#everybody on the team are named after mars probes

[verdemoth]

i’ve posted this set of guys together in a lineup but i never got around to sharing more about them individually, so i’m gonna do that!

Tune here is an original member of the EEG, one of the first researchers approached by Sojourner and Pathfinder, the founders, back when the whole operation was just some barely funded passion project, and the properties of the Otherworld were poorly understood. She was a team leader for decades up until he met a tragic demise on what should have been a routine mission. He’s since been declared M.I.A. (in truth she Stayed Alive Wrong)

-> Tune and Odyssey were queerplatonic partners. They met each other in their school years and hit it off quickly. They signed on with the project as a package deal and for years they were a team of two and both set out for field research and exploration, but following an Incident that injured them both, Odyssey left the field for a different role and the various teams were consolidated into one unit for safety reasons. As a precaution, future expeditions would need at least three active participants.

-> Tune was very confident and self-assured, and naturally fell into a leadership role within the new system. He had a knack for assessing and utilizing the strengths of her teammates and encouraging teamwork and communication.

-> In the early days they were quite cocky and perhaps a bit too reckless, but the decades of her employment with the EEG mellowed her out somewhat. What really drew her to the initial job offer was the thrill of adventuring in uncharted lands full of unknown dangers.

-> In general, Opportunity tended to prioritize the pursuit of knowledge above his own safety, though being in charge of a team who depended on her for their own well-being helped to balance out this impulse.

-> In that early incident, Tune received a concussion that had lasting effects in the form of frequent migraines and insomnia. She wasn’t very vocal about her struggles, and he was more inclined to push through the pain than slow down and wait for it to pass.

-> Age didn’t temper her active lifestyle, either. As she neared her 50s they were still up to shit like free climbing vertical cliffs to get a good vantage point (and for the fun of it).

-> She was up to just that, on a mission with her sibling Spirit and friend Curiosity when a terrible, unnatural storm hit without warning. The Otherworld had always been a turbulent place, the landscape and climate always changing, but the team’s experience and technology should have been enough to sense the shift coming, but it caught them unawares.

-> Tune and his two teammates lost contact with mission control and each other for more than an hour. When the storm cleared, Curiosity and Spirit and the two constructs accompanying them were all recovered, but no trace of Opportunity could be found. Reluctantly, the team came to the decision to abandon the search.

-> Opportunity still exists, in some form. They haven’t had a run in with her old team in the few years since her disappearance. Mentally she’s not all there, retaining only their instincts and basic desires. He’s generally passive, but whatever the storm did to him left them with a connection to the shifting terrain of the Otherworld, which responds to their presence and volatile feelings. She’s usually surrounded by a storm like the one that changed her. He wants to be found, but… if she encountered and recognized her team, it’s likely he would seek to drive them out with force in a misguided attempt to protect them from the Otherworld’s many hazards.

[aion-rsa]

How Netflix’s Away Became A Surprisingly Timely Tale of Human Connection

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The production team behind Netflix’s Away couldn’t possibly have known while they were making the show that it would release in the middle of a global pandemic, at a time when much of the world would be as isolated as any astronaut on a long journey. But sometimes, stories arrive precisely when people most need to hear them, and this heartfelt tale about the power of science and human connection feels right on time.

Away follows the aspirational story of the first manned trip to Mars on a spaceship called the Atlas, staffed by a diverse international crew from a variety of backgrounds. And though their eighteen-month journey to the Red Planet is full of conflict and life-threatening space crises, it’s the small gestures of kindness, patience, and trust that ultimately build bonds between them. After all, they’re literally all they’ve got. 

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In a time when our own humanity is struggling through a similar journey of pain and separation, Away is a remarkably comforting reminder that humanity’s best moments have always come when we work together in the service of something that is ultimately greater than ourselves.

“I’m just so moved that people are moved by the show,” showrunner Jessica Goldberg says. “From the response I’ve gotten from people from all walks of life and on Facebook and people [I] went to high school with, I do feel like it is touching a chord.”

Now more than ever before, viewers can relate to the idea of extended separation from family and friends – we’re living it every day thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. And the questions that Away poses about isolation and connection feel more relevant than ever in a world stuffed to the gills with Zoom calls and socially distanced birthday parties.

“We finished shooting, then we’re editing and then suddenly the world shut down. [Everything] just completely changed and the sort of probing question of how do we stay connected to each other felt all the more resonant,” Goldberg says. “I’m watching these episodes like, oh my gosh, this is how I’m talking to my mother on the iPad now.”

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Away Review (Spoiler-Free)

By Lacy Baugher

Away was initially inspired by a 2014 Esquire piece of the same name, which profiles astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year aboard the International Space Station.

“It’s so beautiful,” Goldberg says. “It’s about Scott Kelly on the space station when (Former Arizona Representative) Gabby Gifford – his sister in law – was shot. And he has this moment where he talks about how being in space is the best of humanity, and what happened on the ground is the worst of humanity.”

The Esquire piece was optioned by Jason Katims (Friday Night Lights, Parenthood) and Matt Reeves (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Felicity) who tapped playwright Andrew Hinderaker to pen a pilot installment. According to Goldberg, she was struck “by the idea of people coming together to promote exploration and science…the best of humanity” and signed on to take part. 

In our current era of Peak TV, the idea of hope can feel like something of an antiquated concept. The small screen is full of antiheroes and bleak plots, where the devils of humanity often triumph over its better angels. According to Goldberg, Away is a very deliberate answer to that kind of storytelling.

“Everybody’s going dark, so why not do the opposite?“ Goldberg says. “It’s not cynical, it’s not dystopian. [It’s a show] you can watch with your family. You can cry together.”

There’s always been a feeling of transcendence associated with space and the possibilities of exploring worlds beyond our own. (Looking at you, Star Trek!) And that sort of hopeful tone seems more necessary than ever right now.

“[We’re] in this moment where everything is so divisive,” Goldberg says. “We’re trapped in our homes, there’s a real feeling of helplessness. This [is a] fantasy of the world working together – for science, for ingenuity, the love that they have for their fellow man. It’s bursting with humanity.”

Over the course of the series, U.S. Commander Emma Green (Hilary Swank), must find common ground with a grizzled Russian cosmonaut (Mark Ivanir), an emotionally closed off Chinese chemist (Vivian Wu), a British botanist (Ato Essandoh) whose faith sustains him among the stars, and a second in command who may or may not have a crush on her (Ray Panthaki). Though these people initially have little in common beyond their status as astronauts, they must eventually learn to trust and rely on one another, if for no other reason than their lives may one day depend on doing so.

“Mike Massimino the astronaut [told us] it’s like war,” Goldberg explains. “When you go out into the field you have to know this person is going to have your back and carry you. Anything could happen out there.”

Though Away has yet to be renewed for a second season, it’s consistently high rankings in Netflix’s Top Ten are certainly an encouraging sign that this series is reaching a significant audience. And according to Goldberg, any season 2 will continue to explore similar themes of family, both found and biological; the excitement of exploration; and the power of science.

“Mars is like going to the Grand Canyon on crack, you know – the possibility for adventure, exploration, just [everything that] we could learn is so vast. And, now that we’re in these deep relationships with these characters, I want to know what’s going to happen to them, how their relationships with Earth are going to get more strained.”

But though the series’ first season was a warm tale of human connection, its future installments will, by necessity, take a darker turn. After all, the crew of the Atlas will not only have to survive on an alien and hostile planet, they’ll have to wrestle with the larger implications of what their exploration will ultimately reveal about our own future. 

“Telling a story like this, you also get into global warming eventually. The story Mars tells us about our own planet is so remarkable and so prescient and we have to look at Mars as that their atmosphere burned up. It once looked like Earth. What does that mean?”

Yet, if the first season of Away is any indication, this isn’t the sort of show that will lean into the innate hopelessness of that kind of story, but rather how we can solve it. In this world, Mars is more likely to point us toward our own salvation, rather than our destruction – and leave us all the better for it. 

The post How Netflix’s Away Became A Surprisingly Timely Tale of Human Connection appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[asfeedin]

How NASA engineers developed a ventilator for COVID-19 patients in just a month

Working as an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, David Van Buren usually spends his time designing and building instruments for space telescopes or robots that will explore other worlds in our Solar System. But for the last month, Van Buren and a group of his colleagues at JPL have been working on a project that is truly unexplored terrain for them: making a ventilator to help patients sick with COVID-19.

While Van Buren had some previous experience in medical engineering, he’d never designed a ventilator before. But he and his co-workers at JPL are used to making things they don’t have any experience making. In fact, they’re used to making things that no one has experience making.

“We’re used to looking at new problems … and figuring out how to do them.”

“When a scientist comes to us and says they want to go to a moon of Jupiter and drill into the ice and see what’s underneath, that’s something that’s never been done before,” Van Buren tells The Verge. “We’re used to looking at new problems — things people haven’t done before or at least that we haven’t done before — and figuring out how to do them.”

After a whirlwind 37 days of research, planning, and tinkering, a subset of engineers at JPL have created a prototype they’re calling the VITAL ventilator. A white digital box with a breathing tube attached, the ventilator is somewhere between the sophisticated high-end ventilators that the sickest patients need and a simple ambulatory bag that can be used as a temporary measure to quickly squeeze air into the lungs. The team didn’t want to interfere with the production of the more critical ventilators, so the VITAL ventilator is meant for the patients who still need breathing support but are not in the most dire conditions. It’s a temporary tool designed to last just three to four months in a hospital.

VITAL is tailored specifically for people with COVID-19, which helped to guide its design. “It’s pared down in all the things that it can do, to just retain those functions needed for COVID-19 patients,” says Van Buren.

The VITAL ventilator.

Image: NASA

Throughout January and February, Van Buren had been following the news about the spread of COVID-19 in China with growing concern. Pandemics have been on his mind ever since the outbreak of H1N1 in 2009 when his daughter had to be hospitalized because of the new flu strain.

When it became clear in early March that there was community spread of COVID-19 in Washington and California, Van Buren really started focusing on what he could do to help. Early models suggested that hospitals would not have enough capacity or equipment to handle the influx of COVID-19 patients. Van Buren figured JPL could be an asset in the fight. One day, he bumped into Rob Manning, JPL’s chief engineer, in the center’s cafeteria, and they started talking about what they could do. “We both had been thinking, given the circumstances, maybe the projects that we were spending our time on might not be the most important things we could be doing, given what we both recognized was about to happen,” Van Buren says.

“We more or less applied the pattern we apply when we build an instrument to land on Mars.”

Manning found money to form a small team, and the project kicked off on March 16th. The group contacted a pulmonologist named Michael Gurevitch who’s been working on ventilators for decades. He came in and told the team the exact requirements that were needed for ventilators, while a JPL employee took detailed notes on a giant whiteboard.

“We more or less applied the pattern we apply when we build an instrument to land on Mars and, say, drill through the surface and take measurements of what’s down below,” says Van Buren. “We engage with scientists. In this case, we engaged with the clinicians as to what exactly is needed, so that we can then engineer an instrument — or in this case, a ventilator.”

Eventually, other people at JPL joined the project, including Michelle Easter. Normally, she works on mechanisms known as actuators. These motors are used to deploy or rotate instruments like solar panels during a mission.

“Actuators are often a combination of mechanisms and electronics,” Easter tells The Verge. “And that’s exactly what the VITAL device is; it’s a mechanism that’s controlled by embedded electronics, and that type of design is something super comfortable for me.”

To make VITAL, the team tried to use as many common, off-the-shelf parts as possible, such as tubing, motors, valves, and electronics displays. That way, anyone manufacturing the device in the future wouldn’t need to special order anything needed for a more sophisticated ventilator. The team found that companies and vendors were eager to help provide supplies that could be scalable. And when they didn’t have what JPL needed, they gave them references.

“Companies were just opening up their Rolodexes and giving us the names of their competitors.”

“Companies were just opening up their Rolodexes and giving us the names of their competitors,” says Easter, “which is not what you think for a business mindset. But people threw all of the traditional competition out the window.”

Eventually, the team settled on the final VITAL design. Because the machine is tailored for COVID-19 patients, it’s focused on providing air delicately to stiff lungs — a hallmark symptom of the virus. Stiff lungs have a harder time expanding, so patients struggle to get enough air to breathe. VITAL is meant to provide enough air pressure to patients to inflate their lungs but not so much so that the lungs over-expand. The machine also works to ensure the lungs don’t completely deflate, either. COVID-19 patients have lung damage that makes the sides of their lungs inflamed and sticky. If all the air goes out of their lungs and the sides touch each other, they might stick together and make it even harder to open back up again. So VITAL tries to keep the lungs slightly inflated whenever patients exhale.

JPL is equipped with various test facilities, such as a giant vacuum chamber used to subject spacecraft to extreme environments.

Image: NASA

Now that the team has a working prototype, they’ve moved on to environmental testing with the device. Whenever NASA sends a spacecraft to another world, each vehicle must be subjected to extreme conditions — such as wide-ranging temperatures, intense vibrations, loud sounds, and more — to see if it can withstand the harsh environment of space. Many of those same tests are needed to qualify medical equipment, too, and JPL has the facilities to run them, including a giant vacuum chamber and setups to shake hardware rigorously.

“We build spacecraft not medical devices, but there are so many similar elements, because they both have to be extremely high reliability systems — for different reasons,” says Easter. “For spacecraft, once you put it up in space, you will never be able to go and fix it. So we have to verify that it’s absolutely perfect and works exactly as we expect in all conditions. Then, of course, for the medical devices, we’re connecting this to a human; we have to verify that we’re not going to hurt a person. They’re both very, very important.”

Since the Food and Drug Administration is encouraging organizations to create new devices quickly to combat COVID-19, many of the tests usually required to certify equipment are no longer needed. But JPL still has to do elevation testing with VITAL to see if the machine will work in places like Denver, for instance. They also need to do electromagnetic interference testing, which will determine if VITAL can operate normally if someone is, say, talking on a cellphone nearby.

“We build spacecraft not medical devices, but there are so many similar elements.”

On April 30th, JPL received word from the FDA that VITAL will receive an emergency use authorization. Now that they have approval, the team will send the design off to companies that can produce VITAL en masse and deliver the ventilators to hospitals in need. “We don’t do production,” says Van Buren. “We do make one or two of a kind, and we send them off to Mars or Saturn or somewhere. And so we have engaged a couple of companies to help us understand the mass production aspects.”

It’s unclear how the team will proceed when the VITAL ventilator is shipped out into the world. Many of the people on the team put their normal projects on pause to get this ventilator ready as soon as possible. They’ll likely go back to designing interplanetary space probes very soon, but they’ve been buoyed by their brief stint in the medical world.

“I think everybody on the team is just so grateful that we have something positive to contribute in our brainpower and our teamwork,” says Easter. “It definitely helps us to feel empowered in an otherwise powerless kind of situation.”

Update April 30th, 6:30PM ET: This article was updated to indicate that the VITAL ventilator had received emergency use authorization from the FDA.

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Tags: COVID19, developed, Engineers, month, NASA, patients, ventilator

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Cassini Sends Its Final Signal To Earth As It Plunges Into Saturn

Well, here we are. After 293 orbits of Saturn and more than 3,000 scientific papers, Cassini has finally sent its somber farewell. But it will leave behind it a vast and incredible legacy of discovery that shook our understanding of our place in the universe.

At 7.55am EDT (12.55pm BST), Cassini sent its final transmission to Earth. While we'll never know for sure what happened next, it's predicted that the spacecraft then broke apart about a minute later as it traveled into the atmosphere of Saturn. Its final swan song was a streak of light as it was destroyed at the end of its Grand Finale mission.

“The spacecraft's final signal will be like an echo,” Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.

The last signal from Cassini. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Cassini was purposefully destroyed because, as it runs out of fuel, scientists don’t want the spacecraft to accidentally crash onto one of Saturn’s moons that could host life. Ironically, it’s thanks to Cassini that we know some of these moons could be habitable.

But in its 13 years orbiting Saturn, the mission has been an astounding success. Discovery after discovery has told us incredible things about Saturn and its moons, and let’s not forget the cavalcade of pictures we have been treated to for more than a decade.

The idea for the Cassini mission was first dreamed up in 1975 when the US National Research Council (NRC) suggested an in-depth exploration of the Saturnian system. By 1982, a proposal to develop a Saturn orbiter and Titan probe was submitted to NASA and ESA, called Project Cassini.

A stunning image of Saturn taken by Cassini in 2013. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The project itself marked a shift in US-European relations. Europe’s close ties with Russia had pushed them away from the US, but this mission promised to mend some of their differences. That was one of the reasons it was able to survive several challenges in Congress in the early 1990s.

“The successful launch of Cassini-Huygens was regarded as a miracle by some involved in the mission,” notes US-European Collaboration in Space Science. “The mission was very ambitious and its implementation was risky.”

Ambitious was certainly the word. Cassini would not only become the first spacecraft to ever orbit Saturn, it would also carry a small lander – the Huygens probe. This would attempt to touch down on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, regarded as one of the most Earth-like places in the Solar System.

On October 15, 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission lifted off on board a Titan IVB rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Following flybys of Venus, Earth, and Jupiter, it finally arrived at the Saturnian system on July 1, 2004, to uncover its secrets. And few could have predicted what it would discover.

Cassini launched on October 15, 1997. NASA/JPL-Caltech

“If you were to stack Cassini up against all over missions ever flown, the only one you could say did more is Voyager,” Trina Ray, Senior Science Systems Engineer for the Cassini team at NASA, told IFLScience. “Cassini has far surpassed its original goals.”

Those original goals were extensive. Cassini, the size of a car, was expected to study Titan, Saturn’s magnetosphere, its icy satellites, its ring system, and the planet itself all in its four-year primary mission. A delicate dance of orbits made this possible, as did the Huygens lander. Subsequent mission extensions have only increased the goals.

On Christmas Day 2004, Huygens was released from the Cassini spacecraft. It entered the atmosphere of Titan on January 14, 2005, descending to the surface with the help of a parachute, where it returned the first ever images from the surface of a world in the outer Solar System. Huygens remains our only landing ever in this region.

Huygens returned images of smoothed pebbles, likely caused by liquid. By bouncing radio waves off the ground on Titan, Cassini was later able to discover the presence of vast lakes and seas on its surface, made up of liquid hydrocarbons. Aside from Earth, Titan is the only world we know to have bodies of liquid on the surface.

Cassini used radar to study bodies of liquid on Titan. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Arguably Cassin’s greatest discovery came back in 2005. This was when it first spotted plumes of icy particles coming from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. This astounding discovery proved there was an ocean of liquid water under this moon, with the plumes providing an incredible opportunity to directly sample it.

“Everybody was just blown away,” said Ray, recounting the moment she first heard about it in February 2005. “We thought something had gone wrong with one of the instruments. We were like, ‘what? There are cracks that are hot, and the material above them is water? Are you kidding me?’”

Such was the excitement around Enceladus that NASA is already looking into sending a mission back there in the future – the tentatively named Enceladus Life Finder. It’s thought the ocean may have some of the conditions necessary for life. This spacecraft would seek to work out if that’s true.

The spacecraft also took a close-up look at the bizarre two-toned moon Iapetus, revealing that material as black as tar on one side may be dust from another moon, Phoebe. And it also revealed the aurora of Saturn.

“I think my fondest memory of the Cassini mission was realizing that we had passed through the source of Saturn Kilometric Radiation, radio emissions associated with Saturn's auroras,” Bill Kurth from the University of Iowa, a member of Cassini's Radio Plasma and Wave group (Radio and Plasma Wave group), told IFLScience.

“This represented the first time such a radio source region had been sampled directly other than at Earth.”

The discovery of plumes at Enceladus astounded scientists. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Cassini has fulfilled dozens of objectives. But a couple have eluded it. One is that we still don’t know how long a day is on Saturn because we aren’t quite sure about the structure of its magnetic field. The other is that we don’t know the true mass of the rings. It’s hoped these Grand Finale orbits may provide some answers.

The mission has continuously required innovations, as Cassini could only carry 12 instruments. One that's rather incredible is that mission scientists used Saturn’s rings to study the planet’s interior. Looking at patterns within the rings, and monitoring movement within them, it’s been possible to describe movements taking place within Saturn.

Just because the Cassini mission is coming to a close, however, it does not mean the mission is over. Once the mission ends on September 15, scientists will spend another year archiving all the remaining data from the mission. It could then be decades before researchers have finished publishing papers from this data. There’s a long way to go.

Saturn's rings have been seen in glorious detail by Cassini. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Understandably, though, the end of this groundbreaking mission is a heartfelt occasion. “It’s hard to see something that is such a huge part of your life come to an end,” said Ray, who has worked on the mission for 21 years. “It’s like a neighborhood. People have gotten married and had kids, and they have gone to college. And all the big surprises from Cassini are done. It’s a sad time. It’s bittersweet.”

Cassini’s demise leaves just one spacecraft orbiting a planet in the outer Solar System – NASA’s Juno spacecraft around Jupiter. No other spacecraft to this region is currently in the works, although there are numerous ideas.

With attention seeming to focus on the Moon and Mars at the moment, it’s vital to remember how important and groundbreaking planetary science is. Cassini’s end should not be mourned but celebrated, a reminder of how a little cooperation can reap a huge reward. Wherever we go next, Cassini will be a benchmark every other mission can only dream of matching.

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