WASHINGTON — Astra has won a NASA contract to launch a small constellation of Earth science cubesats, while General Atomics selected Rocket Lab for the launch of a small satellite with a NOAA hosted payload.
NASA announced Feb. 26 that it awarded a $7.95 million contract to Astra for three launches of the company’s Rocket 3 vehicle, which will be used to deploy the agency’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats (TROPICS) mission.
The three launches will take place over a 120-day period between Jan. 8 and July 31, 2022, from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Those would be the first ground-based orbital launches from Kwajalein since the last Falcon 1 launch, from Omelek Island there, in 2009. Kwajalein has hosted several flights of the air-launched Pegasus rocket, most recently in 2012.
TROPICS is a constellation of six 3U cubesats in three orbital planes at an inclination of 30 degrees and altitude of 600 kilometers. Each identical satellite will carry a radiometer to collect profiles of temperature and water vapor as they pass over tropical weather systems. Scientists will use TROPICS to gain information on the structure of tropical storms, with the constellation allowing frequent revisits to study how those storms evolve.
The TROPICS contract is the second NASA award Astra has received. In December, the company was one of three small launch vehicle developers to win Venture Class Launch Services contracts for launches of cubesats. Astra’s award, valued at $3.9 million, is for the dedicated launch of 30 kilograms of cubesats to a 500-kilometer mid-inclination orbit, no later than June 2022.
General Atomics announced Feb. 24 that it selected Rocket Lab to launch an Orbital Test Bed satellite it developed carrying the Argos-4 Advanced Data Collection System (A-DCS) hosted payload. NOAA arranged for the launch of the payload through the Hosted Payload Solutions contract vehicle run by the Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center. The launch, on an Electron rocket, is scheduled for late 2021 or early 2022.
The A-DCS payload is part of the Argos data collection system that includes NOAA, the French space agency CNES, Eumetsat and the Indian space agency ISRO. The payload receives data from sensors, ranging from those mounted on ocean buoys to wildlife trackers, and relays that data to ground stations.
The contract is the second in as many weeks awarded by General Atomics for the launch of an Orbital Test Bed satellite. The company selected Firefly Aerospace Feb. 18 to launch a satellite carrying the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols hosted payload, a NASA Earth sciences instrument. That satellite will launch into polar orbit on an Alpha rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in 2022.
The Nebraska Public Health Lab has detected new COVID-19 mutations. The lab’s assistant director Baha Abdalhamid said the mutations are not concerning and it’s a good sign for the future. “We detected unique mutations that we believe might attenuate the virus, makes it weaker to establish the infection,” Abdalhamid said. Recently, scientists were able to detect new COVID-19 mutations in seven nursing home patients. “We detected high viral concentration in the specimen of those patients, however the patients were asymptomatic,” Abdalhamid said. Abdalhamid said the new mutations might weaken the virus and make it harder for infection. “It was very interesting to understand this risky group who are in nursing homes, like why don’t they have severe disease of the virus? Even though they are high risk group,” Abdalhamid said. “That’s the good thing in this story that maybe the virus is losing its ability to cause as severe of disease,” lab director Peter Iwen said. Iwen said it’s opposite of the variants, like the UK and South African strains that have surfaced in the U.S. “Which is in contrary to the story we’re hearing about the variants of concern which are actually causing more diseases,” Iwen said. Looking to the future, the lab is attempting to sequence all positive coronavirus samples in the state. “We will use that data to not only look for variants of concern, but other variants that might appear,” Iwen said. The lab’s using the Clear DX GridION Nanopore Sequencer and it was the first lab in the nation to use it. “This technology has a lot of good use passed just the COVID discussion we are having now,” Iwen said. Iwen hopes this new technology will also be used to look at the influenza virus in the fall.
OMAHA, Neb. —
The Nebraska Public Health Lab has detected new COVID-19 mutations. The lab’s assistant director Baha Abdalhamid said the mutations are not concerning and it’s a good sign for the future.
“We detected unique mutations that we believe might attenuate the virus, makes it weaker to establish the infection,” Abdalhamid said.
Recently, scientists were able to detect new COVID-19 mutations in seven nursing home patients.
“We detected high viral concentration in the specimen of those patients, however the patients were asymptomatic,” Abdalhamid said.
Abdalhamid said the new mutations might weaken the virus and make it harder for infection.
“It was very interesting to understand this risky group who are in nursing homes, like why don’t they have severe disease of the virus? Even though they are high risk group,” Abdalhamid said.
“That’s the good thing in this story that maybe the virus is losing its ability to cause as severe of disease,” lab director Peter Iwen said.
Iwen said it’s opposite of the variants, like the UK and South African strains that have surfaced in the U.S.
“Which is in contrary to the story we’re hearing about the variants of concern which are actually causing more diseases,” Iwen said.
Looking to the future, the lab is attempting to sequence all positive coronavirus samples in the state.
“We will use that data to not only look for variants of concern, but other variants that might appear,” Iwen said.
The lab’s using the Clear DX GridION Nanopore Sequencer and it was the first lab in the nation to use it.
“This technology has a lot of good use passed just the COVID discussion we are having now,” Iwen said.
Iwen hopes this new technology will also be used to look at the influenza virus in the fall.
For the study, researchers at Pfizer and the University of Texas Medical Branch genetically engineered versions of the virus to carry some of the mutations found in B.1.351. They tested them against blood samples taken from 15 people who had received two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine as part of a clinical trial.
While the blood serum samples produced less neutralizing antibody activity, it was still enough to neutralize the virus, they wrote in a letter to the journal. This is in line with other studies. And it’s well within what is seen with other viruses, one of the researchers said.
“Although we do not yet know exactly what level of neutralization is required for protection against COVID-19 disease or infection, our experience with other vaccines tells us that it is likely that the Pfizer vaccine offers relatively good protection against this new variant,” Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch and an author of the study, told CNN.
“The reduction in the levels of neutralization against the South African variant of about 2/3 is fairly small compared to variations in neutralization levels generated by vaccines against other viruses that have even more variability in their protein sequences than SARS-CoV-2,” Weaver added.
Pfizer said there is no evidence in real life that the variant escapes the protection offered by its vaccine. “Nevertheless, Pfizer and BioNTech are taking the necessary steps, making the right investments, and engaging in the appropriate conversations with regulators to be in a position to develop and seek authorization for an updated mRNA vaccine or booster once a strain that significantly reduces the protection from the vaccine is identified,” Pfizer said in a statement.
Separately, a team at the National Institutes of Health and Moderna published a letter in the same journal outlining findings from an experiment they reported last month. They also reported a reduction in the antibody response to viruses genetically engineered to look like the B.1.351 variant — but not enough of a reduction to make the vaccine work any less effectively.
“Despite this reduction, neutralizing titer levels with (the variant discovered in South Africa) remain above levels that are expected to be protective,” the company said in a statement.
They found no reduction in efficacy against a variant first seen in the UK and known as B.1.1.7.
Titan is the largest moon of Saturn, and the second largest moon in the solar system, about the same size as Mercury. Unique among moons, it has a thick atmosphere — despite the lower gravity, the surface pressure is 1.5 times Earth’s at sea level.
Its atmosphere is 95% nitrogen (Earth’s is 78%) and 5% methane. Normally that would be transparent, but Titan’s air is loaded with haze — tiny particles about a micron across (one-millionth of a meter; a human hair is roughly 50–100 microns wide). These particles are suspended in the atmosphere, making it opaque.
The haze particles are formed when ultraviolet light from the Sun and/or subatomic particles zipping around space slam into the nitrogen and methane, breaking it down into elements that then rearrange themselves into more complex molecules. Some of them are simple rings of carbon, and some are far more complex molecules called PAHs — polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. It’s not been clear how the simple ones link up to form the bigger ones, but now, for the first time, this process has been simulated in a lab and the results examined using a powerful type of microscope that reveals the basic atomic configurations of the molecules.
That’s amazing. Those are individual molecules you’re seeing in those images. The scalebar is 0.5 nanometers, half of a billionth of a meter. They’re not images like a photograph, though. It’s literally impossible to do this with visible light; the wavelength of light is hundreds of nanometers, too long to see structures this small. Instead, they used what’s called atomic force microscopy*.
This uses a technique analogous to the way phonographs work, by using a needle at the end of an arm that traces the grooves in a record. In this case though, a molecule at the tip of a microscopic needle runs along a molecule and can detect the change in the shape due to atomic forces holding the molecule together. It’s like running your fingers over an object to feel its shape.
The samples of molecules were created in a lab to simulate Titan’s atmosphere. Scientists filled a stainless steel vessel with a gaseous mixture that’s the same as Titan’s air and used an electric discharge (a spark maker, essentially) to simulate the UV and cosmic rays hitting the gas. It’s not exactly like Titan: They did this at room temperature, which is much warmer than Titan, but the reactions aren’t very sensitive to temperature. They also used a gas pressure of about 0.001 Earth’s, which, though very thin, is much higher than the top of Titan’s atmosphere where the reactions take place. However, the higher pressure allows the reaction rate to be much higher, so they aren’t waiting weeks to get a decent sample.
They found over a hundred different molecules, a dozen or so of which they could examine using their microscope. Many are simple carbon rings and more complex PAHs, as expected. But they also found that many of the PAHs had a nitrogen atom embedded in them, making what are called N-PAHs. These molecules were detected in Titan’s atmosphere by the Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn for 13 years and made over 100 passes of Titan during that time, examining its surface and atmosphere. The simulations in the lab confirm this result.
Moreover, the lab experiment created molecules made of many connected rings, up to seven of them, which will help atmospheric scientists understand how the more complex PAHs are made from simpler molecules.
This work is important for many reasons. Titan’s atmosphere is loaded with this stuff, collectively called tholins (Greek for “mud”, since they make molecules which color the environment yellow, orange, and reddish-brown), and they’re also seen on other worlds; Pluto’s reddish colored landscape is due to tholins.
Titan doesn’t have a water cycle like Earth, but it does have a methane cycle: Liquid methane in vast lakes at its north pole evaporates into the atmosphere, rains down on the hills nearby, then flows back into the lakes. Methane vapor may condense on the suspended tholins, helping it rain out, and then the tholins can coat the moon’s surface. That’s very interesting, because nitrogen and carbon molecules are important in prebiotic chemistry, making up amino acids, which in turn are the building blocks of proteins.
Earth’s early atmosphere was likely very similar to Titan’s, before the Great Oxygenation Event about 3 billion years ago which gave us the atmosphere, more or less, we have today. Studying Titan is like studying ancient Earth. Not to be too broad, but life evolved on Earth in that early atmosphere, so it’s not too silly to wonder if something similar is occurring on Titan. We certainly don’t know if life is brewing or thriving there, but it’s certainly within the realm of science to look into it.
Titan is an alien world over a billion kilometers from the Sun, and drier than any desert on our own planet. Yet there are aching similarities, ones we can study in the lab. NASA is already in the early stages of planning a mission to Titan called Dragonfly — a lander and quadcopter drone that will fly over the surface and examine regions likely to have or have had conditions conducive to life.
What will it find there? These lab results are an important step in figuring that out.
*Just typing those words makes me feel like a scientist in an old black-and-white sci-fi movie.
WUHAN, China (AP) — World Health Organization investigators on Wednesday visited a research center in the Chinese city of Wuhan that has been the subject of speculation about the origins of the coronavirus, with one member saying they’d intended to meet key staff and press them on critical issues.
The WHO team’s visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a highlight of their mission to gather data and search for clues as to where the virus originated and how it spread.
“We’re looking forward to meeting with all the key people here and asking all the important questions that need to be asked,” zoologist and team member Peter Daszak said, according to footage run by Japanese broadcaster TBS.
Reporters followed the team to the high security facility, but as with past visits, there was little direct access to team members, who have given scant details of their discussions and visits thus far. Uniformed and plainclothes security guards stood watch along the facility’s gated front entrance, but there was no sign of the protective suits team members had donned Tuesday during a visit to an animal disease research center. It wasn’t clear what protective gear was worn inside the institute.
The team left after around three hours without speaking to waiting journalists.
At a daily briefing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the experts also held talks Wednesday with experts from Huazhong Agricultural University.
“It should be noted that virus traceability is a complex scientific issue, and we need to provide sufficient space for experts to conduct scientific research,” Wang said. “China will continue to cooperate with WHO in an open, transparent and responsible manner, and make its contribution to better prevent future risks and protect the lives and health of people in all countries.”
Following two weeks in quarantine, the WHO team that includes experts in veterinary medicine, virology, food safety and epidemiology from 10 nations has over the past six days visited hospitals, research institutes and a traditional wet market linked to many of the first cases. Their visit followed months of negotiations as China seeks to retain tight control over information about the outbreak and the investigation into its origins, in what some have seen as an attempt to avoid blame for any missteps in its early response.
One of China’s top virus research labs, the Wuhan Institute of Virology built an archive of genetic information about bat coronaviruses after the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. That has led to unproven allegations that it may have a link to the original outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan in late 2019.
China has strongly denied that possibility and has promoted also unproven theories that the virus may have originated elsewhere or even been brought into the country from overseas with imports of frozen seafood tainted with the virus, a notion roundly rejected by international scientists and agencies.
Full Coverage: Coronavirus pandemic
The institute’s deputy director is Shi Zhengli, a virologist who worked with Daszak to track down the origins of SARS that originated in China and led to the 2003 outbreak. She has published widely in academic journalists and worked to debunk theories espoused by the former Trump administration and other American officials that the virus is either a bioweapon or a “lab leak” from the institute.
Confirmation of the origins of the virus is likely to take years. Pinning down an outbreak’s animal reservoir typically requires exhaustive research, including taking animal samples, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies. One possibility is that a wildlife poacher might have passed the virus to traders who carried it to Wuhan.
The first clusters of COVID-19 were detected in Wuhan in late 2019, eventually prompting the government to put the city of 11 million under a strict 76-day lockdown. China has since reported more than 89,000 cases and 4,600 deaths, with new cases largely concentrated in its northeast and local lockdowns and travel restrictions being imposed to contain the outbreaks.
New cases of local transmission continue to fall with just 15 reported on Wednesday as Chinese heed government calls not to travel for the Lunar New Year holiday later this month.
Few places they are visiting are as controversial as a laboratory run by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which officials in former US President Donald Trump’s administration suggested, without providing evidence, could have been the origin of the coronavirus.
The lab in question, which is affiliated with the central government-run Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the only one in mainland China equipped for the highest level of biocontainment, known as Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4).
BSL-4 labs are designed to study the world’s most dangerous pathogens — those that pose a high risk for transmission, are frequently fatal and most often have no reliable cure, such as coronaviruses.
Wuhan lab led by China’s ‘bat woman’
The Wuhan lab was created in the wake of the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic, which swept through China and other parts of Asia in 2002 and 2003.
In particular, the Wuhan lab team led by virologist Shi Zhengli, known as China’s “bat woman” for years of virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves, has focused on bat-borne coronaviruses, exactly what the current pandemic is believed to have been caused by.
Bats are a major reservoir for viruses, and though they do not suffer from them thanks to natural resistance, they are known carriers of many infectious pathogens that are devastating for humans, including Ebola, rabies, SARS, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). Current scientific consensus is that SARS-Cov-2, the virus behind the Covid-19 pandemic, also evolved in bats and then spread to humans, potentially with an intermediary animal host.
This makes the work of labs such as that in Wuhan all the more important, as understanding how viruses evolve and spread from bats to humans could better enable scientists to fight future infections. It also means however, that such labs may play host to a number of potentially deadly pathogens, and must be extra cautious about ensuring they do not escape.
Although the stridently anti-China Trump administration suggested this could have taken place in Wuhan, most experts disagree.
In a paper published in the journal Nature Medicine last March, leading infectious disease specialists in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia said it was “improbable” that the novel coronavirus had emerged from a lab, citing comparative analysis of genomic data.
“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the paper said.
Peter Daszak, a member of the WHO team currently in Wuhan and president of EcoHealth Alliance, an environmental health non-profit, said he was confident in the lab’s safety protocols.
“I know that lab really well,” said Daszak, who has worked closely with virologist Shi in the past.
“It is a good virology lab that was doing good work that got close to finding what the next SARS-related coronavirus would be. But it didn’t find it as far as I know. But you know, unfortunately, it maybe got so close that people now ironically start to blame it.”
Some have speculated that the WHO team may be limited in what they can see during inspections in China — particularly as Beijing has begun to push alternative, often completely unfounded, theories about the origin of the virus — but Daszak said he hoped his personal relationships with the lab leadership will mean they get everything they need.
“We’ve already spoken with (Shi) Zhengli, and she’s open about these things. I’m hoping that we’ll have the same level of openness and transparency,” he said.
However, Daszak did express concern that the wider investigation may be too late to find important information in Wuhan, where the initial outbreak of the virus occurred and it is believed to have originated from.
“We could have been here a year ago doing good work,” Daszak said, though he added “we’re getting good access … all the time, we’re digging in to find out more and more information about each possible pathway.”
Wuhan seafood market visit
On Sunday, the WHO team visited the now disinfected and shuttered Huanan seafood market, where a cluster of pneumonia-like cases were first detected in late 2019 and which is long thought to have been a potential origin of the outbreak.
Peter Ben Embarek, the leader of the WHO team and a food safety specialist, told CNN that “even if the place had been to some extent disinfected, all the shops are there — and the equipment is there. It gives you a good idea of the state of the market in terms of maintenance, infrastructure, hygiene and flow of goods and people.”
The team was able to talk to locals and workers, said Ben Embarek, adding that it was too early in their investigations to draw conclusions.
“It’s clear that something happened in that market,” Ben Embarek said. “But it could also be that other places had the same role, and that one was just picked because some doctors were clever enough to link a few sporadic cases together.”
Another WHO team member, Professor Thea Fisher, told CNN she’d been surprised by the “usefulness” of seeing a market that had been deserted for the past year. “We had some very good public health people with us who had actually been undertaking some of the environmental sampling at the market … explaining to us exactly where did they take the samples from the ventilation system.”
Daszak, who specializes in zoonoses — diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans — said the market visit was “to me a critical point in the trip.”
“We got to see the place where every infected person that was confirmed from that market had a stall, you got a feel for how new it was, what the infrastructure is like,” he said. “Would it have been a messy place, a busy crowded place? So that was extremely useful.”
All the WHO team have cautioned that any findings from the current investigation are likely to take a considerable amount of time, and spoken of a need to “manage expectations,” even as the eyes of the world are upon them.
Two spacewalking astronauts faced down and fixed numerous technical glitches during a busy spacewalk Wednesday (Jan. 27), but couldn’t quite finish upgrading a European science platform on the International Space Station (ISS).
NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover spent nearly seven hours spacewalking outside the station to work on the Bartolomeo external science platform on the European Space Agency’s Columbus module. While the astronauts managed to overcome most of their issues, they were unable to activate the Bartolomeo platform itself because one of three cables refused to connect.
Working with space and ground teams, Glover and Hopkins managed to overcome numerous other issues. These included several stiff cables, an initially unresponsive antenna, and two sticky devices called H-fixtures. The teams also encountered, but moved past, rare astronaut communication issues during Canadarm2 robotic arm operations.
Before the astronauts returned inside, NASA reported that a new high-speed data antenna the spacewalkers installed is “working as it should be.” This was a major win for space and ground teams after overcoming several failed attempts to turn on heaters during the spacewalk, to support the antenna’s operations.
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Astronaut Victor Glover rides the Canadarm2 robotic arm outside the International Space Station while crewmate Michael Hopkins of NASA works nearby in a spacewalk on Jan. 27, 2021. (Image credit: NASA TV)
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Astronaut Victor Glover tosses an antenna cover into space for disposal while riding a robotic arm outside the International Space Station during a spacewalk on Jan. 27, 2021. (Image credit: NASA TV)
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Astronaut Victor Glover rides the Canadarm2 robotic arm outside the International Space Station while crewmate Michael Hopkins of NASA works nearby in a spacewalk on Jan. 27, 2021. (Image credit: NASA TV)
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A view of SpaceX’s Crew-1 Crew Dragon spacecraft (right) docked at the International Space Station. The spacecraft ferried four Expedition 64 astronauts to the station in November, including NASA’s Victor Glover and Michael Hopkins, who took a spacewalk on Jan. 27, 2021. (Image credit: NASA TV)
An astronaut’s first spacewalk
The day started quietly when Hopkins and Glover, both of Expedition 64, switched to spacesuit battery power inside the Quest airlock at 6:28 a.m. EST (1128 GMT). Their big goals on the spacewalk were to install the high-speed antenna and connect the Bartolomeo external science platform’s cables at the European Space Agency’s Columbus module. They also planned to ready the space station for essential power upgrades.
Hopkins, an Expedition 36/37 veteran on his third excursion outside the space station, made his way to Columbus using tethers and handgrips. Glover’s first few minutes of extravehicular activity were spectacular, as the astronaut climbed aboard the Canadarm2 robotic arm for a ride to Columbus, under the control of NASA astronaut Kate Rubins inside the ISS.
“Hey, Mike,” Glover casually said during his ride, as he approached his crewmate perched on Columbus.
Hopkins quickly looked up. “That’s a beautiful view,” he said.
“Yeah,” Glover said, continuing his journey.
Cable troubles
The first major task for astronauts was installing a new high-speed Ka-band data cable on Columbus so astronauts and researchers have access to a broadband connection with European science facilities on the ground. Trouble started almost immediately when Hopkins and Glover struggled with four bolts they needed to remove from Columbus to safely install the cable.
The astronauts, in conversation with Mission Control, tried different approaches to screw and unscrew the bolts, which NASA said had “some resistance” to being removed – not an uncommon situation in space, where metal expands and contracts considerably under large temperature swings. Eventually, the astronauts safely bolted in the Columbus Ka-band antenna (ColKa) and verified it was firmly in place.
“EV2 sees no wiggle,” Glover said to Houston about the newly installed antenna, referring to his designation of “EV2” or second spacewalker. Hopkins was EV1, wearing red stripes on his spacesuit so that orbital camera views could easily distinguish between the two astronauts.
Minutes after the astronauts moved to the next workstation, however, NASA discovered ColKa wasn’t responding to commands to turn on the heaters. Hopkins backtracked for a classic solution familiar to any computer user facing cable issues – “demating and remating”, or unplugging and replugging, the two cables connecting ColKa to Columbua. With the antenna heaters still not responding, NASA put in a call to ESA’s European Operations Control Center in Cologne, Germany to discuss solutions.
It was a lengthy NASA-ESA conversation as Glover and Hopkins also discovered a second issue, minutes later. Cables to activate the Bartolomeo external science platform were stiff, which is a common problem in cold microgravity conditions, and refused to fully clamp down. The crew members were able to “soft dock” the Columbus cables, but couldn’t secure the connection as planned. A firm connection required fully pulling down levers on each of the three cables, and the crew reported the cables were only moving down halfway.
Astronaut Victor Glover rides the Canadarm2 robotic arm outside the International Space Station while crewmate Michael Hopkins of NASA works nearby in a spacewalk on Jan. 27, 2021. (Image credit: NASA TV)
Bartolomeo still down
After nearly an hour of interagency discussion, with the spacewalk approaching the three-hour mark, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen — responsible for coaching the spacewalkers through their tasks from Houston — radioed a new set of instructions from Mission Control.
Hopkins and Glover removed an unneeded ColKa cover in another bid to get the heaters working. Next, Hopkins grabbed some wire ties to force at least some of the Bartolomeo cables to close. Thanks to Hopkins’ efforts, two of the three cables are connected and transmitting power and data as expected, but the third couldn’t be connected and is temporarily capped off and stowed safely in place, NASA said in updates during the broadcast.
The trouble means Bartolomeo is “not yet functional” due to the cable issues, NASA added, but space agency officials will continue discussions after the spacewalk. The next opportunity to address the problem is a scheduled spacewalk on Monday (Feb. 1.)
An antenna cover overboard (on purpose)
As Hopkins battled the Bartolomeo cables, Glover hopped on Canadarm2 to jettison the unneeded ColKa cover. This was a planned procedure also marred by temporary communications issues with Glover. Glover’s voice was breaking up, but Rubins – in control of Canadarm2 – could transmit her communications to Glover with no issue.
Mogensen, relaying the consensus from Mission Control, said there probably was something on station physically blocking the voice signal. Rubins was authorized to move Glover into place to toss the cover away from the space station, an operation NASA broadcast live on video.
As ColKa’s cover floated away, NASA reported the recalcitrant antenna heaters were finally alive. The upgraded antenna should give quick speeds of up to 50 megabits a second for downlink and up to two megabits for uplink, according to ESA, a healthy enough connection to easily stream video.
Five hours into the spacewalk, the astronauts — who had spent most of their time outside so far troubleshooting the unexpected — began joking about taking a snack break and eating bacon, which is technically impossible given they were each locked inside of a spacesuit.
“It is definitely snack time,” one astronaut said during the conversation, with the other adding, “I would have thought Rubins would have snacks in the airlock for just this kind of an event.”
“We’ll have snacks for you later,” Rubin reassured Glover and Hopkins.
But the astronauts kept up their energy, even without bacon, as they managed to overcome yet another small snag at the P6 truss. The H-fixtures (grapple fixtures) they worked on there proved harder than expected to remove. With that task accomplished, the newly opened slots will open up room for an ISS power upgrade.
The orbiting complex will eventually get six new solar arrays that will boost power by 20 to 30 per cent, which will assist with the station’s growing focus on commercial and research opportunities. Astronauts have also spent several years upgrading existing nickel hydrogen batteries to more powerful lithium ion batteries, a four-year task that Hopkins and Glover are expected to complete on their second spacewalk Monday (Feb. 1.)
NASA even authorized a “get-ahead” task on Wednesday’s spacewalk, referring to an item usually put in when the astronauts are well ahead of schedule. Glover prepared to remove and replace what NASA thought was a broken “pip pin” inside the crew airlock, following up on a previous crew report during a July 2020 spacewalk. After inspecting the pin up close, however, both ground teams and Glover determined the pin appeared to be working well. Glover thus left aside the replacement task.
Wednesday’s spacewalk was the 233rd spacewalk in support of station maintenance, operations and upgrades, according to the live NASA Television broadcast. The support team in Mission Control also included CapCom Drew Feustel, a Canadian-U.S. NASA astronaut.
Glover’s spacewalk was the first for an African-American since NASA astronaut Alvin Drew’s EVA on space shuttle mission STS-133 on Feb. 28, 2011. The first African-American to walk in space was NASA astronaut Bernard Harris on Feb. 3, 1995, during STS-63.
Glover is also flying the first long-duration ISS mission for an African-American, marking a long overdue milestone in the space station’s more than 20 years of continuous operations. His scheduled six-month stay should easily eclipse the past African-American record of 42 cumulative days in space, set by NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson across three space station missions: STS-121, STS-120 and STS-131.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcomand on Facebook.
Dr. Peter Daszak described how easy it was to manipulate bat-based coronaviruses in an interview filmed just weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.
Daszak has close ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and reportedly pushed back against a National Institute of Health request that he arrange an outside inspection of the lab.
Daszak orchestrated a statement at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that condemned “conspiracy theories” that the virus did not have a natural origin.
Daszak now serves on a World Health Organization panel currently investigating the origins of the pandemic on the ground in China.
A U.S. doctor who is part of the World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic discussed his work manipulating bat-based coronaviruses in labs just weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.
Dr. Peter Daszak, a close associate with China’s premier bat-based coronavirus researcher and a key figure in directing taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, explained how easy it was to alter coronaviruses during a podcast interview filmed Dec. 9, 2019.
“You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily,” Daszak said. “Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein — and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this — and insert the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab.”
It’s unclear where the coronavirus manipulation Daszak described in the podcast, also known as gain of function research, was conducted. Daszak did not return multiple requests for comment.
Daszak said that manipulating coronaviruses in labs is a useful tool in developing treatments and vaccines for potential future outbreaks, but some virologists say such research is playing with fire.
“The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright told New York magazine.
There’s no evidence suggesting that Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina had anything to do with COVID-19. However, the high-containment lab was the site of a “near-miss” incident in 2016 after a researcher was bitten by a mouse infected by a lab-created variant of the SARS coronavirus, according to ProPublica.
And Baric told New York magazine that he can’t rule out the possibility that COVID-19 unintentionally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“Can you rule out a laboratory escape? The answer in this case is probably not,” Baric said.
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Daszak also said in the podcast that he and his team had discovered “over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses” after seven years of surveilling bats across southern China.
“We’ve even found people with antibodies in Yunnan to SARS-related coronaviruses, so there’s human exposure,” Daszak said. “We’re just beginning another five years’ work to look at cohorts in southern China to see how frequent does spillover happen.”
Chinese researcher Shi Zhengli, known by her colleagues as the “bat lady,” reported in early 2017 that she and her colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had discovered 11 new strains of SARS-related viruses from horseshoe bats in the Yunnan Province, situated over 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Coronavirus Expert Says Virus Could Have Leaked From Wuhan Lab)
Shi told the Scientific American in March that she lost sleep worrying that COVID-19 could have leaked from her lab in Wuhan after first learning of the outbreak in December 2019.
“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” Shi said.
Daszak routed funds from former President Barack Obama’s Predict program and the National Institute of Health to Shi’s bat-surveillance team through his nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, according to New York magazine.
Shi contributed to a study published in February 2020 reporting that COVID-19 is 96.2% identical to a viral strain that was detected from one of the Yunnan horseshoe bats.
Former President Donald Trump’s State Department announced on Friday that it had obtained evidence showing that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick with flu-like symptoms in Fall 2019 prior to the first known cases of COVID-19, a sign that experts have previously stated would be evidence pointing to the theory that the virus unintentionally leaked from the Wuhan lab.
Daszak was a key figure in leading the charge at the onset of the pandemic against the theory that COVID-19 unintentionally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Daszak orchestrated a statement published in The Lancet medical journal in February, prior to any serious research on the origins of COVID-19, condemning “conspiracy theories” that suggest the virus doesn’t have a natural origin.
A spokesman for Daszak told The Wall Street Journal on Friday that his statement, which was cited by numerous news outlets — and by fact check organizations to censor unwelcome inquiries — during the onset of the pandemic, was meant to protect Chinese scientists.
“The Lancet letter was written during a time in which Chinese scientists were receiving death threats and the letter was intended as a showing of support for them as they were caught between important work trying to stop an outbreak and the crush of online harassment,” Daszak’s spokesman told The Journal.
Daszak is a part of the WHO’s 10-person panel that began investigating the origins of COVID-19 on the ground in China on Thursday.
Daszak obtained a position on the investigative panel despite his previous objection to the NIH to cease funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology until he arranged an outside inspection of the lab.
“I am not trained as a private detective,” Daszak said, according to New York magazine.
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