🍄 6 Things To Learn Before Breakfast: COSMIC DANCE
Astromycology, In-Space Manufacturing, Space Biobank and the Dark Matter within
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🍄 Track the stars with a Sonic Mushroom: Listen to Citizens of the Solar System
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Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander… Mark your celestial calendars, August is a busy month: meteor showers, supermoon, planets and clusters!
(Use an online planetarium app to see times for your location.)
August predawn: bright Jupiter and speedy Mars in the morning sky
August 4: ideal night for catching star clusters with your binoculars
August 11-12-13: Perseid meteor shower peaks as Delta Aquariid fades
August 19: Full Blue Supermoon, the Sturgeon Moon
August 20: conjunction of Moon and Saturn
August 31 predawn: binocular view of crescent Moon and Beehive Cluster
🍄 Meet the Astromycologist
Traveling to space? Might want to bring your mushrooms. That’s the goal of mycologist Paul Stamets—now the world’s first astromycologist—in a new “astromycological” venture launched in conjunction with NASA, Stamets and various research teams are studying how fungi can be leveraged to build extraterrestrial habitats, terraform planets and provide psilocybin therapy to astronauts. An emerging field, astromycology is the study of fungal biology throughout the universe, a subset of astrobiology, the study of biological organisms extraterrestrially. Perhaps the most renowned mycologist, Stamets is also founder of Host Defense mushroom supplements, and author of the seminal book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. He also recently received an honor that many researchers would consider only slightly less hallowed than a Nobel Prize: the distinction of having a Star Trek character named after him.
⚙️ SpaceFacturing
UK start-up Space Forge is launching mini factories into orbit inside reusable satellites. A World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, Space Forge is at the forefront of the next industrial revolution by utilizing microgravity as a service with its world-first reusable, returnable orbital manufacturing platform, the ForgeStar™.
Its proprietary return system will bring precious cargo back to Earth gently, with no shock on landing, safely delivering high-value products back in an innovative vehicle with a precision engineered capture and recovery system. It aims to produce next-generation building blocks of 21st century electronics in space, where the advantages of being in orbit allow the development of super materials that are a magnitude more efficient and powerful than anything that we’ve seen before. And in the world of pharmaceuticals, on-orbit R&D can accelerate new discoveries and improve the efficiency of existing drugs. From compounds with a vastly improved shelf life to pure protein crystallization that will enable better drug delivery methods, off-world production in the new age of space will revolutionize pharmaceutical innovation on Earth.
🩺 Space Omics
Tracking astronaut’s health in space? We can now bank on it with the creation of the first “space-omics” biobank—a collection of thousands of blood and tissue samples, plus medical information, taken over multiple space missions, from the International Space Station to the first all-civilian space flight, SpaceX’s Inspiration4, a three day trip in 2021. The new biobank, called the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA), is a resource that contains detailed medical data, such as on changes in people’s gene activity, immune system functioning and DNA damage, collectively known as biomarkers. So far we know that astronauts lose bone density and muscle mass due to the lack of gravity, and higher levels of radiation in space seem to cause cell and DNA damage, which may be why astronauts are more prone to developing heart disease in later life and some have experienced worsening vision after being in space.
🌌 Dance of Two Galaxies
Two new galaxies, nicknamed the Penguin and the Egg, were seen locked in a cosmic dance by the James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxies, named because of their resemblance to a penguin guarding an egg, are 326 million light-years from Earth in the Hydra constellation. Astronomers estimate that the Penguin and the Egg galaxies first interacted 25 million to 75 million years ago. Since then, their celestial dance has continued as they loop around each other. Millions of years from now, they will merge into a single galaxy.
🌗 Lunar Shelter
A long, wide cave on the moon, found by reviewing archival NASA data, could be used to protect astronauts from harsh radiation and extreme temperature swings as well as provide a new avenue to study lunar rocks. Scientists found the subterranean cavity beneath the Sea of Tranquility, and it may provide shelter for future lunar astronauts.
🪐 In the dark, we will find our solace
In researching dark matter, we found this striking statement from the Editor-in-Chief of Atmos on finding ourselves in the dark matter. While the piece was written as a reflection on COVID, the sentiment still resonates in today’s social volatility. And, as Willow Defebaugh writes, “perhaps someday we will find solace in the secrets swimming all around us—the space between stars.”
What can space teach us about our own inner musing? Dark matter holds everything together. Dark energy expands our universe. And yet we demonize the darkness, which is just another word for that which we do not understand. We cling to the light, but what is already known cannot, by definition, teach us anything new. As Buddhist author Jack Kornfield says, it is the time we spend in the unknown that we learn the most. Like our universe, it is in the dark that we grow and learn how to hold ourselves together.
Many characterize our time as one spent searching for answers in the shadows, seeking truth, in which the uncertainty is ever-present, as are loss and learning. We all experience moments of darkness. But the truth is, we’ve always been in it. We always are. Try as we might to understand our unknowable universe, some mysteries cannot be solved. Perhaps someday we will find solace in the secrets swimming all around us—the space between stars.
—Willow Defebaugh, Editor-in-Chief, Atmos
What else we are wandering…
🔦 Beam-them up
NASA is leveling up its radio frequency communications system that it uses to “chat” with both astronauts and spacecrafts with a new space-y technology: lasers.
NASA laser beamed pictures of pet dogs, cats, chickens, pigs and other species to the International Space Station. The lasers are faster than most home WiFi connections. The images and videos were sent from Earth to NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) and laser relay systems can carry much more data than radio signals — it's akin to downloading images via 3G versus 5G.
📸 Galactic Gallery
From a galaxy devourer to the dance of Jupiter's moon, check out 30 amazing images of our universe from photographers shortlisted for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Competition 2024.
☀️ The sun and the three-body problem
The sun’s gravitational pull reaches further than what we imagine today, able to capture incoming objects from as far as 3.8 light years away—challenging scientists to recalculate the size of our solar system. Their calculations identify places of gravitational balance, known as Lagrange points, between the sun and the center of the galaxy. A similar point exists in our solar system already, where the gravitational pull of Earth and the sun are balanced, used to keep spacecraft such as the James Webb Space Telescope in a fixed position. For this outer edge solar region, there would be two entry points where the sun and galaxy’s gravitational spheres interact to make objects enter an unusual orbit around our sun, possibly trapping rogue planets— worlds unbound to a star that drift through space—or interstellar comets and asteroids like ‘Oumuamua, which entered our solar system in 2017. (Read more on that in our newsletter "Will ‘Oumuamua Phone Home?")
Calculating the orbit of an object under the gravitational pull of both the sun and the center of the galaxy is an example of a three-body problem – the astronomical riddle that inspired the sci-fi trilogy by Cixin Liu and its recent adaptation on Netflix.
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