
Honeybee Robotics

Each tower contains a mix of solar panels, batteries, wireless power and communications transmission equipment, and even lights. They’d be able to generate power from the two straight weeks of sunlight the lunar surface experiences, store it locally and save it for the two weeks of darkness that follows.

Honeybee has built two types of solar panels. One is an “origami bellows” that wraps around the pole, providing 360-degree coverage to capture sunlight from any angle. The other unfurls big sails and tracks the location of the Sun in the sky to keep them at the optimal angle. Deployed near the Moon’s south pole, the team says this provides access to nearly 95% of the solar light throughout the year.

Specialized, dust-resistant plugs at the bottom could power up equipment locally. Or building a network of these poles within line of sight of each other could let them beam their energy and wireless comms signals over long distances, effectively setting up a lunar grid that connects different outposts and even vehicles.

For example, say your lunar rover runs out of juice in the middle of the lunar night, with 8 days to go till dawn. A nearby LUNARSABER could just aim a beam of concentrated sunlight at its solar panels to get it moving again.

Lights attached to gimbals on the outside can even act like streetlights, breaking up the darkness of the fortnight night and keeping the first human settlers safe from getting mugged by aliens.

Lights on gimbals on the outside of the LUNARSABER poles could act like giant streetlights for those long lunar nights
Honeybee Robotics

It’s a fun sci-fi concept, but of course there’s a lot that needs to go right before LUNARSABERs are dotted all over the Moon. NASA’s original plan was to have humans back up there this year, but it’s now been delayed until late 2026. A rollout of big infrastructure like this would be much later than that, if ever.

The Honeybee team discusses the concept in the video below.

LUNARSABER: Powering a Human Presence on the Moon

Source: Honeybee Robotics

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August 15, 2024
Wall-building robot eyed for blast shield construction on the Moon

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When you live on the Moon, your only option for commuting back to Earth or onward to Mars will be some kind of rocket. But each launch will kick up a hellstorm of debris. Building walls to contain all that mess might one day fall to autonomous rovers.

During the Apollo 12 mission in 1969, astronauts brought back parts from the Surveyor III lander which had been dropped to the lunar surface in early 1967. When those pieces were examined it brought to light an issue with lunar comings and goings – the rockets that carry people and cargo to and from the surface kick up a lot of regolith, which had actually damaged the lander. In fact, it’s estimated that Moon landings can affect the lunar environment thousands of meters away from the actual landing site.

NASA’s Artemis mission is set to establish a colony on the Moon and will use SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System (HLS) to ferry colonists between an orbiting gateway and the lunar surface. That means a lot of dust is set to get kicked up in the coming years, and containing it to protect habitats and other sensitive equipment is going to be a key piece of the Moon-life puzzle.

The idea of building walls around launch and landing sites has been explored before with possible solutions including the microwave heating of surface soil to create Moon bricks and the use of 3D printing to create structures from pastes made from lunar soil. But according to a new study led by Jonas Walther, there’s a cheaper, better way to make blast shields that doesn’t involve transforming lunar materials into something else. Walther has done work at ETH Zürich’s Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems and at the Center for Space and Habitability in Bern. He now works at Switzerland’s Venturi lab which studies designs for lunar rovers.

Walther and his colleagues propose simply stacking up the boulders from the lunar surface to make stone walls that could contain blast debris. He says such a project could be easily carried out by autonomous rovers, such as the HEAP excavators demonstrated by ETH Zurich last year, which you can see in action in the following video.

Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry stone wall

Walther’s team says such an approach would be two orders of magnitude more energy efficient than previously proposed ideas. That’s because simply using existing boulders doesn’t require the transport of any materials – other than the rovers – to the lunar surface. Nor does it require the heating or transformation of lunar soils into building materials.

The researchers examined the possibility of building their boulder blast shields in two areas on the Moon: the Aristarchus Plateau and the Shackelton-Henson Connecting Ridge. Their calculations focused on building shield rings that would have a radius of 50 meters (164 ft), a circumference of 314 m (1,030 ft) and a height of 3.3 m (10.8 ft). In both areas, the rovers would have to travel up to 1,000 km (621 miles) to harvest boulders. With all of those factors accounted for, and allowing time for the rovers to charge and hibernate during the lunar night, the team figures the shield wall could get built in a minimum of about 126 Earth days.

The team acknowledges that one of the challenges of the proposed method is that stacking the boulders will lead to small gaps between them which could let regolith escape. So these gaps would need to be sealed using smaller stones, regolith or other materials. Still, the researchers feel the plan is worth considering as part of the suite of construction methods that will no doubt be used on the Moon, especially because of the potential energy savings it affords.

The research has been published in the journal Frontiers in Space Technology.

Source: Frontiers in Space Technology

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August 6, 2024