Category: Science

WASHINGTON — SpaceLogistics, a satellite-servicing firm owned by Northrop Grumman, announced June 20 it has three confirmed orders for its Mission Extension Pods that will fly to orbit on servicing missions in 2025.

Intelsat ordered the third and last pod available on the debut mission of the company’s new servicing spacecraft, called Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV).

Australian communications satellite operator Optus was the first customer to sign up for the Mission Extension Pods, which are propulsion jet packs that add six years to the life of geostationary satellites. Intelsat in April said it purchased one of the pods, followed by today’s announcement that it ordered a second one. 

The MRV has two robotic arms developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA in 2020 signed an agreement with Northrop Grumman allowing the company to use the robotic payloads on the MRV in exchange for access to technology demonstrations and program data. 

The robotic arms will install the jet packs on Optus’ and Intelsat’s communications satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit. 

The MRV is the successor to SpaceLogistics’ Mission Extension Vehicles (MEVs) that are currently docked with two Intelsat spacecraft providing life-extension services. 

Intelsat’s latest order for the MEP “completes the launch manifest for our first tranche of MEPs and underscores the demand for our services,” Rob Hauge, president of SpaceLogistics, said in a news release.

MRV launched pushed to 2025

SpaceLogistics had previously projected a 2024 launch for the MRV. The company said June 20 that both the MRV and MEPs have completed their critical design reviews and are proceeding toward a planned 2025 launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. 

“While this order wraps up our first launch, it’s just the beginning of the MEP product line with plans not just for commercial, but also government variants to meet their unique needs,” Hauge said.

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The discovery of a molecular mechanism for stimulating hair growth may offer a road map for a new generation of therapies for androgenetic alopecia, a common form of hair loss in both women and men.

The researchers have identified the process by which aged, or senescent, pigment-making cells in the skin cause significant growth of hair inside skin moles, called nevi.

The study, published in the journal Nature, describes the essential role that the osteopontin and CD44 molecules play in activating hair growth inside hairy skin nevi. These skin nevi accumulate particularly large numbers of senescent pigment cells and yet display very robust hair growth.

“We found that senescent pigment cells produce large quantities of a specific signaling molecule called osteopontin, which causes normally dormant and diminutive hair follicles to activate their stem cells for robust growth of long and thick hairs,” says lead corresponding author Maksim Plikus, a professor of developmental and cell biology at the University of California, Irvine and lead corresponding author of the study published in Nature.

“Senescent cells are typically viewed as detrimental to regeneration and are thought to drive the aging process as they accumulate in tissues throughout the body, but our research clearly shows that cellular senescence has a positive side to it.”

The growth of hair follicles is well regulated by stem cell activation; these cells divide, enabling follicles to produce new hair in a cyclical manner. After each bout of hair growth, there’s a period of dormancy, during which the follicle’s stem cells remain inactive until the next cycle begins.

The study involved mouse models with pigmented skin spots that had hyperactivated hair stem cells and displayed accelerated hair growth, strongly resembling the clinical observations documented in human hairy skin nevi.

Further detailed analysis of senescent pigment cells and the nearby hair stem cells revealed that the former produced high levels of a signaling molecule called osteopontin, for which hair stem cells had a matching receptor molecule called CD44. Upon molecular interaction between osteopontin and CD44, hair stem cells became activated, resulting in robust hair growth.

To confirm the leading role of osteopontin and CD44 in the process, the researchers studied mouse models lacking either one of these genes; they exhibited significantly slower hair growth. The effect of osteopontin on hair growth has also been confirmed via hairy skin nevi samples collected from humans.

“Our findings provide qualitatively new insights into the relationship between senescent cells and tissue’s own stem cells and reveal positive effects of senescent cells on hair follicle stem cells,” says first and co-corresponding author Xiaojie Wang, an associate specialist in developmental and cell biology.

“As we learn more, that information can potentially be harnessed to develop new therapies that target properties of senescent cells and treat a wide range of regenerative disorders, including common hair loss.”

“In addition to osteopontin and CD44, we’re looking deeper into other molecules present in hairy skin nevi and their ability to induce hair growth. It’s likely that our continued research will identify additional potent activators,” Plikus says.

The work was supported in part by the LEO Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the WM Keck Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. Additional backing came from Simons Foundation and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine Shared Research Laboratory.

Source: UC Irvine

WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration has started to reduce the amount of airspace it closes for launches from Cape Canaveral as part of efforts to limit the impact of growing launch activity on commercial aviation.

The FAA recently introduced a revised zone of restricted airspace around and extending offshore for many launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and the Kennedy Space Center. The revised zone keeps open airspace to the north of the spaceports that had previously been closed for all launches.

By doing so, the FAA said in a June 15 statement, it keeps open a key arrival route for commercial flights from northeastern U.S. to airports in central Florida, notably Orlando International Airport and Tampa International Airport. For a typical launch, the original restriction would require up to three dozen flights to be rerouted, causing up to 300 cumulative minutes of delay.

The revised airspace restriction will be used for launches on eastern or southern trajectories, the FAA said, based on risk analyses conducted for every launch. Launches that go on more northerly trajectories, such as missions to the International Space Station, will continue to use the larger zone.

The move is part of broader efforts to address the conflicts between launches and commercial aviation, particularly in Florida’s congested airspace. In April, the FAA released a set of factors when considering whether to allow a launch to proceed or ask the launch company to identify alternative windows for the launch.

Among those factors are the timing of the launch, particularly relative to holidays or other special events that cause increases in air traffic, and the duration of the launch window. “The FAA encourages commercial space operations to take place during nighttime hours (to the extent practicable) when other flight operations tend to be reduced,” the guidelines state.

The document added that the FAA will prioritize missions for national security or otherwise in the national interest, as well as commercial launches carrying payloads.

“The focus really is on Florida as we move forward,” said Duane Freer, manager of space operations for the FAA’s air traffic organization, during a May 15 meeting of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC). He noted 92% of launches that affect the national airspace system are from the Cape.

One ongoing area of concern is launch scrubs. Freer said the FAA has been encouraging launch operators to inform air traffic control of scrubs as soon as possible, including before airspace closures go into effect.

A separate effort is the Space Data Integrator (SDI), a tool to automate the distribution of data from launches and reentries to air traffic controllers, enabling more dynamic management of airspace and reducing the size and duration of airspace closures.

Freer said at the COMSTAC meeting that full integration of launch and reentry data into air traffic management systems won’t be completed until 2028, citing “budgetary constraints.” He said he did not know how much additional funding would be needed to accelerate that schedule.

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A new study shows how irrigation affects regional climates and environments around the world, illuminating how and where the practice is both untenable and beneficial.

The analysis also points to ways to improve assessments in order to achieve sustainable water use and food production in the future.

“Even though irrigation covers a small fraction of the Earth, it has a significant impact on regional climate and environments—and is either already unsustainable, or verging on towards scarcity, in some parts of the world,” says Sonali Shukla McDermid, an associate professor in the environmental studies department at New York University and lead author of the paper in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment.

“But because irrigation supplies 40% of the world’s food, we need to understand the complexities of its effects so we can reap its benefits while reducing negative consequences.”

Irrigation, which is primarily used for agricultural purposes, accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater extractions from lakes, rivers, and other sources, amounting to 90% of the world’s water usage.

Previous estimates suggest that more than 3.6 million square kilometers—or just under 1.4 million square miles—of the Earth’s land are currently irrigated. Several regions, including the US High Plains states, such as Kansas and Nebraska, California’s Central Valley, the Indo-Gangetic Basin spanning several South Asian countries, and northeastern China, are the world’s most extensively irrigated and also display among the strongest irrigation impacts on the climate and environment.

While work exists to document some impacts of irrigation on specific localities or regions, it’s been less clear if there are consistent and strong climate and environmental impacts across global irrigated areas—both now and in the future.

To address this, 38 researchers from the US, Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan analyzed more than 200 previous studies—an examination that captured both present-day effects and projected future impacts.

Their review pointed to both positive and negative effects of irrigation, including:

• Irrigation can cool daytime temperatures substantially and can also change how agroecosystems store and cycle carbon and nitrogen. While this cooling can help combat heat extremes, irrigation water can also humidify the atmosphere and can result in the release of greenhouse gasses, such as powerful methane from rice.
• The practice annually withdraws an estimated 2,700 cubic kilometers from freshwater sources, or nearly 648 cubic miles, which is more water than is held by Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined. In many areas, this usage has reduced water supplies, particularly groundwater, and has also contributed to the runoff of agricultural inputs, such as fertilizers, into water supplies.
• Irrigation can also affect precipitation in some areas, depending on the locale, season, and prevailing winds.

The researchers also propose ways to improve irrigation modeling—changes that would result in methods to better assess ways to achieve sustainable water and food production into the future.

These largely center on adopting more rigorous testing of models as well as more and better ways of identifying and reducing uncertainties associated with both the physical and chemical climate processes and—importantly—human decision-making. The latter could be done with more coordination and communication between scientists and water stakeholders and decision-makers when developing irrigation models.

“Such assessments would allow scientists to more comprehensively investigate interactions between several, simultaneously changing conditions, such as regional climate change, biogeochemical cycling, water resource demand, food production, and farmer household livelihoods—both now and in the future,” says McDermid.

The National Science Foundation, the National Research Foundation of Korea, and the Japan Science and Technology Agency funded the work.

Source: NYU

TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat told the Paris stock exchange June 15 it is selling its European retail broadband activities to “an experienced private operator” to return focus to wholesale services.

The sale includes assets the French satellite operator bought just three years ago from European capacity reseller Bigblu Broadband, and covers retail activities in the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and Greece.

Eutelsat’s brief announcement did not disclose the buyer and other financial details.

Altogether, Eutelsat spokesperson Anita Baltagi said the activities generated annual revenues in the low double-digit range.

The 2020 acquisition of U.K.-based Bigblu Broadband’s European business came with about 50,000 subscribers at the time.

Eutelsat said the sale of its European retail broadband activities follows successes in a wholesale business strategy for its geostationary satellite services.

The company pointed to major deals signed with Spanish satellite operator Hispasat and telecoms companies in France, Italy, and Switzerland for capacity on the Eutelsat Konnect satellite launched January 2020.

The entry into service of Konnect VHTS in the second half of this year will further boost its wholesale business, according to Eutelsat, by bringing an extra 500 gigabits per second (Gbps) of Ka-band capacity over Europe to meet demand.

Eutelsat’s sale bucks a trend in recent years that has seen satellite operators snap up service providers to get closer to their end customers, partly in response to industry uncertainty.

Notable recent deals include Intelsat’s purchase in 2020 of Gogo’s commercial aviation business, and the sale of U.S. government satellite communications provider Leonardo DRS to SES in 2022.

Inmarsat’s international network of distributors was also one of the drivers behind its recently completed sale to Viasat, which has historically sold its broadband services directly to customers. 

Eutelsat’s disposal also comes as it seeks regulatory approval to buy British low Earth orbit broadband operator OneWeb, which relies on a network of distributors to sell its connectivity services to customers. 

In addition to Europe, Eutelsat has a retail broadband presence in Africa that is not part of the deal.

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SAN FRANCISCO – Orbital Composites, a California company focused on robotic additive manufacturing, is gaining traction in the emerging in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing sector thanks to government contracts and partnerships.

The U.S. Space Force, Air Force and Navy have awarded six Small Business Innovation Research contracts to the Campbell, California, startup in the last two years. In connection with the SBIRs and separately, Orbital Composites has projects underway with Axiom Space, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

In 2015, Cole Nielsen, Orbital Composites founder and chief technology officer, started designing 3D printers for large aerospace structures like drones and satellites in his garage. Since then, the startup has kept a low profile in the space sector.

“We were selling into the terrestrial market, while quietly working on the space side,” Amolak Badesha, Orbital Composites CEO, told SpaceNews. Still, as its name implies Orbital Composites was founded with the long-term goal of robotic in-space manufacturing.

Executives are now eager to talk about space applications because their “technology has matured to the point where we’re credible,” Badesha said. “We have 3D printed parts that are a game-changer for space, defense and energy applications.”

Plus, the company is riding tailwinds created by the rapid growth of the U.S. Space Force, increasing demand for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM), heightened concern about orbital debris and the satellite-to-smartphone boom.

Catalyst Accelerator

Orbital Composites participated in the 2021 Catalyst On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing Accelerator backed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate, the U.S. Space Force and corporate sponsors. Through the accelerator, Orbital Composites executives shared their goal of manufacturing antennas and other large structures with people from the Space Force, NASA and companies.

“One of the best use cases for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing is antennas,” Badesha said. “The satellite to cellular broadband market needs big antennas. Imagine if you could start making antennas in space, unfurlable antennas at the cost of fixed antennas.”

Core Manufacturing Capability

Under SBIR contracts, Orbital Composites is developing radiation tolerant satellites, technology to capture space debris, quantum antennas and robotic ISAM platforms. The company also is developing technology to 3D print thermal protection systems and rocket nozzles.

At its core, Orbital Composites is a manufacturing business.

“We hold the potential to become an aerospace and energy giant because our applications already span across these verticals,” Badesha said. “People forget, aerospace companies are built on top of advanced manufacturing.”

Space-Based Solar Power

On June 20, Orbital Composites announced a memorandum of understanding with Virtus Solis Technologies focused on a megawatt-scale commercial space-based solar power station. Under the agreement, Michigan-based Virtus will design core technologies. Orbital Composites will develop the necessary manufacturing processes and offer manufacturing-as-a-service to Virtus.

“This partnership is a significant step towards providing clean, low-cost energy to our planet and unlocking the potential of cislunar space,” Virtus CEO John Bucknell said in a statement. “By combining our breakthrough technologies with Orbital Composites’ expertise, we aim to revolutionize space-based solar power and accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy future.”

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A new study shows improved rates of survival and reduced risk of recurrence in patients with non-small cell lung cancer taking osimertinib, a targeted therapy, following surgery.

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common type of lung cancer, tends to recur when diagnosed at advanced stages, which makes treatment challenging.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, focused on patients with NSCLC with a mutation in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene.

“ADAURA used osimertinib in the setting of lung cancer where patients already had surgery, and the results are impressive,” says lead author and principal investigator Roy S. Herbst, deputy director of Yale Cancer Center and assistant dean for translational research at Yale School of Medicine. “We’re moving this effective drug therapy into the earliest stages of disease.”

The phase III trial assessed the safety and efficacy as well as survival outcomes following osimertinib use in patients with surgically removed (completely resected) stage IB-IIIA NSCLC, who were previously treated with or without adjuvant chemotherapy.

Results from the trial showed significant benefits for patients with NSCLC taking osimertinib, including prolonged disease-free survival (DFS) over placebo, reduced risk of local and distant metastases (spread of tumor), and improved central nervous system DFS.

Of the 682 patients with stage IB-IIIA NSCLC enrolled in the trial, 88% of patients treated with osimertinib following surgery were still alive five years later compared to 78% of patients treated with a placebo. The study data supports osimertinib as a highly effective treatment in patients with resected EGFR-mutated stage IB-IIIA non-small cell lung cancer.

“In the US, 10 to 15% of patients with lung cancer will have mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor and these patients, even after they receive the best available therapy, their tumor still often comes back,” says Herbst, who also is professor of medicine (medical oncology) at Yale School of Medicine.

“We’re now adding osimertinib, a pill that targets this specific receptor, and what we’ve found is a significant overall survival benefit for patients who received osimertinib.”

“When we treat the cancer early, we prevent the cancer from spreading to the brain, to the liver, to the bones,” says Herbst.

“In this trial, we took advantage of the efficacy of osimertinib, used it earlier, and it resulted in a really phenomenal impact on survival. That’s practice-changing, and it helps people live longer with lung cancer. I’m very excited to be part of this research.”

AstraZeneca, the manufacturer of osimertinib, supported the work.

Source: Michael Masciadrelli for Yale University

New findings in mice offer an explanation for how psychedelic drugs work.

Neuroscientists have long searched for ways to reopen “critical periods” in the brain, when mammals are more sensitive to signals from their surroundings that can influence periods of brain development.

Now, researchers say the new study in mice shows that psychedelic drugs are linked by their common ability to reopen such critical periods, but differ in the length of time the critical period is open—from two days to four weeks with a single dose.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, suggest potential to treat a wider range of conditions, such as stroke and deafness, beyond those in current studies of the drugs, such as depression, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The scientists also provide a new look at molecular mechanisms psychedelics affect.

Critical periods have been demonstrated to perform such functions as helping birds learn to sing and helping humans learn a new language, relearn motor skills after a stroke, and establish dominance of one eye over the other eye.

“There is a window of time when the mammalian brain is far more susceptible and open to learning from the environment,” says Gül Dölen,  associate professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “This window will close at some point, and then, the brain becomes much less open to new learning.”

Building on her laboratory’s experience studying social behavior, Dölen’s team has been researching how psychedelic drugs work by reopening these critical periods. In 2019, her team found that MDMA, a psychedelic drug that arouses feelings of love and sociability, opens a critical period in mice.

At the time, Dölen thought MDMA’s prosocial properties smooth the way for opening the critical period, but her team was surprised, she says, to find in the current study that other psychedelic drugs without prosocial properties could also reopen critical periods.

For the current study, Dölen’s team looked at the reopening potential of five psychedelic drugs—ibogaine, ketamine, LSD, MDMA, and psylocibin—shown in numerous studies as able to change normal perceptions of existence and enable a sense of discovery about one’s self or the world.

The research team conducted a well-established behavioral test to understand how easily adult male mice learn from their social environment. They trained mice to develop an association between an environment linked with social interaction versus another environment connected with being by themselves. By comparing time spent in each environment after giving the psychedelic drug to the mice, the researchers were able to see if the critical period opened in the adult mice, enabling them to learn the value of a social environment—a behavior normally learned as juveniles.

For mice given ketamine, the critical period of social reward learning stayed open in the mice for 48 hours. With psilocybin, the open state lasted two weeks. For mice given MDMA, LSD, and ibogaine, the critical period remained open for two, three, and four weeks, respectively.

The researchers say the length of time that the critical period stayed open in mice seems to roughly parallel the average length of time that people self-report the acute effects of each psychedelic drug.

“This relationship gives us another clue that the duration of psychedelic drugs’ acute effects may be the reason why each drug may have longer or shorter effects on opening the critical period,” says Dölen.

“The open state of the critical period may be an opportunity for a post-treatment integration period to maintain the learning state,” she adds. “Too often, after having a procedure or treatment, people go back to their chaotic, busy lives that can be overwhelming. Clinicians may want to consider the time period after a psychedelic drug dose as a time to heal and learn, much like we do for open heart surgery.”

Next, the scientists looked at psychedelic drugs’ impact on molecular mechanisms. First, in mouse brain cells, they examined a binding point, known as a receptor, for the neurotransmitter serotonin. The researchers found that while LSD and psilocybin use the serotonin receptor to open the critical period, MDMA, ibogaine, and ketamine do not.

To explore other molecular mechanisms, the research team turned to ribonucleic acid (RNA), a cousin to DNA that represents which genes are being expressed (producing proteins) in the mice’s cells. The researchers found expression differences among 65 protein-producing genes during and after the critical period was opened.

About 20% of these genes regulate proteins involved in maintaining or repairing the extracellular matrix—a kind of scaffolding that encases brain cells located in the nucleus accumbens, an area associated with social learning behaviors that are responsive to rewards.

Funding for the research came from the Klingenstein-Simons Foundation, the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Johns Hopkins Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and the National Institutes of Health.

No authors declared conflicts of interest related to this research under Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine policies.

Source: Johns Hopkins University