NASA sent rodents to infest the ISS along with an HPE supercomputer:
NASA's future deep space exploration – including to Mars – is an unprecedented venture in spaceflight, requiring us to tackle challenges we've never faced before. For instance, we know the human body changes significantly while in space, and we'll need to find ways to address those effects. NASA is conducting research to learn more about the long-term impact of extended human spaceflight. One experiment that just launched, Rodent Research-9, is contributing to this goal by sending rodents to the International Space Station, to study how a lack of gravity in space affects blood vessels, eyes and joints.
Using transport and habitat technology developed at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, the mice will fly to the space station aboard the 12th SpaceX resupply mission, and return to Earth about a month later. Due to biological similarities to humans, the mouse is a good choice of model organism for research aimed at understanding biological changes caused by the space environment. By studying rodents in the short term, NASA can make predictions about long-term human biological change in space, with applications here on Earth as well.
[...] For Rodent Research-9, the agency's space biology program is sponsoring three scientists from different universities to address different issues. NASA's bio-specimen sharing allows the three investigators to work with the same group of mice, without having to send three different missions to the space station. The three complementary research investigations will be combined into one cost-effective mission, addressing questions that are fundamental to human space exploration.
Rodents, meet human guinea pigs.
Technical mission page. Story reprint.
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise is sending a supercomputer to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX's next resupply mission for NASA, which is currently set to launch Monday.
Officially named the "Spaceborne Computer," the Linux-based supercomputer is designed to serve in a one year experiment conducted by NASA and HPE to find out if high performance computing hardware, with no hardware customization or modification, can survive and operate in outer space conditions for a full year – the length of time, not coincidentally, it'll likely take for a crewed spacecraft to make the trip to Mars.
Typically, computers used on the ISS have to be "hardened," explained Dr. Mark Fernandez, who led the effort on the HPE side as lead payload engineer. This process involves extensive hardware modifications made to the high-performance computing (HPC) device, which incur a lot of additional cost, time and effort. One unfortunate result of the need for this physical ruggedization process is that HPCs used in space are often generations behind those used on Earth, and that means a lot of advanced computing tasks end up being shuttled off the ISS to Earth, with the results then round-tripped back to astronaut scientists in space.
[Ed note: Please accept my apologies for messing up the scheduling of this story. This story was supposed to post prior to launch, but an error on my part scheduled it afterwards. Note: the launch was successful, booster rocket landed back at the landing site on land, and the Dragon capsule has deployed without issue.]
According to Ars Technica, After a Month-Long Break, SpaceX Aims to Return to Flight Monday:
After standing down for a month due to Air Force maintenance on the launch range along the US East Coast, SpaceX will attempt to return to flight on Monday. Provided the weather and spacecraft cooperate, the company will launch a Dragon carrying about 3 tons of cargo to the International Space Station. Launch time is set for 12:31pm ET, and there is a 70-percent chance of "go" conditions for the instantaneous launch window.
This will be SpaceX's 11th launch attempt of 2017, with the company already having flown more rockets into space this year than in any previous calendar year. It last flew on July 5, when a Falcon 9 rocket lifted the very heavy Intelsat 35e communications satellite, nearly 7 tons, to geostationary orbit. Because the Dragon spacecraft is only going to low Earth orbit, the Falcon 9 rocket flying Monday will have plenty of propellant left behind to attempt a return to Landing Zone 1, along the Florida Coast.
According to the company, this will also be the last time a "new" Dragon cargo spacecraft flies into space. Future cargo missions will be fulfilled with refurbished Dragons that the company recovers after water landings in the Pacific Ocean. This change should allow the company to move into production of crew variants of the Dragon spacecraft.
Spaceflight Now has a timeline of the launch attempt.
SpaceX's YouTube channel will be hosting a live webcast of the launch and booster recovery.
HPE supercomputer is still crunching numbers in space after 340 days
HPE's mini supercomputer launched into space last year has survived the harsh conditions of zero gravity and radiation for almost a year. The Spaceborne Computer isn't the greatest supercomputer and has a performance of one teraflop, runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is built out of two HPE Apollo Intel x86 servers with a 56Gbps interconnect.
NASA wanted to see if a computer would last for a year - roughly the time it takes to reach Mars - inside the International Space Station (ISS). So, HPE offered to tuck its Spaceborne Computer aboard SpaceX's CRS-12 rocket and send it into the abyss. "It has now been in space for 340 days", said Mark Fernandez, America's HPC technology officer at HPE and co-principal of the experiment, during a panel talk at the ISS Research & Development Conference on Wednesday in San Francisco.
[...] The machine hasn't been radiation hardened, and relies on a few software tricks to stop it from corrupting, something Fernandez calls "autonomous self-care". Continuous health checks helps keep the computer in check, and when it detects any potential hardware failures, it runs at a slower pace or enters "idle mode", where it powers down.
Previously: HPE Supercomputer to be Sent to the ISS
Related: Rodent Research-9 Experiments Sent to the ISS
(Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Wednesday August 16 2017, @07:54AM (1 child)
So, rodents tend to cause a smell at the best of times. In a fully enclosed system like the ISS? I hope they've come up with a clever way of sanitizing their cages, that's all I'm sating...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @08:43AM
Even with just people in the ISS for months, drinking their own recycled piss and sweat they'd smell pretty bad. Fortunately, this isn't actually a problem for several reasons. For instance, they can open the airlock very briefly [youtube.com] if things get too bad. The CO2 scrubbers also help a great deal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @09:45AM
NASA today are mostly a bunch of parasites thinking up more innovative ways to suck tax money.
Spending all that money on figuring out all the bad things that happen to us in zero g and spending zero on stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module [wikipedia.org]
I guess it's just too much useful science to compare mice in a 1g centrifuge with mice in a Mars g centrifuge and mice in a Moon g container for a similar period. Oh nos we might actually learn something useful for our species like whether Mars level gravity is OK for us in the long term and thus help us decide based on _scientific_ evidence (rather than wishful thinking) whether we really want to spend billions/trillions and years/decades trying to get people there and to live there. I guess if it turns out we can't do well in Mars g, they might have to downsize the entire Mars colonization department or similar, so meanwhile let's not look too closely at such stuff...
And look at all those isolation experiments they keep having in Hawaii: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HI-SEAS#Missions [wikipedia.org]
Nice way for the _administrators_ to get paid to stay Hawaii every now and then. I guess it would put an end to the paid holidays in Hawaii if someone actually asked the US Navy on their notes for selecting, training and handling nuclear submariners who have to be stuck in metal tubes for months with no escape.
(Score: 3, Funny) by rts008 on Wednesday August 16 2017, @10:58AM
So THIS is how our mouse overlords get into space.
I mean, come on now, it was all spelled out clearly in Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy!
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday August 16 2017, @12:30PM
I'm wondering what happened to Rodent Research 1-8. At least there might be an upside, they can make rodent kebabs when they are done with the experiments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @09:29PM
Apparently they couldn't think of any research benefits: