Space

After three postponements Thursday

NASA hopes the spacecraft will make it to Mars one day

The Italian engineered 'ISSpresso' can be sipped through a straw

If the only thing keeping you from joining the space program was a lack of decent coffee outside Earth’s orbit, you no longer have that excuse.

This week Italy sent astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti to the International Space Station with a specially designed espresso machine that works in zero-gravity.

Designed by Turin-based Lavazzo and engineering firm Argotec, the ISSpresso, pumps water under high pressure through the machine into a pouch, where it can be sipped through a straw.

Part of an international crew that arrived on the Russian Soyuz craft, Cristoforetti, 37, also a captain in the Italian air force, “will be not only the first female astronaut from Italy to go into space, but also the very first astronaut in the history of the conquest of space to savor an authentic Italian espresso in orbit,” the companies said in a statement.
If slurping hot coffee through a straw sounds less than ideal, more innovations are on the horizon, thanks to researchers in Portland, where coffee obsession rivals that in Italy.

On Monday a team at Portland State University presented a paper, The Capillary Fluidics of Espresso, detailing a way to enjoy espresso in space in a manner similar to the one on Earth – which is to say in a cup – by replacing the role of gravity with the forces of surface tension.

Espresso, noted the team, which included a member of NASA and also a high school student, “is distinguished by a complex low density colloid of emulsified oils. Due to gravity, these oils rise to the surface forming a foam lid called the crema …. To some, the texture and aromatics of the crema play a critical role in the overall espresso experience. We show how in the low-g environment this may not be possible. We also suggest alternate methods for enjoying espresso aboard spacecraft.”

Of equal importance, these impressive innovations mean that, should the ISS ever encounter life on other planets, aliens’ first experience of coffee will not be adulterated with pumpkin spice.

This article originally appeared at PEOPLE.com

A new theory predicts a new breed of cosmic wanderers

The idea that stars live in galaxies has been astronomy’s conventional wisdom since the 1920’s. It took a serious hit recently, though, when observers concluded that as many as half the stars in the universe might actually hover outside galaxies, flung off into the intergalactic void as collateral casualties when smaller galaxies merge to become large ones.

But while that discovery was startling, a new prediction posted online takes the finding to a whole new level. A significant number of stars, say Avi Loeb and James Guillochon, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, should not just be floating through intergalactic space: they should be screaming across the cosmos at absurdly high speeds. “We calculate that there should be more than a trillion stars in the observable universe moving at velocities of more than a tenth the speed of light,” says Loeb. That’s about 67 million m.p.h. (108 million k/h). And about ten million of those stars, he says, are moving at least five times faster than that.

High-velocity stars are not without precedent. Astronomers already knew of a handful of stars in the Milky Way that are moving at a million m.p.h (1.6 million k/h) or so, and which should eventually leave our galaxy. But this new class of speedsters—if they’re confirmed—would make those so-called hypervelocity stars look like garbage trucks lumbering along in the cosmic slow lane.

There’s reason to hope that the findings are validated, beyond the mere wow factor of the work. Astronomers currently study the origin and development of the universe by trapping particles in telescopes and detectors—photons of light, mostly, and also, more recently, the ghostly particles called neutrinos, which bear information about the stars, galaxies and quasars in which they originated. Superfast stars would be another sort of “particles,” albeit huge, shining ones, which could tell astronomers plenty about the conditions they’ve encountered since they escaped their galactic homes. “They give us the opportunity to do cosmology in an entirely new way,” he says, “with massive objects moving at near lightspeed across the universe.”

How they got moving so fast is the core of Loeb’s and Guillochon’s idea. Most galaxies harbor huge black holes in their cores, and when two galaxies merge to form one, those black holes end up circling each other in a tight do-si-do. Eventually, they too will merge into a single object, but as they approach each other, the complex gravitational interplay between them and the stars that orbit them exerts incredible force—and impart incredible speed. (Black hole interactions also give rise to hypervelocity stars within the Milky Way, but here there’s just a single black hole, and thus a lot less energy available.)

As the free-range, extra-galactic stars fly across the universe, their trajectories are bent by the gravity of galaxies they pass along the way. “It’s like a ball moving through a pinball machine,” says Loeb. “If we can reconstruct their trajectories back to their original host galaxies, we can test whether General Relativity [Einstein’s theory of gravity] acts the way we expect.”

You can do this only if you actually find the speeding stars—but Loeb is convinced it’s possible. “It’s challenging,” he admits, “but they could be detected with upcoming instruments.” Among them: the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and more, all of which are expected to come online by the end of this decade.

“The most exciting aspect,” Loeb continues, is that these need not be single stars.” They could be double stars, or even stars with planets. “If these planets are habitable,” says Loeb, “these would be the most exhilarating roller-coaster rides in the universe.”

While none of this can happen in our own galaxy at the moment, that’s just a temporary situation. The giant spiral galaxy M31, also known as Andromeda, is slowly approaching the Milky Way. In two billion years or so, they’ll smash together. When they do, the new, gigantic galaxy that emerges will at last be equipped with the twin black holes you need to build a cosmic slingshot.

What happens after that is anybody’s guess.

Smoked turkey with all the freeze-dried fixings

The printer's goal is to make spare parts and tools for the International Space Station

The first 3-D printer in space has borne its first object, NASA said Tuesday, and it’s a bit self-fulfilling.

The object, a replacement faceplate for the printer’s casing that holds its internal wiring in place, is one of about 20 objects that will be printed aboard International Space Station (ISS) over the coming weeks, the space agency said. The objects will then be sent down to Earth for analysis, the final step in testing the 3-D printer before establishing a permanent 3-D printing facility aboard the space station.

“This is the first time we’ve ever used a 3-D printer in space, and we are learning, even from these initial operations,” said Niki Werkheiser, project manager for the ISS’s 3-D printer. Creating the faceplate demonstrated how the printer is able to make replacement parts for itself, the agency added. “As we print more parts we’ll be able to learn whether some of the effects we are seeing are caused by microgravity or just part of the normal fine-tuning process for printing.”

Before its launch in June to the ISS, the 3-D printer had successfully completed a series of tests evaluating its ability to withstand take-off forces and to function properly in zero gravity. The goal is to create spare parts and tools to make the ISS less dependent on expensive resupply ships, in addition to improving crew safety.