The Filtered Files

Nowadays, it seems as if most of the world has been mapped and all unknown lands visited. However, the cold and inhospitable land known as Antarctica has always seemed a bit mysterious to most of us. Recently NASA announced in a press release that it has “created the first complete map of the speed and direction of ice flow in Antarctica.”

Creating the map took a lot of effort and time. Using radar and a collection of international satellites, Eric Rignot, Jeremie Mouginot, and Bernd Scheuchl, scientists from UC-Irvine, “used billions of data points captured by European, Japanese and Canadian satellites to weed out cloud cover, solar glare and land features masking the glaciers. With the aid of NASA technology, the team painstakingly pieced together the shape and velocity of glacial formations, including the previously uncharted East Antarctica, which comprises 77 percent of the continent.”

The scientists discovered a new ridge between the 5.4 million square miles of land between East and West Antarctica and unknown formations of land that move 800 ft. ever year towards the Antarctic Ocean. The findings will give these scientists plenty of data to pore over, including “tracking future sea-level increases from climate change.”

Check out the map for yourself:

3D image from NASA depicting spring and summer on a slope inside Mars' Newton crater.

We’ve heard endlessly about the possibility that Mars, the far away red planet, has water, but recently we’ve gotten closer to a confirmation. Last week NASA revealed that its “Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter [has] revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars.” And, according to an article published in the New York Times, scientists note that “shifting dark streaks on the surface of Mars are signs that water is flowing there today.”

Ice has been plentiful on Mars for quite some time but scientists have been looking for evidence of water because it could lead to the possibility of life outside the scope of Earth. While ice is important, “the recipe for life, at least as we know it, calls for liquid water, carbon-based molecules and a source for energy” and “chemical reactions for life come to a halt when water freezes.”

The data collected by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is being pored over by Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona. McEwen notes that “the best explanation for these observations so far is the flow of briny water. We have this circumstantial evidence for water flowing on Mars. We have no direct detection of water.”

The observations of the data reveal seasonal discrepancies and that

“some aspects of the observations still puzzle researchers, but flows of liquid brine fit the features’ characteristics better than alternate hypotheses. Saltiness lowers the freezing temperature of water. Sites with active flows get warm enough, even in the shallow subsurface, to sustain liquid water that is about as salty as Earth’s oceans, while pure water would freeze at the observed temperatures.”

While it may be too early to get your hopes up about water or life on Mars, these findings bring us closer than ever to an exciting breakthrough about how we perceive life in the universe.

Artist's rendering of a quasar

Discussions of black holes in space tend to veer toward science-fiction. Couple that with stories of water on distant planets or moons and you have a tale that many would find hard to believe. However, as National Geographic recently reported, traces of water outside the realm of Earth is now science-fact and evidence suggests that a large mass of water vapor resides in a black hole light years from Earth.

A study co-authored by Eric Murphy, an astronomer based in Pasadena, California who works at Carnegie Observatories, has indicated that “in a galaxy 12 billion light-years away resides the most distant and most massive cloud of water yet seen in the universe…Weighing in at 40 billion times the mass of Earth, the giant cloud of mist swaddles a type of actively feeding supermassive black hole known as a quasar.”

Terms like black holes and quasars may sound a bit daunting, but the concepts are easy to understand. NASA states that a black hole “is a great amount of matter packed into a very small area – think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City. The result is a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.”

And quasars “are black holes at the centers of galaxies that are gravitationally consuming surrounding disks of material while burping back out powerful energy jets. As this disk of material is consumed by the central black hole, it releases energy in the form of x-ray and infrared radiation, which in turn can heat the surrounding material, resulting in the observed water vapor.”

Murphy’s study indicates that water resides within this quasar, but just how much water are we talking about? According to the study, the vapor surrounding the quasar could have “enough water to fill all the oceans on the Earth over 140 trillion times.”

While we won’t have access to intergalactic water anytime soon there is still plenty of scientific worth to this major finding: “Astronomers are hoping to use the find to study how large quantities of water in the young universe may have acted as efficient coolants of the interstellar medium—the thin gas and dust that exists between stars—possibly affecting star formation and the evolution of galaxies such as our Milky Way.”

As for now, take the time to enjoy terrestrial water.

NASA's FOB bag

Recently we brought you the story of Spirit, the retired Mars Rover. Now we bring you a tale from Atlantis. No, not the mythical city, but the recently launched NASA Space Shuttle. The voyage of Atlantis will be the last space shuttle mission from NASA. Will another shuttle ever launch from the famed Cape Canaveral launchpad? Maybe, if it’s written in the stars.

However, that isn’t stopping NASA from conducting its mission, one part of which includes testing a kit that converts urine into drinking water. Yes, you read that correctly. No, the Atlantis astronauts will not be drinking their own urine aboard the shuttle.

NASA tells us that the kit, known as the Forward Osmosis Bag (FOB) system, “convert[s] dirty water into a liquid that is safe to drink using a semi-permeable membrane and a concentrated sugar solution. FOB looks at the forward osmosis membrane in a space flight environment and compares its performance against ground reference controls.” Water filtering technology is nothing new, but NASA is attempting this experiment in space, specifically in a zero gravity environment.

As reported by Wired, the International Space Station astronauts currently have their own pee-recycling machine that they convert urine from, but that system requires an external power source from the orbital laboratory to function. The new FOB system requires no external power source, just forward osmosis.

According to NASA, the process is simple:

“NASA’s recycler will use a sugary solution injected into a semi-permeable inner bag, which is nested inside an outer bag. Dirty fluid that’s pumped into the outer bag will slowly pass through the inner bag and into the sugary solution, leaving behind its contaminants. On Earth, the double-sack system makes about a liter of sports drink-like fluid in four to six hours.”

The Atlantis astronauts will be testing the kit with samples of dirty water, not urine. NASA believes that this experiment could have major implications for the future of space exploration. For example, “a small forward osmosis device could be incorporated into new long-exposure EVA suits in order to recycle metabolic wastewater (i.e., sweat and urine) into drinkable fluid.” Here on Earth there are more practical applications, such as providing clean drinking water to disaster victims and those in emergency situations.

While the thought of drinking filtered urine provides many with a certain ick-factor, the technology is available and shouldn’t be pissed away.

NASA is investing millions into the effort of creating more eco-friendly airplanes for cleaner air. The project is called N+3 and looks ahead three generations into the future of aircraft design – calling for developments completed by 2030 to 2035. As with most technological innovations these days, less is more. The planes will use 70 percent less fuel, emit 75 percent less nitrous oxide, create less noise pollution and require less space for takeoff and landing. A similar initiative, N+2 also calls for greater fuel efficiency (50 percent less consumption), but looks toward completion in the nearer future – 2020 to 2025.

Airlines are currently attempting to retrofit planes to make them more efficient, which costs less than building new planes from scratch. Plans for a solar powered airplane with zero emissions – the most efficient aircraft possible – are also underway.

This is not NASA’s first effort to be environmentally conscious. Recently, astronauts developed a system that recycles urine for drinking water during space travel.

NASA Urine Recycling System

Humans can survive only a few days without water. In an emergency situation, drinking urine will add another day or two at most, but this is not too highly recommended.  Although urine is sterile and over 90 percent water, the waste products it contains are toxic and highly concentrated and can lead to further dehydration.

Astronauts aren’t typically in emergency situations, but they do need access to clean water over long periods of time. Fortunately, NASA has developed a recycling system that filters urine, perspiration, bath water and other forms of waste water, turning it  into potable water that astronauts can drink while on space missions. In this video, NASA-TV’s Allard Beutel tries a sip for himself and admits that it’s no worse than the bottled water he had been drinking earlier that day. That doesn’t say much, considering what we know about the contaminants frequently found in bottled water. But I suppose that in any survival situation, recycled urine can really be no worse than toxic BPA or crickets.