Saturday Space Reads

Because we all need a little space on Saturday

The remotely operated robo-surgeon known as spaceMIRA conducted its first procedure in microgravity last week aboard the ISS. Credit: Virtual Incision

• No one who has ever played Operation has wished for bigger tweezers. So of course, Virtual Incision’s new robot surgeon, SpaceMIRA is only two pounds. With the help of a group of Nebraska-based surgeons, the tiny cyborg completed its first remote microgravity procedure on the ISS last week – and don’t worry, it was only tissue-simulating rubber bands under the robo-scalpel. This time.

• Let’s face it: manipulating location information is only helpful when you’re hiding a surprise party from someone who tracks you on Find My Friends. The entire Global Positioning System (GPS) constellation going down – due to, we don’t know, a Russian spacecraft annihilator – is a whole other story. Read about the backup systems currently being considered for such a scenario.

• If you’ve read the last couple newsletters, you know that the recent Intuitive Machines mission not only delivered a lunar lander to the surface of the Moon – but also some art. Jeff Koons, the man behind the balloon animal sculptures – one of which sold for a record-breaking $91 million dollars in 2019 – hitched his installation of 125 miniature moon sculptures to the Nova-C spacecraft, in hopes that the “historically important” artifact will remain in space forever. And yes, according to the Artemis Accords he can actually do that. 

• NASA’s biggest firestarters – and no, not the 2022 Stephen King-inspired flop film starring Zac Efron – began a series of experiments eight years ago known as the Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiments, or SAFFIRE. While the team’s last hurrah might have gone up in flames, the mission’s primary objective to observe how fire behaves in space will continue to support future spacecraft safety.

• In honor of Oppenheimer’s inevitable sweep at the Oscars next month, here’s a delightful musing on the Earth’s nuclear fate, and whether any others out there in the universe were (are?) also doomed by their own intelligence. 

• In the ever-so-heated China-U.S. space race, here are some thoughts on how Elon Musk capitalized on a Chinese rocket’s failure in 2020 to gain ground in Indonesia.

Saturn’s moon Mimas, as captured here by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, is now one of 5 moons in our solar system thought to likely have a subsurface ocean. Credit: Reuters, NASA, JPL-Caltech

• Unlike its doppelganger, the Death Star, Saturn’s moon Mimas does not have the capability of destroying another planet – at least, we don’t think so. But what it does have is a subsurface ocean, astronomers confirmed with recent data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. 

• We are what we eat our environment. If scientists can develop slang and even a new accent specific to their isolated research stations in Antarctica, then surely future lunar (or Martian) settlements will develop their own dialects. 

Saturday Space Jam: