NASA has chosen its first commercial partner for a proposed space station, known as the Lunar Gateway, to be built near the Moon. On Thursday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Maxar Technologies would build the first component of the Gateway—the power and propulsion element. Like the name suggests, it will provide electricity to the Gateway and help move it around.

“This time when we go to the Moon, we’re actually going to stay,” Bridenstine said in making the announcement. He has characterized the Gateway, which will be positioned in a high, elliptical orbit balanced between the Earth and Moon’s gravity, as a reusable “Command Module.” Under NASA’s current plans to land humans on the Moon by 2024, this is where astronauts will launch to from Earth before climbing aboard pre-positioned landers to take them down to the lunar surface.

Despite the fanfare Thursday—Bridenstine provided an hour-long overview of NASA’s ambitious Moon plans at the Florida Institute of Technology for a relatively simple contract award—the announcement represents a continuation of a Lunar Gateway plan that was initiated under the Obama administration. The Obama space plan involved using the Gateway as a stepping stone toward Mars, but now the Trump administration is pivoting toward the lunar surface.

There has been a somewhat heated debate in the aerospace community about whether such a Gateway, which adds to the delta-v energy needed to reach the lunar surface, helps or hinders NASA’s efforts to build a sustainable deep-space exploration program. Thursday’s announcement left no doubts about the project’s embrace by the White House, meaning the Gateway concept has successfully survived a transition from one president to another.

Gateway could grow

The contract announced Thursday is worth a maximum of $375 million. Intriguingly, Maxar said Blue Origin and Draper will join the team in designing, building, and operating the spacecraft. Such a partnership raises the possibility that the power and propulsion element, which will weigh about 5 tons fully fueled, could be launched on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.

During a teleconference with media, Maxar’s Mike Gold said the company would choose a commercial rocket for the power and propulsion element launch in the next 12 to 18 months. Most likely, New Glenn is the favored launch vehicle, however, Maxar is protecting itself in case that rocket is not ready to fly in 2022 when NASA wants this hardware in space. (At present, Blue Origin is working toward a 2021 launch date of the powerful rocket, but large rocket projects often slip to the right).

The Gateway is a unique piece of hardware for NASA in that it will form the cornerstone of its first deep-space outpost. The station will use solar electric propulsion to maintain its orbit and have the ability to maneuver into other orbits around the Moon. Before humans visit the Gateway in 2024, the space agency plans to add a small “habitat” module.

Over the course of the 2020s, NASA may expand the Gateway with other modules, including those provided by international partners. Officials said the electricity from the power and propulsion element’s solar panels would be more than enough to accommodate Gateway expansion.

Most of our building practices aren’t especially sustainable. Concrete production is a major source of carbon emissions, and steel production is very resource intensive. Once completed, heating and cooling buildings becomes a major energy sink. There are various ideas on how to handle each of these issues, like variations on concrete’s chemical formula or passive cooling schemes.

But now, a large team of US researchers has found a single solution that appears to manage everything using a sustainable material that both reflects sunlight and radiates away excess heat. The miracle material? Wood. Or a form of wood that has been treated to remove one of its two main components.

With the grain

Wood is mostly a composite of two polymers. One of these, cellulose, is made by linking sugars together into long chains. That cellulose is mixed with a polymer called lignin, which is not really a single polymer. The precise chemical formula of its starting material can vary among species, and it typically contains multiple places where chemical bonds can form, turning the polymer into a chaotic but extremely robust mesh.

Lignin creates a lot of problems for biofuels production, since its variability makes it difficult to digest (cellulose, by contrast, can be broken down into simple sugars given time). But lignin provides a toughness to wood that cellulose alone wouldn’t.

Or at least cellulose wouldn’t in its native form in wood. The new chemical treatment essentially removes the lignin from wood. The precise nature of the process isn’t mentioned in the paper, which suggested it might be nightmarishly complex or involve extremely toxic chemicals. But a check of the supplemental material shows that the process involves dumping the wood in concentrated hydrogen peroxide and boiling it. While I wouldn’t want to drink boiling, concentrated hydrogen peroxide, it’s not an especially difficult chemical to handle safely.

Based on the description of lignin, you’d expect the resulting wood would be weaker. But the chemically treated wood is then compressed. With no cells or lignin to keep them apart, the many oxygen/hydrogen groups that hang off sugars are free to interact with each other, creating a dense hydrogen bonding mesh. This ultimately makes the material much stronger than wood (though the researchers don’t compare its strength to that of pressure-treated lumber, which is also stronger than untreated wood).

There are myriad ways to measure toughness: resistance to bending, stretching, impacts, etc. The researchers measured a number of these, and the modified wood came out ahead of untreated wood by large margins—anywhere from three to 10 times wood’s value. Strikingly, for at least one of these measures (tensile strength), it edged out some types of steel and titanium. All of which means that it should be possible to use this material in places where wood wouldn’t normally be considered.

It’s cool stuff

But rather than simply being structurally useful, the wood has some properties that could make it extremely useful as cladding, covering the exterior of a building. While most of the cellulose fibers are aligned along the grain of the wood, that alignment is very rough—there’s plenty of variability in their orientation. That means light that strikes the processed wood will bounce around within a dense mesh of cellulose fibers, scattering widely in the process. The end result is a material that looks remarkably white, in the same way a sugar cube looks white even though each sugar crystal in it is transparent.

As a result, the material is really bad at absorbing sunlight, and thus it doesn’t capture the heat in the same way regular wood does.

But it gets better. The sugars in cellulose are effective emitters of infrared radiation, and they do so in two areas of the spectrum where none of our atmospheric gases is able to reabsorb it. The end result is that, if the treated wood absorbs some of the heat of a structure, wood can radiate it away so that it leaves the planet entirely. And the wood is able to do so even while it’s being blasted by direct sunlight; the researchers confirmed this by putting a small heater inside a box made of the treated wood and then sticking it in the sunlight in Arizona.

In the heat of the day, a square meter of the wood could radiate away about 16W of power. At night, that figure shot up to 63W, for a 24-hour average of 53 Watts per square meter. At mid-day, if there was no source of heat in the box, its ambient temperature was over 4°C lower than the surrounding air. This is all the result of the fact that the treated wood emits energy in the infrared more efficiently than it absorbs energy in the visible wavelengths.

Around the country

What could this do for a building? To find out, the researchers used a model of a typical apartment building that included sources of heat like lights and occupants and tracked radiative heat transfer using ray tracing. They then placed the building in 16 different US cities and tracked its energy balance over the course of a year using historic weather data. In cities in the West and South, like Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, the material cut down on the amount of energy needed for cooling considerably.

The researchers estimate that covering an apartment building with the treated wood could save about 35 percent of the energy used for cooling. In a dense urban setting, that number goes up to over half. Plus, it also has the strength to handle some of the internal structure of the building. And while forestry can create environmental issues, it is certainly possible to manage it in a way that is sustainable.

All of which makes the wood—the researchers refer to it as “cooling wood”—a very promising looking material. So it’s no surprise to see that three of the team members behind the new paper have a patent out to commercialize the tech.

Science, 2019. DOI: 10.1126/science.aau9101  (About DOIs).

The First Trailer for STAR TREK: PICARD is Here!

The first trailer for CBS All Access’ Star Trek: Picard is here, and Picard is no longer a part of Starfleet. But why? I guess we’ll have to watch the series to find out!

[CBS All Access]

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Scientists think they’ve stumbled on a new cache of water ice on Mars — and not just any ice but a layered mix of ice and sand representing the last traces of long-lost polar ice caps.

That’s according to new research based on data gathered by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the Red Planet since 2006 and has just marked its 60,000th trip around Mars. On board the spacecraft is a radar instrument that can see about 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) below the planet’s surface — and in that data, scientists see lots and lots of ice.

“We didn’t expect to find this much water ice here,” lead author Stefano Nerozzi, a doctoral student in geology at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, said in a statement released by the American Geophysical Union, which published the new research. “That likely makes it the third largest water reservoir on Mars after the polar ice caps.”

Related: Mars’ South Pole May Hide a Large Underground Lake

That is a lot of water. And the sheer amount of water ice in the area is backed up by a second study done by an overlapping team of scientists. That research used gravitational data about Mars collated by NASA from several of its missions to the Red Planet. But by this technique, too, the region comes up chock-full of water ice — enough that if you melted it down and spread it evenly around the planet, it would flood Mars by about 5 feet (1.5 meters).

Even more intriguingly, it isn’t pure ice — the radar instrument picked up several different ice surfaces within the region in a pattern that suggests alternating bands of ice and sand.

If that finding holds up, these layers might represent the remains of ice caps that ornamented Mars’ poles hundreds of millions of years ago. If that, too, is the case, the layers could be evidence of how the Martian climate has warmed and cooled over the eons in response to tiny changes in the planet’s orbit and tilt.

(Image: © NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

The new research also helps scientists map out where water resources can be found on Mars — and that’s vital to inform the search for life, since if there is life or its traces, they are most likely near water.

“Understanding how much water was available globally versus what’s trapped in the poles is important if you’re going to have liquid water on Mars,” Nerozzi said. “You can have all the right conditions for life, but if most of the water is locked up at the poles, then it becomes difficult to have sufficient amounts of liquid water near the equator.”

The instrument that spotted the layers isn’t the only radar instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. A second device on board has also peered below the Red Planet’s surface, and in July, a team of scientists published findings suggesting a lake of very salty water buried under a mile (1.6 kilometers) of ice at the south pole of Mars.

The research suggesting layered deposits and the research supporting the estimated volume of ice is described in two papers published today (May 22) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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