Synthetic biology for space exploration

 

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Microbial-based biomanufacturing could be transformative once explorers arrive at an extraterrestrial site.

Does synthetic biology hold the key to manned space exploration of the Moon and Mars? Berkeley Lab researchers have used synthetic biology to produce an inexpensive and reliable microbial-based alternative to the world's most effective anti-malaria drug, and to develop clean, green and sustainable alternatives to gasoline, diesel and jet fuels. In the future, synthetic biology could also be used to make manned space missions more practical.

"Not only does synthetic biology promise to make the travel to extraterrestrial locations more practical and bearable, it could also be transformative once explorers arrive at their destination," says Adam Arkin, director of Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences Division (PBD) and a leading authority on synthetic and systems biology.

"During flight, the ability to augment fuel and other energy needs, to provide small amounts of needed materials, plus renewable, nutritional and taste-engineered food, and drugs-on-demand can save costs and increase astronaut health and welfare," Arkin says. "At an extraterrestrial base, synthetic biology could make even more effective use of the catalytic activities of diverse organisms."

Arkin is the senior author of a paper in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface that reports on a techno-economic analysis demonstrating "the significant utility of deploying non-traditional biological techniques to harness available volatiles and waste resources on manned long-duration space missions." The paper is titled "Towards Synthetic Biological Approaches to Resource Utilization on Space Missions." The lead and corresponding author is Amor Menezes, a postdoctoral scholar in Arkin's research group at the University of California (UC) Berkeley. Other co-authors are John Cumbers and John Hogan with the NASA Ames Research Center.

One of the biggest challenges to manned space missions is the expense. The NASA rule-of-thumb is that every unit mass of payload launched requires the support of an additional 99 units of mass, with "support" encompassing everything from fuel to oxygen to food and medicine for the astronauts, etc. Most of the current technologies now deployed or under development for providing this support are abiotic, meaning non-biological. Arkin, Menezes and their collaborators have shown that providing this support with technologies based on existing biological processes is a more than viable alternative.

"Because synthetic biology allows us to engineer biological processes to our advantage, we found in our analysis that technologies, when using common space metrics such as mass, power and volume, have the potential to provide substantial cost savings, especially in mass," Menezes says.

In their study, the authors looked at four target areas: fuel generation, food production, biopolymer synthesis, and pharmaceutical manufacture. They showed that for a 916 day manned mission to Mars, the use of microbial biomanufacturing capabilities could reduce the mass of fuel manufacturing by 56-percent, the mass of food-shipments by 38-percent, and the shipped mass to 3D-print a habitat for six by a whopping 85-percent. In addition, microbes could also completely replenish expired or irradiated stocks of pharmaceuticals, which would provide independence from unmanned re-supply spacecraft that take up to 210 days to arrive.

"Space has always provided a wonderful test of whether technology can meet strict engineering standards for both effect and safety," Arkin says. "NASA has worked decades to ensure that the specifications that new technologies must meet are rigorous and realistic, which allowed us to perform up-front techno-economic analysis."

The big advantage biological manufacturing holds over abiotic manufacturing is the remarkable ability of natural and engineered microbes to transform very simple starting substrates, such as carbon dioxide, water biomass or minerals, into materials that astronauts on long-term missions will need. This capability should prove especially useful for future extraterrestrial settlements.

"The mineral and carbon composition of other celestial bodies is different from the bulk of Earth, but the earth is diverse with many extreme environments that have some relationship to those that might be found at possible bases on the Moon or Mars," Arkin says. "Microbes could be used to greatly augment the materials available at a landing site, enable the biomanufacturing of food and pharmaceuticals, and possibly even modify and enrich local soils for agriculture in controlled environments."

The authors acknowledge that much of their analysis is speculative and that their calculations show a number of significant challenges to making biomanufacturing a feasible augmentation and replacement for abiotic technologies. However, they argue that the investment to overcome these barriers offers dramatic potential payoff for future space programs.

"We've got a long way to go since experimental proof-of-concept work in synthetic biology for space applications is just beginning, but long-duration manned missions are also a ways off," says Menezes. "Abiotic technologies were developed for many, many decades before they were successfully utilized in space, so of course biological technologies have some catching-up to do. However, this catching-up may not be that much, and in some cases, the biological technologies may already be superior to their abiotic counterparts."

This research was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

India Spacecraft Successfully Arrives at Mars

 

The Mangalyaan probe, the country's first mission to another world, has entered the Red Planet's orbit

Artist rendering of the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), informally called Mangalyaan (Sanskrit: मङ्गलयान, English: Mars-craft) is a Mars orbiter that was successfully launched on 5th November 2013 by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). 
Credit: Nesnad via Wikimedia Commons

India joined the distinguished club of Mars explorers on 24 September, as its Mangalyaan probe maneuvered into the red planet's orbit according to plan. Until then, only the United States, the former Soviet Union and the European Space Agency had conducted missions that successfully reached Mars. India's space program is the first to do so on its first attempt.

“History has been created today,” declared Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) mission control room in Bangalore. “The odds were stacked against us but we have prevailed and have achieved the near impossible,” he added.

As the news of the probe's successful insertion into orbit poured in, the ISRO control room erupted into thunderous applause, with scientists shaking hands, hugging and distributing sweets.

Mangalyaan, known formally as the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), has been hailed as one of the least expensive interplanetary endeavors in recent history, costing $75 million — less than the price of producing space-based Hollywood film Gravity, as Modi has pointed out.

But former ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair warns that if ISRO were to launch a mission of similar to one of NASA's in scope and depth, it would end up spending many times more.

Science and security
Mangalyaan carries five instruments to study the planet’s geology and evolution, and to look for methane, a signature of life. Some observers however view its scientific objectives with caution. “Some of this is hyped up and overstretched,” says Amitabha Ghosh, an India-born planetary geologist based in Washington DC. “I am sceptical that MOM will be able to dwell decisively on present or past life on Mars.”

Ghosh says that MOM is unlikely to supply data comparable in breadth or quality to those generated by other recent missions. He finds it unlikely that MOM will add anything significant to our understanding of Martian topography, for instance, given that NASA's Mars Global Surveyor has already taken 640 million elevation measurements and mapped the planet in detail.

However, ISRO describes MOM not as a science mission, but as a “technology demonstrator”.

Some policy experts say that India's space programme is also relevant to its national security, especially given that China has ramped up its space capabilities and tested anti-satellite weapons. “Military dimensions of China’s space program also carry strategic significance for India,” warns Brahma Chellaney, a strategist with the Center for Policy Research think tank in New Delhi.

India and China signed civilian space-cooperation agreements during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to India in mid-September, even as renewed tension simmered along the border between the two countries.

China and Japan have previously made ill-fated attempts to reach Mars, with the Yinghuo-1 and Nozomi probes respectively.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 24, 2014.

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Discovery expands search for Earth-like planets: Newly spotted frozen world orbits in a binary star system

 

At twice the mass of Earth, the planet orbits one of the stars in the binary system at almost exactly the same distance from which Earth orbits the sun. However, because the planet's host star is much dimmer than the sun, the planet is much colder thanEarth -- a little colder, in fact, than Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

Four international research teams, led by professor Andrew Gould of The Ohio State University, published their discovery in the July 4 issue of the journal Science.

The study provides the first evidence that terrestrial planets can form in orbits similar to Earth's, even in a binary star system where the stars are not very far apart. Although this planet itself is too cold to be habitable, the same planet orbiting a sun-like star in such a binary system would be in the so-called "habitable zone" -- the region where conditions might be right for life.

"This greatly expands the potential locations to discover habitable planets in the future," said Scott Gaudi, professor of astronomy at Ohio State. "Half the stars in the galaxy are in binary systems. We had no idea if Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits could even form in these systems. "

Very rarely, the gravity of a star focuses the light from a more distant star and magnifies it like a lens. Even more rarely, the signature of a planet appears within that magnified light signal. The technique astronomers use to find such planets is called gravitational microlensing, and computer modeling of these events is complicated enough when only one star and its planet are acting as the lens, much less two stars.

Searching for planets within binary systems is tricky for most techniques, because the light from the second star complicates the interpretation of the data. "But in gravitational microlensing," Gould explained, "we don't even look at the light from the star-planet system. We just observe how its gravity affects light from a more distant, unrelated, star. This gives us a new tool to search for planets in binary star systems."

When the astronomers succeeded in detecting this new planet, they were able to document that it produced two separate signatures -- the primary one, which they typically use to detect planets, and a secondary one that had previously been only hypothesized to exist.

The first was a brief dimming of light, as the planet's gravity disrupted one of the magnified images of the source star. But the second effect was an overall distortion of the light signal.

"Even if we hadn't seen the initial signature of the planet, we could still have detected it from the distortion alone," Gould said, pointing to a graph of the light signal. "The effect is not obvious. You can't see it by eye, but the signal is unmistakable in the computer modeling."

Gaudi explained the implications.

"Now we know that with gravitational microlensing, it's actually possible to infer the existence of a planet -- and to know its mass, and its distance from a star -- without directly detecting the dimming due to the planet," he said. "We thought we could do that in principle, but now that we have empirical evidence, we can use this method to find planets in the future."

The nature of these distortions is still somewhat of a mystery, he admitted.

"We don't have an intuitive understanding of why it works. We have some idea, but at this point, I think it would be fair to say that it's at the frontier of our theoretical work."

The planet, called OGLE-2013-BLG-0341LBb, first appeared as a "dip" in the line tracing the brightness data taken by the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) telescope on April 11, 2013. The planet briefly disrupted one of the images formed by the star it orbits as the system crossed in front of a much more distant star 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.

"Before the dip, this was just another microlensing event," Gould said. It was one of approximately 2,000 discovered every year by OGLE, with its new large-format camera that monitors 100 million stars many times per night searching for such events.

"It's really the new OGLE-IV survey that made this discovery possible," he added. "They got a half dozen measurements of that dip and really nailed it." From the form of the dip, whose "wings" were traced out in MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) data, they could see that the source was headed directly toward the central star.

Then, for two weeks, astronomers watched the magnified light continue to brighten from telescopes in Chile, New Zealand, Israel and Australia. The teams included OGLE, MOA, MicroFUN (the Microlensing Follow Up Network), and the Wise Observatory.

Even then, they still didn't know that the planet's host star had another companion -- a second star locked into orbit with it. But because they were already paying close attention to the signal, the astronomers noticed when the binary companion unexpectedly caused a huge eruption of light called a caustic crossing.

By the time they realized that the lens was not one star, but two, they had captured a considerable amount of data -- and made a surprising discovery: the distortion.

Weeks after all signs of the planet had faded, the light from the binary-lens caustic crossing became distorted, as if there were a kind of echo of the original planet signal.

Intensive computer analysis by professor Cheongho Han at Chungbuk National University in Korea revealed that the distortion contained information about the planet -- its mass, separation from its star, and orientation -- and that information matched perfectly with what astronomers saw during their direct observation of the dip due to the planet. So the same information can be captured from the distortion alone.

This detailed analysis showed that the planet is twice the mass of Earth, and orbits its star from an Earth-like distance, around 90 million miles. But its star is 400 times dimmer than our sun, so the planet is very cold -- around 60 Kelvin (-352 degrees Fahrenheit or -213 Celsius), which makes it a little colder than Jupiter's moon Europa. The second star in the star system is only as far from the first star as Saturn is from our sun. But this binary companion, too, is very dim.

Still, binary star systems composed of dim stars like these are the most common type of star system in our galaxy, the astronomers said. So this discovery suggests that there may be many more terrestrial planets out there -- some possibly warmer, and possibly harboring life.

Three other planets have been discovered in binary systems that have similar separations, but using a different technique. This is the first one close to Earth-like size that follows an Earth-like orbit, and its discovery within a binary system by gravitational microlensing was by chance.

"Normally, once we see that we have a binary, we stop observing. The only reason we took such intensive observations of this binary is that we already knew there was a planet," Gould said. "In the future we'll change our strategy."

In particular, Gould singled out the work of amateur astronomer and frequent collaborator Ian Porritt of Palmerston North, New Zealand, who watched for gaps in the clouds on the night of April 24 to get the first few critical measurements of the jump in the light signal that revealed that the planet was in a binary system. Six other amateurs from New Zealand and Australia contributed as well.

Other project collaborators hailed from Ohio State, Warsaw University Observatory, Chungbuk National University, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, University of Cambridge, Universidad de Concepción, Auckland Observatory, Auckland University of Technology, University of Canterbury, Texas A&M University, Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory, University of Notre Dame, Massey University, University of Auckland, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Osaka University, Nagano National College of Technology, Tokyo Metropolitan College of Aeronautics, Victoria University, Mt. John University Observatory, Kyoto Sangyo University, Tel-Aviv University and the University of British Columbia.

Funding came from the National Science Foundation, NASA (including a NASA Sagan Fellowship), European Research Council, Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, National Research Foundation of Korea, U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Marsden Fund from the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Israeli Centers of Research Excellence.

Expedition 38 Takes an In-Flight Crew Portrait

 

 

Expedition 38 crew members pose for an in-flight crew portrait in the Kibo laboratory of the International Space Station on Feb. 22, 2014. Pictured (clockwise from top center) are Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov, commander; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata, Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazanskiy, NASA astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins, and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, all flight engineers.

Image Credit: NASA

We choose the Moon–Pre-Launch

 

We choose the Moon