Astronomy

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NASA and Boeing will provide an update about the Starliner capsule's ongoing astronaut mission today (July 24), and you can watch it live.

We take high definition streaming for granted in many parts of the world. Even now, as I type this article, I have the Martian streaming in high definition but until now astronauts on board the Space Station have had to accept low definition streaming. A team of researchers at NASA have developed and used a new system using an aircraft as a relay. A laser terminal was installed on a research aircraft and data was sent to a ground station. The signals were sent around the Earth and beamed to a relay satellite which then sent the signal on to the Space Station. What the astronauts will actually use it for is less likely to be streaming HD movies but will certainly be able to take advantage of the high bandwidth for science data and communications. 

Over the years, space travellers from all countries have had to rely upon radio waves to transfer data and information to and from space. This has meant reliable communication but low quality video. Alternative technologies have been available but these are generally limited to Earth-based activity. Laser is an obvious alternative which uses infrared light to transmit 10 to 100 times more data transfer than radio based systems. 

A team of researchers based at the Glenn Research Centre, part of NASA’s Cleveland presence has succeeded in establishing sufficient bandwidth to stream 4K video to the ISS using laser communications. The study was part of a series of tests of new technology that could provide high quality live video coverage of the Artemis lunar landing missions. 

The International Space Station (ISS) in orbit. Credit: NASA

The team worked closely with the Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program. Together they installed a temporary laser terminal on the bottom of a Pilatus PC-12 aircraft. The pressurised single engined aircraft then flew over Lake Erie in Cleveland sending data to a ground station nearby. The next hop was for the data to be sent over Earth-based infrastructure to White Sands, the NASA test facility in New Mexico where it was translated to an infrared signal. 

Orbiting Earth at an altitude of about 35,000 kilometres is NASA’s experimental Laser Communications Relay Demonstration satellite which received the infrared signal and then relayed it to the ISS via the Illuma-T, the Integrated LCRD LEO User Modem and Amplifier Terminal. A new system known as High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking was integrated into the transfer and helped to deal with cloud penetration more efficiently. 

Multiple flights were completed by the Pilatus aircraft and after each test, the functionality was improved. It’s far easier to identify issues and subsequent enhancements during aeronautical testing than during ground testing. 

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft launches on the Artemis I flight test, Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022, from Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky.

The upcoming Artemis missions to the Moon and beyond are a real driving force behind developing high bandwidth data transfer not just for streaming video but to provide full video conferencing abilities to the astronauts. This will not only aid mission efficiency but also help to maintain astronaut morale and wellbeing. The drive too for the capture of high quality video data along with vast amounts of scientific data will benefit this high bandwidth technology as NASA embraces laser communications as a core part of their future projects. 

Source : NASA Streams First 4K Video from Aircraft to Space Station, Back

The post Astronauts Can Now Watch 4K Streaming Video on the Station appeared first on Universe Today.

Check any container of over-the-counter medicine, and you’ll see its expiration date. Prescription medicines have similar lifetimes, and we’re told to discard old medications rather than hold on to them. Most of them lose their effectiveness over time, and some can even become toxic. We’re discouraged from disposing of them in our wastewater because they can find their way into other organisms, sometimes with deleterious effects.

We can replace them relatively easily on Earth, but not on a space mission beyond Low Earth Orbit.

A round trip to Mars takes about three years. A lot can happen in that time. Important medical supplies, including medicines, might not remain as effective for that long.

That could create problems for astronauts who make the journey.

New research in Nature’s npj Microgravity examines the lifetimes of medicines and how they could affect astronauts on long-duration space missions. It’s titled “Expiration analysis of the International Space Station formulary for exploration mission planning,” and the senior author is Daniel Buckland. Buckland is from the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine and is an aerospace medicine researcher. The lead author is Thomas Diaz, a pharmacy resident at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Getting sick in space isn’t rare. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield talked about the problem in 2013. “When we first get to space, we feel sick. Your body is really confused. And so, you know, you’re dizzy, your lunch is floating around in your belly ’cause you’re floating, and what you see doesn’t match what you feel.” NASA calls it ‘space adaptation syndrome,’ and motion sickness and anti-nausea medications can help.

Research also shows that astronauts’ immune systems are weakened in space. Weaker immune systems raise the risk of infections. Humans carry latent viruses that can become active when immune systems are weakened, and the entire problem is amplified on longer missions.

When used properly and early enough, common medications can prevent relatively simple afflictions, such as a minor infection, from growing into more dangerous problems. Expired medications can create a problem because their effectiveness is often diminished over time.

“Effective medications will be required to maintain human health for long-duration space operations,” the authors write in their paper. “Previous studies have explored the stability and potency of several of the medications used on the International Space Station (ISS).”

However, this is the first time researchers have compared medications used in space with drug expiration dates in four different international drug registries.

Lead author Thomas Diaz got the idea for this work and then contacted Buckland.

Daniel Buckland, MD, PhD, is an emergency medicine physician at Duke School of Medicine and a NASA affiliate. He studies the risk of spaceflight on humans, including using robotics to deliver care in space. (Photo by Eamon Queeney.)

“Tom reached out with the idea, knowing my work on risk mitigation for extended spaceflight,” said Buckland. “He was concerned that not enough research addressed the problem of medication longevity on a Mars mission.”

NASA doesn’t reveal what medicines it stores on the ISS. For this research, Diaz used a Freedom of Information Act Request to get the list of medicines. The researchers assumed that the formulary would be the same or at least similar for a Mars mission.

The ISS carries 111 medications, divided among five different colour-coded kits. Each kit holds medicines pertinent to its designated use.

• Convenience kit: 23 medications.
• Emergency/Advance Life Support: 4 medications.
• Oral Medication: 36 medications.
• Topical and Injectable: 37 medications.
• Vascular Contingency: 11 medications.

Some medications are duplicated in multiple kits, and two of them are diluents for other medications.

This table from the research shows the four medications in the Advanced Life Support kit, along with their expiry dates in different jurisdictions. Some have a range of dates because of different manufacturers making the same drug. Image Credit: Diaz et al. 2024.

The ISS’s formulary, a list of drugs stocked on the station, contains 106 medications, excluding multiples and diluents. The most common issues that need to be addressed with medicines are motion sickness, allergies, minor pains, and infections. The list of medicines includes antibiotics, sleep aids, pain relievers, and allergy medicines. The drugs are chosen because they are effective in microgravity environments and because they have longer shelf lives than similar medications.

The research shows that over half of the medicines stocked on the ISS would expire on a Mars mission before astronauts returned to Earth.

“Of the 106 medications in the ISS formulary, shelf-life data was found in at least 1 of the registries for 91 (86%) medications,” the authors write in their research. “Of these 91 medications, 54 have an estimated terrestrial shelf-life of less than or equal to 36 months when stored in their original packaging. 14 will expire in less than 24 months.”

This graph from the research shows the survival percentage of ISS medicines by mission length for a lunar mission (Moon image) and a Mars mission (Mars image.) After five years, all medicines would expire. Image Credit: Diaz et al. 2024.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean the medicines won’t work, but in the same way you shouldn’t take expired medications you have lying around at home, space exploration agencies will need to plan on expired medications being less effective,” said Buckland.

On Earth, different medications become less effective at different rates after expiration. However, the effects of space flight on their effectiveness are largely unknown. Space is a harsh environment, and radiation could have a pronounced effect on medications. Increasing the amount of each medication carried on a Mars mission could help deal with the problem, but it’s a rather clumsy solution.

“Hopefully, this work can guide the selection of appropriate medications or inform strategies to mitigate the risks associated with expired medications on long-duration missions,” Buckland said.??

“Prior experience and research show astronauts do get ill on the ISS, but there is real-time communication with the ground and a well-stocked pharmacy that is regularly resupplied, which prevents small injuries or minor illnesses from turning into issues that affect the mission,” he said.??

In their conclusion, the researchers note that pharmaceutical drugs will be the cornerstone of astronaut health on long missions. They also point out a gap in data regarding the shelf lives of the drugs in the ISS’s formulary. For example, 14% of the medicines in the formulary lack expiration data. “It is imperative to know and understand these pharmacologic parameters in order to supply a safe and effective astropharmacy,” they write.

If medicines become unstable sooner on long space missions, it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.

“Ultimately, those responsible for the health of spaceflight crews will have to find ways to extend the expiration of medications to the complete mission duration or accept the elevated risk associated with administration of an expired medication,” they conclude.

The post The Shelf Life of Many Medications Is Shorter Than A Round Trip To Mars appeared first on Universe Today.

Using methods typically applied to the study of galaxies, researchers have been able to reliably spot the difference between real faces and deepfakes.

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There’s a burgeoning arms race between Artificial Intelligence (AI) deepfake images and the methods used to detect them. The latest advancement on the detection side comes from astronomy. The intricate methods used to dissect and understand light in astronomical images can be brought to bear on deepfakes.

The word ‘deepfakes’ is a portmanteau of ‘deep learning’ and ‘fakes.’ Deepfake images are called that because they’re made with a certain type of AI called deep learning, itself a subset of machine learning. Deep learning AI can mimic something quite well after being shown many examples of what it’s being asked to fake. When it comes to images, deepfakes usually involve replacing the existing face in an image with a second person’s face to make it look like someone else is in a certain place, in the company of certain people, or engaging in certain activities.

Deepfakes are getting better and better, just like other forms of AI. But as it turns out, a new tool to uncover deepfakes already exists in astronomy. Astronomy is all about light, and the science of teasing out minute details in light from extremely distant and puzzling objects is developing just as rapidly as AI.

In a new article in Nature, science journalist Sarah Wild looked at how researchers are using astronomical methods to uncover deepfakes. Adejumoke Owolabi is a student at the University of Hull in the UK who studies data science and computer vision. Her Master’s Thesis focused on how light reflected in eyeballs should be consistent, though not identical, between left and right. Owolabi used a high-quality dataset of human faces from Flickr and then used an image generator to create fake faces. She then compared the two using two different astronomical measurement systems called the CAS system and the Gini index to compare the light reflected in the eyeballs and to determine which were deepfakes.

CAS stands for concentration, asymmetry, and smoothness, and astronomers have used it for decades to study and quantify the light from extragalactic stars. It’s also used to quantify the light from entire galaxies and has made its way into biology and other areas where images need to be carefully examined. Noted astrophysicist Christopher J. Conselice was a key proponent of using CAS in astronomy.

The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is also used to study galaxies. It’s named after the Italian statistician Corrado Gini, who developed it in 1912 to measure income inequality. Astronomers use it to measure how light is spread throughout a galaxy and whether it’s uniform or concentrated. It’s a tool that helps astronomers determine a galaxy’s morphology and classification.

In her research, Owolabi successfully determined which images were fake 70% of the time.

These eyes are all from deepfake images with inconsistent light reflection patterns. The ones on the right are coloured to highlight the inconsistencies. Image Credit: Adejumoke Owolabi (CC BY 4.0)

For her article, Wild spoke with Kevin Pimbblet, director of the Centre of Excellence for Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Modelling at the University of Hull in the UK. Pimblett presented the research at the UK Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting on July 15th.

“It’s not a silver bullet, because we do have false positives and false negatives,” said Pimbblet. “But this research provides a potential method, an important way forward, perhaps to add to the battery of tests that one can apply to try to figure out if an image is real or fake.”

This is a promising development. Open democratic societies are prone to disinformation attacks from enemies without and within. Public figures are prone to similar attacks. Disturbingly, the majority of deepfakes are pornographic and can depict public figures in private and sometimes degrading situations. Anything that can help combat it and bolster civil society is a welcome tool.

But as we know from history, arms races have no endpoint. They go on and on in an escalating series of countermeasures. Look at how the USA and the USSR kept one-upping each other during their nuclear arms race as warhead sizes reached absurd levels of destructive power. So, inasmuch as this work shows promise, the purveyors of deepfakes will learn from it and improve their AI deepfake methods.

Wild also spoke to Brant Robertson in her article. Robertson is an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies astrophysics and astronomy, including big data and machine learning. “However, if you can calculate a metric that quantifies how realistic a deepfake image may appear, you can also train the AI model to produce even better deepfakes by optimizing that metric,” he said, confirming what many can predict.

This isn’t the first time that astronomical methods have intersected with Earthly issues. When the Hubble Space Telescope was developed, it contained a powerful CCD (charge-coupled device.) That technology made its way into a digital mammography biopsy system. The system allowed doctors to take better images of breast tissue and identify suspicious tissue without a physical biopsy. Now, CCDs are at the heart of all of our digital cameras, including on our mobile phones.

Might our internet browsers one day contain a deepfake detector based on Gini and CAS? How would that work? Would hostile actors unleash attacks on those detectors and then flood our media with deepfake images in an attempt to weaken our democratic societies? It’s the nature of an arms race.

It’s also in our nature to use deception to sway events. History shows that rulers with malevolent intent can more easily deceive populations that are in the grip of powerful emotions. AI deepfakes are just the newest tool at their disposal.

We all know that AI has downsides, and deepfakes are one of them. While their legality is fuzzy, as with many new technologies, we’re starting to see efforts to combat them. The United States government acknowledges the problem, and several laws have been proposed to deal with it. The “DEEPFAKES Accountability Act” was introduced in the US House of Representatives in September 2023. The “Protecting Consumers from Deceptive AI Act” is another related proposal. Both are floundering in the sometimes murky world of subcommittees for now, but they might breach the surface and become law eventually. Other countries and the EU are wrestling with the same issue.

But in the absence of a comprehensive legal framework dealing with AI deepfakes, and even after one is established, detection is still key.

Astronomy and astrophysics could be an unlikely ally in combatting them.

The post Astronomers Have Tools That Can Help Detect Deepfake Images appeared first on Universe Today.