Space Flight Cultivation for Radish (Raphanus sativus) in the Advanced Plant Habitat

In preparation of a flight experiment, ground-based studies for optimizing the growth of radishes (Raphanus sativus) were conducted at the ground-based Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) unit at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida. The APH provides a large, environmentally controlled chamber that has been used to grow various plants, such as Arabidopsis, wheat, peppers, and now radish. In support of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s goals to provide astronauts with fresh vegetables and fruits in a confined space, it is important to extend the cultivation period to produce substantial biomass. We selected Raphanus sativus cv. Cherry Belle as test variety both for preliminary tests and flight experiments because it provides edible biomass in as few as four weeks, has desirable secondary metabolites (glucosinolates), is rich in minerals, and requires relatively little space. We report our strategies to optimize the growth substrate, watering regimen, light settings, and planting design that produces good-sized radishes, minimizes competition, and allows for easy harvesting. This information will be applicable for growth optimization of other crop plants that will be grown in the APH or other future plant growth facilities.

‘See your spaceport’: Project Apollo and the origins of Kennedy Space Center tourism, 1963–67

This article argues that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) deployed tourism as a key public relations strategy during preparations for Project Apollo. NASA appropriations hearings in 1963 catalysed a national debate over the tangible benefits and costs of sending Americans to the moon. American ambivalence towards the effort alarmed Democratic Representative Olin E. Teague of Texas, chairman of the powerful House Subcommittee on Manned Spaceflight, who understood the correlation between public opinion and congressional appropriations. Inspired by the crowds that congregated on the beaches outside Florida’s John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for each crewed space launch, Teague proposed a tourism programme to encourage public support for NASA’s objectives. Public affairs officers facilitated these programmes at KSC, beginning with a modest information trailer in 1964 and culminating in a Visitor Information Center in 1967 that included an exhibition hall, outdoor displays and depot facilitating escorted bus tours. The space centre quickly became a popular attraction: however, a culture of racial discrimination and intimidation in Brevard County deterred African Americans from participating in space centre tourism. Public programming at KSC – an important legacy of Project Apollo that continues today – was not the panacea Teague and NASA hoped it would be.

DIMENSIONALITY REDUCTION VIA AN ORTHOGONAL AUTOENCODER APPROACH FOR HYPERSPECTRAL IMAGE CLASSIFICATION

Nowadays, the increasing amount of information provided by hyperspectral sensors requires optimal solutions to ease the subsequent analysis of the produced data. A common issue in this matter relates to the hyperspectral data representation for classification tasks. Existing approaches address the data representation problem by performing a dimensionality reduction over the original data. However, mining complementary features that reduce the redundancy from the multiple levels of hyperspectral images remains challenging. Thus, exploiting the representation power of neural networks based techniques becomes an attractive alternative in this matter. In this work, we propose a novel dimensionality reduction implementation for hyperspectral imaging based on autoencoders, ensuring the orthogonality among features to reduce the redundancy in hyperspectral data. The experiments conducted on the Pavia University, the Kennedy Space Center, and Botswana hyperspectral datasets evidence such representation power of our approach, leading to better classification performances compared to traditional hyperspectral dimensionality reduction algorithms.

Enabling the Spaceflight Methylome: DNA Isolated from Plant Tissues Preserved in RNAlater® Is Suitable for Bisulfite PCR Assay of Genome Methylation

Spaceflight has a unique set of abiotic conditions to which plants respond by orchestrating genome-wide alterations to their transcriptome. The methods for preserving plants for RNA analysis are well-established and proven over multiple missions, but, methods for investigating the possible epigenetic mechanisms that may contribute to the transcriptome alteration are not well-developed for the confining limitations of the International Space Station (ISS). Currently, the methods used to isolate genomic DNA and to perform epigenetic analyses are ideal for frozen plants, as opposed to plants stored in RNAlater®—a high salt solution that chemically suspends all cellular activity and is typically used on the ISS. Therefore, we developed a method for extracting high-quality genomic DNA suitable for epigenetic analysis from Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) plants that were preserved with the current preservation system aboard the ISS—fixation in RNAlater® using Kennedy Space Center Fixation Tubes (KFTs).

Early Comparison of OCO-3 XCO2 Measurements with TCCON

<p>The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3) was successfully launched on May 4, 2019 from Kennedy Space Center via a Space-X Falcon 9. One week later, the instrument was installed as an external payload on the International Space Station (ISS). OCO-3 extends NASA’s study of carbon and measures the dry-air mole fraction of column carbon dioxide (XCO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere from space.</p><p>These space-based measurements are compared to ground-based observations from the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON). TCCON is a global network of high-resolution ground-based Fourier Transform Spectrometers that records spectra of the sun in the near-infrared spectral region. From these spectra, accurate and precise column-averaged abundances of atmospheric constituents including CO2 are retrieved. TCCON data are tied to the WMO scale and serve as the link between calibrated surface in situ measurements and OCO-3 measurements.</p><p>OCO-3’s agile 2-D pointing mirror assembly (PMA) allows the instrument to stare at a TCCON station as it passes overhead - providing information about the quality, biases, and errors in the OCO-3 data. Here, we show early comparisons between the OCO-3 XCO2 dataset collected during target mode observations and coincident TCCON measurements and discuss site-dependent biases and its potential origins.</p>

The Wind Environment Interactions Relative to Launch Vehicle Design

Since atmospheric winds play the most critical natural enviroment (NE) role as input into the design and development of an aerospace launch vehicle, this paper provides a more detailed description of the wind environment and its interaction with engineering design in launch and space vehicle development applications at Kennedy Space Center (KSC).