Latest news with #xenon
Gizmodo
3 days ago
- General
- Gizmodo
NASA Switches to Backup Fuel Line After Psyche Thruster Glitch
Less than two years after launch, NASA's Psyche spacecraft experienced a glitch in its propulsion system that's now jeopardizing its mission to explore a unique metallic asteroid in the main belt. NASA engineers, ever resourceful, implemented a fix for the spacecraft's unexpected drop in pressure by switching to a backup line—one they hope will help Psyche reach its namesake asteroid. Earlier in April, the team of engineers with the Psyche mission detected an unexpected decrease in fuel pressure in the spacecraft's propulsion system. The issue needed to be resolved before mid-June, otherwise it would have affected the spacecraft's trajectory towards the Psyche asteroid. After investigating, the team recently switched from the primary propellant line to a backup that NASA says is identical. The Psyche spacecraft remains on course to rendezvous with the asteroid in August 2029. Psyche's thrusters, powered by two large solar arrays, ionize and expel xenon gas to gently propel the spacecraft, according to NASA. The spacecraft began firing its thrusters in May 2024, but just over a year later, engineers detected a pressure drop in the line that delivers xenon gas to the thrusters—from 36 pounds per square inch (psi) to about 26 psi, according to NASA. After the sudden drop in pressure, the team paused the four electric thrusters as they investigated the issue. NASA's engineers ran extensive tests and diagnostic work and found that a part inside one of the valves, which opens and closes to manage the flow of propellant, stopped functioning the way it was designed to. As a result, the glitchy valve was obstructing the flow of xenon to the thrusters. The team then switched to the backup fuel line and will command the spacecraft's thrusters to resume firing by mid-June. The mission's engineers will keep the backup line's valve in the open position to 'ensure propellant flow and avoid any potential mechanical issues in the future,' NASA wrote. The mission is scheduled for a Mars flyby in spring 2026, using the planet's gravity to slingshot the spacecraft toward the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. If all goes well, the spacecraft will enter asteroid Psyche's orbit in late July 2029 and begin its mission in August of the same year. Psyche launched in October 2023, beginning a 2.2 billion-mile journey to a metal-rich asteroid located in the main belt. Its journey has been a long time in the making, and had run into issues even before its liftoff. The mission was originally scheduled to launch in 2022, but an issue with the spacecraft's flight software delayed the mission until its next launch window the next year. The spacecraft's flight software controls its orientation and trajectory, as well as its ability to send and receive data to Earth. A week before its original launch date on October 5, 2023, engineers discovered an issue with the Psyche spacecraft's thrusters that could have caused it to overheat during its eight-year mission. As a result, the mission's liftoff date was delayed by one week as the team resolved the issue. Psyche is a 140-mile-wide (226-kilometer) asteroid that may be the stripped-down core of a shattered planetesimal, one of the building blocks that come together to form a planet. If the mission manages to reach the asteroid, it will become the first to explore an asteroid of its kind. We're rooting for you, Psyche.
CBC
5 days ago
- Health
- CBC
Xenon gas could speed Everest treks. There's concern it could also leave climbers dangerously unprepared
When Canadian Chris Dare attempted to climb Mount Everest in 2019, one of the challenges he faced was a serious overcrowding problem. There were so many people making the attempt that the final push to the summit of the world's highest mountain took twice as long as expected due to bottlenecks, which he says made the climb far more dangerous. Eleven people were killed on the mountain during that year's climbing season. But after a team of British climbers who had inhaled xenon gas recently made headlines for reaching the summit in five days, the B.C. resident is worried the issue could be made significantly worse. Making the mountain easier to summit, Dare told CBC News, will likely attract more climbers, "exacerbating the already serious overcrowding problem." That potential problem is just one of many issues being raised around the use of the gas by mountain climbers. 5 days to climb Everest Xenon is a colourless and odourless gas found in very small amounts in the Earth's atmosphere and is known to have some anaesthetic properties and medical uses, like helping to diagnose lung problems, according to the Mayo Clinic website. Mountain guide Lukas Furtenbach said last week that he and a team of British climbers had inhaled xenon gas before embarking on an expedition where they climbed the 8,848 metre peak of Everest less than five days after departing London. The climbers spent months preparing, Furtenbach told The Associated Press upon his return to Kathmandu. He said they slept in hypoxic tents that simulate high-altitude conditions, underwent a xenon gas treatment at a clinic in Germany just two weeks before heading to Nepal and used supplemental oxygen during their climb. Climbers normally spend weeks at base camp to allow their bodies to adjust to the higher altitude. To prepare their bodies for the lower air pressure and lower level of oxygen available at the top of Everest, they make practice runs to the mountain's lower camps before beginning their final attempt to reach the peak. "Climatization is a process in which the body adapts to a high-altitude environment and makes kind of physiological changes to allow you to function in a hypobaric, hypoxic environment," said Dr. Rob Casserley, a British doctor who works in Quebec and has scaled Mount Everest eight times. Dare says he believes more studies are needed on the use of xenon to aid climbers. "It just seems very, very risky at this onset, right at the beginning," he said. "It's really hard for me to think about ... using a new type of technique. What type of safety protocol is involved with that?" He's also concerned that if climbers come to rely more on xenon gas, they'll forgo the training needed to make such climbs and discover too late that their pre-acclimatization efforts didn't necessarily work. As a result, climbers' bodies may not be ready to deal with the lack of oxygen at high altitudes, which means they could develop altitude sickness and end up with fluid build-up in the lungs (pulmonary edema) and swelling of the brain (cerebral edema), he said. "You're not training the traditional way of being on the mountain for a month and a half, two months to acclimatize in the natural environment." 'Great psychological risk' Casserley says the advantage of a longer expedition is that it allows climbers to acclimatize over time. That means they become stronger and more "street-wise and savvy on the mountain," he said. In 2015, he survived avalanches on Mount Everest that were triggered by an earthquake in Nepal. He says climbing Everest is about 90 per cent psychological and 10 per cent physical. "You start putting in people who've just come cold turkey out of their normal environment, I think it will put them at great psychological risk of having some kind of meltdown and not having the skills necessarily to get themselves down in a kind of so-called disastrous situation," Casserley said, noting that this could endanger a lot of people. He also questions the science around using xenon gas to aid climbers, noting that there's been some evidence that it can increase erythropoietin (EPO), the hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells, which in turn increases the capacity of blood to carry oxygen in the body. And that could possibly lead to enhanced athletic ability that would allow people to scale a mountain at a faster rate. But he says that so far, there's only anecdotal evidence that the gas is performance enhancing. (In 2014, the World Anti-Doping Agency added xenon gas to its list of banned substances after claims surfaced that it can be used by athletes to help boost performance.) Climbers' observations shouldn't be dismissed Dr. Peter Hackett, a high-altitude researcher at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who has also scaled Mount Everest, says Furtenbach's observations shouldn't be dismissed. "I trust observations of experienced and skilled climbers. They know their bodies. They know how they react to high altitude," Hackett said. "If they thought there was a difference with the xenon, then I think it's upon science to try to find out if that's really true." But he says it's also important to stress that Furtenbach's crew slept in hypoxic tents for three months before they went to the mountain and also used oxygen on the mountain, two things that are already known to make a big difference. To say xenon on its own was responsible for their quick ascent is "misinformation," he said. Hackett noted that Ukrainian climber Andrew Ushakov claims to have recently climbed Everest from sea level to the summit in a record four days with supplemental oxygen and pre-acclimatization in a hypoxic tent, but without the use of xenon. "He did even better than these other guys," Hackett said. He says the idea that xenon gas might be useful in high altitudes because it could increase red blood cells and protect vital organs from low levels of oxygen hasn't been shown in studies. "There's no science to say that this works at high altitudes for climbers, and there's no science to say that it doesn't." Hackett says it's worth researching the effects of xenon, but not because it could be a way for climbers to scale mountains faster.
New York Times
27-05-2025
- Health
- New York Times
They Inhaled a Gas and Scaled Everest in Days. Is It the Future of Mountaineering?
Climbing Mount Everest typically takes weeks, with most of that time spent at the foot of the mountain adjusting to the thin air. But four British men last week shrank that timeline dramatically, traveling from London to the summit and back in less than a week, according to the organizer of their expedition. They skipped the adjustment period, in part, by inhaling a secret weapon: xenon gas. Their feat has roiled the world of mountaineering and prompted an investigation by the Nepalese government, as use of the gas is fiercely debated. Some research has shown that xenon can quickly acclimatize people to high altitudes, even as some experts say the benefits, if any, are negligible and the side effects of its use remain unclear. Organizers said the gas was key to the speed of the climb, but their approach has prompted a broader debate that strikes at the core of mountaineering: Should scaling Mount Everest, one of sporting's greatest accomplishments, be made easier — available to more people during a quick vacation — with the help of a performance enhancer? 'It is a provocation, especially for traditional mountaineers, who feel bad about this idea that you can climb Everest in less than a week,' Lukas Furtenbach, who organized the exhibition, said in a phone interview from the base of the mountain. 'This showed that it can work.' Mr. Furtenbach said that beginning in 2026 he planned to offer two-week round-trip excursions to Mount Everest using xenon gas, cutting the typical time needed to scale the mountain by several weeks. 'This can be the future of commercially guided mountaineering on Mount Everest,' he said. With Xenon, 'you feel better.' For those who live at lower elevations and have traveled to the mountains, the discomfort of altitude sickness is all too clear. Symptoms include nausea, headaches and disrupted sleep, and in some cases it can lead to brain swelling, or even death. As you go higher, less oxygen is absorbed into the bloodstream with each breath. That is why so many people who climb Everest use supplemental oxygen. Xenon, an odorless gas, has been known for years to activate a molecule called the hypoxia-inducible factor, which is also turned on when people acclimate to low oxygen, said Hugh Montgomery, a professor of intensive care medicine at University College London and a mountaineer who led an expedition to Mount Everest to study how humans respond to low oxygen. 'So what these people claim to have done,' he said, 'is basically found a way to switch on the adaptation to low oxygen levels.' The group took what was known from medical science, he said, 'and have now applied it, recreationally, to sport mountaineering.' Professor Montgomery said scientists were still unsure how xenon triggers this response. While some doctors have used the gas in the past to 'precondition' patients to low oxygen levels — for example, before major heart surgery — the practice hasn't really caught on because 'it hasn't been as protective as one would hope,' he said. Mike Shattock, a professor of cellular cardiology at King's College London, said 'xenon probably does very little and there is virtually no reputable scientific evidence that it makes any difference.' Experts also cautioned that self-medicating with xenon, which has the effects of anesthesia, could lead to overdose or death, and more study was needed to understand how the gas works and its use in mountaineering. On Mount Everest, the weeks of training and acclimation on the lower levels of the mountain are typically required to survive the 'death zone,' the area above 26,000 feet where the air is particularly thin. The British group, which included four former special forces members, took a different approach. About 10 weeks before the expedition, the men began sleeping in hypoxic tents, which lower oxygen levels in the air and gradually acclimatized the hikers to conditions on Mount Everest, Mr. Furtenbach said. While hypoxic tents have been used by some climbers for years, the big innovation for the British expedition came two weeks before the excursion, when the men flew to Limburg, Germany, outside Frankfurt, where a doctor, Michael Fries, had been experimenting with inhaled gases in his clinic. The men wore masks hooked up to ventilators as an anesthesiologist slowly introduced higher levels of xenon into their systems. Mr. Furtenbach, who has tried xenon gas on his own mountaineering trips since 2020, said that after the treatment, users experienced enhanced breathing and the sensation of more lung volume, and 'when you do your workout or training, you feel better.' After arriving at the base of Everest, the British group climbed to the summit in less than three days, which Mr. Furtenbach said was one of the fastest times for a group that hadn't acclimatized on the mountain. (According to the Nepalese government, the record for the fastest climb overall is held by Lakpa Gelu, a Sherpa, who reached the top of the mountain in just under 11 hours.) The rapid climb by the British expedition and the use of the gas caught the eye of the Nepalese government, and the fallout has been swift. The use of the gas is 'against climbing ethics.' Himal Gautam, the director of Nepal's tourism department, which is responsible for regulating expeditions on the nation's mountains, said in an interview that using the gas was 'against climbing ethics,' and that it would hurt the country's tourism industry and the Sherpas who help climbers by reducing their time on the mountain. Mr. Gautam said his department was looking into the use of the gas by the British climbers, one of whom, Alistair Carns, is also a member of Parliament. In an interview, Mr. Carns said that his expedition has been in touch with the ministry, and clarified with the department that it had not taken the gas on the mountain. He added that many people who want to climb Mount Everest don't have the time to spend multiple weeks acclimating. 'The reality is if I had six to eight weeks to climb Everest, I would, but I'm a government minister and I don't have time,' he said. 'What we've done is we've proven that you can reduce the timeline safely.' Others in the mountaineering community have warned against the use of the gas. In January, the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation, a global network that promotes and protects the sport, released a statement that said there was no evidence that xenon gas improved performance, adding that 'inappropriate use can be dangerous.' The federation noted that xenon has been on the World Anti-Doping Agency's list of banned substances since 2014 and is not approved in all countries. 'From a medical point of view, off-label use without a scientific basis and with unknown health risks must be rejected,' the statement said. Mr. Furtenbach argued that his expeditions were still using Sherpas — five accompanied the British climbers to the summit — and that shorter times on the mountain were safer, as they reduce the chance that climbers will be exposed to other health threats, including avalanches, hypothermia or falls. He said the prohibition of the gas by the World Anti-Doping Agency didn't apply to mountaineering because it is not a regulated competitive sport. Use of the gas gets at a core question about why people climb big hills in the first place, Professor Montgomery said. 'Is it really a good idea that we can all have what we want, when we want, as quick as we want?' he asked. 'Are we missing out on the sacrifice you sometimes have to make to get the achievement?' 'I'm not a critic,' he added. 'But maybe just bagging every hill at speed means you miss out on the joy you could have had.'
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Daily Mail
British MP makes history as he scales Everest just five days after leaving London using gas to help acclimatise for ascent that usually takes two months
A British minister has climbed to the summit of Mount Everest in just five days, thanks to a special gas that dramatically cut his prep time and allowed him to make a record-breaking ascent. Al Carns, the UK's veterans minister, was seen alongside a group of ex-British Special Forces soldiers at the top of the world's tallest mountain on Wednesday. They waved the Union Jack from the peak. An ascent normally takes two months to prepare for, as climbers have to acclimatise their bodies to deal with thin air at the top of the Nepalese mountain. Carns said the climb was 'off the scale of a challenge'. He added: 'Now that we have done the biggest, I am never doing another mountain again.' But the Labour MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, a former regular and a current Royal Marines Reserves colonel who was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in Afghanistan, used xenon gas to massively cut down their acclimatisation time. Carns' team said they inhaled xenon gas at a German clinic two weeks before the expedition to prevent altitude sickness, and prepared with tents that simulated the lack of oxygen at high altitudes. Research has suggested that xenon can increase the body's production of a protein that fights hypoxia, which can increase the chances of survival on a mountain that has claimed the lives of countless people. Carns told the Sun before the climb: 'This is like a Special Forces mission. We have the best people, the best training, the best kit and we are at the very cutting edge of science. We'll go in, hit the objective and leave no trace, no waste.' The mountain has a 'death zone' above 8,000 metres, where oxygen levels are so low that the body struggles to function, causing sickness, cognitive impairment and exhaustion that can rapidly lead to death. Though the minister's climb, believed to be the fastest anyone has climbed Everest without acclimatisation, was done in order to raise £1 million for British military charities, the Nepalese government has criticised the use of xenon gas. 'We are investigating the travel agency and the climbers who used xenon gas for scaling everest,' Narayan Prasad Regmi, Nepal's tourism chief, told The Telegraph. 'We will summon them, including the British minister, and take action as deemed fit under the law,' he added. Regmi said that xenon gas has never been used by climbers in Nepal, and that legislation needed to be brought in to clarify its legality. 'All climbers and expedition organisers are required to declare the substances and equipment they use,' Regmi said. Furtenbach Adventures, the Austria-based company that organised the climb, defended the use of the gas. Founder Lukas Furtenbach said: 'There was no breach of any Nepali regulation. What happens outside Nepal should not be under the purview of the Nepal government.' He added: 'It makes the climb safer and shorter while ensuring climbers are properly acclimatised, unlike those who rely solely on oxygen from Base Camp without prior acclimatisation, which is extremely dangerous.' Furtenbach claimed that shorter trips had the benefit of being more environmentally friendly, as fewer resources are used and left behind on the mountain. But Rajendra Bajgain, a Nepalese MP, said these short-duration climbs aided by xenon gas 'will hurt our mountain economy'. He claimed: 'These quick summits reduce the need for local sherpas, guides and kitchen staff, cutting off vital income for rural communities who have long depended on traditional expeditions. It will collapse the support ecosystem.'
The Independent
21-05-2025
- The Independent
A renowned mountain guide puts clients on Everest summit less than a week after they left London
An expert mountain guide successfully put four of his clients on top of Mount Everest on Wednesday less than a week after they left London, one of the fastest ascents on record of the world's highest peak. The four British climbers flew from London to Kathmandu on May 16 and reached the 8,849-meter (29,032-foot) summit Wednesday morning local time, according to Lukas Furtenbach, who has been using different methods over the past five years to speed up the climb. The climbers had put in months of preparation, training in hypoxia tents and undergoing xenon gas treatment at a clinic in Germany before heading to Nepal. 'Xenon improves the acclimatization and protects the body from altitude sickness and the effects from the hypoxic environment. Xenon makes the climb safer," Furtenbach told The Associated Press from the base camp at Everest. He said all the climbers were safe and returning back to lower camps after the successful ascent on Wednesday Climbers normally spend weeks at base camp to acclimatize to the higher altitude. They make practice runs to the lower camps on Everest before beginning their final attempt on the peak, so that their bodies are prepared for the low pressure and lower level of oxygen available. The new method is likely to reduce the time climbers spend out of their home countries and cut the number of days they need to take off work, also cutting down on expenses. Nepal does not have any rules on how many days climbers must spend acclimatizing or making practice climbs. Their permits, which cost $11,000 each, are valid for 90 days. Climbing season normally wraps up by the end of May, when the weather deteriorates and monsoon season begins. The ropes and ladders fixed to the mountain are then pulled out. Hundreds of foreign climbers have been given permission to climb Everest this year. Roughly half of them have succeeded and the remaining will likely attempt their climb within the next few days.
