Volcano-observing Drone Flights Open Door to Routine Hazard Monitoring - NASA

The ability to provide a “volcano forecast” could help reduce the significant health, safety, and even economic impacts of eruptions; they regularly disrupt aviation and the global supply chain we depend on. Last fall, circling the summit of an active volcano, a small aircraft moved us toward a future where remote but hazardous volcanoes are consistently monitored for signs an eruption could be brewing. 

This unmanned aircraft system, or UAS, commonly known as a drone, was specially designed for scientific uses in challenging environments – and then upgraded to become an airborne volcano-observing platform. With flights to Makushin Volcano in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands in September 2021, a group of federal scientists and industry engineers demonstrated the UAS could successfully fly without its pilots’ eyes on the aircraft. And that opens new possibilities for monitoring volcanoes and other hazards worldwide.

Maciej Stachura of Black Swift Technologies carries the S2 aircraft to its launch site at Dutch Harbor airport in Alaska. Credits: Aleutian Aerial/Andy Dietrick

 

Out-of-Sight Flights, Years in the Making

Sending researchers on foot or piloted aircraft to survey volcanoes up close can be dangerous and costly. It’s also just not realistic to do for a large number of volcanoes on a regular basis. But a sophisticated UAS could do the job, if it could fly beyond the visual line of sight of its operators. The capability, known by the acronym BVLOS, marks a kind of threshold that, once passed, will make many more applications possible.

At NASA, using UASs for up-close monitoring of volcanoes was first demonstrated by researchers from the agency’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. In 2013, they collected science data by flying small, fixed-wing drones over Turrialba Volcano in Costa Rica.

Later, a long-term collaboration between NASA and Black Swift Technologies of Boulder, Colorado, resulted in the S2 UAS, which made the recent groundbreaking flights in Alaska.

“We needed it to be really rugged, to withstand flying in the turbulent conditions and corrosive gases around volcanoes,” said Florian Schwandner, director of the Earth Sciences division at Ames and an early member of the project. “We also developed a gas-sensing payload the UAS could carry to look for signs of volcanic unrest.”

When the U.S. Geological Survey joined the partnership a few years in, they brought an even more capable payload to detect additional gases and collect visual and thermal images.pic

The development path that led to the S2’s flight demonstration was supported in part by NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer program, whose management office is located at Ames. The program funds small businesses and research institutions for the research, development, and demonstration of innovative technologies with significant potential for successful commercialization. For all drones, scientific and otherwise, achieving safe BVLOS flight is the next big step toward widespread commercial use.

View of the Makushin Volcano summit captured by a camera on the wing of the S2 aircraft. The unmanned aircraft system flew autonomously beyond range of its pilot’s sight – 15 miles away and to an altitude of 6,000 feet – to capture data about volcanic activity during a flight demonstration in September 2021. Credits: Black Swift Technologies 

To the Summit and Back

To demonstrate the S2 could fly this way – with no eyes on the aircraft, only on monitors displaying its flight path – one major requirement was a plan for integrating the UAS safely into the airspace. The Flight Operations division at Ames worked with the Federal Aviation Administration and Black Swift to develop the operations necessary to fly safely out of sight.

During the deployment, the team flew four BVLOS missions to Makushin Volcano, 15 miles away. The S2 relied on its autonomous systems and a programmed flight plan to reach the summit, where the aircraft captured high-resolution visible-light and thermal images. The team’s scientists confirmed they could use these to detect changes in physical features that indicate volcanic activity changing underground. The flights also demonstrated the capacity of sensors aboard the aircraft to detect gases that may signal changes in activity brewing in the volcano’s depths.

“Our goal is to continue to push the capabilities of UASs to provide valuable insight into natural phenomena,” said Jack Elston, CEO of Black Swift Technologies. “This deployment demonstrated some state-of-the-art automation technologies we think will help greatly simplify what are now very difficult UAS operations. One of the most exciting results was to see our custom autopilot system determine when conditions had become too dangerous and turn back.”

Aerial photograph of the summit of Makushin Volcano in Alaska, overlaid with thermal image data in yellow. The thermal data shows areas of hot ground, testifying to the active nature of this volcano. Both images were captured by the S2 UAS using onboard instruments during a successful demonstration of beyond-visual-line-of-sight, or BVLOS, flights in September 2021. The volcano’s crater lake is visible at lower right, along with fumaroles scattered around the summit area that are releasing volcanic gases. Credits: Black Swift Technologies 

A Future of Routine Flights

The proven ability to fly safely beyond range of a pilot’s sight with this scientific platform paves the way for more routine operations.

“Working with NASA and Black Swift, our scientists believe we can use UASs to help authorities warn communities about the onset of dangerous volcanic eruptions, and many other hazards that now take us by surprise,” said Jonathan Stock, director of the USGS National Innovation Center, which helped fund and coordinate the September 2021 flights. “With this tool, we could routinely monitor even remote volcanoes for activity and respond to eruption events – a gamechanger for the safety of both our scientists and the communities around these geologic hazards.”

This partnership between government and small business could make BVLOS drone flights possible for tracking and responding to a diverse suite of hazards around the world, including droughts, floods, wildfires, and many more. 

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This work is the product of a long-term partnership between NASA, Black Swift Technologies LLC, and USGS. Funding for the Makushin Volcano project was provided by the USGS National Land Imaging Program and the USGS National Innovation Center, working with NASA’s SBIR/STTR program to leverage NASA’s original investment in the aircraft prototype. USGS also funded the NASA Ames Flight Operations division through an interagency agreement to provide airworthiness reviews and airspace integration coordination with the FAA.

Banner image: The S2 UAS ready for deployment on its pneumatic launcher at Dutch Harbor airport in Alaska. Credits: Aleutian Aerial/Andy Dietrick

For news media:
Members of the news media interested in covering this topic should reach out to the NASA Ames newsroom.

Author: Abby Tabor, NASA's Ames Research Center

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/volcano-observing-drone-flights-open-door-to-routine-hazard-monitoring

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NASA’s MRO Finds Water Flowed on Mars Longer Than Previously Thought - UNIVERSE

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its Context Camera to capture this image of Bosporos Planum, a location on Mars. The white specks are salt deposits found within a dry channel. The largest impact crater in the scene is nearly 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) across. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS 

Caltech researchers used the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to determine that surface water left salt minerals behind as recently as 2 billion years ago.

Mars once rippled with rivers and ponds billions of years ago, providing a potential habitat for microbial life. As the planet’s atmosphere thinned over time, that water evaporated, leaving the frozen desert world that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) studies today.

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It’s commonly believed that Mars’ water evaporated about 3 billion years ago. But two scientists studying data that MRO has accumulated at Mars over the last 15 years have found evidence that reduces that timeline significantly: Their research reveals signs of liquid water on the Red Planet as recently as 2 billion to 2.5 billion years ago, meaning water flowed there about a billion years longer than previous estimates.

The findings – published in AGU Advances on Dec. 27, 2021 – center on the chloride salt deposits left behind as icy meltwater flowing across the landscape evaporated.

While the shape of certain valley networks hinted that water may have flowed on Mars that recently, the salt deposits provide the first mineral evidence confirming the presence of liquid water. The discovery raises new questions about how long microbial life could have survived on Mars, if it ever formed at all. On Earth, at least, where there is water, there is life.

The study’s lead author, Ellen Leask, performed much of the research as part of her doctoral work at Caltech in Pasadena. She and Caltech professor Bethany Ehlmann used data from the MRO instrument called the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) to map the chloride salts across the clay-rich highlands of Mars’ southern hemisphere – terrain pockmarked by impact craters. These craters were one key to dating the salts: The fewer craters a terrain has, the younger it is. By counting the number of craters on an area of the surface, scientists can estimate its age.

Follow link: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-mro-finds-water-flowed-on-mars-longer-than-previously-thought

Click on this interactive visualization of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and take it for a spin. The “HD” button in the lower right offers more detailed textures. The full interactive experience is at Eyes on the Solar System. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

MRO has two cameras that are perfect for this purpose. The Context Camera, with its black-and-white wide-angle lens, helps scientists map the extent of the chlorides. To zoom in, scientists turn to the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) color camera, allowing them to see details as small as a Mars rover from space.

Using both cameras to create digital elevation maps, Leask and Ehlmann found that many of the salts were in depressions – once home to shallow ponds – on gently sloping volcanic plains. The scientists also found winding, dry channels nearby – former streams that once fed surface runoff (from the occasional melting of ice or permafrost) into these ponds. Crater counting and evidence of salts on top of volcanic terrain allowed them to date the deposits.

“What is amazing is that after more than a decade of providing high-resolution image, stereo, and infrared data, MRO has driven new discoveries about the nature and timing of these river-connected ancient salt ponds,” said Ehlmann, CRISM’s deputy principal investigator. Her co-author, Leask, is now a post-doctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, which leads CRISM.

The salt minerals were first discovered 14 years ago by NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter, which launched in 2001. MRO, which has higher-resolution instruments than Odyssey, launched in 2005 and has been studying the salts, among many other features of Mars, ever since. Both are managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

“Part of the value of MRO is that our view of the planet keeps getting more detailed over time,” said Leslie Tamppari, the mission’s deputy project scientist at JPL. “The more of the planet we map with our instruments, the better we can understand its history.”

More About the Mission

JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the MRO mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colorado. MARCI and the Context Camera were both built and are operated by Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.

For more information about MRO: https://mars.nasa.gov/mro/ and www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/main/index.html

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-mro-finds-water-flowed-on-mars-longer-than-previously-thought

Five Space Station Research Results Contributing to Deep Space Exploration - NASA/UNIVERSE

More than 3,000 experiments have been conducted aboard the International Space Station during the 21 years humans have been living and working in space. These experiments have provided insights helping improve life back on Earth and explore farther into the solar system. Researchers have shared these results in thousands of scientific publications.

Over the past few months, scientists shared the outcomes of space station studies that could help us recover more water from life support systems, construct Moon bases, grow plants in space, and more.

Here are some of the important new discoveries made and inventions created thanks to space station research and technology demonstrations:

Click on each discovery in the list below to learn more about the study and why it matters.

Closing the water loop for exploration: Additional water can be recovered from the brine produced in the space station’s Urine Processor Assembly (UPA).

Mixing cement in space to learn to construct Moon bases: Cement mixed in space has different properties than cement mixed on Earth. Using simulated lunar soil to inform how to construct structures on the Moon looks promising.

A new way to grow plants in space: A newly patented system tested aboard station can provide plants water and nutrients they need to grow in space without the use of electricity.

Communicating back home: A successful technology demonstration aboard the space station verified a communications technique that could enable larger amounts of data to be transmitted much faster between space and Earth.

Studying fertility in space: Space radiation did not affect mouse sperm DNA or fertility and yielded normal offspring with the same success rate as ground controls.

Closing the water loop for exploration

Preflight imagery of the Brine Processor Assembly (BPA). The BPA’s dual-membrane bladder works to recover additional water from urine brine. Credits: Credits: NASA/Robert Markowitz 

What We Learned: Additional water can be recovered from the brine produced in the Urine Processor Assembly (UPA), part of the station’s environmental control and life support system (ECLSS).

Why It Matters: Future deep space exploration missions will require spacefarers to have a nearly self-contained water system in which they can recover, recycle, and reuse more than 98% of the water loaded aboard their spacecraft from the beginning of their mission.  The UPA aboard the space station can achieve close to 94% recovery, but some water remains in the brine waste product after urine is processed, and that water has potential to be recovered.  The new Brine Processor Assembly (BPA) is a technology demonstration system that is now recovering that water on station.

The Details: The BPA technology demonstration flew to station aboard the Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft and has now completed five de-watering cycles.  Bladders from these operational runs are planned to return to Earth on the SpaceX Dragon capsule and will be analyzed to confirm BPA efficiency.  All indications from in-orbit telemetry are that the BPA is functioning as intended.

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Mixing cement in space to learn to construct Moon bases

European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst works on the MICS experiment aboard the International Space Station. Observations of how cement reacts in space during the hardening process may help engineers better understand its microstructure and material properties, which could improve cement processing techniques on Earth and lead to the design of safe, lightweight space habitats. Credits: NASA 

What We Learned: Cement mixed in space has different properties than cement mixed on Earth. Using simulated lunar soil to inform how to construct structures on the Moon looks promising.

Why it matters: Now that researchers know those properties, they are more prepared to create materials that are better construction tools in space.

The Details: Lunar regolith simulant (JSC-1A), mock lunar soil that emulates the properties of material from the Moon, has been used to create metals, glasses, and cement on Earth. The Microgravity Investigation of Cement Solidification (MICS) study conducted aboard the International Space Station recently published results examining JSC-1A for its potential use as a lunar construction material. Researchers found a fine portion of lunar soil simulant can be used as a cement supplement, a coarse portion can be used as filler, and that mixing the lunar regolith simulant, cement, and water results in a hardy mortar. These results indicate it might be feasible to use lunar dust as a material for building lunar bases. The Redwire Regolith Print study launched aboard the Northrop Grumman Cygnus on its 16th commercial resupply services mission builds on these results, using JSC-1A to see if regolith can be used for 3D printing to study the feasibility of printing structures on the Moon or Mars.

The MICS study also investigated the effect of microgravity on the reaction that occurs when cement and water are mixed together. Results recently published in ScienceDirect showed that the cement mixed in space had a microstructure marked by long lines and more trapped air than cement created on Earth. By learning this aboard the space station, scientists can better anticipate the strength of cement structures in space, and the results will contribute to the development of new materials for the construction of extraterrestrial habitats.

Learn more: A Concrete Advantage for Space Explorers

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A new way to grow plants in space

Infographic illustrating the Passive Orbital Nutrient Delivery System (PONDS) plant growth unit. The PONDS units are an entirely passive system – meaning no electricity, no pumps and no moving parts – and the basic concept involves using a free-standing reservoir of water that plants can draw from when needed, cutting down on time astronauts would spend watering plants during the growth interval. Credits: NASA 

What We Learned: A newly patented system tested aboard station can provide plants water and nutrients they need to grow in space without the use of electricity.

Why It Matters: On future deep space missions, astronauts could use this method to grow fresh vegetables to supplement their packaged diet.

The Details: The Passive Orbital Nutrient Delivery System (PONDS) is a newly patented plant growth approach that was tested aboard the space station to water plants both in Earth’s gravity and microgravity. The system provides reliable water delivery to seeds, transports water from a reservoir, and provides nutrients and aeration to roots. PONDS is passive, meaning it operates with no electricity, no pumps and no moving parts. On future deep space missions, astronauts could use this method to grow fresh vegetables to supplement their diet as they venture deeper into space.

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Communicating back home

What We Learned: A successful technology demonstration aboard the space station verified a communications technique that could enable larger amounts of data to be transmitted much faster between space and Earth.

Why It Matters: This promising test demonstrated a new technology that could be used for faster data transmission to Earth and could support deep space mission communications.

The Details: SOLISS, a small Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) communication terminal attached to the space station, was tested for its laser pointing accuracy. The SOLISS team published their results detailing how they succeeded in establishing a bidirectional optical Ethernet link between low-Earth orbit and the ground. This technology transmits information faster than ever before, potentially supporting Earth’s needs while supplying needed capabilities as humans travel farther from Earth.

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Studying effects of space radiation on fertility

What We Learned: Space radiation did not affect mouse sperm DNA or its fertility and yielded normal offspring on Earth with the same success rate as ground controls.

Why It Matters: Sustaining life beyond Earth either on space stations or other planets requires a clear understanding of how the space environment affects mammalian fertility. Before this experiment, only non-mammalian reproductivity had been studied in space.

The Details: The Space Pup experiment sent mouse sperm samples to the International Space Station and returned the samples to Earth at different times, first at nine months, then two years and nine months, and finally after 5 years and 10 months (the longest time period any samples have been preserved in station biological research). The intent was to determine the effects of space radiation on DNA mutations. New results published in Science Advances from the experiment indicate that space radiation did not affect mouse sperm DNA or fertility and yielded normal offspring on Earth with the same success rate as ground controls.

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For daily updates, follow @ISS_Research, Space Station Research and Technology News, or our Facebook. For opportunities to see the space station pass over your town, check out Spot the Station.

Erin Winick Anthony
International Space Station Program Research Office
Johnson Space Center

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/five-ISS-research-results-deep-space-exploration#Back%20to%20List

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