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EIRSAT-1 Ireland's first Satellite is in Space

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EIRSAT-1 Ireland's first Satellite is in Space

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Six years of hard work and dedication paid off in spectacular fashion today, as the Educational Irish Research Satellite, EIRSAT-1, successfully blasted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Hitching a ride on a Space-X Falcon-9 launcher, the tiny satellite - measuring just 10.7cm x 10.7cm x 22.7cm - has now made history as Ireland's first satellite!

EIRSAT-1 was designed, built, and tested by students from University College Dublin (UCD) participating in ESA Academy's Fly Your Satellite! programme, a hands-on initiative supporting university student teams to develop their own satellites according to professional standards. The launch opportunity itself was provided by ESA.

ESA experts have been on-hand throughout the satellite's development to offer training and guidance to dozens of UCD students. Their learning journey also included test campaigns at ESA Education's CubeSat Support Facility in Belgium, and dedicated spacecraft communications sessions both at ESA Academy's Training and Learning Centre and at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt Germany, to learn Ireland's first spacecraft operations procedures.

"I would like to wholeheartedly congratulate the EIRSAT-1 team for this successful launch and the start of Ireland's first exciting adventure in orbit," said Josef Aschbacher, ESA Director General. I'd also like to thank UCD for joining forces with ESA towards a common educational objective: boosting the skills of the young generation," he continued. "It's only by building capacity that we can make our space ambitions become a reality, for Ireland and for Europe. With our Education programme we are nurturing generations of citizens who are learning to use space technology and space solutions in order to make a difference for our society, our planet and our future."

From low earth orbit EIRSAT-1 will carry out three main experiments, which were built from scratch by the students:

GMOD, a detector to study gamma ray bursts, which are the most luminous explosions in the universe and occur when a massive star dies or two stars collide.

EMOD, an experiment to see how a thermal treatment protects the surface of a satellite when in space.

WBC, an experiment to test a new method of using Earth's magnetic field to change a satellite's orientation in space.

Following EIRSAT-1's deployment to orbit, the student team is now working to establish contact with the satellite and start operations from their dedicated ground control facility, also entirely operated by students and located at UCD in Dublin.

"The team at ESA Education would like to join ESA DG in expressing their heartfelt congratulations to the EIRSAT-1 students for achieving their incredible goals," said Hugo Marée, Head of the ESA Education Office.

"Not only has EIRSAT-1 made history by being Ireland's first satellite, but it has also inspired a generation of Irish school students to grow their ambitions higher. This has been achieved thanks to the inspiration activities organized by ESERO Ireland (a collaboration between ESA and Science Foundation Ireland) around this mission," he continued. "I am proud of our Education programme which is able to inspire and engage different age groups towards a future career in STEM."

Stay tuned for more news at https://www.esa.int/Education/CubeSats_-_Fly_Your_Satellite/
Contacts
Joost Vanreusel, Head of the ESA Academy Programme - joost.vanreusel@esa.int

Alex Kinnaird, ESA Academy, Fly Your Satellite! Programme Coordinator- alex.kinnaird@esa.int

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Lift-off for EIRSAT-1, Ireland's first ever satellite

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Six years of hard work and dedication paid off in spectacular fashion today, as the Educational Irish Research Satellite, EIRSAT-1, successfully blasted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Hitching a ride on a Space-X Falcon-9 launcher, the tiny satellite - measuring just 10.7cm x 10.7cm x 22.7cm - has now made history as Ireland's first satellite!

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Growing organs (e.g. Heart) using human cells in space

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Science in Space: December 2023

Imagine someone needs a heart transplant and scientists take cells from that person to create an entire new heart for them. Research on the International Space Station is helping to bring that dream closer to reality.

The process of 3D printing (also known as additive manufacturing) enables the design and production of one-of-a-kind items made of plastic, metal, and other materials, including tools, equipment, and even buildings. Biological printing or bioprinting uses living cells, proteins, and nutrients as raw materials and has the potential to produce human tissues for treating injury and disease and to create entire organs for transplants.

In Earth's gravity, bioprinting requires a scaffold or other type of structure to support tissues, but in the near-weightlessness of the space station's orbit, tissues grow in three dimensions without such support. Redwire Corporation developed the BioFabrication Facility (BFF) as a part of the larger goal of using microgravity to bioprint human organs. Popular Science magazine recently awarded the BFF a 2023 Best of What's New Award in the Health Category. These awards, handed out since 1988, recognize "groundbreaking innovations changing our world," according to Popular Science, and "radical ideas that are improving our everyday lives and our futures."

A current investigation, BFF-Cardiac, uses the BFF to evaluate the printing and processing of cardiac tissue samples. Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in the United States. Adult heart tissue is unable to regenerate, so damaged heart tissue is mostly replaced with scar tissue, which can block electrical signals and prevent proper cardiac contractions. This investigation could support the development of patches to replace damaged tissue - and eventually the creation of replacement hearts. The work represents a big step toward addressing the significant gap between the number of transplant organs needed and available donors.

The BFF-Meniscus investigation and the follow-up BFF-Meniscus-2 investigation resulted in the first successful bioprinting of a human knee meniscus in orbit using the space station's BioFabrication Facility, announced in September 2023. Musculoskeletal injuries, including tears in the meniscus, are one of the most common injuries for the U.S. military and this milestone is a step toward developing improved treatments on the ground and for crew members who experience musculoskeletal injuries on future space missions. After initial printing and a period of growth in microgravity, the tissues returned to Earth for additional analysis and testing.

The Russian state space agency ROSCOSMOS launched equipment in 2018, 3D MBP, that included a magnetic printer called Organ.Aut. A series of experiments from 2018 through 2020 showed that this approach could create tissue constructs, helping to pave the way for additional research on producing artificial organs.

Bioprinting technology also could create artificial retinas to help restore sight for the 30 million people worldwide who suffer from degenerative retinal diseases. One way to manufacture artificial retinas is a technique that alternates layers of a light-activated protein and a binder on a film. On Earth, gravity affects the quality of these films, but researchers suspected that films created in microgravity would be more stable and have higher optical clarity. Protein-Based Artificial Retina Manufacturing is one of several investigations by LambdaVision Inc. in partnership with developer Space Tango Inc. to develop and validate space-based manufacturing methods for artificial retinas. The company has consistently manufactured multiple 200-layer artificial retina films in microgravity and now is working to commercialize its hardware and strategies for development of other therapies and drugs.

Bioprint FirstAid, a study from ESA (European Space Agency) and the German Space Agency (DLR), demonstrated the function of a prototype for a portable handheld bioprinter that creates a patch from a patient's own skin cells. Space causes changes in the wound healing process, and such customized bandages could accelerate healing on future missions to the Moon and Mars. Using cultured cells from the patient reduces the risk of rejection by the immune system, and the device offers greater flexibility to address wound size and position. Because the device is small and portable, health care workers could take it almost anywhere on Earth. The investigation showed that the device works as intended in microgravity, and researchers are studying the space-printed patches and comparing them with samples printed on the ground before taking the next step.

Bioprinting in microgravity also could make it possible to produce food and medicine on demand on future space missions. Such capabilities would reduce the mass and cost of materials needed at launch and help maintain the health and safety of crew members throughout a mission.

The 3D Printing In Zero-G investigation, which started in 2014, demonstrated that the process of 3D printing with inorganic materials such as plastic worked normally in microgravity. ¹ 3D printing could reduce the need to pack costly spare parts on future long-term missions and help solve the problem of trying to predict every tool or object that might be needed on a mission. With the addition of bioprinting capabilities, crews eventually may be able to 3D print almost anything they need - from a replacement screwdriver to a replacement knee.
John Love, ISS Research Planning Integration Scientist Expedition 70
Search this database of scientific experiments to learn more about those mentioned above.

Citations:

1 Prater TJ, Bean QA, Werkheiser N, Grguel R, Beshears RD, Rolin TD, Huff T, Ryan RM, Ledbetter III FE, Ordonez EA. Analysis of specimens from phase I of the 3D Printing in Zero G Technology demonstration mission. Rapid Prototyping Journal. 2017 October 6; 23(6): 1212-1225. DOI: 10.1108/RPJ-09-2016-0142.

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Space Station Research Integration Office

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The process of 3D printing (also known as additive manufacturing) enables the design and production of one-of-a-kind items made of plastic, metal, and other

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NASA’s Webb Rings in Holidays With Ringed Planet Uranus - NASA

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently trained its sights on unusual and enigmatic Uranus, an ice giant that spins on its side. Webb captured this dynamic

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There are many things humanity must overcome before any return journey to Mars is launched.

The two major players are NASA and SpaceX, which work together intimately on missions to the International Space Station but have competing ideas of what a crewed Mars mission would look like.

Size matters

The biggest challenge (or constraint) is the mass of the payload (spacecraft, people, fuel, supplies etc) needed to make the journey.

We still talk about launching something into space being like launching its weight in gold.

The payload mass is usually just a small percentage of the total mass of the launch vehicle.

Read more: Buried lakes of salty water on Mars may provide conditions for life

For example, the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the Moon weighed 3,000 tonnes.

But it could launch only 140 tonnes (5% of its initial launch mass) to low Earth orbit, and 50 tonnes (less than 2% of its initial launch mass) to the Moon.

Mass constrains the size of a Mars spacecraft and what it can do in space. Every manoeuvre costs fuel to fire rocket motors, and this fuel must currently be carried into space on the spacecraft.

SpaceX's plan is for its crewed Starship vehicle to be refuelled in space by a separately launched fuel tanker. That means much more fuel can be carried into orbit than could be carried on a single launch.

Official SpaceX Photos/Flickr, CC BY-NC

Time matters

Another challenge, intimately connected with fuel, is time.

Missions that send spacecraft with no crew to the outer planets often travel complex trajectories around the Sun. They use what are called gravity assist manoeuvres to effectively slingshot around different planets to gain enough momentum to reach their target.

This saves a lot of fuel, but can result in missions that take years to reach their destinations. Clearly this is something humans would not want to do.

Both Earth and Mars have (almost) circular orbits and a manoeuvre known as the Hohmann transfer is the most fuel-efficient way to travel between two planets. Basically, without going into too much detail, this is where a spacecraft does a single burn into an elliptical transfer orbit from one planet to the other.

A Hohmann transfer between Earth and Mars takes around 259 days (between eight and nine months) and is only possible approximately every two years due to the different orbits around the Sun of Earth and Mars.

A spacecraft could reach Mars in a shorter time (SpaceX is claiming six months) but - you guessed it - it would cost more fuel to do it that way.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Safe landing

Suppose our spacecraft and crew get to Mars. The next challenge is landing.

A spacecraft entering Earth is able to use the drag generated by interaction with the atmosphere to slow down. This allows the craft to land safely on the Earth's surface (provided it can survive the related heating).

But the atmosphere on Mars is about 100 times thinner than Earth's. That means less potential for drag, so it isn't possible to land safely without some kind of aid.

Some missions have landed on airbags (such as NASA's Pathfider mission) while others have used thrusters (NASA's Phoenix mission). The latter, once again, requires more fuel.

Life on Mars

A Martian day lasts 24 hours and 37 minutes but the similarities with Earth stop there.

The thin atmosphere on Mars means it can't retain heat as well as Earth does, so life on Mars is characterised by large extremes in temperature during the day/night cycle.

Mars has a maximum temperature of 30℃, which sounds quite pleasant, but its minimum temperature is -140℃, and its average temperature is -63℃. The average winter temperature at the Earth's South Pole is about -49℃.

So we need to be very selective about where we choose to live on Mars and how we manage temperature during the night.

The gravity on Mars is 38% of Earth's (so you'd feel lighter) but the air is principally carbon dioxide (CO₂) with several percent of nitrogen, so it's completely unbreathable. We would need to build a climate-controlled place just to live there.

SpaceX plans to launch several cargo flights including critical infrastructure such as greenhouses, solar panels and - you guessed it - a fuel-production facility for return missions to Earth.

Life on Mars would be possible and several simulation trials have already been done on Earth to see how people would cope with such an existence.

Return to Earth

The final challenge is the return journey and getting people safely back to Earth.

Apollo 11 entered Earth's atmosphere at about 40,000km/h, which is just below the velocity required to escape Earth's orbit.

Spacecraft returning from Mars will have re-entry velocities from 47,000km/h to 54,000km/h, depending on the orbit they use to arrive at Earth.

Read more: Dear diary: the Sun never set on the Arctic Mars simulation

They could slow down into low orbit around Earth to around 28,800km/h before entering our atmosphere but - you guessed it - they'd need extra fuel to do that.

If they just barrel into the atmosphere, it will do all of the deceleration for them. We just need to make sure we don't kill the astronauts with G-forces or burn them up due to excess heating.

These are just some of the challenges facing a Mars mission and all of the technological building blocks to achieve this are there. We just need to spend the time and the money and bring it all together.

NASA

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How to get people from Earth to Mars and safely back again

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There are many things humanity must overcome before any return journey to Mars is launched. The two major players are NASA and SpaceX, which work together intimately on missions to the International Space Station but have competing ideas of what a crewed Mars mission would look like.

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NASA’s real-time portal for Mars exploration, featuring the latest news, images, and discoveries from the Red Planet.

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https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESRS/HDEV/

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Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos with the vision of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space for the benefit of Earth.

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Virgin Galactic is launching a new space age, where all are invited along for the ride.

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SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.

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NASA's real-time portal for Mars exploration, featuring the latest news, images, and discoveries from the Red Planet.

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How our Solar System formed

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Video Transcript

The solar system is a pretty busy place. It's got all kinds of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets zipping around our Sun.

But how did this busy stellar neighborhood come to be?

Our story starts about 4.6 billion years ago, with a wispy cloud of stellar dust.

This cloud was part of a bigger cloud called a nebula.

At some point, the cloud collapsed-possibly because the shockwave of a nearby exploding star caused it to compress.

When it collapsed, it fell in on itself, creating a disk of material surrounding it.

Finally the pressure caused by the material was so great that hydrogen atoms began to fuse into helium, releasing a tremendous amount of energy. Our Sun was born!

Even though the Sun gobbled up more than 99% of all the stuff in this disk, there was still some material left over.

Bits of this material clumped together because of gravity. Big objects collided with bigger objects, forming still bigger objects. Finally some of these objects became big enough to be spheres-these spheres became planets and dwarf planets.

Rocky planets, like Earth, formed near the Sun, because icy and gaseous material couldn't survive close to all that heat.

Gas and icy stuff collected further away, creating the gas and ice giants.

And like that, the solar system as we know it today was formed.

There are still leftover remains of the early days though.

Asteroids in the asteroid belt are the bits and pieces of the early solar system that could never quite form a planet.

Way off in the outer reaches of the solar system are comets. These icy bits haven't changed much at all since the solar systems formation.

In fact, it is the study of asteroids and comets that allows scientists to piece together this whole long story.

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Student Video: Space Place in a Snap: The Solar System's Formation | NASA/JPL Edu

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Find out how our solar system formed and how it came to be the busy place it is today.

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How many people are in space right now

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Asteroids, Comets, Meteors and Meteroids

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Asteroids, Comets, Meteors and Meteroids

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What are the differences between an asteroid, comet, meteoroid, meteor, and meteorite?

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Multiple choice questions are perhaps the easiest to complete - you simply put a cross in a box - however, the questions often have two answers that could, at first glance, be correct. Don't make the mistake of reading the first answer and thinking this is correct without checking all the others.

If it says 'Tick box', you must tick one box. If you leave it blank or tick two or more boxes, you will get zero marks. These multiple choice questions will not start with command words like 'Describe...' or 'Explain...'. They will be written in the form of a question like or .

There will be more multiple choice questions on the Foundation paper.
This page contains AQA material which is reproduced by permission of AQA.

Sample question 2 - Foundation

Complete the following sentence by drawing a ring around the correct option.

The fact that light from a distant galaxy seems to move towards the red end of the spectrum gives scientists evidence that ...

C
As distant galaxies move away, the wavelengths of light waves emitted are stretched by the motion of the galaxy, making them longer. Red light is the longest wavelength of light in the visible spectrum so we say the waves have been red-shifted as they appear closer to the red end of the spectrum than they would do if the galaxy was not moving. Red-shift is detected in light from all galaxies, so they must all be moving away from each other, meaning that the Universe is expanding.

Sample question 3 - Higher

Use the correct answer from the box to complete the sentence.

Energy is released in stars by the process of nuclear ______.

Fusion
Within stars, smaller atoms like hydrogen are fused together into larger atoms like helium. Fission occurs in nuclear reactors when large atoms are split and nuclear decay releases a form of nuclear radiation.

Sample question 4 - Higher

The discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation was important because it ...

The 'Big Bang' theory has not been proven but the detection of cosmic microwave background radiation provided more evidence for the 'Big Bang' theory that could not be explained by the 'Steady State' theory.

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Space physics - Multiple choice questions - Sample exam questions - AQA - GCSE Physics (Single Science) Revision - AQA - BBC Bitesize

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Multiple choice questions are perhaps the easiest to complete - you simply put a cross in a box - however, the questions often have two answers that could, at first glance, be correct. Don't make the mistake of reading the first answer and thinking this is correct without checking all the others.

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The Conical Flask - Space, Celestial objects and the Origin of the Universe

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Life Cycle of Stars | GCSE Physics | Doodle Science

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Follow me!: https://twitter.com/DoodleSci Doodle Science teaches you high school physics in a less boring way in almost no time! GCSE Science Script: Stars initially form from clouds of dust and gas. The force of gravity makes the gas and dust spiral in together to form a protostar.

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NASA Website

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All Resources | Resources - NASA Solar System Exploration

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NASA's real-time science encyclopedia of deep space exploration. Our scientists and far-ranging robots explore the wild frontiers of our solar system.

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Online 3D simulation of the Solar System and night sky in real time - the Sun, planets, dwarf planets, comets, stars and constellations

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The solar system - KS2 Science - BBC Bitesize

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KS2 Science The solar system learning resources for adults, children, parents and teachers.

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The offical website for NOVA. NOVA is the most-watched prime time science series on American television, reaching an average of five million viewers weekly.