• Astronaut Application Deadline Approaching
  Individuals interested in becoming America’s future space explorers have until Friday to submit their applications. The deadline to apply for NASA’s next astronaut class is Jan. 27.
• Virginia Students to Speak Live With Space Station Astronauts
  Students gathered at The University of Virginia College at Wise will speak with Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank and Flight Engineer Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station at 9:20 a.m. EST on Thursday, Jan. 26.

The International Space Station can be seen as a small object in upper left of this image of the moon in the early evening Jan. 4 in the skies over the Houston area flying at an altitude of 390.8 kilometers (242.8 miles). The space station can occasionally be seen in the night sky with the naked eye and a pair of field binoculars. Image credit: NASA/Lauren Harnett

This unusual image was photographed through the Cupola on the International Space Station by one of the Expedition 30 crew members. The lake just above the bracket-mounted camera at center is Egirdir Golu in Turkey, located at 38.05 degrees north latitude and 30.89 degrees east longitude. A Russian Soyuz spacecraft is docked to the station at lower right and part of the Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM) can be seen just above it. The photo was taken on Dec. 29, 2011. Image Credit: NASA

International Space Station Commander Dan Burbank captured spectacular imagery of Comet Lovejoy from about 240 miles above the Earth’s horizon on Wednesday, Dec. 21. Burbank described seeing the comet two nights ago as “the most amazing thing I have ever seen in space,” in an interview with WDIV-TV in Detroit. Last night he captured hundreds of still images of the comet. A selection of images is available at: http://www.NASA.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/gallery/index.html. Image Credit: NASA

• NASA’s Kepler Announcing Newly Confirmed Planets
  NASA will host a news teleconference at 1 p.m. EST, Tuesday, Dec. 20, announcing new discoveries by the Kepler mission.
• Station Crew Set To Launch To A New Home For The Holidays
  Just in time for the holidays, the residents of the International Space Station will welcome three new crew members.

The roundworm C. elegans. Credit: Heiti Paves, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Space explorers and science fiction authors have long dreamed of space colonization, of the day when the human species will inhabit distant planets. Habitable planets, however, lie beyond the roughly 1,200-mile-boundary of low Earth orbit (LEO), which humans have not flown past since the final Apollo mission in December 1972. Indeed, beyond-LEO travel is fraught with technological and logistical issues. And it poses significant challenges to human survival—problems that researchers are now addressing through studies in space with the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, an organism that shares 40 to 50 percent genetic similarity with humans and hence offers insight into potential impacts of distant space travel on human physiology.

In a recent paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, scientists from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada described an automated, remotely monitored culture system for growing C. elegans during long-duration LEO spaceflight. The scientists successfully tested the system in a six-month-long trial aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and now say that the automated system is ready for deployment on unmanned missions beyond LEO, to other planets, such as Mars.

The worms lived in specialized culture cells connected by peristaltic pumps and filled with a liquid medium that supported their survival. For launch and flight to the ISS, the worms were maintained in a growth-arrested state, which helped them resist stress. Once aboard the space station, they were revived through feeding and began to grow and reproduce. Their growth, reproduction, and movement in response to long-duration spaceflight were monitored and analyzed from a laboratory on Earth via remote uplink to cameras mounted on the culture cells. Hence, there was never any need for humans aboard the ISS to handle the cells.

The scientists observed C. elegans for 12 generations in space and compared their findings with their observations of Earth-bound worms, which served as controls. The comparisons revealed that long-duration flight aboard the ISS had no effect on worm development. In addition, when fully fed, space C. elegans demonstrated rates of movement comparable to their Earth counterparts, and when deprived of food, both populations showed similar declines in movement, which recovered to normal after feeding. The experiments demonstrated not only that C. elegans could serve as a biological model in long-duration spaceflight but also that a biological species could reproduce and grow normally under spaceflight conditions.

Unmanned missions using space worms as biological models offer key advantages to understanding the effects of long-duration, beyond-LEO travel on living organisms. For example, it is far less expensive and much safer to send worms into space instead of humans. In addition, the success of the liquid life-support system designed for C. elegans may help scientists conceive of new ideas for mechanisms of human life support and radiation shielding technologies, which will be required for space colonization. Radiation in space, in fact, is a significant threat to human health and survival.

While space colonization likely remains a long way off, the need to escape from Earth in the future may be real, and it may be approaching more rapidly than we suspect. As the world population grows and resources become scarce, and with another ice age possibly looming a few millennia ahead, the future of our species could someday depend on the human colonization of other planets.

This post was originally published in NaturePhiles on TalkingScience.org.

• Indiana Students Will Talk Live With Space Station Commander
  Students at the Westchester Intermediate School in Chesterton, Ind., will speak with Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank aboard the International Space Station at approximately 11:35 a.m. EST on Friday, Dec. 9.

• Space Station Astronaut Will Answer Video Questions From Public
  ASA has announced a unique opportunity to ask the commander of the International Space Station a question about his role on the orbiting outpost. Commander Dan Burbank will answer videotaped questions from the public during a live event tentatively set for Friday, Jan. 20 on NASA Television.
• Norah Jones, Astronaut Piers Sellers Featured in New NASA Spinoff Technology Public Service Announcements
  Much of the technology we rely on daily was developed by NASA for space exploration and then adapted or enhanced for use here on Earth. Singer Norah Jones and NASA Astronaut Piers Sellers talk about how some of the agency’s outstanding accomplishments in space are used to improve our life on Earth.

• Expedition 29 Commander Mike Fossum Available for Interviews
  Just back from his command of the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Mike Fossum will be available for live satellite interviews from 6 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. CST on Thursday, Dec. 1.
• NASA Awards Financial and Business Management Services Contract
  NASA selected Wichita Tribal Enterprises, LLC, of Houston to provide financial and business management services for the Office of the Chief Financial Officer and other entities at agency’s Johnson Space Center.

• NASA’s Hubble Observes Young Dwarf Galaxies Bursting With Stars
  Using its near-infrared vision to peer 9 billion years back in time, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered an extraordinary population of young dwarf galaxies brimming with star formation.
• New Space Station Crew Members Launch from Kazakhstan
  NASA astronaut Dan Burbank and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin launched to the International Space Station at 11:14 p.m. EST Sunday.