Bioprinted body parts could prove vital to future medical treatments, and scientists are going to great lengths to test it — in a very literal sense. NASA, Redwire and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences Center for Biotechnology (4DBio3) are sending a new 3D printer to the International Space Station, Redwire's BioFabrication Facility, to bioprint a human knee meniscus in orbit and study the result on Earth. Ideally, this will lead to treatments for the meniscal injuries that US soldiers all-too-frequently face.

Redwire hopes to 3D print whole organs in space, although it characterizes this as a "long-term" goal. The company is also using NASA's Advanced Plant Habitat for a project to identify genes for space-friendly plants. Another investigation will use a NASA furnace to create and demo passive cooling for electronics in low gravity.

The BFF printer will fly to the ISS aboard a supply rocket launching as soon as November 6th from NASA's Wallops Island spaceport. The mission will carry three extra payloads.

This isn't NASA's first spaceborne 3D printer. Last year, NASA carried a Redwire printer to the ISS to demonstrate printing lunar soil. That technology could one day help Moon colonists build habitats without carrying an abundance of supplies from Earth. The bioprinter is more immediately practical, of course. If the research pans out, doctors could replace damaged body parts without resorting to donations or inorganic implants.

Frictions exerted during atmospheric reentry are enough to rend spacecraft into comets of glowing slag if not properly mitigated — that’s a good thing, when intentional, but otherwise nearly always very bad. The Space Shuttle, when it was still in service, was designed to hit the outermost edges of Earth’s atmosphere traveling at around Mach 25 (~17,000 MPH), then ride a wave of superheated plasma — generated because frictional forces are so great that they literally tear the surrounding air apart at the molecular level — down into the atmosphere until aerodynamic surfaces regain their effectiveness.

“Utilizing atmospheric drag is the most mass-efficient method to slow down a spacecraft,” NASA notes. To survive those intense 3000-degree F temperatures, the Shuttle relied on layers of ablative heat shielding tiles that would melt and slough off, carrying extra heat away with them, but for tomorrow’s reusable spacecraft, NASA has something better in mind, something inflatable.

NASA has scheduled a launch window beginning November 9th for the LOFTID mission. It will fly out of Vandenberg Space Force Base aboard a ULA Atlas rocket, alongside a new NOAA “polar weather satellite.” After the satellite separates from the Atlas rocket’s upper stage, the LOFTID will unfurl and inflate in low earth orbit ahead of its reentry.

“One of the biggest differences is before we were doing suborbital tests, coming in at roughly 5,600 miles per hour or 2.5 kilometers per second, which is already difficult,” Steve Hughes, LOFTID aeroshell lead at NASA's Langley Research Center said in a press release. “But with LOFTID, we’ll be coming in at nearly 18,000 miles per hour, or 8 kilometers per second. That is about three times as fast, but that means nine times more energy.”

NASA

The LOFTID heatshield offers four layers of protection against all that energy. The outermost layer is made from ceramic and silicon carbide yarn woven into cloth on the same sorts of industrial weavers that make denim. The second and third layers are two kinds of insulation, they’re there to protect the fourth layer — the actual inflatable bits. Everything is stacked into a series of concentric rings — themselves constructed from a woven polymer ten times stronger than steel by weight — that will help guide the shield’s expansion.

NASA has been developing Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD) technology for more than a decade. LOFTID (Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator) is the latest iteration of that tech, a new kind of heat shield that potentially avoids many of the issues NASA has with the current generation of rigid aeroshells. These hard shields have a hard limit on their size, dictated by the diameter of the rocket’s shroud. Soft aeroshells don’t face that limitation and can be extended far past the shroud’s edge, enabling NASA to protect larger and heavier payloads as they enter atmo.

This is especially important to our future solar system exploration plans, because the other issue with current heat shields is that they only work in Earth’s atmosphere. You try to set something the size of the Space Shuttle down on the surface of Mars and that exercise is going to end with your spacecraft a very long streak smeared across the Red Planet — or one very short crater if you’re especially unlucky. Mars’ atmosphere simply isn’t thick enough to generate sufficient friction against modern-sized heat shields to safely slow the Shuttle’s descent. So, NASA is testing out an inflatable one that is.

When it begins its descent, LOFTID will be traveling at more than 25 times the speed of sound. NASA hopes that by the end, LOFTID will be crawling along at a relatively pokey 609 MPH. Throughout its flight, the test shield’s onboard data recorder will transmit the most pertinent sensor and video data while storing as much as possible onboard in an ejectable recorder. Should everything go according to plan, the LOFTID shield will slow sufficiently to deploy a landing chute before setting down in the Pacific Ocean ahead of retrieval by the ULA.

Life on Earth would not exist as we know it, if not for the protein molecules that enable critical processes from photosynthesis and enzymatic degradation to sight and our immune system. And like most facets of the natural world, humanity has only just begun to discover the multitudes of protein types that actually exist. But rather scour the most inhospitable parts of the planet in search of novel microorganisms that might have a new flavor of organic molecule, Meta researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind metagenomic database, the ESM Metagenomic Atlas, that could accelerate existing protein-folding AI performance by 60x.

Metagenomics is just coincidentally named. It is a relatively new, but very real, scientific discipline that studies "the structure and function of entire nucleotide sequences isolated and analyzed from all the organisms (typically microbes) in a bulk sample." Often used to identify the bacterial communities living on our skin or in the soil, these techniques are similar in function to gas chromatography, wherein you're trying to identify what's present in a given sample system.

Similar databases have been launched by the NCBI, the European Bioinformatics Institute, and Joint Genome Institute, and have already cataloged billions of newly uncovered protein shapes. What Meta is bringing to the table is "a new protein-folding approach that harnesses large language models to create the first comprehensive view of the structures of proteins in a metagenomics database at the scale of hundreds of millions of proteins," according to a TK release from the company. The problem is that, while advances of genomics have revealed the sequences for slews of novel proteins, just knowing what those sequences are doesn't actually tell us how they fit together into a functioning molecule and going figuring it out experimentally takes anywhere from a few months to a few years. Per molecule. Ain't nobody got time for that.  

"The ESM Metagenomic Atlas will enable scientists to search and analyze the structures of metagenomic proteins at the scale of hundreds of millions of proteins," the Meta research team wrote on TK. "This can help researchers to identify structures that have not been characterized before, search for distant evolutionary relationships, and discover new proteins that can be useful in medicine and other applications."

Like languages, proteins are made up of their constituent atoms (think, words) which can all be smashed together as you wish but will only make a functional molecule (ie a coherent thought) if assembled in a specific order (a molecular sentence). Meta's system drastically accelerates our capabilities to uncover organic chemistry's syntax and grammar, however the analogy isn't perfect. "A protein sequence describes the chemical structure of a molecule, which folds into a complex three-dimensional shape according to the laws of physics," the team explained. "Protein sequences contain statistical patterns that convey information about the folded structure of the protein."

Specifically, Meta's Evolutionary Scale Modeling AI treats gene sequences like a Mad Libs for O-Chem using a self-supervised learning called masked language modeling. "We trained a language model on the sequences of millions of natural proteins," the research team wrote. "With this approach, the model must correctly fill in the blanks in a passage of text, such as 'To __ or not to __, that is the ________.' We trained a language model to fill in the blanks in a protein sequence, like 'GL_KKE_AHY_G' across millions of diverse proteins." 

The resulting "protein language model" is named ESM-2 and operates across 15 billion parameters, making it the largest model of its kind to date. The "new structure prediction capability enabled us to predict sequences for the more than 600 million metagenomic proteins in the atlas in just two weeks on a cluster of approximately 2,000 GPUs." So much for months and years.

Starship's first orbital test flight could finally take place next month. Mark Kirasich, a senior NASA official overseeing the development of the Artemis moon program, has revealed the information during a livestreamed NASA Advisory Council meeting. According to Reuters, Kirasich said that NASA tracks four major Starship flights and that the first one is coming up in early December. 

Based on the plans SpaceX previously released, the Starship spacecraft with its Super Heavy booster will launch from the company's Boca Chica facility in Texas. The booster will break off three minutes into the flight and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Starship vehicle itself will go into orbit before reentering and making an ocean landing near Hawaii. The company expects the entire test flight to last for 90 minutes. 

SpaceX has been planning Starship's first orbital flight since mid-2021, but it kept getting pushed back due to various technical and regulatory reasons. The space corporation's launch facility in Boca Chica, for instance, only recently cleared the FAA's environmental assessment. And even then, the FAA required the company to make more than 75 changes to mitigate the environmental impact of its flights before it grants the company a launch license for the site. 

An FAA spokesperson told Reuters that the agency will grant the company a launch license "only after SpaceX provides all outstanding information and the agency can fully analyze it." As SpaceNews notes, SpaceX must also conduct and clear more tests before the flight, including a static fire test of all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster. 

A static fire test of the Starship in July ended up in flames when propellants ignited under the booster. SpaceX's next attempt in August went smoothly, but the company only fired a single Raptor engine on the Super Heavy that time. In addition, Starship must go through a full wet dress rehearsal, wherein a rocket that's loaded with propellants go through the launch countdown without actually taking off. 

It’s been a busy week for NASA in the days leading up to Halloween. In the spirit of the season, the agency recently released a new image of the Eagle Nebula captured by the James Webb Space Telescope where the Pillars of Creation look like a ghostly hand. By coincidence, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory managed to capture a similarly spooky image of the sun.

On Wednesday, the agency shared a capture of the sun “smiling.” As The Guardian points out, more than a few Twitter users were quick to point out how the star looks like a carved pumpkin in NASA’s image. There’s a bit of interesting science behind the resemblance. “Seen in ultraviolet light, these dark patches on the sun are known as coronal holes and are regions where fast solar wind gushes out into space,” according to NASA. The sun is constantly sending out solar winds. At times, these geomagnetic storms have been known to knock power out here on Earth, as was the case in part of Canada in 1989.

This isn’t the first time the Solar Dynamics Observatory has captured an interesting image of the sun. In 2016, NASA released an animation of the sun doing a somersault. The capture was the result of a seven-hour maneuver the SDO completes once a year to take an accurate measure of the star’s edge.

NASA has released another image that the James Webb Space Telescope has captured of the Pillars of Creation. While the picture that the agency offered up last week provided a detailed look at stars forming in the region, the latest one is a spookier and more ethereal image.

Bathed in orange and black, the image that Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) captured is certainly timely, given that Halloween is just a few days away. NASA says the rendering provides a fresh perspective on the Pillars of Creation, with a focus on the region's gas and dust.

Last week's image was captured with Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which was able to look through the columns of dust to observe thousands of new stars in the region in more detail than before. However, many of the stars aren't bright enough to shine through at the wavelengths MIRI focuses on.

NASA says that, with this image, astronomers have mid-infrared light data at higher resolution than has been available in the past. The agency notes that researchers will look at more precise dust movements to form a fuller 3D landscape of the Pillars of Creation. This will help to develop a deeper understanding of how stars form.

The Pillars of Creation is in the Eagle Nebula, some 6,500 light years away. In case you're wondering how vast the whole thing is, take a look at the bright red star that juts out from the right side of the top pillar, around halfway up. NASA says the star and its dusty shroud are bigger than our entire solar system, which may or may not spark an existential crisis or two. Have a wonderful Halloween weekend.

SpaceX is on track to launch the Falcon Heavy for the first time in three years after it successfully put the heavy-lift launch vehicle through a static fire test. The private space corporation has announced the test's successful completion on Twitter, along with a photo of the rocket as it breathes out fire and smoke while perched at NASA Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39A. During a static fire test, a rocket's engines are ignited to check their performance while remaining on the ground. 

The company conducted this particular test in preparation for USSF-44, the classified mission SpaceX is flying for the US Space Force. USSF-44 will have two payloads, both satellites, that will be deployed into geostationary orbit. It was originally scheduled for liftoff on October 31st, but SpaceX is currently targeting a November 1st launch. The company hasn't revealed a launch time within the day yet, but according to Space and Next Spaceflight, it will happen around 9:40AM ET.

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket first took flight in 2018, carrying a cherry red Tesla Roadster owned by company chief Elon Musk with a dummy dubbed "Starman" in the driver's seat. The last time it flew was in June 2019, and SpaceX described it at the time as one of the "most challenging" launches in its history — landing the center core proved too tricky that it missed the drone ship waiting for it by a few feet. Since then, it has been certified to carry the Space Force's secret spy satellites to orbit, and the first of those missions could occur in a few days' time. 

NASA's InSight lander may have had its last hurrah. Researchers have learned that a marsquake the lander detected in Mars' Amazonis Planitia region on December 24th, 2021 was actually a meteoroid impact — the first time any mission has witnessed a crater forming on the planet. Scientists found out when they looked at before-and-after pictures from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) revealing a 492-foot gash in the landscape.

The meteoroid is believed to have been somewhere between 16 and 39 feet long. It would have burned up in Earth's skies, but it was large enough to survive Mars' extra-thin atmosphere. The impact was violent, digging a hole 70 feet deep and tossing debris as far as 23 miles away from the crater. It also exposed subsurface ice that hasn't been seen so close to the martian equator before now. A sound adaptation of Insight's data (below) shows just how "loud" the event was compared to Mars' regular activity.

It took some time to confirm the event. A Malin Space Science Systems team used two of the MRO's cameras (the black-and-white Context Camera and the Mars Color Imager) to spot the crater in February. Pictures from the color camera helped narrow down the impact to a 24-hour window.

Separately, a group has suggested that 20 of InSight's roughly 1,300 detected marsquakes may be signs of magma. As Gizmodoexplains, the quakes' spectral signature hints at a comparatively soft crust in Mars' Cerberus Fossae region. Combined with dark dust, this hints that volcanic activity might have occurred on the planet within the past 50,000 years.

The discovery could help the scientific community understand Mars' geologic timeline by defining the rate of craters appearing on the planet. It might also prove crucial to Mars colonists and explorers who may need the underground ice for sustenance and rocket fuel. Human visitors could carry fewer supplies, or extend their stays.

There's a bittersweetness to this news. NASA previously warned that InSight couldn't last much longer, and now expects the lander to shut down in six weeks as accumulating dust limits the effectiveness of its solar panels. That's better than the end-of-summer cutoff the agency predicted this spring, but it could leave the meteorite detection as InSight's last major accomplishment.

Last June, NASA announced that it would convene a panel to study "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAP), aka UFOs — while saying it doesn't believe they're "extraterrestrial in origin." Now, the space agency has unveiled the 16-member panel that will focus on "unclassified sightings and other data collected from civilian government and commercial sectors."

Chairing the panel is David Spergel, former head of astrophysics at Prince University. Other members include Anamaria Berea, a research affiliate at the SETI (Search for Intelligence Life) Institute in Mountainview, California; retired NASA astronaut and test pilot Scott Kelly; and others ranging from oceanographers to astrophysicists to science journalists. 

The panel is separate from a Pentagon group investigating UAPs reported by military pilots and investigated by US defense and intelligence officials. Now, the US government is effectively running two tracks of UFO probes after keeping such work behind closed doors for years. 

Conspicuously absent are special effects experts like Corridor Crew skilled at spotting fake and altered clips. In a recent video, the group debunked a number of famous videos UFO clips, even from the Pentagon, ascribing them to ordinary occurrences like a camera's iris, a bird and an infrared lens flare. 

NASA itself doesn't seem to believe there's much going on with these videos and sightings, either. However, it said the panel can still serve an important role in determining how to classify them — even if there are no aliens involved.

"Understanding the data we have surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena is critical to helping us draw scientific conclusions about what's happening in our skies," said NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen. "Data is the language of scientists and makes the unexplainable explainable."

Put horror movies and games aside for a few minutes to listen to something truly unsettling this Halloween season. The European Space Agency has released audio of what our planet's magnetic field sounds like. While it protects us from cosmic radiation and charged particles from solar winds, it turns out that the magnetic field has an unnerving rumble.

You can't exactly point a microphone at the sky and hear the magnetic field (nor can we see it). Scientists from the Technical University of Denmark converted data collected by the ESA's three Swarm satellites into sound, representing both the magnetic field and a solar storm.

The ethereal audio reminds me of wooden wind chimes rattling as a mass of land shifts, perhaps during an earthquake. It brings to mind the cracking sounds of a moving glacier as well. You might get something different out of the five-minute clip.

“The team used data from ESA’s Swarm satellites, as well as other sources, and used these magnetic signals to manipulate and control a sonic representation of the core field. The project has certainly been a rewarding exercise in bringing art and science together," the university's Klaus Nielsen, a musician and supporter of the project, said. “The rumbling of Earth’s magnetic field is accompanied by a representation of a geomagnetic storm that resulted from a solar flare on November 3rd, 2011, and indeed it sounds pretty scary."

If you happen to visit Solbjerg Square in Copenhagen this week, you may be able to immerse yourself in the magnetic field's low rumble. More than 30 loudspeakers are pointed at the ground there. They'll broadcast the audio three times daily until October 30th. “We have set it up so that each speaker represents a different location on Earth and demonstrates how our magnetic field has fluctuated over the last 100,000 years," Nielsen said.

This isn't the first time researchers have turned data from otherwise silent forces into sound. Last year, NASA released an audio representation of magnetic field activity around Jupiter's moon Ganymede. More recently, we got to hear a terrifying depiction of what a black hole sounds like.