Design of a Green Monopropellant Propulsion System for the Lunar Flashlight CubeSat Mission

Lunar Flashlight is a 6U CubeSat mission from NASA\u27s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that will search for water-ice deposits near the lunar south pole. Lunar Flashlight aims to add to the flight experience of deep-space CubeSats by demonstrating an orbit insertion using a green monopropellant propulsion system designed uniquely for this mission. Developed by NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center (MSFC) and Georgia Tech\u27s Space Systems Design Laboratory (SSDL), the Lunar Flashlight Propulsion System (LFPS) delivers over 2500N-s of total impulse for the orbit insertion and necessary attitude maneuvers. The custom propulsion system fits within a 2.5U volume and has a total wet mass of less than six kilograms. It will be fueled byAF-M315E, which is a green monopropellant developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) as a safer alternative to hydrazine. Additive manufacturing is utilized to fabricate several components of its primary structure. Upon completion, Lunar Flashlight may become the first CubeSat to achieve orbit around a celestial body besides Earth. The LFPS aims to be a pathfinder device for CubeSat missions by demonstrating how monopropellant systems, green monopropellant fuel, and additive manufacturing can be utilized to expand the reach of small satellite space exploration

The molecular and cellular origin of human prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed male malignancy. Despite compelling epidemiology, there are no definitive aetiological clues linking development to frequency. Pre-malignancies such as proliferative inflammatory atrophy (PIA) and prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN) yield insights into the initiating events of prostate cancer, as they supply a background "field" for further transformation. An inflammatory aetiology, linked to recurrent prostatitis, and heterologous signalling from reactive stroma and infiltrating immune cells may result in cytokine addiction of cancer cells, including a tumour-initiating population also known as cancer stem cells (CSCs). In prostate tumours, the background mutational rate is rarely exceeded, but genetic change via profound sporadic chromosomal rearrangements results in copy number variations and aberrant gene expression. In cancer, dysfunctional differentiation is imposed upon the normal epithelial lineage, with disruption/disappearance of the basement membrane, loss of the contiguous basal cell layer and expansion of the luminal population. An initiating role for androgen receptor (AR) is attractive, due to the luminal phenotype of the tumours, but alternatively a pool of CSCs, which express little or no AR, has also been demonstrated. Indolent and aggressive tumours may also arise from different stem or progenitor cells. Castrate resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) remains the inevitable final stage of disease following treatment. Time-limited effectiveness of second-generation anti-androgens, and the appearance of an AR-neuroendocrine phenotype imply that metastatic disease is reliant upon the plasticity of the CSC population, and indeed CSC gene expression profiles are most closely related to those identified in CRPCs