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April 03 2012
What Would You Sound Like on Venus?
First consider what, exactly, you’d be doing here.
Like a Smurf with a bass voice, according to Tim Leighton, a professor of acoustics at University of Southampton who has made it his mission to figure this kind of thing out, using physics and math combined with data about otherworldly atmospheres.
Venus’s atmosphere is much denser than ours, so vocal chords would vibrate more slowly there, yielding a lower voice—the opposite of what happens when you inhale helium. The speed of sound, though, is a lot faster on Venus than it is here, Leighton explains in a press release. He says that this can mess with how big we imagine the speaker to be: “This tricks the way our brain interprets the size of a speaker (presumably an evolutionary trait that allowed our ancestors to work out whether an animal call in the night was something that was small enough to eat or so big as to be dangerous).” So we might interpret that deep bass rumble as coming from a diminutive form.
Interesting! Keep in mind, though, that any vocal chords vibrating on Venus won’t belong to a living human: the atmosphere is poisonous, the pressure is ...
February 22 2012
How to Turn a Blazing-Hot Fusion Reactor Into a Sunny Paradise, in 10 Easy Steps
Stephen Gaskell is a British science fiction writer whose work has been published in Nature, Interzone, and Clarkesworld. A graduate of the Clarion East writing workshop, he recently released Strata, co-written with Bradley P. Beaulieu.
In many ways the interior of a star would be an ideal place to live for an advanced species. A near limitless source of energy. Camouflage from interstellar predators. And sunshine three hundred and sixty five days a year.
In our new novella, Strata, Bradley P. Beaulieu and I didn’t travel so far into the future that humankind had migrated to the sun, but we did imagine giant solar mining platforms that orbit through the sun’s chromosphere. Of course, at present such a feat of engineering is beyond the technological and economic reach of humanity, but we wondered if this might one day be a scientifically feasible enterprise. Here are 10 features of the extremely hostile solar environment that had to be overcome:
1. Pressure
You might think your boss is putting you under enormous pressure for next week’s deadline, but it ain’t got a patch on the kind of stress that the center of the sun’s under. At its core, the pressure of the sun ...
October 24 2011
Moonrock-Peddling Grandma Feels the Cold Hand of the Interplanetary Police
The warrant for Davis’s arrest sports a snapshot of the contraband—
a paperweight containing a fleck of the moon.
The zany world of moonrock theft and recovery has produced some of the stranger science-related stories in recent years—you know, like “NASA interns steal safe of moonrocks and spread them on hotel bed to have sex amongst them” strange. The case of the grandma apprehended by federal agents in a Riverside County Denny’s with a moonrock paperweight, explored at length in an AP exclusive, is a fitting entry in this pantheon of interplanetary skulduggery. To make some extra cash, Joann Davis, 74, the widow of a contractor who worked with NASA during the Apollo moon mission era, decided to find an online buyer for a tiny moon fragment she says her husband received as a gift from Neil Armstrong (Armstrong has denied giving anyone such lunar souvenirs). It’s illegal to sell Apollo moonrocks, which are all US government property and thus can’t be used to turn a profit. Davis apparently had a hard time finding taker for the plastic-encased shard, because she ultimately emailed NASA to ask if they had any tips on selling the things. “I’ve been searching the internet for months attempting to find a buyer,” Davis wrote in May, the AP reports. “If you have any thoughts as to how I can proceed with the sale of these two items, please call.”
Let me just give you a pointer, reader: when selling contraband, don’t contact the people it came from. They will probably want to make your acquaintance in the very near future.
So NASA set up a sting operation and had an agent contact her about buying the object. Davis apparently knew that selling moonrocks was not kosher, because according the warrant for her arrest, she told the buyer (aka a NASA agent) that she was willing to sell it for “big money underground” and referenced the black market. After closing the deal for $1.7 million, Davis headed to a Denny’s in Southern California for the handoff—and was shocked to find herself suddenly swarmed by federal agents who confiscated the moonrock. She told the AP that they also bruised her when they pulled her from her booth and scared her so much she peed her pants.
Oddly enough, it’s now been five months since the fateful events in the Denny’s, and Davis hasn’t been charged with a crime, nor has NASA given any inkling of whether they’ll move the case forward. The moonrock, however, remains in their possession.
Image courtesy of U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, via AP
September 01 2011
(1) Capture Asteroid. (2) Mine It. (3) PROFIT!! (4)…KABLOOM
Reel ‘er in!
We all know that asteroids close to the Earth are Bad News. (Although not as bad as many would have you think.) But what if we could catch one? Bring it home? Put it in Earth orbit? Maybe mine it for some valuable minerals; do a little science; potentially, I don’t know, back a new currency? Sure, say some Chinese scientists in a paper on the ArXiv. We should go for it!
In fact, there’s a snazzy little number approaching the Earth right now, they write. It’s about 30 feet wide. Should be pretty easy to hook in, using one of a variety of techniques outlined in the paper, which include “conventional explosive, kinetic impactor and nuclear explosive,” as well as “Enhanced Yarkovsky effect, focused solar, gravity tractor, mass driver, pulsed laser and space tug.” The nuclear route may not be advisable, they opine: “Because the nuclear explosion can release a very large amount of energy, the result may be a fragmentation of the target NEO.” Better to go with the kinetic imapactor, they decide. A little tap to the ol’ asteroid, and it will accelerate just enough to get stuck ...
August 04 2011
No Shuttle? No Biggie! NASA’s New Astronauts are LEGO People
The future of manned spaceflight, it’s not. We hope.
Ever since the Space Shuttle took its last flight earlier this summer, the US has had no real plan for getting humans back up in space. Meanwhile, NASA is sending three LEGO figurines to Jupiter tomorrow, as part of a sponsorship deal with LEGO “to inspire children to explore science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” Because flying little plastic Jupiter, Juno, and Galileo more than 1,700 million miles is a great way to demonstrate to future scientists the importance of funding!
The figurines of the god, goddess, and seventeenth-century astronomer aren’t part of any of the scientific experiments also making the journey on NASA’s Juno probe. But, the press release is quick to note, “Of course, the miniature Galileo has his telescope with him on the journey.” Too bad he has no eyes.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/KSC
June 27 2011
Fore! NASA Golf Game Lets You Frolick on Saturn’s Moons
This takes location golfing to a new level.
If 18 holes on Kauai or Tenerife is old hat, grab your clubs and head to Saturn’s moons.
The NASA team behind the Cassini orbiter periodically release troves of gorgeous images of Saturn and its dozens of moons, revealing the gouges on Enceladus and the lakes of Titan. The drool-worthy vistas just beg to be explored, and you can now do just that with a nifty little Flash game the team has developed called Golf Sector 6. The game takes players through several 9-hole courses across a variety of Saint-Exupéry-esque moons, whose cratered surfaces are patched together from Cassini’s images. As Saturn drifts by in the background, you can relax, put your feet up, and bat a small pink ball toward the hole with your mouse. But beware of that pesky escape velocity: it’s different on every moon, and it’s way, way less than Earth’s.
The trick of the game is getting used to the gravity of each of these moons. While the team has made some sacrifices in accuracy for the sake of playability—Saturn’s pull on the moons’ gravitational fields is excluded, as is ...
April 12 2011
Who Has the Best Pre-Space Launch Superstitions? Hint: Not US
Fifty years ago today, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. In the half-century following, many men and women have followed in his flight path—and come up with a slew of unusual rituals meant to help their missions go smoothly, described in a 2008 article in The Space Review. Here are Discoblog’s rankings of various space programs’ pre-launch superstitions:
USA:
Eat a steak-and-eggs breakfast. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had this meal before his 1961 launch. Plus, it’s thought to, uh, decrease the need to do things you’d rather not do in a space suit. (Then again, Shepard is probably not the best example for that, considering he famously peed his suit while Freedom 7 was mired in protracted delays on the launch pad.) Take a load off. Before a mission, astronauts sit in the same leather armchairs the Apollo guys sat in. Not just for rest and relaxation, though: As they lean back in the E-Z Boys, the astronauts are wearing pressure suits and breathing pure oxygen to rid their blood of nitrogren pre-launch. Lose at cards. Specifically, the mission commander must lose to the tech crew, ...
February 14 2011
Triumph: Fake Astronauts Walk on Fake Mars!
The simulated eagle has finally landed, and today, two men have walked upon the red sands of fake Mars. This jaunt along a sandpit in Moscow, the latest episode in the Mars500 project designed to test human endurance, gives the cosmonauts a respite from their past eight months of windowless confinement.
As the BBC reports:
“We have made great progress today,” commented Vitaly Davydov, the deputy head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, who was watching a video feed of the two men. “All systems have been working normally.”
Organized by Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency, the Mars500 project seeks to better understand how humans would endure the psychological and physical effects of the isolation and confinement necessary for a real mission to Mars. The ’500′ in Mars500 indicates the mission’s time frame–the organizers estimated that it would takes 250 days to travel to Mars, and then allotted 30 days for surface exploration before a 240-day return trip. (Technically, the project’s name should be Mars520.)
The six crew members have been conducting experiments during their mission, which began last June, and ...
February 11 2011
To Hitch a Ride to Mars, Just Flag Down an Asteroid
Mars missions should probably come with the kind of warning label you’d find on a cigarette pack: “May cause cancer and blindness.”
If you were traveling to Mars solely by spacecraft, your health might take a serious hit during the 18-month or so round-trip journey–and you might not even be able to see your home by the time you got back. Throughout the journey high-energy particles known as cosmic rays would course through your body, not only damaging your eyesight, but also increasing your risk of cancer by up to 20 percent.
Luckily, one scientist has an answer: Don’t fly a spaceship to Mars, hop on an asteroid instead.
Cosmic rays zing into our solar system from interstellar space; here on Earth our planet’s magnetic field protects us from them, and astronauts aboard the International Space Station are mostly protected by the Earth’s bulk and its magnetic field as well. But astronauts on a long-haul trip to Mars would be in more danger.
As it stands, our current radiation shields are too cumbersome for spacecraft, and light-weight aluminum shields can exacerbate the problem: Cosmic rays can reflect off the metal and create secondary radiation. ...
February 10 2011
Maybe E.T. Hasn’t Come Calling Because Human Messages Are “Messy”
In the noble pursuit of contacting aliens, we humans have broadcast images, music, voices, and more into space, but have you ever stopped to think that maybe we’re sending mixed messages? Some astronomers have, and to counter that problem they’ve suggested creating standard rules for all future space-bound missives–and they want to harness the power of crowdsourcing to “edit” these messages.
In their Space Policy paper, a team of alien-hunting scientists say that standard message protocols would increase the likelihood that aliens would hear us, the main goal for those involved with SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Wired Science quotes astrobiologist Jacob Haqq-Misra:
“The paper is really a call for unity among thinking about messaging exraterrestrials,” Haqq-Misra said. “Right now it’s messy, it’s kind of all over the place. Maybe we can increase our success chances by being more unified about this.”
Such a protocol would set guidelines for the message’s topic and length, and would outline how the signal should be encoded and the technology used to send it. And once this protocol is set, the researchers hope to use ...
January 24 2011
Android… in… Space! A Smartphone Prepares for Blast-Off
Cell phones will soon make a giant leap for mankind–right into outer space. In the coming year, British engineers from Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) plan to send a cell phone into orbit to test whether cell phones are tough enough to withstand outer space, and whether they’re powerful enough to control satellites. As the BBC reports:
“Modern smartphones are pretty amazing,” said SSTL project manager Shaun Kenyon…. “They come now with processors that can go up to 1GHz, and they have loads of flash memory…. We’re not taking it apart; we’re not gutting it; we’re not taking out the printed circuit boards and re-soldering them into our satellite – we’re flying it as is,” Mr Kenyon explained.
The jury’s still out as to what cell phone model will be the world’s first orbital smartphone–but the scientists have already decided to pick one that uses Google’s Android operating system. That software is open source, allowing the engineers to tweak the phone’s functions. Not every phone, after all, comes off the shelf with the ability to navigate a nearly 12-inch-long, GPS-equipped,
January 21 2011
Fake Mars Astronauts Are Approaching Fake Mars!
With less than 10,000 miles to go until they reach fake Mars, the fake mission to the Red Planet is going as planned. Which is to say, the space travel simulation project known as Mars-500 project is full of mishaps and surprises, as the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems tests the fake astronauts’ ability to handle anything outer space could throw at them.
The next milestone: the fake arrival in Mars orbit on February 1.
And for being confined to a 1,800-square-foot test module for 520 lonely days, the crew members are doing a stellar job. In their last update, published on the official Mars-500 website on January 14, they give a terse but positive appraisal of their condition:
226th day of the experiment. Scientific equipment is in operable condition. Clarification for implementation of special experiments is carried out. There are no alterations of health state which can interfere with participating in the experiment and realizing of scientific program.
The list of experiments is long, and they’re all meant to test the many difficulties involved in actually traveling to Mars, from astronauts’ overall health ...
January 13 2011
Houston, We May Have Some Problems: Colonizing Mars and Sex in Space
Strap on your astronaut suit and hold on to your space shoes, because in 20 years, you could just be aboard Earth’s first mission to Mars. At least, that’s the hope of over 400 people who read the Journal of Cosmology’s special edition issue, The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet, and volunteered to take part in a not-yet-scheduled trip to Mars.
The journal spills the details about the logistics involved in a privately-funded journey to the Red Planet–a book-length brainstorm by leading scientists. What, for example, happens if you get an infection on Mars? How do you have sex in space? And, most importantly, how long do you have to live on Mars before you get to call yourself a Martian? (Ok, I made that last question up, but aren’t you curious?)
Any journey to Mars–especially one with no scheduled return to Earth–is fraught with challenges. As Fox News reports:
“It’s going to be a very long period of isolation and confinement,” said Albert Harrison, who has studied astronaut psychology since the 1970s as a professor of psychology at UC Davis…. “After the excitement of blast-off, and after the initial landing on Mars, it ...
January 05 2011
If Ke$ha Was Into Astrobiology, She Still Wouldn’t Have Made This Video
Need to teach 13-year-old Ke$ha fans about the quest for extraterrestrial life, but worried you won’t capture their attention? Fret no more. Fresh off of YouTube comes a parody of Ke$ha’s song “We R Who We R,” refashioned into an informative and utterly dorky song about astrobiology.
The video credits Jank for the lyrics and video and mrskimful for the music. We applaud the creators for their shout-outs to moons like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Titan and Enceladus–all promising destinations in the search for microbial life in our solar system. But we have to take exception to the quick, unqualified mention of bacteria that can thrive on arsenic, and the video’s implication that this recent finding stretches scientists’ notions about what kinds of life can exist. Have they not been following the roiling controversy over whether that finding is valid?
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Astronomy Gets Adorable: Ten-Year-Old Girl Discovers Supernova
Most ten-year-olds don’t have the patience to sift through star images for thousands of hours. But Kathryn Aurora Gray was on a mission: She wanted to become the youngest person to discover a supernova.
And luckily for her, Kathryn’s work didn’t take thousands of hours–she discovered an exploded star about fifteen minutes after starting her career as an amateur astronomer. After looking through four of the 52 pictures provided by family friend and astronomer David Lane, she saw it, her father explains to the Canadian Star:
“Kathryn pointed to the screen and said: ‘Is this one?’ I said ‘yup, that looks pretty good’,” said Paul Gray, describing his daughter’s find.
The images that Kathryn studied to find the supernova were taken by Lane on New Year’s Eve at his “backyard astronomical observatory” in Nova Scotia, Canada. On January 2nd, Kathryn and her father sat down to analyze Lane’s images using a computer program that overlays pictures of the sky from different dates. If one of the stars in the frame brightens dramatically, it appears to “blink” when switching back and forth ...
December 10 2010
SpaceX Reveals Secret Cargo on Its Orbital Test Flight: Space Cheese!
This top-secret space passenger doesn’t have the attributes often associated with astronauts–instead of being labeled brave and resolute, this passenger has been described as nutty, sweet, and buttery. Meet Le Brouere, a space-faring wheel of cheese.
The cheese in question was a passenger on SpaceX’s successful test of its Dragon crew capsule this week, a flight CNN describes as:
One small step for a cheese, one giant leap fromage-kind.
The mild French cheese Le Brouere isn’t the first of its kind to be blasted towards space, but it is the first to reach orbit and to be successfully recovered post-flight. The cheese orbited the Earth twice before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday. The test flight was the first ever orbital reentry and recovery mission by a commercial space company.
The cheese was chosen in reverent reference to sketch comedy troupe Monty Python, company spokeswoman Kirstin Brost told CNN:
The block of fermented curd was a nod to one of the group’s best-known sketches, “Cheese Shop.” The wheel, described only as “very big,” was being towed back to California aboard a barge along with the spacecraft and “basking in the glow of being the first cheese to travel to orbit on a commercial spacecraft.”
The cheese was bolted to the floor of the capsule and covered with a sign warning any onlookers that the contents were “Top Secret!”
And if future space tourists are looking for something to wash down their space cheese with, they need look no further than a bottle of space beer, already on the market. Now, how do I get my hands on a chunk of that nutty-spacey goodness?
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Discoblog: The Nose Knows: Men’s Sweat Smells Like Cheese, Women’s Like Onions
80beats: SpaceX Blasts Its Dragon Space Capsule Into Orbit (UPDATE: Splashdown Success)
DISCOVER: The Biology of… Cheese
Image: SpaceX’s Facebook page, Chris Thompson
December 06 2010
NASA Found Aliens! Or Not. The Worst Coverage of Arsenic-Loving Bacteria
While watching the science news for you here at Discover blogs, we’ve seen our share of bad science coverage. Most of the time, we let it slide. Most of the time, we write the truth and hope to overshadow the erroneous and exaggerated stories. But this time… this time we’re calling it out.
Last week’s coverage of the bacteria that live in Mono Lake, CA was over hyped because of a cryptic message in a NASA press release (namely, that the discovery would “impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life”). And even after all the build up, the early embargo break, and a long press conference, many news outlets STILL got the story wrong.
First, a quick recap of the important findings from DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science, for those who were off-planet last week:
In California’s Mono Lake, Felisa Wolfe-Simon has discovered bacteria that not only shrug off arsenic’s toxic effects, but positively thrive on it. They can even incorporate the poisonous element into their proteins and DNA, using it in place of phosphorus.
While the discovery is amazing and definitely sheds new light on the search for life in extreme (even extraterrestrial) environments, it is important to remember that this doesn’t mean that aliens exits and definitely doesn’t mean that this bacteria is alien. I’m talking to you, Telegraph:
‘Life as we don’t know it’ discovery could prove existence of aliens
NASA has sent the internet into a frenzy after it announced an “astrobiology finding” that could suggest alien life exists–even on earth.
While the bacteria live in a relatively high-arsenic environment, which made them able to tolerate the presence of the poison, the critters typically still used phosphorus to build the “backbone” of their DNA double helix. It wasn’t until the researchers weaned them off the phosphorus in the lab that the bacteria began to incorporate arsenic.
This doesn’t mean these little bacteria are the second (or third, or fourth) coming of life on earth–they are the same “strain of life” as everything else on the planet (including us). This point seems to escape The Huffington Post, who led their incredibly misleading article with the title:
NASA Announcement LIVE: New Life Form Discovered (VIDEO)
Though, if both the headline and the article are misleading, is it really misleading? It seems that they got their false information from an article published by Gizmodo (also posted to Wired Science). In its original form (Gizmodo edited the post once they realized how wrong they’d gotten it), the post says:
NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living on planet Earth. This changes everything…. Discovered in poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible.
No, actually, it doesn’t change everything. While the exciting claims may change the way we think about life in extreme environments, there are still doubters in the scientific community. Many are saying that additional research is necessary to confirm Wolfe-Simon’s results, and some scientists are even suggesting that the study’s authors got it all wrong. We’ll keep you updated on the developments, but we can tell you one thing right now: it’s definitely not aliens.
Related Content:
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Gene Expression: The Alien Embargo and Other Follies
Image: adapted from Flickr/MJTR
December 01 2010
Great Space Balls of Fire! How to Explain Weird Sightings Over Australia?
Those “green UFOs” that caused a stir in Australia four years ago? Researchers say they definitely weren’t alien spaceships (not like they were going to say anything different), but they still aren’t sure what they actually were.
The three green fireballs were spotted by more than 100 people in the sky over Queensland, Australia on May 16th, 2006. The potential abductees said the lights were brighter than the moon, but not as bright as the sun. A single farmer claims to have seen one of the green balls bouncing down the side of a mountain after hitting the earth.
Stephen Hughes, a researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, has just published a paper on the phenomenon in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. He explained to LiveScience that the main fireballs were most likely caused by a meteor breaking up and burning in earth’s atmosphere:
In fact, a commercial airline pilot who landed in New Zealand that day reported seeing a meteor breaking up into fragments, which turned green as the bits descended in the direction of Australia. The timing of the fireballs suggests they might have been debris from Comet 73P/Schwassmann–Wachmann 3.
Hughes believes that the strange color of the meteor shards might be due to electrically charged oxygen molecules around the debris, similar to how electrically charged particles in the upper atmosphere produce the northern lights. But the meteor theory doesn’t explain the farmer’s sighting of the light-ball rolling down the hillside. A foot-wide perfectly spherical meteorite wouldn’t be slowly meandering down a hillside after impacting the earth.
To explain the bouncing ball, Hughes told Live Science that he has a second hypothesis–ball lightning, which he thinks could have been caused by the meteor, though it is usually thought to be caused by storms:
“A transient electrical link between the ionosphere and ground, created by meteors or some other means, could help to solve the mystery of many UFO sightings,” Hughes told LiveScience. “Since such balls would be very insubstantial they would be able to move and change direction very fast as has often been observed.”
Ball lightning is itself poorly understood and controversial: One recent study suggested that the phenomenon might just be a hallucination. But other researchers seem to buy Hughes’ explanation, according to New Scientist:
“It is certainly plausible,” says John Lattanzio, an astrophysist at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. But he adds: “It’s almost impossible to prove anything with such an ephemeral event as this.”
Of course, Hughes told New Scientist that no one else reported seeing the rolling ball that the farmer described:
Hughes … set up an online survey to find out more. More than 100 people, scattered over a 600-kilometre-long strip along Australia’s east coast, reported seeing a bright fireball like the first green ball that Vernon saw, but no else saw the bouncing ball.
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Image: Wikimedia commons
November 22 2010
New “Symphony of Science” Video—Featuring a Melodious Discover Blogger!
Our favorite autotuned scientists are back at it, with the seventh video in the “Symphony of Science” series. This video focuses on scientific/skeptical thought, explains creator John Boswell:
It is intended to promote scientific reasoning and skepticism in the face of growing amounts of pseudoscientific pursuits, such as Astrology and Homeopathy, and also to promote the scientific worldview as equally enlightening as religion.
Keep your eyes peeled for DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, who makes a few appearances!
If you haven’t seen the earlier iterations, I recommend a trip over to Symphony of Science headquarters to watch some of the previous videos. You can even pick up a seven-inch vinyl of the original “A Glorious Dawn” featuring Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan.
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Video: Youtube.com/melodysheep
November 18 2010
In the Glorious Future, Could Space Travel Be Poop-Powered?
Since we’re experimenting with using human excrement to power all kinds of things on earth, from buses and cars to natural gas for our homes, why not try renewable poop power in space?
That’s the mission adopted by a team at the Florida Institute of Technology–they hope to bring the flexibility and sustainability of poop power to space. As a first step towards that goal, they’re testing the ability of a special hydrogen-creating bacteria, called Shewanella MR-1, to live aboard a UN satellite, says Fast Company:
The goal is, to put it bluntly, to see if Shewanella can convert astronaut feces into hydrogen for use in onboard fuel cells. “The bacteria generates hydrogen. If we give waste to bacteria, it converts to hydrogen that could be used in a fuel cell. We’re looking at how reliable the bacteria are,” explains Donald Platt, the Program Director for the Space Sciences and Space Systems Program at the Florida Institute of Technology.
The bacteria will be going up on the UN’s first satellite, a $5 million project by the UN’s Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that will stay in space for five years. The satellite is scheduled for launch in the first half of 2011. If the bacteria are able to successfully grow in space, this project might lead the way to recycling the astronaut waste of the future, instead of freeze drying the excrement and turning it into a shooting star.
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Image: UNESCO
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