ISS Commander Chris Hadfield has become known for his demonstrations of ordinary activities that become somewhat extraordinary when enacted in space. His latest display was a response to a question from two Nova Scotian high school students: what happens when you wring a washcloth in space? Watch this bit of microgravity physics at work: Staff WritersMore Posts
Post Tagged with: “microgravity”
Seth Green Talks Microgravity on Conan
Actor Seth Green put in an appearance on the Conan O’Brien show on March 28 to talk about an upcoming movie…but instead spent most of his visit explaining what it’s like to fly on a Zero-G parabolic flight. Check it out: Video located by Moonandback.com Staff WritersMore Posts
3D Printing Takes on the Final Frontier: Food
Imagine one day being able printing your own dishes, like in a Star Trek movie. This is the dream of many astronauts. Currently, astronauts have a limited variety of vacuum-sealed or canned foods which they eat repeatedly and quickly gets monotonous; however, 3D food printing may radically change astronauts’ selection of food. In the future astronauts will have the opportunity for [...]
CASIS Announces Grants for Protein Crystal Experiments
By Edward Wright A researcher at NASA’s Johnson Space Center tells us that only about 200 proteins have been studied in space. It is estimated that the human body contains more than 2,000,000 proteins.These proteins are encoded by fewer than 25,000 genes. While the Human Genome Project was a major undertaking, the Human Proteome Project (which is just now getting [...]
NASA to Investigate Blurred Vision in Space
This spring NASA will start an investigation into a range of vision issues that are suffered by some humans during long-duration space flights. Approximately 20 percent of astronauts serving aboard the International Space Station have reported blurry vision during their expedition length mission. During the post-mission physical rehabilitation back on Earth, the vision problems typically disappear. “This was a process [...]
ISS: Is Somebody Singing?
On February 8, the multi-talented Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield performed a duet from space with his long time friend and front man of the band Barenaked Ladies, Ed Robertson. The second space-Earth duet in history, Friday’s performance was the first to feature release of a new song. In this case, the song had been jointly composed by Hadfield and Robertson [...]
Everything You Wanted to Know about Space Tourism but Were Afraid to Ask
For at least the past ten years, space tourism has been the next big thing coming. With all the private human space flight companies announcing, postponing, and re-announcing the dates of the foreseen commencements of their operations, the public might have grown a little bit tired of waiting. One American news website even wrote earlier this month that with XCor [...]
Are You Healthy Enough for Commercial Spaceflight?
None of the private space companies planning to offer commercial human space flight opportunities have started their operations yet, however, discussion has been going on regarding the medical constraints limiting the possibilities of an individual to join either a suborbital or orbital space trip. So far it seems that authorities would prefer less strict medical requirements in order not to [...]
Mothership and her Hedgehogs: New Concept for Exploring Phobos
Exploring the low gravity environment of small celestial objects has always posed a challenge to researchers. Now, a collaboration among engineers at Stanford, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a new concept. The idea was designed with exploration of the Martian moon Phobos in mind, and uses an autonomous robotic system named the Phobos [...]
Sleep Issues Could Affect Future Mars Mission
A study based on Mars500 data revealed that the crew experienced increasing lethargy over the course of the mission, resulting in hypokinesis connected to sleep disturbances. “The success of interplanetary human spaceflight will depend on many factors,” said biomedical and psychiatric researchers from the US and Russia who published the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “including the behavioral activity [...]
