Investigation of bio-regenerative life support and Trash-to-gas experiment on a 4 month mars simulation mission

Future crewed missions to other planets or deep space locations will require regenerative Life Support Systems (LSS) as well as recycling processes for mission waste. Constant resupply of many commodity materials will not be a sustainable option for deep space missions, nor will stowing trash on board a vehicle or at a lunar or Martian outpost. The habitable volume will decline as the volume of waste increases. A complete regenerative environmentally controlled life support system (ECLSS) on an extra-terrestrial outpost will likely include physico-chemical and biological technologies, such as bioreactors and greenhouse modules. Physico-chemical LSS do not enable food production and bio-regenerative LSS are not stable enough to be used alone in space. Mission waste that cannot be recycled into the bio-regenerative ECLSS can include excess food, food packaging, clothing, tape, urine and fecal waste. This waste will be sent to a system for converting the trash into high value products. Two crew members on a 120 day Mars analog simulation, in collaboration with Kennedy Space Center’s (KSC) Trash to Gas (TtG) project investigated a semi-closed loop system that treated non-edible biomass and other logistical waste for volume reduction and conversion into useful commodities. The purpose of this study is to show how plant growth affects the amount of resources required by the habitat and how spent plant material can be recycled. Real-time data was sent to the reactor at KSC in Florida for replicating the analog mission waste for laboratory operation. This paper discusses the 120 day mission plant growth activity, logistical and plant waste management, power and water consumption effects of the plant and logistical waste, and potential energy conversion techniques using KSC’s TtG technology

Recovery of surface reflectance spectra and evaluation of the optical depth of aerosols in the near-IR using a Monte-Carlo approach: Application to the OMEGA observations of high latitude regions of Mars

We present a model of radiative transfer through atmospheric particles based on Monte Carlo methods. This model can be used to analyze and remove the contribution of aerosols in remote sensing observations. We have developed a method to quantify the contribution of atmospheric dust in near-IR spectra of the Martian surface obtained by the OMEGA imaging spectrometer on board Mars Express. Using observations in the nadir pointing mode with significant differences in solar incidence angles, we can infer the optical depth of atmospheric dust, and we can retrieve the surface reflectance spectra free of aerosol contribution. Martian airborne dust properties are discussed and constrained from previous studies and OMEGA data. We have tested our method on a region at 90{\deg}E and 77{\deg}N extensively covered by OMEGA, where significant variations of the albedo of ice patches in the visible have been reported. The consistency between reflectance spectra of ice-covered and ice-free regions recovered at different incidence angles validates our approach. The optical depth of aerosols varies by a factor 3 in this region during the summer of Martian year 27. The observed brightening of ice patches does not result from frost deposition but from a decrease in the dust contamination of surface ice and (to a lower extent) from a decrease in the optical thickness of atmospheric dust. Our Monte Carlo-based model can be applied to recover the spectral reflectance characteristics of the surface from OMEGA spectral imaging data when the optical thickness of aerosols can be evaluated. It could prove useful for processing image cubes from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)

Detection of arcs in Saturn's F ring during the 1995 Sun ring-plane crossing

Observations of the November 1995 Sun crossing of the Saturn's ring-plane made with the 3.6m CFH telescope, using the UHAO adaptive optics system, are presented here. We report the detection of four arcs located in the vicinity of the F ring. They can be seen one day later in HST images. The combination of both data sets gives accurate determinations of their orbits. Semi-major axes range from 140020 km to 140080 km, with a mean of 140060 +- 60 km. This is about 150 km smaller than previous estimates of the F ring radius from Voyager 1 and 2 data, but close to the orbit of another arc observed at the same epoch in HST images.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, To appear in A&A, for comments : [email protected]

A homeostatic function of CXCR2 signalling in articular cartilage

Funding This work was funded by Arthritis Research UK (grants 17859, 17971, 19654), INNOCHEM EU FP6 (grant LSHB-CT-2005-51867), MRC (MR/K013076/1) and the William Harvey Research FoundationPeer reviewedPublisher PD

A Pressure-Induced Incommensurate Phase in Ammonium Hydrogen Oxalate Hemihydrate

We report evidence for the existence of a new incommensurate phase in a crystal of ammonium hydrogen oxalate hemihydrate. This phase is remarkable in two aspects: it exists only above a critical pressure Pc, and the incommensurate wave vector, which is parallel to the vector c* of the reciprocal lattice, has the largest variation ever reported, varying continuously from 0.147c* at 4.3 kbar to ~ 0.25c* at the maximum pressure (8 kbar) used to date