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There’s something wrong with us. We’ve risen to prominence on a world that’s positively “rippling with life,” as Carl Sagan described it. The more we study our planet, the more we find life eking out an existence in the most unlikely of places. Yet we seem destined to drive many species to extinction, even though we see those extinctions coming from miles away. As an indication of how serious the problem is, one group of researchers suggests we use the Moon—yes, the Moon—as a safe repository for Earth’s biodiversity. The idea makes sense technically—samples of Earth life can be preserved cryogenically on the Moon—but it also sounds like something out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel. At first glance, it seems like an absurd proposal. However, as Camus explained, acknowledging absurdity is the starting point for genuine understanding. Camus and Vonnegut are both dead, so it’s up to living scientists to prepare for the odious task of preventing a catastrophic reduction in Earth’s biodiversity. They’re taking it seriously. In a new paper in the journal BioScience, a diverse group of scientists from the USA outline their plan. The paper is “Safeguarding Earth’s biodiversity by creating a lunar biorepository.” The first author is Mary Hagedorn, a Senior Research Cryobiologist at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, DC. “Earth’s biodiversity is increasingly threatened and at risk,” the authors write, shocking no one. This graph shows extinction rates are rising along with the human population and industrial activity. Image Credit: Earth.org Human activities are behind species extinction. “Because of myriad anthropogenic drivers, a high proportion of species and ecosystems face destabilization and extinction threats that are accelerating faster than our ability to save these species in their natural environment,” the authors write. Their proposal is to build a biorepository on the Moon that can hold “prioritized taxa of live cryopreserved samples.” Not only would the biorepository protect Earth’s precious, wondrous biodiversity, but it would also serve space exploration and terraforming. The researchers are in the initial stages of exploring the idea. They intend to test the cryopreservation of animal skin samples containing fibroblast cells. Fibroblasts are the main connective tissue cells in bodies, present in the skin, tendons, ligaments, blood vessels, and bones. Fibroblasts are not stem cells, but they share some similarities with stem cells. They’re the only other type of cell that can regenerate tissues and organs and create copies of themselves. Fibroblasts are also used in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. They’re widely used in research and are sometimes called the “workhorses” of cell culture. Cryopreserved fibroblasts can stay frozen and alive for hundreds of years. Scientists are getting better at thawing cryopreserved materials to recover DNA and intact cells. They’re even able to thaw living organisms. In this 2018 research, coral larvae were cryopreserved, then warmed, and then resumed swimming. This 2023 research showed similar success. These efforts were both aimed at preserving Earth’s coral biodiversity. The scientific community is clearly concerned, and momentum is building. “In the face of potential catastrophic ecosystem loss, such as coral reefs from climate-related warming, we propose the creation of a lunar biorepository to maintain samples in a cryopreserved state with little human intervention,” the authors of the new research write. There’s nowhere on Earth with temperatures naturally low enough for cryopreservation. But the Moon is much different. The authors point out that the Moon’s southern polar region is nearly ideal for a “hands-off” biorepository. In some craters there, the temperature is quite stable, with only small seasonal fluctuations. The temperature stays at or below -196 Celsius (-320 F), which is the temperature for liquid nitrogen and is considered the ideal temperature for cryopreservation. This shaded relief image shows the Moon’s Shackleton Crater, a 21-km-wide crater permanently shadowed crater near the lunar south pole. The crater’s interior structure is shown in false colour based on data from NASA’s LRO probe. Like other craters in the region, Shackleton’s floor is in perpetual darkness, and the temperature is extremely low. Image Credit: NASA The researchers envision a vault that could protect Earth’s most at-risk species. In the future, other plant and animal species will be added. “Our goal is to cryopreserve most animal species on Earth,” they write. A parallel goal is to preserve Earth species that can be used in future terraforming. “The biorepository could store biomaterials for food, filtration, microbial breakdown, and ecosystems engineering,” they explain. There’s precedent for this type of thinking and this type of initiative: The Doomsday Vault. In 2008, the Norwegian government opened the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It’s a repository for seeds that protects crop diversity. It holds backup seeds preserved in other genebanks around the world. The vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million different seed samples, each holding up to 500 individual seeds. It is built into the side of a mountain on Spitsbergen Island in Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago. It maintains an ideal seed-preserving temperature of -18°C (-0.4°F). At only 1300 km from the North Pole, the site is kept cold in permafrost even if climate control fails. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault has room to preserve 4.5 million types of seeds. Image Credit: Crop Trust. The Lunar Biorepository isn’t the first proposal to protect Earth’s biodiversity on the Moon. In 2021, researchers proposed the Lunar Ark, a facility in lunar lava tubes that could preserve the seeds, sperms, eggs, and DNA of endangered Earth life. But lunar lava tubes aren’t naturally as cold as polar craters, and the idea relies on solar power for energy. That means it’s susceptible to failure. But at the naturally cold temperatures at the lunar pole, power failure isn’t an issue. Initially, the Lunar Biorepository would hold endangered animal taxa. After that, it would need to expand and include plants since they’re critical to rebuilding ecosystems. This list from the research shows what samples would be included initially in the Lunar Biorepository. Image Credit: Hagedorn et al. 2024. The researchers are starting by developing an exemplar system to extract and cryopreserve tissue from the Starry Goby, a fish native to Hawaii. Previous researchers have shown that the species responds well to cryopreservation. “Our vision is that these fibroblasts would be distributed into a variety of space-hardy cryopackaging and tested under space-like conditions on Earth. Candidate packaging for the cells would be tested next on the ISS,” the researchers state. This graphic from the study shows the proposed process. Fins and DNA samples are collected from Starry Gobies, and cells can be either stored or expanded into fibroblasts. The fibroblasts can be cryopreserved and stored at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where they can be preserved for decades or longer. Then, they can be expanded into fibroblasts and cryopreserved again and tested on Earth again. The samples can then be sent to the ISS or its successor one day for testing, then returned to Earth again to test the system’s viability and to look for DNA changes. Image Credit: Hagedorn et al. 2024. The Lunar Repository could offer protection that goes beyond the scientific. By virtue of its remote lunar location, it’s protected from Earthly climate disasters and natural disasters like Earthquakes. Human affairs can also be extremely messy and catastrophic, and in a deep crater at the lunar south pole, the repository would be isolated from political upheaval or war. The authors recognize the many challenges involved, mostly technical. But the endeavour is a long-term one, so there’s time to solve problems. “This is a decades-long program,” the authors write. “Realizing a lunar biorepository will require collaboration by a broad array of nations, cultural groups, agencies, and international stakeholders to develop acceptable sample holding, governance, and long-term plans.” But the Moon is attracting a lot of attention and effort, and this project can be an important part of it all. “Protecting Earth’s life must be a top priority,” they conclude. The post Scientists Want to Use the Moon to Safeguard Earth’s Biodiversity appeared first on Universe Today.

Technologies for enabling NASA’s Artemis mission are coming thick and fast, as plenty of problems must be solved before a permanent human presence on the Moon can be established. A novel idea from Honeybee Robotics, one of the most prominent space technology companies now owned by Blue Origin, could solve plenty of them with one piece of infrastructure. The Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution, or LUNARSABER (which must have been named by someone who really likes Star Wars), is a 100m tall pole that can hold one ton of equipment on top of it. It could serve as a central power, communications, and lighting hub of an Artemis base and part of a mesh network with other places of interest on the Lunar surface.  Let’s start with the enabling tech of LUNARSABER itself. No rocket can hold a 100-meter-tall tower and land it on the Moon, and building such a tower on the lunar surface without any existing infrastructure would also be almost impossible. So Honeybee will leverage another existing technology—the Deployable Interlocking Actuated Bands for Linear Operations, or DIABLO system (maybe someone at Honeybee also likes Blizzard Entertainment games). DIABLO uses a rolled piece of metal and bends it into a deployable cylindrical structure that supports heavy payloads. In this case, that structure serves as the base for LUNARSABER. But the secret sauce is what that structure enables. Let’s take a look at what goes along the sides first. This video from Honeybee describes the LUNARSABER project in detail.Credit – Honeybee Robotics YouTube Channel Since power is such an important thing on the Moon, it seems evident that putting solar panels along the sides is the most useful, and that is precisely what Honeybee is doing. In a recently released video, they discuss two types of solar panel deployments. One looks like a yo-yo extended from the top payload holder of the LUNARSABER tower. This methodology would entirely envelop the metallic structure underneath but allow access to the Sun at all angles. Alternatively, the top part of the 100m tower could deploy its booms that hold traditional solar panels and then track where the Sun is as it makes its 14-day journey across the lunar sky. Honeybee’s engineers estimate it could produce about 100kW of power using these techniques, but it also has some other advantages. Some parts of the lunar poles are bathed in eternal sunlight – or are very close to being so. At these places, a tall pole would capture at least some sunlight almost 95% of the time. Admittedly, the sunlight would only hit the top part of LUNARSABER, significantly decreasing its overall power output. However, having some power during the cold lunar night is undoubtedly better than not having any and relying on batteries for survival. Supplying power is only one part of what LUNARSABER does, though. It has four main other capabilities: It can beam power to other devices It can track those other devices It can communicate with a wide range of assets It can provide light for those assets. Fraser discusses how power beaming works with Dr. Stephen Sweeney. Let’s tackle the first one first. Power beaming is all the rage in the space technology community, partly due to recent successful tests by Caltech and the US’s Naval Research Laboratory. This technology could be applied to LUNARSABER as well. If one mast is bathed in sunlight while another lingers in shadow, the one with excess power can beam power to the one needing it. Additionally, that power beaming can occur between the LUNARSABER and individual assets such as rovers or astronauts in spacesuits. If one needs a power fill-up, a 100m tower with a power beaming system on top of it could provide that fill-up over a vast area very effectively. Beaming power effectively to those assets requires the LUNARSABER to know where they are, though. That’s where the second enabling technology comes in. It can use a series of sensors to find and track different assets as they operate around the LUNARSABER tower. Anything with a direct line of sight could be tracked and powered directly by the tower itself.  Line of sight is also helpful for the subsequent use case but unnecessary. LUNARSABER could serve as a kind of lunar cell phone tower, enabling wireless communication between the assets in its network. This prototype internet allows different rovers to coordinate together or an astronaut in one part of the base to issue a command to a rover in a different part. Fraser discusses the importance of having capabilities and infrastructure set up properly for exploration. Finally, to issue those commands, it would be helpful for astronauts to see where they’re going. It’d also be helpful for rovers, as many of their science missions would otherwise have to wait out the two-week lunar darkness. Floodlights on the top of LUNARSABER could provide visible light to these astronauts and rovers, allowing them to effectively perform their activities whether it’s lunar night or not. Another aspect of LUNARSABER that utilizes a few of the different applications mentioned above is combining several towers in a line-of-sight mesh, which would allow both communication and power to be beamed from literally the other side of the Moon. This enables two main applications that have proven a thorn in Lunar Exploration’s side: constant solar power and constant communication with Earth. Since at least half of the Moon is always lit up, if engineers strategically place LUNARSABERs around the surface of the Moon, there should always be at least one in full sunlight. That one sunlight tower could then wirelessly transmit power to another tower in its line of sight. That process could continue until the power is beamed back to the main Artemis base, providing power even in the cold lunar dark. A LUNARSABER could serve as a streetlight on the Moon during its two week dark period, as show in this artist’s rendition.Credit – Honeybee Robotics Explorations on the other side of the Moon are also tricky, limiting the area of scientific inquiry primarily to the side directly facing us. However, a strategically set-up mesh of LUNARSABERS would allow communication back to Earth, even with assets exploring the “dark” side of the Moon that faces us.  As Vishnu Sangiepalli, the PI on the LUNARSABER, put it in the recent video, “the best way to describe the LUNARSABER would be a Swiss Army Knife.” These multifunctional tools have been a mainstay in explorers’ pockets for decades, and LUNARSABER helps match their versatility and flexibility to solve the problems facing the new lunar explorers. Learn More:Sanigepalli et al. – LUNARSABER: Lunar Utility with Navigation, Advanced Remote Sensing, and Autonomous Beaming for Energy RedistributionHoneybee Robotics – Honeybee Robotics to Develop LUNARSABER for DARPA’s LunA-10 ProgramUT – Does Beaming Power in Space Make Sense at the Moon?UT – Exploring the Moon’s Shadowed Regions Using Beamed EnergyUT – Wireless Power Transmission Could Enable Exploration of the Far Side of the Moon Lead Image:LUNARSABERS configured in a mesh network to beam power and communications to various points of interest on the lunar surface.Credit – Honeybee Robotics The post A Tower On The Moon Could Provide Astronauts With Light, Power, and Guidance appeared first on Universe Today.

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Muhammad al-Masri, more commonly known as Muhammad Deif and purported to be one of the masterminds behind Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, has been confirmed to have been killed in a strike last month, according to a a statement from the Israeli military.  “Following an intelligence assessment, it can be confirmed that Muhammad Deif was eliminated in the strike,” the IDF statement read, in reference to a July 13 strike on the city of Khan Younis. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 90 people were killed in the vicinity of the strike.  Deif had been a top target for the IDF since 1995, and survived eight earlier assassination attempts, including one in 2014 that killed his wife and two of his children.  The Al-Qassam Brigades have neither confirmed nor denied Deif’s death. “No news published in the media or by any other parties can be confirmed,” announced the militant group in a post on Telegram.  The announcement of Deif’s death comes on the heels of the assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran on Wednesday. Deif, alongsides Haniyeh and Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, was wanted under a warrant from the International Criminal Court.  The post IDF: Senior Hamas Commander Killed in Strike Last Month appeared first on The American Conservative.