What is the Benefits of ISS Research - A interview Video

Earth framing the International Space Station

Earth framing the International Space Station in May 2010 following undocking of Atlantis during the STS-132 mission. (NASA)

Almost as soon as the International Space Station was habitable, researchers began using it to study the impact of microgravity and other space effects on several aspects of our daily lives. This unique scientific platform continues to enable researchers from all over the world to put their talents to work on innovative experiments that could not be done anywhere else. 

Although each space station partner has distinct agency goals for station research, each partner shares a unified goal to extend the resulting knowledge for the betterment of humanity. We may not know yet what will be the most important discovery gained from the space station, but we already have some amazing breakthroughs! In the areas of human health, telemedicine, education and observations of Earth from space, there are already demonstrated benefits to human life. Vaccine development research, station-generated images that assist with disaster relief and farming, and education programs that inspire future scientists, engineers and space explorers are just some examples of research benefits. 

The stories featured here summarize the scientific, technological and educational accomplishments of research on the space station that has and will continue to have an impact on life on Earth.

The benefits outlined here serve as examples of the space station's potential as a groundbreaking scientific research facility. Through advancing the state of scientific knowledge of our planet, looking after our health, and providing a space platform that inspires and educates the science and technology leaders of tomorrow, these benefits will drive the legacy of the space station as its research strengthens economies and enhances the quality of life here on Earth for all people.

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Source: Nasa

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A Long dry spell doomed Mexican city 1,000 years ago

Ruins of the city of Cantona in the Mexican state of Puebla, with the mountain Cerro Pizarro in the background. The city was abandoned almost 1,000 years ago, probably as a result of a prolonged dry spell. (Ines Urdaneta image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

A UC Berkeley study sheds new light on this question, providing evidence that a prolonged period of below-average rainfall was partly responsible for the abandonment of one such city, Cantona, between A.D. 900 and A.D. 1050.

At its peak, Cantona, located in a dry, volcanic basin (La Cuenca Oriental) east of today’s Mexico City, was one of the largest cities in the New World, with 90,000 inhabitants. The area was a major source of obsidian, and the city may have played a military role alongside an important trade route from the Veracruz coast into the highlands.

To assess the climate in that area before and after Cantona’s collapse, UC Berkeley geographers analyzed sediment cores from a lake located 20 miles south of the former city. They found evidence of a 650-year period of frequent droughts that extended from around A.D. 500 to about A.D. 1150. This was part of a long-term drying trend in highland Mexico that started 2,200 years ago, around 200 B.C. The climate became wetter again in about A.D. 1300, just prior to the rise of the Aztec empire.

“The decline of Cantona occurred during this dry interval, and we conclude that climate change probably played a role, at least towards the end of the city’s existence,” said lead author Tripti Bhattacharya, a UC Berkeley graduate student.

Surprisingly, the population of Cantona increased during the early part of the dry period, perhaps because of political upheaval elsewhere that increased the importance of the heavily fortified city, she said. Teotihuacan, less than 100 miles to the west, was in decline at the time, also possibly because of more frequent droughts. 

Lake Aljojuca, Mexico
The maar lake Aljojuca, 20 miles south of Cantona, yielded sediments that recorded a lengthy series of droughts between A.D. 500 and 1150. (Tripti Bhattacharya photo)

“In a sense the area became important because of the increased frequency of drought,” said UC Berkeley associate professor of geography Roger Byrne. “But when the droughts continued on such a scale, the subsistence base for the whole area changed and people just had to leave. The city was abandoned.”

Bhattacharya, Byrne and their colleagues report their findings in an article appearing this week in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The UC Berkeley researchers analyzed lake cores provided by scientists at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Juriquilla, Querétaro, Mexico and the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany.

Political upheaval and climate change

Byrne emphasized that the area’s typical monsoon weather with wet summers and dry winters did not stop, but was interrupted by frequent short-term droughts, no doubt affecting crops and water supplies. Today the area is close to the northern limit of maize production without irrigation, and would have been particularly vulnerable to drier conditions, he said.

Byrne, a member of the Berkeley Initiative on Global Change Biology (BiGCB) and curator of fossil pollen in the Museum of Paleontology, has studied sediment cores from many lakes in Mexico and California, and is particularly interested in possible links between climate change and human activities.

Nearly 20 years ago, he learned of Cantona and traveled with students to the areas three times to obtain cores from lakes near the site, most of which are maar lakes created by magma explosions. They are deep and often contain undisturbed and regularly layered sediments ideal for chronological studies.

Tripti Bhattacharya
Tripti Bhattacharya analyzed carbonates in lake sediments to explore the climate history of the Cuenca Oriental east of Mexico City. (Ellie Broadman photo)

German colleagues cored this particular lake, Aljojuca, in 2007, and Bhattacharya traveled to Potsdam to collect sediment samples. Oxygen isotope ratios in carbonate sediments are correlated with the ratio of precipitation to evaporation and thus indicate aridity. Organic material in the sediments was used for accelerator mass spectroscopy carbon-14 dating.

“We can show that both the growth and decline of the site took place during a time period of frequent drought, which forces us to think in more nuanced ways about how political and social factors interact with environmental factors to cause social and cultural change,” Bhattacharya said. “That makes the study particularly interesting.”

Bhattacharya noted that more studies are necessary to reconstruct the prehistoric climate of highland Mexico. Such studies could reveal the causes of prehistoric climatic change and whether they were similar to the factors that regulate the region’s climate today, such as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation.

Co-authors include Harald Böhnel and Kurt Wogau of UNAM, Juriquilla; Ulrike Kienel of the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam; B. Lynn Ingram of UC Berkeley; and Susan Zimmerman of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Source: UC Berkeley

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Facebook of the Planet Science

David Kramer, MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor in Photosynthesis and Bioenergetics, has created the Facebook of plant science. Courtesy of MSU

By building PhotosynQ – a handheld device with sensors and an online data-sharing and analysis platform – a team of Michigan State University researchers is creating the plant-science equivalent of Facebook.

Following the trail blazed by successful social media networks, the team is giving away patentable devices at a nominal fee, building an active global community of plant science enthusiasts and sharing all data collected from around the world.

The goal is to allow even citizen scientists to make research-quality measurements, said David Kramer, MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor in Photosynthesis and Bioenergetics.

“We’ve built a platform that everyone can access through their cell phones,” he said. “We want to create a community that sees a 12-year-old student in China ask a question about a drought-resistant plant. Then we hope that hundreds of people answer, and not only the student in China is able to grow sustainable crops, but also a farmer in Africa could benefit from those insights.”

One component of PhotosynQ is a handheld device that costs about $100, scans plants and collects a handful of key data points. Via a smartphone running Android, the data is transferred from the device to the researcher’s project page on the PhotosynQ platform.

Currently, there are about 20 research projects on the burgeoning network. As new data is collected, community members can observe the projects’ progression.

Projects range from one measuring the robustness and productivity of beans, to another monitoring the efficiency of photosynthesis. Collecting data on how well plants convert sunlight to energy can be derived from satellite images in a very limited way. To improve the data, it’s best to get on-the-ground observations as well. The more handheld devices used in the field to gather the data, the better.

PhotosynQ will enable local scientists, plant breeders and citizens to improve the productivity and security of crops in communities around the world. This low-cost approach of collecting samples from global sites could change how science has traditionally been conducted, said Greg Austic, who is leading the development in the Kramer lab.

“It’s critical that PhotosynQ stays open source,” he said. “We’re changing the model of moving new technology from academia to the world. We’re maximizing the data and building a community rather than maximizing profits.”

If only two people use the network, it’s worthless. If 2 million people join in, it’s priceless. It will be a snapshot of what’s happening in the plant world at this very moment. Successful breeding efforts, rapidly spreading diseases and other trends can be identified quicker, he added.

This nontraditional approach is indicative of Kramer’s unique lab. Soldering irons and circuit boards outnumber plants and petri dishes. Shelves are lined with electronic prototypes. The buzzing hive of nearly 40 students is a blend of biologists, programmers and engineers.

“Many times one of our biology students will come up with an idea and bounces it off some of the other students,” Kramer said. “The computer specialists write a program, and the electronics students build a prototype and a new technique is developed and used – sometimes in a single day.”

His lab is a microcosm of what he hopes he can create on a global scale; empower people with data and easy-to-use scientific instruments, and people will look at their world differently, he said.

Kramer is a professor in the College of Natural Science and the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory. His research is funded in part by MSU AgBioResearch.

Source: MSU

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Scientist to Gather Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Melting Permafrost

Goddard scientist Emily Wilson poses here with an early version or prototype of her recently miniaturized laser heterodyne radiometer — an instrument for which she received a patent in 2014. Image Credit: NASA

A NASA scientist who has developed a novel suitcase-size instrument to measure column carbon dioxide and methane is taking her recently patented instrument on the road this summer to comprehensively measure emissions of these important greenhouse gases from Alaska’s melting permafrost. 

Emily Wilson, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will use her recently patented miniaturized laser heterodyne radiometer (mini-LHR) to carry out a multi-disciplinary field campaign at three sites — each representing a different type of permafrost — near Fairbanks, Alaska, in June. Her team has designed a unique and comprehensive experiment that records permafrost depth and structure, meteorological data, and concentrations of methane and carbon dioxide during the seasonal ground melt.

Multi-Disciplinary Approach

“With the global mean temperature rising, the release of these gases could create an amplified effect,” she said. “These data will allow us to estimate fluctuation of emissions from the melting permafrost.”

Permafrost is permanently frozen soil. Comprising 24 percent of the Northern Hemisphere, permafrost contains old organic carbon deposits — some relicts from the last glaciation — that are locked up beneath the surface. Scientists have observed that more of the permafrost’s upper layer, or the active layer, is melting each summer, creating concern that the thawing could lead to the significant greenhouse-gas emissions.

Further exacerbating the situation is the fact that while methane doesn’t linger as long as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it is more potent and effective at absorbing heat, creating a positive feedback, where emissions leads to more warming, which in turn accelerates the thaw.

Highly portable, the mini-LDR is ideal for permafrost studies, Wilson said. Made up of commercially available components, the instrument literally can go anywhere to measure carbon dioxide and methane in the atmospheric column — that is, the levels of these gases in a vertical column extending from the ground to space. Currently, the only ground-based network that measures these two greenhouse gases in the atmospheric column is the Total Carbon Column Observing Network. However, the network has 22 operational sites globally, with limited coverage in the Arctic.

“We’re targeting areas where there is limited coverage,” she said.

To prepare for the campaign, Wilson made her instrument more rugged and more sensitive. She added a satellite communications port to remotely retrieve data, a thermally controlled instrument housing to protect the instrument from changing temperatures, and a solar grid and battery storage system for powering the instrument in remote locations.

Source: Nasa

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