SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the is-dark-matter-like-dark-energon dept.
The Conversation has a story about five key findings from 15 years of the International Space Station:
1. The fragility of the human body — there is considerable loss of strength and bone mass without intervention. Mitigating this is key to making it possible to have manned trips to mars.
2. Interplanetary contamination — spores of Bacillus subtilis were exposed to space upon the ISS (but shielded from solar UV radiation). "The space vacuum and temperature extremes alone were not enough to kill them off."
3. Growing crystals for medicine — "Crystals in a microgravity environment may be grown to much larger sizes than on Earth, enabling easier analysis of their micro-structure. Protein crystals grown on the ISS are being used in the development of new drugs for diseases such as muscular dystrophy and cancer."
4. Cosmic rays and dark matter — early results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) support the theory that a halo of dark matter surrounds the Milky Way.
5. Efficient combustion — flames burn more efficiently in space with much less soot produced. Understanding this may lead to more efficient combustion in vehicles.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday January 01 2016, @02:08AM
Is that all we've gotten out of 15 years?
Surely the engineering and construction experience must be worth something. Probably way more than any of the "science" done on board.
You look at pictures of the interior [geek.com] these days, and its a total shambles. Wires and patch cables running everywhere, notes taped to everything. I get claustrophobia just looking at it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday January 01 2016, @02:19AM
Well, the more interesting stuff... they done it all the way back n 1968 [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by isostatic on Friday January 01 2016, @02:20AM
Do you not run a 15 year old equipment room? If mine was half that neat I'd be singing!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @02:41AM
Training, budgeting, engineering, manufacturing, quality control, mission control, launches, communications, resupply, dealing with emergencies. And providing career paths for aeronautical engineers and astronauts in the USA.
Skill within any demanding skill is use it or lose it - now we can barely remember how we got to the moon. Continued practice is vital, and that costs lots of money.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Friday January 01 2016, @03:26AM
Yeah if those 5 are really the key findings the ISS is I'd say it's a very very expensive way of achieving "science fair" quality results. The burning with less soot could just be the lack of convection causing stuff to stay hot more easily- no updraft.
If you ask me the most interesting and ground breaking experiment the ISS did was space tourism. And the NASA were against it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 01 2016, @05:31AM
Just being there, actually doing that, and maintaining the political, financial, logistical supply chain to keep it going is a huge achievement. Yeah, rocket science is cool and all, but it's actually kind of the easy part.
Put another way, what have we learned from the CVN-75 Harry S. Truman, 8th Nimitz class aircraft carrier in the fleet (of 10), after 17 years in service? I'm not saying nothing, and I'm not saying that aircraft carriers are redundant and useless in international politics, but: the ISS also serves a role in international relations, and is operating in a unique environment that does teach things you can't learn elsewhere - and, overall, the ISS is costing less money and creating / occupying fewer U.S. jobs than the super carrier fleet, probably a small fraction of a single ship, when you consider the entire logistics tail.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday January 01 2016, @06:17AM
Puzzling, isn't it?
I thought maybe stuff would not burn past the initial flareup because nothing was pushing the spent reactants out of the way.
This is precisely the kind of weird stuff that orbiting zero-gravity space labs are supposed to foster the investigation of.
My belief is that space will become the ultimate "clean room" for building perfect microcircuit structures to atomic precision. When I say that, I mean building circuits atom by atom just as a building is made block by block. Maybe one day we will understand DNA well enough we can build some analogues that construct whatever nanodevices we dream up - a 3D printer operating at the atomic level.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday January 01 2016, @05:25AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by Some call me Tim on Friday January 01 2016, @06:33AM
Try to understand that they're dealing with an ever changing environment. That equipment might change every time a re-supply mission comes up. That means having cables available to connect various experiments to power and monitoring gear as well as control and telemetry. All of that stuff is standard knowledge on the ground and the experiments are built to connect to what is available. That looks pretty clean, everything is Ty-wrapped out of the way, extra cables are protected and stowed in the over-head. For as little space as they have, that's not bad at all.
Questioning science is how you do science!