My Science School

An ellipse is a geometric shape that results from viewing a circular shape in perspective, or from a different vantage point.  In simple terms, an ellipse is an oval.  Depending on the vantage point of the viewer, an ellipse results from the distortion of an object that is circular in shape.

As a geometric element, an ellipse has many definitions. As artists, we need not get too concerned with the mathematic elements of an ellipse.  We simply need to know how to draw one accurately. 

First we'll look how an ellipse works.  As mentioned before, an ellipse is the result of viewing a circular object from any vantage point other than "straight on".  Since there are many objects that are circular in shape, ellipses will be used quite frequently in our drawings and paintings.

Any circular shape can cause issues for an artist. It can be difficult at times to create smooth curvatures that are evenly balanced. For this reason, we can use a few methodologies to help us draw ellipses to a higher degree of accuracy.

To draw a perfect oval or ellipse, stick two pins through a paper covered board. Join them with a thread that is longer than the distance between the pins. Put a pencil in the thread, keep it tight and draw an ellipse.

Credit : The Virtual Instructor 

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A science about the movement, distances and sizes of the Sun, Moon, stars, planets, meteors, constellations and comets within our and other solar systems.

Thousands of years ago some groups of stars were given names because their shape was similar to a bear, a dog, a lion or perhaps a plough!

Astronomers aren’t stargazers. Or, at least, there’s no longer any need for them to be. If you think an astronomer treks up mountains to spend night after night behind the eyepiece of a giant telescope, think again. These days telescopes can be controlled remotely, so it’s common for modern astronomers to simply make requests for observations and then download computer-generated data and images the next morning for their analysis. That includes space telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope.

People very often confuse astronomy with astrology. Every professional astronomer has had to hear someone say to them, "so you’re an astrologer, right?" Astrology and astronomy are not the same thing, but they used to be. Observational astronomy can be traced back to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia as far back as 3,000 B.C., but the calculating of solar eclipses, the movements of the planets and theories about how the night sky works was the job of ancient astrologers who presumed that celestial events and alignments had a direct impact on human affairs. 

Modern astrologers attempt to do something similar, making predictions about human lives based on pseudoscience. Astrology is not a science. 

Credit : Space 

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Lapland is a region mainly inside the Arctic circle. It stretches across the north of Norway, Sweden and Finland.

This is the land of the Midnight Sun, which shines continually for 24 hours a day, for 73 days from mid-May to the end of July.

Lapland is a region of great topographical variety. To the west it embraces the northern part of the Kolen Mountains, which reach elevations of more than 6,500 feet (2,000 metres). On its Norwegian (western) side this range slopes abruptly and is deeply eroded into fjords and headlands and fractured into archipelagoes. The eastern flank of the range, which is situated in Swedish Lapland (see Lappland), slopes more gradually into a broad piedmont studded with large, fingerlike lakes that feed the rivers flowing into the Gulf of Bothnia. Farther to the east, Finnish Lapland (Lappi) is a relatively low-lying region with many bogs and small lakes.

Norwegian Lapland is largely open and windswept, with timber growth only in sheltered tracts and the more protected interior. Southern and central Lapland occupies the zone of the taiga, or swampy coniferous forest, with its saturated land and many bogs and swamps. Forests of pine and spruce give way to the dwarf birch, heath, and lichens of the tundra farther north and at higher elevations.

Many of the Sami have adopted a sedentary life and intermarried with Scandinavians and Finns. The region is still home to several hundred thousand reindeer, but the traditional reindeer country has been intruded upon by permanent farming, forestry, mining, and hydroelectric and even industrial enterprises. Those who practice reindeer herding have liberty of movement across the open boundaries of Finland, Norway, and Sweden.

Credit :  Britannica 

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The first all-civilian space mission was launched on September 15, 2021, from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. Florida. The Inspiration4 mission ventured deeper into space than the International Space Station. It was the first mission to orbit Earth without a professional astronaut aboard. The four-member crew was sent on a three-day mission to orbit Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. It is seen as part of an effort to open up space travel to non-professionals.

Aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule dubbed Resilience, Isaacman — a self-described space geek who has accrued more than 6,000 hours piloting various aircraft — was the commander of the flight. Joining him were physician assistant Hayley Arcenaux, data engineer Chris Sembroski, and geoscientist and science communication specialist Sian Proctor. 

Resilience and its four occupants circled Earth for three days, splashing down off the Florida coast on Sept. 18. The primary purposes of Inspiration4, according to the mission's official website, were to raise awareness and funds for St. Jude and to begin "a new era for human spaceflight and exploration."

Inspiration4 was chartered by Jared Isaacman, billionaire CEO and founder of Shift4 Payments, a payment processing company that he established as a 16-year-old and which now handles billions of transactions each year. 

Credit : Space.com

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The UAE has selected two new Emiratis to be part of its astronaut corps, including the Arab world’s first female astronaut.

The 4,305 applicants were chosen based on age and educational background. A total of 2,099 candidates then passed the IQ, personality and technical assessments.

Only 122 made it to the interview round. Of these, 61 candidates took part in preliminary and advanced medical examinations.

Fourteen passed a final round of interviews and evaluations, which the UAE's first two astronauts and two female Nasa astronauts participated in.

Four candidates passed fitness, communications and teamwork tests, from whom the new astronauts were selected.

Salem Al Marri, head of the astronaut programme at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (Mbrsc), said the space centre's goal was pick the best out of the lot.

"The team at Mbrsc has worked tirelessly after receiving applications to evaluate them according to specific criteria and standards, and then conducted successive evaluations to ensure the selection of the best candidates, until we reached this point to announce the new astronauts," he said.

Credit : The National News

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Blue Origin is a private spaceflight company based in Kent, Washington that is working to send tourists to space on its reusable suborbital rocket called New Shepard. The company was created in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com. 

In 2015, Blue Origin made history by successfully launching and landing a reusable rocket for the first time. The company is currently developing a lunar lander called Blue Moon that will make robotic cargo deliveries to the lunar surface, and it is partnering with SpaceX and Dynetics to develop a human-rated moon lander that will carry astronauts to the lunar surface in 2024 under NASA's Artemis Program.

Initially focused on suborbital spaceflight, the company has designed, built and flown multiple testbeds of its New Shepard vehicle at its facilities in Culberson County, Texas. Developmental test flights of the New Shepard, named after the first American in space Alan Shepard, began in April 2015, and flight testing is ongoing. Blue Origin has moved the date for first passengers back several times, with one recent planned timeframe being 2019 as of September 2018. In the event, it has not yet begun commercial passenger flights, nor announced a firm date for when they would begin. On nearly every one of the test flights since 2015, the uncrewed vehicle has reached a test altitude of more than 100 kilometers and achieved a top speed of more than Mach 3 (3,675 km/h), reaching space above the Karman line, with both the space capsule and its rocket booster successfully soft landing.

Blue Origin moved into the orbital spaceflight technology business in 2014, initially as a rocket engine supplier for others via a contractual agreement to build a new large rocket engine, the BE-4, for major US launch system operator United Launch Alliance (ULA). By 2015, Blue Origin had announced plans to also manufacture and fly its own orbital launch vehicle, known as the New Glenn, from the Florida Space Coast. BE-4 had been expected to complete engine qualification testing by late 2018, but the test program continued into 2019.

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Titan is the largest moon of Saturn, the seventh planet outward from our sun. It’s the only moon in our solar system known to have a thick atmosphere, and it’s the only known body in space, besides Earth, known to have stable bodies of surface liquid. Titan has a kind of hydrological cycle, much like Earth’s, with liquids falling from the sky and flowing across this moon’s surface before evaporating back into clouds. Some of the weather phenomena we’d be familiar with on Titan include dust storms and monsoonal rains. Earth’s atmosphere is 78% nitrogen; Titan’s is 98% nitrogen. Titan’s climate is driven by seasonal change. So you can see that, in some ways, the closest comparison to Titan’s atmosphere is the one we know best: Earth’s.

But there are also many differences between Earth and this distant Saturnian moon, showing how alien and strange it would be to experience the weather on Titan.

Titan is 10 times farther from the sun than Earth and receives 100 times less solar energy. It orbits roughly in the plane of Saturn’s equator, and its tilt relative to the plane of our solar system is about the same as Saturn’s. As on Earth, Saturn’s seasons – and Titan’s – are caused by their tilts, which cause the sun to strike the different hemispheres of these worlds more strongly or more weakly throughout Saturn’s year. Saturn takes 29 years to orbit the sun once; its year is 29 Earth-years long. Thus both Saturn and Titan have seasons lasting more than 7 Earth-years.

And so any given spot on Titan experiences a change in weather at a much slower pace than on Earth.

An equinox on Titan – when both hemispheres of this moon are receiving the sun’s rays about equally – occurs about every 15 years. The last Titan equinox was in 2009. We now know – thanks to the Cassini mission to Saturn, which arrived in 2004 and lasted until 2017 – that powerful wind storms roved across Titan around the time of its 2008 equinox, producing soot that fell like rain and creating dunes on Titan’s surface.

In general, it’s now thought that Titan’s winds flow in a pole-to-pole circulation for some 12 Earth years before taking a few years to transition to the opposite direction as winter changes to summer.

Credit : EarthSky 

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In a key milestone for NASA’s plan to return humans to the moon, the space agency today announced that SpaceX will build the vehicle that will land astronauts on the lunar surface. The current plan, known as Artemis, calls for astronauts to launch on NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, fly to lunar orbit on the space agency’s Orion space capsule, and then transfer to SpaceX’s Starship rocket to make the final descent to the surface.

The contract, worth $2.9 billion, will go toward developing a moon-ready version of the Starship rocket. The futuristic-looking vehicle is still in the prototype stage, with testing ongoing at a Texas facility. SpaceX beat out proposals from Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin—which has been working with defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper—and Dynetics, a defense contractor based in Huntsville, Alabama.

Announced in 2017 under the Trump administration and named in 2019, the Artemis program aims to return U.S. astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, including landing the first woman and the first person of color on the moon.

The Biden administration has voiced support for the program, as well. But while Trump’s team pushed for a crewed mission to the moon’s surface in 2024, Congress has not provided the amount of funding for the program that NASA says would be needed for that time table. Due to a smaller budget than requested, and delays during the development of the SLS rocket and other parts of the program, NASA is reevaluating the soonest date that it could launch people on a lunar mission.

The Artemis I mission, which will launch no sooner than late 2021, will be an uncrewed test flight of Orion and SLS. Artemis II will follow, using SLS and Orion to fly a crew around the moon and back but not land, similar to 1968’s Apollo 8 mission. Then Artemis III will use SLS, Orion, and SpaceX’s Starship to complete the journey to the moon’s surface.

To fly the quarter-million miles to the moon, astronauts will travel on NASA’s SLS heavy-lift rocket and Orion deep-space spacecraft. The plan then calls for Orion to dock with a Human Landing System (HLS)—which is what NASA selected SpaceX’s Starship for. This spacecraft will wait in lunar orbit up to a hundred days before the astronauts arrive and then land them on the surface. To return to Earth, the crew will launch off the moon on Starship, transfer back to the waiting Orion spacecraft, and fly home.

Credit : National Geographic 

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Did you know astronauts on the International Space Station while orbiting Earth witness many more sunsets and sunrises each day than what we people on the planet do? As the ISS circles the Earth every 90 minutes, astronauts witness 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every 24 hours.

The massive ISS is a partnership of 15 countries and is made by conjoining several different parts over the last two decades. As per the data given by NASA, the ISS measures 109 metres long and 75 metres wide, similar to the length of an American football field. Besides, it weighs 420 tonnes and travels around the Earth at extreme speed. The ISS orbits the earth at a speed of over twenty-seven thousand kilometres per hour and thus completes a full revolution in just 90 minutes. Breaking down the data, the station makes 16 orbits of Earth and thus, travels through 16 sunrises and sunsets in just 24 hours.

The news about this exciting event made the headlines yet again after NASA's official Twitter handle made the revelation during an interactive session after astronauts Akihiko Hoshide and Thomas Pesquet completed their spacewalk, reported The Atlantic. Several astronauts including Scott Kelly and Victor Glover have kept their spirits high by posting images of sunrise and sunset from their space module. 

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Since time immemorial, humans have looked at the skies for clues about their history. The Lucy probe, launched recently by NASA, too, like many other missions in the past, seeks to understand the origin of the solar system, the universe and our place within them. And it is focussing its exploration at a place where previous space missions have not been to-the trojan asteroids. What are they? How will the Lucy probe travel to these far-off territories?

What is the Lucy mission all about?

The Lucy mission was launched by the U.S. space agency NASA on October 16. It is the first spacecraft launched to explore the trojan asteroids, a population of primitive asteroids orbiting in tandem with Jupiter. The spacecraft will fly-by a total of eight different asteroids including a main belt asteroid and seven trojan asteroids. With the help of a suite of scientific instruments, Lucy will study the geology, composition, density and structure of each of its targets. The NASA is especially interested in finding primordial organic material on trojan asteroids because billions of years ago. this material may have seeded Earth with the chemical ingredients necessary for life thanks to asteroid impacts. Because asteroids, including trojan asteroids, are remnants from the birth of the Solar System, scientists believe the Lucy mission can uncover details of the early universe. The asteroid probe could also help scientists learn how our planets ended up in their current spots.

During its 12-year mission, Lucy will rely on two giant fan-like solar arrays, which will carry it farther from the sun than any solar-powered spacecraft has ever flown before. The solar panels will provide about 500 watts of power when the spacecraft is flying past the trojan asteroids. But Lucy also has fuel to help it execute some skilled manoeuvres on the way to the asteroids.

By the way, does the name Lucy' ring a bell? Well, Lucy was the nickname of a famous human fossil from Africa, which taught us much about where our species came from. Likewise, the Lucy mission will revolutionise our knowledge of planetary origins and the formation of the solar system, says the NASA.

What is an asteroid?

Asteroids are space rocks that orbit the sun. They are too small to be called planets and hence are called minor planets. The solar system was born about 4.6 billion years ago, when a big cloud of gas and dust collapsed. When this happened, most of the material fell to the centre of the cloud and formed the sun. Asteroids are rocky leftovers from the formation of the solar system. They were formed from small pieces of rock and metal. Asteroids come in different shapes and sizes. They can be irregularly-shaped or near-spherical. They are often filled, with craters. The size could be as large as 530 km in diameter or as small as pebbles. The mass of all the asteroids combined is less than that of Earth's moon, according to NASA. More than 150 asteroids are known to have a moon or two.

Where are the asteroids found?

Most of the asteroids are found orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, which is the main asteroid belt.

The asteroids that orbit close to our planet are Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA). Over 20,000 near-earth asteroids are known to exist.

What are trojan asteroids?

• The Jupiter trojans, commonly called trojan asteroids, are a large swarm of asteroids that share the planet Jupiters orbit around the Sun. They do so in two loose groups - one group leads ahead of Jupiter in its path, the other trails behind.
• The term "Trojan Asteroid" specifically refers to the asteroids co-orbital with Jupiter, but the general term "trojan" is sometimes more generally applied to other small Solar System bodies with similar relationships to larger bodies: for example, there are both Mars trojans and Neptune trojans. Earth too has one trojan sharing orbit with it.
• Jupiter trojans are theorised to have formed in the same part of the Solar System as Jupiter and entered their orbits while it was forming.
• There are about 7,000 trojan asteroids, Even though they share an orbit with Jupiter, the asteroids are very distant from the planet itself- almost as far away as Jupiter is from the sun, according to the NASA.

How will the trajectory be for Lucy?

Over the course of its mission, Lucy will swing by Earth twice for gravity assists that can slingshot it on the right path. Lucy will reach its first target: a small asteroid, called Asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter in 2025. The spacecraft will test its sensors here, before its main mission: flying by seven different trojan asteroids, ranging in size from a tiny moon to a large binary asteroid.

The probe is likely to visit the trojan asteroids in the following order and dates:

• Eurybates and Queta (moon) - August 2027
• Polymele - September 2027
• Leucus - April 2028
• Orus- November 2028
• Patroclus and Menoetius - March 2033

Once this mission ends, the team plans to propose an extended mission to explore more trojans. According to the NASA the trajectory can allow the probe to take further loops as long as the spacecraft is healthy.

What is special about the choice of these trojan asteroids?

Lucy will offer the first close-up view of all three major types of asteroids - the so-called C-, P- and D-types. The P and D-type trojans resemble the asteroids found in the Kuiper Belt that extends beyond the orbit of Neptune. The C-types are found mostly in the outer parts of the main belt of asteroids. All of the trojans are thought to be abundant in dark carbon compounds. Scientists believe that they are probably rich in water and other volatile substances.

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The most powerful auroras in the Solar System occur in the atmosphere over Jupiter's poles. Here, the planet's strong magnetic field accelerates charged particles to energies of 400 kiloelectron volts (keV), which is between 10 and 30 times more powerful than the highest auroral electric potentials observed on Earth.

These measurements of Jupiter's aurora were made in 2017 by the Juno spacecraft's Jupiter Energetic Particle Detector Instrument (or JEDI). Curiously, the measurements revealed that the strongest peaks of electric potential were not closely correlated with peaks in auroral activity, as they are on Earth. The mechanisms behind the variation in Jupiter's aurora is still unknown.

Earth's auroras are caused by interactions between the planet's magnetic field and the constant bombardment of charged particles (free electrons and protons) known as the solar wind. The Earth's magnetosphere deflects most of this barrage, but particles of the solar wind entering the Earth’s magnetic field at the poles are channelled by the magnetic field in to the Thermosphere region of the atmosphere, where they collide and interact with gas molecules.

These interactions cause molecules of gas to become "excited", or made unstable by an injection of additional energy. As they return to a stable state, they emit energy in the form of light. This is the same process as takes place inside a neon sign (where electricity takes the place of solar wind). As with neon signs, different elements produce different wavelengths of light (colours) – oxygen generally gives off green light, while excited nitrogen glows blue or red.

Jupiter's magnetosphere is so large and powerful that all solar wind is deflected long before it can interact with the planet's atmosphere, about 3 million kilometres (1.86 million miles) away. As a result, most of the charged particles that feed Jupiter's aurora must come from inside the planet's protective bubble. The most likely origin for the particles is the inner moon Io, famous for its constant, violent volcanic eruptions, which are powerful enough to launch highly energized material out into orbit around Jupiter. This material is then accelerated by the currents of Jupiter's magnetic field as it is pulled down towards the planet's poles. The process is effectively a colossal, naturally occurring particle accelerator, akin to the magnetic confinement systems in human-made equipment such as the Large Hadron Collider.

Credit : Guinness World Records

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Enceladus, second nearest of the major regular moons of Saturn and the brightest of all its moons. It was discovered in 1789 by the English astronomer William Herschel and named for one of the Giants (Gigantes) of Greek mythology.

Enceladus measures about 500 km (310 miles) in diameter and orbits Saturn in a prograde, nearly circular path at a mean distance of 238,020 km (147,899 miles). Its average density is only 60 percent greater than that of water, which indicates that its interior contains appreciable amounts of non-ice material. Its surface, which reflects essentially all of the light that strikes it (compared with about 7 percent for Earth’s Moon), is basically smooth but includes cratered and grooved plains. The surface is almost pure water ice, with trace amounts of carbon dioxide, ammonia, and light hydrocarbons.

Enceladus’s current activity is responsible for Saturn’s E ring, a tenuous ring of micrometre-sized particles of water ice condensed from vapour ejected by the geysers. The particles are densest near Enceladus’s orbit and are analogous to the cloud of orbiting particles ejected from Jupiter’s volcanically active moon Io. The E ring, however, appears to be much more extensive, reaching out to the orbit of Rhea and perhaps beyond. The orbital lifetimes of the E ring particles are very short, perhaps only 10,000 years, but they are resupplied continually by cryovolcanic eruptions. The E ring coats Enceladus and the other major inner moons of Saturn to give them a bright appearance.

Credit : Britannica 

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Space adaptation syndrome or space sickness is a kind of motion sickness that can occur when one's surroundings visually appear to be in motion, but without a corresponding sense of bodily motion. This incongruous condition can occur during space travel when changes in g-forces compromise one's spatial orientation. According to Science Daily, "Gravity plays a major role in our spatial orientation. Changes in gravitational forces, such as the transition to weightlessness during a space voyage, influence our spatial orientation and require adaptation by many of the physiological processes in which our balance system plays a part. As long as this adaptation is incomplete, this can be coupled to nausea, visual illusions, and disorientation." Sleep deprivation can also increase susceptibility to space sickness, making symptoms worse and longer-lasting.

According to the sensory conflict hypothesis, space sickness is the opposite of the kinds of motion-related disorientation that occur in the presence of gravity, known as terrestrial motion sickness, such as becoming carsick, seasick, or airsick. In such cases, and in contrast to space sickness, one's surroundings seem visually immobile (such as inside a car or airplane or a cabin below decks) while one's body feels itself to be in motion. Contemporary motion sickness medications can counter various forms of motion disorientation including space sickness by temporarily suppressing the vestibular system, but are rarely used for space travel because it is considered better to allow space travelers to adapt naturally over the first one to seven days rather than to suffer the drowsiness and other side effects of medication taken over a longer period. However, transdermal dimenhydrinate anti-nausea patches are typically used whenever space suits are worn because vomiting into a space suit could be fatal by obscuring vision or blocking airflow. Space suits are generally worn during launch and landing by NASA crew members and always for extra-vehicular activities (EVAs). EVAs are consequently not usually scheduled for the first days of a mission to allow the crew to adapt, and transdermal dimenhydrinate patches are typically used as an additional backup measure.

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Astronauts in space can grow up to 3 percent taller during the time spent living in microgravity, NASA scientists say. That means that a 6-foot-tall (1.8 meters) person could gain as many as 2 inches (5 centimeters) while in orbit.

While scientists have known for some time that astronauts experience a slight height boost during a months-long stay on the International Space Station, NASA is only now starting to use ultrasound technology to see exactly what happens to astronauts' spines in microgravity as it occurs.

Past studies have shown that when the spine is not exposed to the pull of Earth's gravity, the vertebra can expand and relax, allowing astronauts to actually grow taller. That small gain is short lived, however. Once the astronauts return to Earth, their height returns to normal after a few months. But still, scientists haven't been able to examine the astronaut's spinal columns when experiencing the effects of microgravity until now.

This month, astronauts will begin using the ultrasound device to scan each other's backs to see exactly what their spines look like after 30, 90 and 150 days in microgravity. Researchers will see the medical results in real time as the astronaut take turns scanning their spines of their crewmates.

Astronauts typically visit the space station in six-month increments, allowing for long-term studies of how the human body changes over time in microgravity.

Credit : Space.com 

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The short answer is the astronauts and cosmonauts (that means a Russian astronaut) bring oxygen from Earth, and they make oxygen by running electricity through water. This is called electrolysis.

The air and water on the Space Station all originally came from Earth. Astronauts and cosmonauts transport these vital supplies to the Space Station when they travel there on Soyuz capsules (a type of spacecraft). Astronauts and cosmonauts also receive supplies from uncrewed spaceships, such as the Russian Progress and American Dragon. Uncrewed means with no people on board.

Water is also used onboard the ISS to produce oxygen. ‘We electrolyse water to split it open to hydrogen and oxygen,’ says Laura. ‘The oxygen goes into the atmosphere for the crew to breathe.’ The hydrogen is then combined with another waste product – carbon dioxide breathed out by the crew – to make methane and water. This is known as the Sabatier reaction. ‘The water gets reused and the methane is currently vented overboard,’ says Laura.

The NASA team is also developing a way to crack open the methane to produce more hydrogen. ‘If we had more hydrogen we could be more efficient on that Sabatier process and produce more water, which we can then turn into more oxygen. So we’d have to resupply less water for that process,’ she explains.

Credit :  RSC Education 

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