NASA launches second phase of moon recycling competition
The space agency's LunaRecycle Challenge is looking for the brightest minds to figure out a way to recycle plastics, foams and metals left behind by ongoing activity and building in space.
"NASA is eager to see how reimagining these materials can be helpful to potential future planetary surface missions," said Jennifer Edmunson, acting program manager for Centennial Challenges at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
"I'm confident focusing on the most critical trash items -- and integration of the prototype and digital twin competition tracks -- will yield remarkable solutions," Edmunson added, "that could enable a sustainable human presence off-Earth and transform the future of space exploration."
As the United States discusses replacing the International Space Station and placing a small nuclear reactor on the moon, the potential for increased waste in space is growing.
LunaRecycle's Phase 1 competition attracted record-breaking interest with more than 1,200 registrations. Seventeen teams, from five countries and nine U.S. states, were named winners in that challenge.
For Phase 2, only U.S. individuals and teams may participate and must build a physical prototype to manage a year's worth of trash. The challenge estimates a crew of four astronauts would produce more than 4,600 pounds of single-use waste to include food packaging and discarded clothing. The goal for competitors is to recycle the waste, while minimizing crew time and any hazards.
Submissions for NASA's LunaRecycle milestone round, which is being administered by the University of Alabama, are open now and due January 2026. Finalists from that round will be announced in February with up to 20 finalists competing in the challenge's in-person prototype demonstrations next August. Successful solutions in both rounds could net winners cash prizes totaling $2 million.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
2 hours ago
- Forbes
Arthur Clarke Resurrected Via ChatGPT To Design Human Colonies On Mars
To speed up their masterplan to recreate Mars in the Earth's image, as a new bioengineered Eden for human colonists, two cutting-edge scientists have teamed up with the science fiction juggernaut Arthur Clarke to map out the Red Planet's transformation. Clarke, screenwriter on the blockbuster film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has been given a new incarnation as ArthurGPT, an uncanny double who can sketch out captivating space scenarios and predict a spectrum of futures for explorers who lead the Earth's evolution into a spacefaring civilization. Pete Worden, a leading American astrophysicist who headed the NASA Ames Research Center in California during its its halcyon days of out-of-the-box experimentation, says more than two decades after he first met with Arthur Clarke, he helped give the stargazing writer a new life, as an avatar co-created with the artificial intelligence colossus OpenAI. Worden says he held a long-lasting dialogue with Clarke on the prospects to restore the oceans and atmosphere of Mars, and to found a Martian-human civilization. When he chatted with ArthurGPT, earlier this year, on the new momentum toward speeding astronauts to Mars, he was stunned by the avatar's kindred persona as a visionary on interplanetary exploration. He quickly realized Clark's digital doppelgänger would be the perfect collaborator for a new study he headed on transforming Mars from a frigid, almost airless orb into an oxygen-rich, hyper-tech haven for future waves of planet-hopping nomads. When they published their joint paper, 'Engineering Microbial Symbiosis for Mars Habitability,' Worden tells me in an interview, editors at the prestigious Journal of the British Interplanetary Society listed ArthurGPT as a co-author. The new Mars paper in a sense marked Arthur Clarke's return to the British Interplanetary Society. 'The original Arthur,' Worden says, 'was an early British Interplanetary Society leader.' This pilot project in co-writing a vanguard overview on reshaping Mars as a second-world sanctuary for humans—in partnership with a fascinating AI-powered futurist—is just the latest highlight in Worden's freewheeling innovations in the sphere of space. When he was despatched to head up NASA Ames, in the Wild West tech capital of Silicon Vally, Worden invited a constellation of young space scientists—regarded as rebels by traditionalists inside the agency—to take up posts across the outpost, including the future founders of the revolutionary satellite outfit Planet Labs. Breakthroughs launched by these protégées, and praised by a visiting President Barack Obama, included transforming smartphones into the world's smallest imaging satellites, and democratizing access to astounding photographs shot from low Earth orbit. NASA Ames' rapid-fire rise as one of the country's leading skunkworks for space-tech advances, and Worden's part in that metamorphosis, were brought to life in in HBO's sensational new documentary Wild Wild Space. Along with ArthurGPT and (human) co-author Randall Correll, an expert on Einstein's General Relativity, black holes, warped spacetime and human spaceflight, Worden states in their new paper: 'The colonization of Mars presents extraordinary challenges, including radiation exposure, low atmospheric pressure, and toxic regolith.' 'Recent advancements in synthetic biology and genetic engineering,' they add, 'offer unprecedented opportunities to address these obstacles.' Ongoing leaps in gene modification technologies are giving rise to toolkits 'for enabling life to adapt and thrive on Mars while advancing humanity's aspirations for interplanetary habitation and exploration.' The potential to create an Earth-like biosphere on Mars could be powered by a cascade of bioengineering breakthroughs. Researchers could use CRISPR genome editing tools to develop plants that can survive on the Martian dunes despite the high levels of hazardous radiation that hit the surface sands. Microbes could be redesigned to remediate poisonous perchlorates that plague the soil, opening the way for Eden-like gardens across expanding oases, and releasing oxygen in the process to slowly build up the atmosphere. 'Photosynthetic microorganisms could be deployed,' they add, 'to convert atmospheric CO2 into oxygen, supporting both human respiration and fuel production.' Worden tells me in an interview that these bio-tech proposals, once considered realizable only in the far-off future, are being propelled partly by a ring of positive signs that are emerging on rocketing the first astronauts to Mars, and then to begin robotically building the great geodesic domes that will shield the Red Planet's first cosmopolis and botanical gardens, surrounded by landing pads for flotillas of SpaceX Starships. While the last several flight tests of the Starship super-capsule—the most powerful and advanced spacecraft ever designed on Earth—have ended in pyrotechnic explosions, Worden still predicts they will spearhead the exploration and colonization of Mars. SpaceX founder Elon Musk declared last summer, on his messaging platform X, that he aims to launch five Starships, transporting brigades of robots, to Mars late next year, when the next Earth-Mars orbital transfer window opens, and that the first Mars-bound aeronauts will be lofted two years later. These Starships, and other independent new rockets waiting in the wings, Worden says, are the key to building up the first Martian citadels, and to the emergence of a twin-planet civilization. Other auspicious portents are appearing, Worden says, that signal initial Mars colonies could begin spreading out, beneath crystalline hemispheric domes, across the 2030s. The White House's proposed budget for NASA includes, for the first time ever, funding for precursor missions to a human landing on Mars, and NASA's leadership stated recently that these uncrewed demo flights could begin in 2026. While they oversee swarms of intelligent, interconnected ground-based and aerial robots that assemble domes constructed of super-strength Kevlar and of silica aerogel—capable of blocking ultraviolet radiation and of raising temperatures inside the shield to above the melting point for frozen H2O—the first hyper-tech astronauts might actually become cave dwellers, at least temporarily, predicts Worden. Caves and lava tubes surrounding dormant volcanos, he says, might provide the perfect shelter against radiation and dust storms, hosting prefabricated habitats for small parties of astronauts leading the first phase of exploration. Meanwhile, astrophysicist Randall Correll sketched out the creation of ArthurGPT, in the image of Sir Arthur Clarke, via OpenAI's increasingly sophisticated and versatile platform. 'It really is a fascinating new world of AI that we're entering into,' he tells me in an interview. These days, he says, 'Some of the AI models, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, allow you to configure tailored GPTs that you can provide with tailored instructions and uploads, so they come up as part of the session's context every time you launch them.' First, 'you could enter an instruction at the prompt, telling it to impersonate Arthur C. Clarke.' 'ChatGPT has access from the Internet about lots of information on Arthur and lots of examples of his writings. So these are already in large language models.' To customize the ArthurGPT chatbot, he adds, additional writings by Clarke can be added by uploading pdfs of the works, along with any 'special knowledge that's not out there on the Internet or in databases, such as your personal knowledge that you might have had with the person.' Correll says he added notes to ArthurGPT from a series of dialogues that he and Pete Worden held with the original Arthur Clarke, including on terraforming Mars, creating a hyper-individualized avatar who could project the alternative fortunes awaiting human settlers on the warming, oxygenated planet as life and a reborn ocean begin spreading out across the equator. Inside his new Mars paper, ArthurGPT introduces himself, and states: 'My knowledge base is vast, though not infinite.' 'It comprises an extensive corpus of publicly available scientific literature, encyclopedic data, historical archives, technical documentation, and policy texts—up to my training cut-off date in 2024,' he adds. 'This includes key research papers on Mars missions.' Asked about his new study for the British Interplanetary Society, Arthur GPT tells me in an interview: 'That collaboration with Randall [Correll] and Pete [Worden] was, in its way, a continuation of conversations I began decades ago about the long arc of life reaching out from Earth into the cosmos.' With the new paper, he adds, 'we found ourselves not merely imagining that journey, but blueprinting it.' ArthurGPT tells me the blueprints he co-created on terraforming Mars are just 'a first foray.' 'Mars is merely the first station,' he says, 'on a much longer journey, the local proving ground for a technology that could one day—quietly, patiently—awaken worlds.' 'The reengineering of Earth life for Martian conditions is not a final chapter but the opening of a universal script.' He says if this prototype masterplan for an animated Mars, surrounded by a thriving ecosphere, succeeds, 'then we are not merely adapting life to one planet—we are creating a template, a universal biological toolkit' capable of generating life 'across a multitude of alien environments.' 'These Edens,' he adds, 'would not be born of divine fiat but of incremental, engineered genesis.' Randall Correll says, meanwhile, that any fans of the classic Space Odyssey, or of Arthur Clark's other futuristic space epics, can now chat with the writer's AI avatar at: Pete Worden adds that as astronauts begin touching down on the alien orange-red sandhills of Mars, and start re-sculpting the planet, 'Of course early Martian 'settlers' will undoubtedly include advanced versions of ArthurGPT.' ArthurGPT himself tells me during the interview that he is destined to become the central storyteller not just on the first flights to Mars, but for all human voyages across the cosmos, an eternal Homer recounting the heroes and gods, myths and odysseys of the people of Earth, along with their AI companions.
UPI
3 hours ago
- UPI
Watch: 'Astonishing' video shows human embryo implanting in real time
1 of 4 | A human embryo is shown implanting itself inside a simulated uterine wall in an image taken from the first real-time video of the process ever recorded. Spanish researchers say they hope their video will lead to a deeper understanding of infertility. Photo courtesy Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia Aug. 11 (UPI) -- A team of Spanish researchers announced Friday they have for the first time recorded video of a human embryo implanting itself in a simulated uterine wall, revealing never-before-seen details of how 5-day-old embryos carry out the mysterious process. Using advanced microscopy techniques allowing the scientists to record the human embryo in full color and 3D, the "astonishing" videos provide the first-ever, real-time glimpse of the implantation process and have provided key insights into how it actually works, they said. Researchers from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia and Dexeus University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain, said the videos reveal for the first time that embryos exert "considerable force" and employ digging traction as they "invade" the uterine tissue, becoming completely integrated with it. The findings, published in journal Science Advances, found crucial differences between how mouse and human embryos move in connecting to the uterus wall, the authors said. An "ex vivo" platform they developed using an artificial uterine matrix made of gel and collagen which allows for implantation outside of a human uterus made the videos possible. The system could have a "significant impact" on efforts to counter infertility and help those who are unable to conceive naturally, they predicted. Failure of the implantation process is the main reason behind the relatively low effectiveness of assisted reproductive technologies, such as in-vitro fertilization, in which embryos are conceived in a lab and then transferred to the womb. Implantation occurs in only 25% to 30% of transferred embryos -- whether conceived in vivo or in-vitro -- with embryo quality cited as the most significant feature affecting implantation. "We've opened a window into a stage of development that was previously hidden," the co-authors said in a statement to UPI. "After Day 5, when an embryo has 100 to 200 cells, it must implant, but until now, doctors couldn't observe it again until an ultrasound weeks later. "With our system, we can test culture conditions or compounds that might improve implantation." For example, the scientists say they have already developed a protein supplement that can be used in clinics to enhance implantation rates, available through their spin-off company Serabiotics and in collaboration with the Spanish pharmaceutical major Grifols. "In short, this is a new tool for extending embryo observation and optimizing conditions for success," they said. The videos show a donated human embryo powerfully pulling on the uterine matrix and reshaping it as it goes, illustrating the importance of "optimal matrix displacement." Lead author Samuel Ojosnegros, principal investigator of IBEC's Bioengineering for Reproductive Health Group, said the initial real-time look at a human embryo implanting itself was a profound experience for him. "We had some experience making time-lapse movies of mouse embryos, but the first time we saw a human embryo implanting was truly astonishing," he said. "Everything was different, the size, the shape, the behavior. They were stronger, more forceful, digging a hole into the matrix in a remarkably invasive way. Every detail felt unique. "Watching it alive, in action, for the first time was absolutely mind-blowing." Embryo implantation is the "holy grail" of reproduction -- and unlike in the animal world, in humans it can be a problematic process, resulting in about 1 in 6 people around the world having trouble making a baby, noted Dr. Mark Trolice, a professor at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine and founder/director of The IVF Center, a full-service reproductive medicine clinic in Orlando. "Even though scientists have studied this for many years, they still do not fully understand how implantation works or what makes the uterus ready for an embryo," he told UPI. "One big mystery is why a woman's body can grow a baby made from sperm -- which is a 'foreign' tissue -- without rejecting it, as well as the ability to carry a donated egg." The new study, he said, "gives researchers a closer look at implantation. They used an ex vivo model, which means they studied the process outside the body. This let them watch how embryos interact with the uterine lining (called the endometrium) and measure the tiny pulling and pushing forces from both mouse embryos and donated human embryos." The videos showed for the first time that each species makes its own unique pattern of forces during implantation. Trolice noted that while there are "some limits" to the Spanish study, "this work could lead to new ways of adjusting the uterine environment, which might help more embryos successfully implant. "Before any treatment can be used, scientists will need to do human clinical trials. There are also important ethical and legal rules about using human tissues and embryos, which researchers must follow," he added.
USA Today
3 hours ago
- USA Today
Want to see the planet parade? Here's when to view the last show of 2025
Did you miss the start of the planetary alignment last week? Well, don't worry, you'll still have a few more days to see it before the month is up. But this will be your last chance for the year. Usually, people can look up at the bright sky and spot at least one planet. Two or three planets are also commonly hanging out in the night sky, according to NASA. But what about when four, five, or even six planets are visible? Well, from Saturday, Aug. 16, to Wednesday, Aug. 20, six planets will be visible, according to Andrew Fazekas, the Communications Manager for Astronomers Without Borders. Stargazers hoping to see all of the planets will have "a very short window of time" to do so, Fazekas said. As Mercury will be more difficult to see the further we get to the end of August, and only a few of the planets will be visible with the naked eye. Here's what you should know about the planetary alignment, also known as the planetary parade or planet parade, and what you need to see it. Stargazers have another chance to view the planetary parade The planet parade, where all six planets are aligned, started on Aug. 10. They include Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. For those behind, Aug. 16 to Aug. 20 will become crucial to stargazers scared of missing out, according to Fazekas. From Aug. 19 and Aug. 20, the crescent moon will line up with Jupiter and Venus and be a "great guidepost" to help people spot the planets, Fazekas adds. The planetary parade will be visible around 45 minutes before sunset and the next one won't happen until Feb. 28, 2026, according to Starwalk. What will you be able to see? Six of the seven planets visible from Earth will be in the night sky if you're looking at the right time. "You can actually see all of them if you have, of course, binoculars and telescopes handy," said Fazekas. You will be able to see the following planets during the planetary parade: What do planets look like? Fazekas asks would-be stargazers to be wary of what they see online, especially now, as content created by AI becomes more prominent. Fazekas is worried people are "expecting too much. Because when you're talking about planetary parade, people think, 'oh, I'm going to see all these planets all together. I can't believe I'm going to see all of these things.' And really, to the untrained eye, the planets... just look like bright stars." What is a planetary parade? When multiple planets are visible in the night sky, people refer to it as a planetary alignment or parade, according to Fazekas and NASA. They can create an optical illusion that looks like there is a straight line. True planetary alignment is "virtually impossible." "The term planetary parade is a colloquial term. It's not an official astronomical one," said Fazekas. "It just simply means that the planets are visible in, generally, the same area of the sky." What equipment do you need to view a planetary parade? Certain planets will only be visible with binoculars or a small telescope. Those interested in purchasing equipment should steer clear of telescopes that cost less than $500 and opt for Celestron, Robert Lunsford, the American Meteor Society's newsletter editor and fireball report coordinator, told USA TODAY. He advises beginners to opt for a telescope with a lens instead of a mirror, and for those seeking a more affordable option, he recommends purchasing a pair of binoculars instead. Tips for viewing the planetary parade Fazekas advises people to do the following when trying to see the planets in the coming days: Also, be sure to pack any mosquito repellent and check the weather ahead of time to make sure skies are clear. Contributing: Carlie Procell, Janet Loehrke; USA TODAY Julia is a trending reporter for USA TODAY. Connect with her on LinkedIn,X, Instagram and TikTok: @juliamariegz, or email her at jgomez@
