Performance Risks During Surface Extravehicular Activity and Potential Mitigation Using Multimodal Displays.

BACKGROUND: Surface extravehicular activity (sEVA) will be a critical component of future human missions to the Moon. sEVA presents novel risks to astronaut crews not associated with microgravity operations due to fundamental differences in task demands, physiology, environment, and operations of working on the lunar surface. Multimodal spacesuit informatics displays have been proposed as a method of mitigating sEVA risk by increasing operator autonomy.METHODS: A formalized literature review was conducted. In total, 95 journal articles, conference papers, and technical reports were included. Characteristics of U.S. spacesuits were reviewed, ranging from the Apollo A7L to the xEMU Z-2.5. Multimodal display applications were then reviewed and assessed for their potential in aiding sEVA operations.RESULTS: Through literature review 25 performance impairments were identified. Performance impairments caused by the spacesuit represented the greatest number of sEVA challenges. Multimodal displays were mapped to impairments and approximately 36% of performance impairments could be aided by using display interfaces.DISCUSSION: Multimodal displays may provide additional benefits for alleviating performance impairments during sEVA. Utility of multimodal displays may be greater in certain performance impairment domains, such as spacesuit-related impairments.Zhang JY, Anderson AP. Performance risks during surface extravehicular activity and potential mitigation using multimodal displays. Aerosp Med Hum Perform. 2023; 94(1):34-41.

Reproductive condition of the black-lip pearl oyster Pinctada margaritifera during the lunar phase.

This study analyzed the relationship between the lunar phase and the reproductive cycle of Pinctada margaritifera inhabiting Weno Island, Chuuk Lagoon, Micronesia. We measured indicators of maturity (gonadosomatic index [GSI] and sexual maturation-related genes) and investigated changes in the gonadal maturity stages (GMS) of P. margaritifera over lunar cycle. GSI was higher around the full moon. GMS of P. margaritifera were classified as the early gametogenesis stage, ripe and spawning stage, and spent and degenerating stage. A large percentage of oysters was observed in the ripe and spawning stage at the first quarter moon in female and the full moon in male as well as in the spent and degenerating stages at the third quarter moon in both sexes. In addition, the expression of doublesex- and mab-3-related transcription factor 2 (DMRT2) in the male P. margaritifera black-lip pearl oyster was the highest during the full and third quarter moon phases, whereas no difference in expression was observed with the lunar phase in females. In contrast, the expression of vitellogenin (VTG) was the highest in female P. margaritifera during the first and third quarters. No difference in expression was observed according to the lunar phase in males. The results suggest that the lunar phase directly affects the expression of sexually mature gonads in P. margaritifera black-lip pearl oyster.

Home ranges, directionality and the influence of moon phases on the movement ecology of Indian flying fox males in southern India.

Flying foxes of the genus Pteropus are amongst the largest fruit bats and potential long-range pollinators and seed dispersers in the paleotropics. Pteropus giganteus (currently P. medius) is the only flying fox that is distributed throughout the Indian mainland, including in urban and rural areas. Using GPS telemetry, we mapped the home ranges and examined flight patterns in P. giganteus males across moon phases in a semi-urban landscape in southern India. Home range differed between the tracked males (n=4), likely due to differences in their experience in the landscape. We found that nightly time spent outside the roost, distance commuted and the number of sites visited by tracked individuals did not differ significantly between moon phases. In 61% of total tracked nights across bats, the first foraging site was within 45˚ of the emergence direction. At the colony-level, scan-based observations showed emergence flights were mostly in the northeast (27%), west (22%) and southwest (19%) directions that could potentially be related to the distribution of foraging resources. The movement ecology of fruit bats in relation to the pollination and seed dispersal services they provide requires to be investigated in future studies. This article has an associated First Person interview with the first author of the paper.

Human challenges to adaptation to extreme professional environments: A systematic review.

NASA is planning human exploration of the Moon, while preparations are underway for human missions to Mars, and deeper into the solar system. These missions will expose space travelers to unusual conditions, which they will have to adapt to. Similar conditions are found in several analogous environments on Earth, and studies can provide an initial understanding of the challenges for human adaptation. Such environments can be marked by an extreme climate, danger, limited facilities and supplies, isolation from loved ones, or mandatory interaction with others. They are rarely encountered by most human beings, and mainly concern certain professions in limited missions. This systematic review focuses on professional extreme environments and captures data from papers published since 2005. Our findings provide an insight into their physiological, biological, cognitive, and behavioral impacts for better understand how humans adapt or not to them. This study provides a framework for studying adaptation, which is particularly important in light of upcoming longer space expeditions to more distant destinations.

Full Moons and Helicopter Emergency Medical Services (HEMS) Activations in The United States.

A long-standing misconception in emergency medicine is that full moons are associated with increased patient volume. Although there has been ample work debunking this belief, virtually no scholarship has tackled this question from the perspective of helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS). We examined a national-level database populated by EMS agencies throughout the United States (NEMSIS) and compared three-day periods containing every full moon in 2019 with control three-day periods one week immediately before and one week immediately after a given full moon. The daily average number of HEMS activations was then compared. A significant increase was defined as full moon periods having at least 20% more HEMS activations than the control periods before and after the full moon. In 2019, full moons had a daily average of 496 HEMS activations, and non-full moon periods had a daily average of 510 HEMS activations. Furthermore, no months saw full moons having a significant increase in HEMS activations. Our data provides important support for the idea that full moons do not translate into increased HEMS activations.

Recent developments in space food for exploration missions: A review.

Food and nutrition have greatly influenced the effectiveness of space exploration missions. With the development of technology, attention is now being paid more and more to preparing food for the microgravity environment, taking into account factors like nutrient density, shelf life, optimized packaging, preservations, innovations, challenges, and applications. The spectrum of food products is designed to meet the balanced nutritional requirements, reduce hazards encountered by astronauts, and utilize space in explorers during space missions. For the long duration of space missions and, consequently, for human permanence in space, it is crucial to provide humans with an adequate supply of fresh food to meet their nutritional needs. By doing this, astronauts could reduce the health risks associated with psychological stress, microgravity, and radiation exposure from space. Maintaining astronauts' health, happiness, and vitality during long-duration human-crewed missions has recently emerged as an essential and critical research area. The food they eat appears to be an important factor. For short-term space missions, astronauts' food could be brought from earth. Still, for long-term space missions to the Moon, Mars, and other distant missions, which are the current research destinations, they must find a way to eat, such as by cultivating plants or finding other means of survival. Scientists and researchers are attempting to develop novel food production technologies or systems that require minimal inputs while maximizing safe, nutritionally balanced, and delicious food outputs for long-duration space missions that could benefit people on earth. This review summarizes various aspects of space food, including evolution, innovations, technological advancements to prolong shelf life, and astronauts' problems. It also involves current research, including space foods like 3D printing and space farming for a long-term space mission.

The MaMBA facility as a testbed for bioregenerative life support systems.

The Moon and Mars Base Analog (MaMBA) is a concept for an extraterrestrial habitat developed at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) in Bremen, Germany. The long-term goal of the associated project is to create a technologically functioning prototype for a base on the Moon and on Mars. One key aspect of developing such a prototype base is the integration of a bioregenerative life support system (BLSS) and its testing under realistic conditions. A long-duration mission to Mars, in particular, will require BLSS with a reliability that can hardly be reached without extensive testing, starting well in advance of the mission. Standards exist for comparing the capabilities of various BLSS, which strongly focus on technological aspects. These, we argue, should be complemented with the use of facilities that enable investigations and optimization of BLSS prototypes with regard to their requirements on logistics, training, recovery from failure and contamination, and other constraints imposed when humans are in the loop. Such facilities, however, are lacking. The purpose of this paper is to present the MaMBA facility and its potential usages that may help close this gap. We describe how a BLSS (or parts of a BLSS) can be integrated into the current existing mock-up at the ZARM for relatively low-cost investigations of human factors affecting the BLSS. The MaMBA facility is available through collaborations as a test platform for characterizing, benchmarking, and testing BLSS under nominal and off-nominal conditions.

A changing thermal regime revealed from shallow to deep basalt source melting in the Moon.

Sample return missions have provided the basis for understanding the thermochemical evolution of the Moon. Mare basalt sources are likely to have originated from partial melting of lunar magma ocean cumulates after solidification from an initially molten state. Some of the Apollo mare basalts show evidence for the presence in their source of a late-stage radiogenic heat-producing incompatible element-rich layer, known for its enrichment in potassium, rare-earth elements, and phosphorus (KREEP). Here we show the most depleted lunar meteorite, Asuka-881757, and associated mare basalts, represent ancient (~3.9 Ga) partial melts of KREEP-free Fe-rich mantle. Petrological modeling demonstrates that these basalts were generated at lower temperatures and shallower depths than typical Apollo mare basalts. Calculated mantle potential temperatures of these rocks suggest a relatively cooler mantle source and lower surface heat flow than those associated with later-erupted mare basalts, suggesting a fundamental shift in melting regime in the Moon from ~3.9 to ~3.3 Ga.

VOILA on the LUVMI-X Rover: Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy for the Detection of Volatiles at the Lunar South Pole.

The project Lunar Volatiles Mobile Instrumentation-Extended (LUVMI-X) developed an initial system design as well as payload and mobility breadboards for a small, lightweight rover dedicated for in situ exploration of the lunar south pole. One of the proposed payloads is the Volatiles Identification by Laser Analysis instrument (VOILA), which uses laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to analyze the elemental composition of the lunar surface with an emphasis on sampling regolith and the detection of hydrogen for the inference of the presence of water. It is designed to analyze targets in front of the rover at variable focus between 300 mm and 500 mm. The spectrometer covers the wavelength range from 350 nm to 790 nm, which includes the hydrogen line at 656.3 nm as well as spectral lines of most major rock-forming elements. We report here the scientific input that fed into the concept and design of the VOILA instrument configuration for the LUVMI-X rover. Moreover, we present the measurements performed with the breadboard laboratory setup for VOILA at DLR Berlin that focused on verifying the performance of the designed LIBS instrument in particular for the detection and quantification of hydrogen and other major rock forming elements in the context of in situ lunar surface analysis.

High abundance of solar wind-derived water in lunar soils from the middle latitude.

Remote sensing data revealed that the presence of water (OH/H2O) on the Moon is latitude-dependent and probably time-of-day variation, suggesting a solar wind (SW)-originated water with a high degassing loss rate on the lunar surface. However, it is unknown whether or not the SW-derived water in lunar soil grains can be preserved beneath the surface. We report ion microprobe analyses of hydrogen abundances, and deuterium/hydrogen ratios of the lunar soil grains returned by the Chang'e-5 mission from a higher latitude than previous missions. Most of the grain rims (topmost ~100 nm) show high abundances of hydrogen (1,116 to 2,516 ppm) with extremely low δD values (-908 to -992‰), implying nearly exclusively a SW origin. The hydrogen-content depth distribution in the grain rims is phase-dependent, either bell-shaped for glass or monotonic decrease for mineral grains. This reveals the dynamic equilibrium between implantation and outgassing of SW-hydrogen in soil grains on the lunar surface. Heating experiments on a subset of the grains further demonstrate that the SW-implanted hydrogen could be preserved after burial. By comparing with the Apollo data, both observations and simulations provide constraints on the governing role of temperature (latitude) on hydrogen implantation/migration in lunar soils. We predict an even higher abundance of hydrogen in the grain rims in the lunar polar regions (average ~9,500 ppm), which corresponds to an estimation of the bulk water content of ~560 ppm in the polar soils assuming the same grain size distribution as Apollo soils, consistent with the orbit remote sensing result.

Biological rhythms: Hormones under moon control.

Grass puffers are fish that engage in mass spawning controlled by the phase of the moon. A new study shows that prostaglandins released by males and females fine tune these events. In addition, regulation of gnrh1 by a transcription factor expressed in a semilunar rhythm suggests a timing signal for the long-term coordination of gonadal maturation.