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New Ways To Protect Astronaut DNA Before Entering Space Radiation Environments

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Significant attention has been given to methods of shielding human space participants from radiation on missions. But what if some astronauts suffer from susceptible DNA before entering the space radiation environment? Two American scientists have proposed that certain astronaut molecular profiles may 1) reduce inherent DNA stability, 2) slow DNA repair, and 3) render DNA more susceptible to mutational events when exposed to the radiation of space.

Michael A. Schmidt, Ph.D. (Sovaris Aerospace) and Thomas J. Goodwin, Ph.D. (NASA Johnson Space Center) have identified a novel approach to space radiation countermeasures, which is based on understanding the DNA stability, DNA repair capability, and oxidative susceptibility of individual astronauts before they enter the space environment. This methodology is linked to individual genotype and micronutrient status, both of which are potentially modifiable by appropriate pre-flight and in-flight countermeasures.

For instance, common gene mutations affecting one carbon metabolism (MTHFR, MTR, MTRR) may result in the build-up of a faulty base (uracil) within the DNA backbone. This can lead to single strand DNA breaks and double strand DNA breaks, before astronauts enter space. The effect of this is amplified by folate and B12 deficiency.

Other common gene mutations (Hfe) trigger excessive iron accumulation, which creates unstable DNA through oxidative stress mechanisms, also before entering space. Magnesium is a central atom in most DNA repair enzymes. Significant serum, urine, and muscle loss of Mg has already been found in ISS astronauts on long missions, thus raising the question about whether we are already flying some astronauts with diminished capacity to repair DNA damage.

According to Schmidt, "We are examining how individual molecular influences affect DNA stability and repair before astronauts enter the elevated radiation conditions of space, and then how to manage those influences while they live in space. But we are looking well beyond DNA and into the vast network of molecular influences on astronaut physiology. We and our colleagues are using genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics to develop a platform for personalized medicine that will guide the present and future of human space flight. As the field evolves, we expect to increasingly be able to individualize countermeasures, so that each astronaut receives the protocol that is most suitable to him or her. This will be crucial for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Of equal importance, we use what we've learned from the complexity of space to translate these benefits to earth-based medicine."

Goodwin states, "In the end, it is about advancing the science and about developing solutions, which we see evolving in phases. Our goal, at minimum, includes: (1) establish the criteria for 'best evidence' that can be used to develop individualized countermeasures today; (2) establish the criteria for best evidence that prioritizes research, clinical assessment, and individualized countermeasures to be developed in the near term; and (3) establish a deliberate discovery path that seeks to develop sophisticated and more complex models for long-term deployment of personalized medicine, as the future standard of preparation and care in human space flight."

Their paper, entitled Personalized Medicine in Human Space Flight: Using Omics Based Analyses to Develop Individualized Countermeasures that Enhance Astronaut Safety and Performance, was recently published in the journal Metabolomics.

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New Ways To Protect Astronaut DNA Before Entering Space Radiation Environments

NASA/JAXA Precipitation Measurement Satellite GO for Feb. 27 Launch Watch Live on NASA TV

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Visualization of the GPM Core Observatory and Partner Satellites. GPM is slated to launch on Feb. 27 from Japan. Credit: NASA See launch animation, Shinto ceremony, Rocket roll out and more below

NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER, MARYLAND Blastoff of the powerful and revolutionary new NASA/JAXA rain and snow precipitation measurement satellite atop a Japanese rocket from a tiny offshore island launch pad is now less than 24 hours away on Thursday, Feb. 27, EST (Feb. 28 JST).

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory aimed at improving forecasts of extreme weather and climate change research has been given a green light for launch atop a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center on Tanegashima Island off southern Japan.

Roll out of the H-IIA launch vehicle from the Vehicle Assembly Building is scheduled for this evening, Feb. 26 at 11 p.m. EST.

Update: rocket rolled out. photo below

Following the Launch Readiness Review, mission managers approved the GO for liftoff.

The H-IIA rocket with GPM rolls to its launch pad in Japan! Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Japanese team members also prayed at a Shinto ceremony for blessings for a successful launch at the Ebisu Shrine, the first shrine in a traditional San-ja Mairi, or Three Shrine Pilgrimage on Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2014 see photo below.

However, the team also set a newly revised launch time of 1:37 p.m. EST (Feb. 28 at 3:37 a.m. JST).

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NASA/JAXA Precipitation Measurement Satellite GO for Feb. 27 Launch Watch Live on NASA TV

High-school teacher's space flight dream to come true

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CHIBA, Japan - High school physics teacher Takanobu Yoneya, 32, who has long dreamed of becoming an astronaut, has won a seat on a suborbital space flight in a national contest.

The contest was organised by Axe, a men's cosmetics brand owned by Unilever.

Yoneya's desire to fly in space was spurred by two key influences. The first came when he was a primary school student and was moved by the star-filled sky above his grandfather's house in Rikuzen-Takata, Iwate Prefecture. Photos of space shuttles from the United States also drove his ambition.

After joining an aviation club when he was in university, Yoneya took to the sky in gliders. He went on to study astrophysics in graduate school. Since acquiring his pilot's license for light aircraft in the United States, he has returned once every few years to fly airplanes there.

Yoneya teaches at Chiba Municipal Chiba High School, his alma mater.

A campaign website was used for the primary selection of candidates from among 1,515 contestants. Yoneya asked students who had taken his supplementary summer class during the school break last year for support, saying, "Please vote for me if you felt my class was helpful."

After passing the primary selection with about 380 votes, he made it through the second-stage screening interview and the final selection phase in the United States. He is one of 25 successful would-be space travelers selected from all over the world.

The flight will be made in the second half of next year at the earliest. The plan is to fly into outer space on a suborbital space plane at an altitude of more than 100 kilometers and to experience zero gravity for about 10 minutes.

"I'm excited to see firsthand phenomena that happen in a gravity-free state," Yoneya said.

He said that after he returns from space, he would like to tell his students, "If you hold fast to your dream, it will surely come true someday."

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High-school teacher's space flight dream to come true

NASA Time-lapse Video Shows MIRI Installation on Webb Telescope

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The four science instruments that will fly aboard NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have to be surgically installed for precision and accuracy. NASA has just released a time-lapse video showing how clean room engineers installed one of those instruments into a large component of the Webb telescope.

The Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI, arrived at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., May 28, 2012, and has undergone inspection and testing. Recently, it was integrated into Webb's science instrument payload known as the Integrated Science Instrument Module, or ISIM. The ISIM will house the Webb's four main instruments.

The 1 minute and 1 second time-lapse video covers a period of four hours. It was filmed in the largest clean room at Goddard, where all four of the Webb telescope's instruments and mirrors currently reside. Viewers of the video will see engineers in clean room suits installing the MIRI over time.

"Actual total time to install the MIRI was just over four hours," said Jason Hylan, lead mechanical systems, mechanical integration and test, and opto-mechanical engineer for the ISIM at Goddard. "The MIRI had to be positioned to a tolerance of 25 microns, or one one-thousandth of an inch, which is less than the width of a human hair."

MIRI will allow scientists to study cold and distant objects in greater detail than ever before. MIRI will observe light with wavelengths in the mid-infrared range of 5 microns to 28 microns, which are longer wavelengths than human eyes can detect and even beyond the 0.6 micron to 5 micron wavelength range of Webb's other three instruments.

MIRI's capabilities will allow it to observe older, cooler stars in very distant galaxies, unveil newly forming stars within our Milky Way, find signatures of the formation of planets around stars other than our own, and record images and spectra of planets, comets and the outermost bits of debris in our solar system.

MIRI's mid-infrared coverage will complement the near-infrared capabilities of the other instruments, including observations of the most distant objects to help determine whether or not they are among the first ones that formed in the universe.

The MIRI was developed by a consortium of 10 European institutions in partnership with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. It was assembled at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom and delivered to NASA by the European Space Agency.

The most powerful space telescope ever built, Webb is the successor to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Webb's four instruments will reveal how the universe evolved from the Big Bang to the formation of our solar system. Webb is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

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NASA Time-lapse Video Shows MIRI Installation on Webb Telescope

The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia

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Enlarge / What might have been.

Lee Hutchinson / NASA / NOAA

If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.

Astronaut Gus Grissom, 1965

It is important to note at the outset that Columbia broke up during a phase of flight that, given the current design of the Orbiter, offered no possibility of crew survival.

Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report

At 10:39 Eastern Standard Time on January 16, 2003, space shuttle Columbia lifted off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A mere 81.7 seconds later, a chunk of insulating foam tore free from the orange external tank and smashed into the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing at a relative velocity of at least 400 miles per hour (640 kph), but Columbia continued to climb toward orbit.

The foam strike was not observed live. Only after the shuttle was orbiting Earth did NASA's launch imagery review reveal that the wing had been hit. Foam strikes during launch were not uncommon events, and shuttle program managers elected not to take on-orbit images of Columbia to visually assess any potential damage. Instead, NASA's Debris Assessment Team mathematically modeled the foam strike but could not reach any definitive conclusions about the state of the shuttle's wing. The mission continued.

In reality, the impact shattered at least one of the crucial reinforced carbon-carbon heat shield panels that lined the edge of the wing, leaving a large hole in the brittle ceramic material. Sixteen days later, as Columbia re-entered the atmosphere, superheated plasma entered the orbiter's structure through the hole in the wing and the shuttle began to disintegrate.

At Mission Control in Houston, the flight controllers monitoring Columbia's descent began to notice erratic telemetry readings coming from the shuttle, and then all voice and data contact with the orbiter was lost. Controllers continued to hope that they were merely looking at instrumentation failures, even as evidence mounted that a catastrophic event had taken place. Finally, at 9:12 Eastern Time, re-entry Flight Director LeRoy Cain gave the terrible order that had only been uttered once before, 17 years earlier when Challenger broke apart at launch: "Lock the doors."

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The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia

Life in space: NASA astronaut speaks in Corvallis

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Fire, water and the threat of exploding chemicals are an astronauts biggest worries aboard the International Space Station, where NASA astronaut Christopher Cassidy spent March to September last year.

The experience was the latest in his almost a decade of space flight for NASA, and Cassidy shared some of the highlights Monday with an audience of medical personnel in a conference room at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center.

Cassidy, 45, a former Navy SEAL, was keeping a promise to his uncle, Bill Monscko of Monmouth, when he spoke in the morning to local students at Ash Creek Elementary School in Monmouth about his time in space, and also addressed the group from Samaritans Graduate Medical Education program in the afternoon.

With a witty, self-deprecating air, Cassidy, 45, said he took a roundabout route to membership in two of the nations most elite groups: He applied to the Navy SEALs program at 21, after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md.

Yes, he said, the training at the SEALs facility on Coronado Island off San Diego and at the SEALs facility in Norfolk, Va., was tough but it was the down time that was brutal.

SEAL doesnt stand so much for Sea, Air and Land as it does for Sleep, Eat and Lay around.

He applied to become an astronaut, and in May 2004 reported to NASAs facilities in Houston for rigorous training.

He flew the Space Shuttle Endeavor to the space station July 15-31 in 2009 and performed three space walks, totalling 18 hours and five minutes.

It was during a space walk, he said, that he actually got nervous.

You have a box in your hands labeled 001, and you know that if something goes wrong, the space station isnt going to work right. Never mind the whole problem of what would happen if you let go and float off into space. The main preventative strategy there, he said, is hang on.

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Life in space: NASA astronaut speaks in Corvallis

North Alabama Small Businesses Get Big Boost from SLS Adapter Program

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Posted on: 2:30 pm, February 24, 2014, by Beth Jett, updated on: 04:37am, February 25, 2014

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) This week, Marshall Space Flight Center will host its first Small Business Alliance meeting of the new year.

About 450 representatives of large and small businesses will be at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center to talk about opportunities for work coming up to support Marshall.

Already, Marshall is making a big difference for small businesses supporting the Space Launch System project.

North Alabama engineers are putting together another key piece of the Space Launch System.

Teledyne Brown Engineering secured a $60 million contract with NASA to build the Launch Vehicle Stages Adapter, which connects the Orion capsule to the core stage.

It electrically connects the two so that they can command and control back and forth, said Dan Jett, project manager for the LVSA program. Then it also protects the delicate avionics that are in the propulsion system from the severe launch environments.

As it turns out, the adapter is also protecting small businesses around north Alabama.

The project means a big boost to at least seven small companies, allowing them to expand their work force and expertise.

Were very excited about this growth opportunity for us, said Jami Peyton, a spokeswoman for Canvas Inc. Its seven new jobs, new positions for us.

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North Alabama Small Businesses Get Big Boost from SLS Adapter Program

Are We Alone in the Universe? The Rise and Decline of U.S. Space Exploration – NASA (1989) – Video

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Are We Alone in the Universe? The Rise and Decline of U.S. Space Exploration - NASA (1989)
The dream of stepping into the outer reaches of the Earth #39;s atmosphere was driven by the fiction of Jules Verne and H.G.Wells, and rocket technology was deve...

By: The Film Archives

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Are We Alone in the Universe? The Rise and Decline of U.S. Space Exploration - NASA (1989) - Video

Explosions on Venus engulf entire planet

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A common space weather phenomenon on the outskirts of Earth's magnetic bubble has larger -- much larger -- repercussions for Venus, NASA scientists say.

Giant explosions called hot flow anomalies in the solar wind can be so large when they encounter Venus they're bigger than the entire planet can happen multiple times a day, they said.

"Not only are they gigantic," Glyn Collinson, a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said, "but as Venus doesn't have a magnetic field to protect itself, the hot flow anomalies happen right on top of the planet. They could swallow the planet whole."

Collinson is the lead author of a paper based on observations from the European Space Agency's Venus Express, showing just how large and how frequent this kind of space weather is at Venus.

Earth is protected from the constant streaming solar wind of radiation by its magnetic bubble -- the magnetosphere -- while Venus, a barren, inhospitable planet with an atmosphere so dense spacecraft landing there are crushed within hours, Venus has no such magnetic protection.

At Earth, hot flow anomalies do not make it inside the magnetosphere, whereas on Venus they can create dramatic planet-scale disruptions, possibly sucking the planet's upper atmosphere up and away from the surface, the scientists said.

That suggests Earth without its magnetic field might be as barren and lifeless as Venus, they said.

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Explosions on Venus engulf entire planet

Branson says space flight ready this year

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AP Sir Richard Branson says the inaugural Virgin Galactic flight into space will take place this year.

UK businessman Sir Richard Branson has reiterated his claim that the first Virgin Galactic flight into space will take place later this year.

The launch date for the much-delayed project has been put back repeatedly from the original 2007 forecast, but the Virgin entrepreneur has confirmed he will fly with his children on the inaugural flight later in 2014.

Celebrities including Hollywood actors Tom Hanks and Angelina Jolie have apparently reserved spaces to become space tourists, with tickets costing six figures and including brief periods of weightlessness during the two-hour trip to 100km above the Earth.

Branson says in an interview with the Guardian that the first unmanned test flight will take place soon.

The inaugural flight - due later this year - will be televised live by American broadcaster NBC.

"Without a doubt, Sir Richard and his children taking the first commercial flight into space will go down in history as one of the most memorable events on television," NBC said in a statement to the newspaper.

Last month Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo made its third rocket-powered supersonic flight in the Mojave Desert, soaring to a record 21,600 metres.

The company says the reusable space vehicle was carried by aeroplane to 14,000 metres the day before, and then released.

The craft used its rocket motor the rest of the way to reach its highest altitude to date. SpaceShipTwo and its two-member crew then glided to a safe landing in the desert north of Los Angeles.

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Branson says space flight ready this year


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