Biological life raft☣️

🌍 Earth is a biological life raft thatsustains human life in the inhospitable environment of the cosmos. This planetary closed-loop system provides oxygen, water and essential nutrients while recycling waste, purifying contaminants and renewing resources. It does all of this using only the things that already exist in the biosphere. And NASA is learning just how this life raft functions in order to create a portable replica of the biological system we call home.

A closed-loop system only uses the resources on hand. In other words, no resupply shipments make it necessary to reuse and recycle everything. On Earth, biology takes care of these processes naturally and efficiently, according to Jitendra Joshi, an engineer based at NASA Headquarters. Joshi studies the systems that sustain human life in space, such as microbiological systems for waste treatment for long duration space missions.

 

A closed-loop system only uses the resources on hand.

 

“The water we drank this morning was somebody’s urine some place on this planet 50 years ago,” he says. “The nutrients that are in our plants or meat were somebody’s poop 500 years ago. The whole buffer of this planet helps us recycle over tens of years or hundreds of years. Inherently, biology is versatile, adaptable, self-repairing and evolving. That goes for the lowest of lifeforms to human beings.”

By exploring the wealth of information available about the nature of biology, NASA is working on adapting that same biology to help keep astronauts alive and healthy when they move from this ecosystem to those with no apparent biological life.

THE MOST PORTABLE AND MULTIFUNCTIONAL RESOURCE IS PLANTS.

Joshi points out that only plants convert carbon in the atmosphere into edible food that humans need. That same biology can generate all of the nutrients the human body needs to remain healthy. Most of the medications we rely on are generated by biology as well (See Plant Factories). While some compounds can be synthesized chemically, the processes to do so are often complicated and not practical for the rugged conditions of space exploration.

However, those same plants come with baggage. They evolved under the influence of gravity and in a biologically rich environment. So it’s not a given that all of them can or will adapt successfully to the sterile environment of space. Thousands of plant experiments performed by multiple space agencies over decades have created a library of information, including challenges to overcome.

Of primary concern is efficiency. Multi-cellular plants grow slowly, and only 30–40% of a plant is edible. The rest—roots, stems, leaves, bark, branches, flowers—is waste that needs to be stored and eventually processed. Plants need something to grow in (what’s called a medium), water and nutrients, all of which can add up to some serious weight. The cost-benefit analysis for the volume of food they produce and the supplies needed for cultivation is part of NASA’s ongoing scientific research and mission architecture analysis.

SIMPLER FORMS OF PLANT LIFE SUCH AS YEAST AND ALGAE PERFORM MANY OF THE SAME FUNCTIONS, BUT WEIGH LESS.

“The versatility of biology lends itself as an appropriate tool in many manufacturing processes,” explains Joshi. “With today’s advances in synthetic biology, I can train a bacteria to make something that I want. Instead of an insulin gene in that bacteria, I can insert a gene that produces amino acids, which are very perishable.”

Synthetic biology—the design and construction of biological devices and systems for useful purposes—benefits greatly from recent advances in DNA technologies. Scientists can identify the genes responsible for various functions in single cell and complex organisms. By removing or inserting genes, it’s possible to change how those cells will function including what they produce, according to John Hogan, an environmental scientist in the Bioengineering Branch at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

“What synthetic biology allows us to do is to look at a biological system as an engineering system,” Hogan says. “It allows us to promote the manufacturing of the compounds that we want. We can very precisely alter the metabolism of an organism to do a number of different things.”

For example, a genetically altered yogurt culture could make a particular vitamin or type of medicine. By mixing milk powder with the right organisms, astronauts would have a cup of yogurt that looks and tastes like the kind we pick up at the grocery store, but contains that something extra.

Hello

In the future, machines everywhere will monitor their own health and request help when something’s wrong, according to the engineers at CEMSol LLC, a young technical services company that is developing such a system with NASA technology.

“There’s going to be an integrated system-health engine as part of every system out there, and it will be able to interface with other systems and components,” says David Cirulli, engineering vice president of the Phoenix-based company he cofounded. “That’s what’s missing today.”

CEMSol’s software is rooted in a system developed in 2003 by a computer engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center to monitor an experimental hybrid rocket engine test bed that used both gas and solid fuel.

During a test launch of the Orion Crew Vehicle in December 2014, the Inductive Monitoring System (IMS) that CEMSol later licensed was used to monitor electrical systems on the space capsule.

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Traditionally, this task would have been accomplished by building models and running simulations, but NASA’s David Iverson instead developed the Inductive Monitoring System (IMS) to gather and interpret real data automatically.

HUNDREDS OF SYSTEMS AT A GLANCE

It’s a pretty straightforward concept: IMS collects data from sensors that measure temperature, pressure, fuel flow, voltage, and other vital signs from within a system, then mines those results to establish a baseline for normal behavior. Any future data that don’t fit the baseline could indicate a problem or impending failure. And while human engineers or operators can understand the interactions between five to seven entities at most, Cirulli says, data-mining software such as IMS can see how hundreds of systems relate to each other at a glance.

 

It’s a pretty straightforward concept.

 

By 2012, the software had been applied to a dozen programs at NASA Mission Control, and now it’s being integrated into launch control systems at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and monitoring the carbon analyzer that ensures drinking-water safety on the International Space Station. When the Orion capsule went on its inaugural test flight in December 2014, the software monitored the new vehicle’s electrical systems.

CEMSol, which stands for Comprehensive Engineering Management Solutions, licensed the program from NASA in 2021 and used it to develop its IMS-derived Integrated System Health Management software in two packages — one as a desktop application and another as a software developer’s kit. The desktop version imports recorded datasets and analyzes them, highlighting any deviations from normal. The software developer’s kit can monitor systems in real time. “It’s a library of functions the programmers can choose from to perform whatever system-detection analysis functions they want,” Cirulli says.

GOOD NEWS: IT’S GOING TO FAIL!

Also in 2020 CEMSol teamed up with Ames and Lockheed Martin to try the system-health monitoring software on the Lockheed C-130 Hercules military transport plane. The aircraft has had a history of problems with a bleed valve that switches air flow between engines during start-up. Four years’ worth of datasets from 16 planes, including starter-system failures, were fed into the program, which was then able to predict a start-up failure three starts before a problem occurred....