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Everybody Wants to Go to the Red Planet

February 25, 2016 By Roxanne Briean Leave a Comment

It would seem that everybody wants to go to the Red Planet under NASA’s fosterage. Or at least that’s what the number of applicants says, even if ‘everybody’ is an overstatement. Still, following NASA’s advert that it’s looking for its next class of astronauts that will most likely get to go to Mars in person over the next couple of decades, no less than 18,300 Americans have signed up to the program to become an astronaut.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration opened the position just two months ago and an astounding number of people already submitted their resumes. While the enthusiasm for the mission is surely flattering for both NASA and humanity as a whole, the ‘new class of astronauts’ will only be able to be comprised of 12 people, which one could say is a little less than the number of applicants.

This huge amount of interest is relatively hard to explain, especially when one looks at the numbers and realizes this time around the number of applicants is three times larger than the number recorded for the hiring session that NASA held 4 years ago.

And yet, the prerequisites of being an astronaut are not to be taken lightly, and it’s still surprising that so many are qualified to put forward their resumes and recommendations in order to hope for a chance to be one of the very few who will embark on what is probably the most important mission of mankind up to this point in time.

The selection process will drag on for a shocking 18-month period and it’s far from your regular job interview kind of system. Testing, background checks, health verifications and even more than just that are some of the stages of the interview that applicants will be taken through in order to become one of the few.

The lucky ones who end up being selected will have a long trek of trials and tribulations ahead of them before they can even step foot into a space craft and leave for milestones as close to our planet as the International Space Station. The ones who make the cut will have to undergo 2 years of initial training that involves practicing on simulated spacecraft systems, spacewalking, learning how to speak Russian and many more.

A realistic trip will not happen until the early 2020s most likely, however. And before the Mars Mission will even have a chance to happen, there will be plenty of other manned missions planned for NASA astronauts, including ISS boarding, two commercial crew space crafts under U.S. companies brands as well as the Orion deep-space exploration vehicle.

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Scott Kelly’s Year in Space Will Be Completed Soon

February 25, 2016 By Nancy Young Leave a Comment

Scott Kelly’s Year in space will be completed soon, in just several days from now. March 1^st 2016 marks the day when astronaut and engineer and retired U.S. Navy Captain Scott Kelly will return to the surface of the Earth, after having spent 340 days on the International Space Station in one go. While Scott Kelly is not the first or the only astronaut to spend such a long time in outer space, but currently holds the record for the most overall time spent – 520 days.

Scott Kelly made an impression on the hearts of many back on Earth, not to mention the fact that he is centric to an experiment that involves his identical twin brother, which hopes to determine the physical and psychological changes that astronauts undergo while in outer space.

To the fans and people back on Earth, he has been an inspiration to say the least and communicated more than anyone would have ever expected from him. By using various social media platforms such as Twitter or Tumblr, Scott Kelly kept in touch with the thousands of people following his year-long story spent on the International Space Station. Whether it was the breathtaking photos he would take of amazing looking sunrises as they are seen from space, the aurora borealis or the night-lit cities of our planet, Kelly continued to post at least a photo a day from the ISS, more than 200 miles above the planet’s surface.

On Tumblr, he took nearly an entire day to answer question coming from numerous people following him about what life in space is really like. Between joking about how he’ll be taller than his brother when he comes back and realizing how he has grown fond of the space station, a fact that makes him feel like he will miss the ISS, Scott Kelly says he will welcome the return to Earth.

His press atop the International Space Station has meant a lot more than it would seem, the experiment that him and his brother are part of only being one of many. All of the studies and experiments run on board of the ISS are preliminary steps that mankind needs to take in preparation of a manned expedition to Mars, the Red Planet. On top of studying how the human body fares when exposed to life in outer space for a prolonged amount of time, the astronauts on the ISS also studied methods of crop growing while in space, for example.

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Why Gardening in Space Is Important and Insightful

February 16, 2016 By Nancy Young Leave a Comment

While more information about it was symbolically released around Valentine’s Day in order to make for a sweet nod to the holiday, here’s why gardening in space is important and insightful. Also recently mentioned in the Reddit AMA Scott Kelly – astronaut who has, at this point, lived on the International Space Station for nearly 10 months – did from the ISS, it would seem that scientists are more than just a little interested in the information they can gather from growing and harvesting plants in outer space.

The plants that were chosen for this experiment were a breed of Zinnia that underwent the Veggie ground control experiment at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and simultaneously on the International Space Station. Recently, both were harvested and studied to see what impact growing them in a zero gravity and harsh outer space conditions had on the plant, in comparison to one that was grown in a similar method on Earth’s surface.

Earlier reports from the ISS mentioned that the Zinnia plants up there had an unexpected fungus growth occurrence that resulted in their withering. However, some of the plants managed to survive to the harvest day that was the 14^th of February. After Scott Kelly managed to complete harvesting the Zinnia plants, he provided the researchers back on earth with a complete report regarding how to effectively grow plants in outer space.

An experiment such as this one, which seems small scale on first look can actually end up having ground-breaking results when the knowledge is applied on a longer span of time in the future. Considering mankind is planning to one day find a method of populating the red planet, Mars, gardening and farming knowledge such as that changes in nature when applied to the wildly different conditions of outer space.

Researchers have multiple things to worry themselves with when it comes to growing plants in outer space. Things such as long-duration seed stow and germination, the effect of pollen on the crew’s health and even things such as the psychological effect on individuals who would be in space for a prolonged time.

A NASA mechanical engineer working on the Veggie experiment explained how blooming flowers of the Zinnia plants are a very good demonstration for sustainable food crops, even in a harsh place such as the International Space Station or even beyond. With sustainable food crops, mankind can hope to be able to prolong manned mission durations and a possible method of sustenance for future trips.

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Tales of the Earth as They Are Seen from Outer Space

February 15, 2016 By Cristopher Hall Leave a Comment

Scott Kelly, an astronaut currently onboard the International Space Station tells us tales of the Earth as they are seen from outer space in his most recent tweets. As of right now, he has been aboard the ISS for a year and thus remained in orbit longer than anyone in American history as well as getting the record for total days spent in space – currently his 502^nd day.

Kelly will continue his mission in outer space until March this year, when he will return with more than one kind of insightful information. He happens to have a twin brother – Mark Kelly – who is still on Earth. The two are the subject of an ongoing study that attempts to understand and investigate the effects and changes that occur in humans during spaceflight.

So far, the astronaut has reported several issues that he himself has sensed in his own body. Most revolve around affected eyesight, bones, microbiome and circulatory system. Scott Kelly reported having started to feel signs of a weakening set of body functions but not in a degree that would be worrying. However, there is no doubt that the human psyche ends up being affected as well.

Recently, Kelly has done an entire Reddit AMA all the way from outer space in addition to carefully posting constant pictures of the Earth as it is seen from the International Space Station nearly every single day during his stay aboard the ISS. His photos depict the way cities and phenomenal geographical sites on Earth look like from up there, with several ‘sunrises’ and ‘sunsets’ becoming incredibly emotional views of our planet.

However, there is also a huge amount of worrying pictures of our own planet, that Kelly also carefully called “very, very fragile” and that is something we should dutifully take care of. In a conversation with CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Kelly said that if he were to look at planet Earth as if it was a human, he would say that the planet looks kind of sick. He mentioned that there are plenty of visible parts of Asia and America that, when looked at from space are not as easily seen because of a haze of pollution.

Kelly also said he happened to notice multiple weather phenomena in unexpected locations such as tropical cyclones that should not take place in those locations under normal circumstances.

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