How Do Astronauts Vote While in Orbit?

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Credit: Jackie Ramirez from Pixabay

Earlier this week, NASA issued an article on how astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) can vote in the upcoming election. Yes, they need to make arrangements like anyone planning to be out of town, but we have a least two astronauts (from Boeing) who did not plan to be on the station during the election.

The process as explained by NASA (and shown below) is as follows:

Just like any other American away from home, astronauts may fill out a Federal Post Card Application to request an absentee ballot. After an astronaut fills out an electronic ballot aboard the orbiting laboratory, the document flows through NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System to a ground antenna at the agency’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

From New Mexico, NASA transfers the ballot to the Mission Control Center at NASA Johnson and then on to the county clerk responsible for casting the ballot. To preserve the vote’s integrity, the ballot is encrypted and accessible only by the astronaut and the clerk.

According to the Pew Research Center, about 66 percent of voting-eligible population cast a ballot in the 2020 election.

If astronauts can find a way to vote, the rest of us here on Earth have no excuse to miss the election.

Please remember to vote.

Credit: NASA

Outside Group with Political Agenda Taxing NASA

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As if things could not get more troublesome, the Heritage Foundation appears to be doing a lot of dirty work on behalf of the Trump campaign to obtain internal conversations by NASA employees. According to Reuters, the focus of the campaign against NASA appears to be looking for comments involving Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

The requests are likely to bog down the NASA’s employees while the Heritage Foundation pursues its agenda to eliminate any “disloyal” federal employees, all part of its earlier, now toxic, Project 2025 mission. You might think we were talking about the Soviet Union, but these are the tactics today of the far right.

SpaceX has done very well under the NASA program, but some may want to continue to tip the scales in his favor now that he has come out and supported Trump for president.

NASA is not alone. The Heritage Foundation has been sending tens of thousands of requests to federal agencies in the past two years building up a case against federal employees, most likely in the hope of putting its own selected staff into these same positions.

This is not the way to run a government or win a campaign. Whoever wins the presidential election will have amply opportunity to place its own managers in all of the federal agencies, including NASA. That in itself is tough enough, with a new president needing to fill more than 4,000 positions under normal circumstances, something the last Trump administration struggled to do.

Pic of the Week: Spacewalk Outside the Chinese Space Station

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Image (Credit): Extravehicular activity on China’s Tiangong space station this past July. (CMSA)

This week’s image is from the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA). It shows taikonaut Li Cong on a spacewalk outside China’s Tiangong station on July 3, 2024. 

The space station was first launched in April 2021 and has been permanently crewed since June 2022. The current crew, called Shenzhou 18, consists of Commander Ye Guangfu, Operator Li Cong, and System Operator Li Guangsu.

Study Findings: Detection of Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen Peroxide on the Stratified Surface of Charon with JWST

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Image (Credit): Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, as captures by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

Nature Communications abstract of the study findings:

Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, has been extensively studied, with research focusing on its primitive composition and changes due to radiation and photolysis. However, spectral data have so far been limited to wavelengths below 2.5 μm, leaving key aspects unresolved. Here we present the detection of carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) on the surface of Charon’s northern hemisphere, using JWST data. These detections add to the known chemical inventory that includes crystalline water ice, ammonia-bearing species, and tholin-like darkening constituents previously revealed by ground- and space-based observations. The H2O2 presence indicates active radiolytic/photolytic processing of the water ice-rich surface by solar ultraviolet and interplanetary medium Lyman-α photons, solar wind, and galactic cosmic rays. Through spectral modeling of the surface, we show that the CO2 is present in pure crystalline form and, possibly, in intimately mixed states on the surface. Endogenically sourced subsurface CO2 exposed on the surface is likely the primary source of this component, with possible contributions from irradiation of hydrocarbons mixed with water ice, interfacial radiolysis between carbon deposits and water ice, and the implantation of energetic carbon ions from the solar wind and solar energetic particles.

Citation: Protopapa, S., Raut, U., Wong, I. et al. Detection of carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide on the stratified surface of Charon with JWST. Nat Commun 15, 8247 (2024).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-51826-4

Study-related stories:

Reuters

Science Alert

Futurism

Space Quote: Can China Win the Lunar Race This Time?

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Image (Credit): Image of Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan on the Moon’s surface. (NASA)

“As the U.S. has flailed, China and its partners have marched forward, notching one success after another. There is no reason to believe they will not be first to send a crewed mission to the lunar south pole, where only a half dozen or so promising regions exist to safely land. Depending on how the currently vague noninterference rules are interpreted and enforced by the Chinese (and others), significant parts of the moon might end up off-limits for anyone else to explore or mine. We do not know for certain how China might behave on the lunar surface—this is part of the conundrum—but terrestrial conflicts in the South China Sea and China’s regular infractions of sovereign airspace give scant rationale for optimism.”

-Quote from an article in Scientific American titled “NASA Needs a ‘Lunar Marathon’ to Match China on the Moon.” The author of the piece is Thomas Zurbuchen, who previously worked at NASA and is now is professor and director of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s ETH Zürich | Space. For another take on where the US is with its Artemis lunar program, you can read an ARS Technica article titled “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Saving NASA’s Floundering Artemis Program.”