AILSA CHANG, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Ailsa Chang.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
And I'm Scott Detrow here with another edition of Spacing Out with Regina Barber from Short Wave and NPR science correspondent Ari Daniel. Hey, everybody.
REGINA BARBER, BYLINE: Hey.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Hi there.
DETROW: Ari, welcome to Spacing Out.
DANIEL: It's a delight...
BARBER: Yep.
DETROW: ...To be here, Scott.
BARBER: (Laughter).
DETROW: What are we talking about today?
BARBER: So we're talking about a call for volunteers for a simulated NASA mission.
DANIEL: Plus, sugar in space and what it might mean for how life started on Earth and beyond.
BARBER: And lastly, a spacecraft on the edge of our solar system that's just waking up from an almost yearlong nap.
DETROW: You know, a yearlong nap sounds appealing.
BARBER: Yes.
DETROW: And I will be honest, when I have seen headlines about these simulated Mars missions...
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: ... I felt - like, once in a while, I'm like, that does seem appealing.
BARBER: Right.
DETROW: It's probably not.
BARBER: It's not.
DETROW: But in little blips, it does.
BARBER: (Laughter).
DETROW: What exactly is this job 'cause I feel like it always captures public attention when they're looking for new people?
DANIEL: Well, right now, people can apply to join a yearlong four-person simulated mission to the moon and Mars. It'll take place at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and could start as soon as August of next year.
DETROW: These people are, of course, not actually going to the moon or Mars, though.
BARBER: No.
DETROW: So what is it that they're doing...
BARBER: Yeah. So...
DETROW: ...When they don't leave Houston?
BARBER: Yeah. So they spend most of their time isolated in a 650-ish square foot enclosure, and they're simulating travel through deep space. And for two months in the middle, they'll move to a different slightly bigger structure to simulate surface living on Mars.
DANIEL: And this structure will have areas for sleeping, recreation, work, medical and food areas, plus an air lock and a place to grow crops. They'll do science experiments and test out protocols for living and working in deep space. But there's one big difference from actually being in space, they'll still be living under Earth's gravity.
DETROW: And that's one of the things that scientists wonder about long-term, long-distance space travel is how being in zero gravity or low gravity that long affects your body.
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: Since that can't be tested out, what exactly is it that NASA is hoping to learn here?
BARBER: Yeah. So one of the big objectives is to understand how the crew deals with stress and isolation. Will they all get along, and how will they handle such long-term separation from their loved ones? One thing they'll test is how the crew deals with communication delays because depending on where Mars is in the orbit, it could take a hello 20 minutes to get to Earth and 20 minutes to hear back, which also means no instant communication with mission control.
DANIEL: In current and past real-life missions, astronauts have been able to talk to loved ones or mission control in real time, but a Mars mission could last two to three years, so they'll be dealing with these communication delays for a while.
DETROW: When - if somebody's been interested by our conversation about this, when are applications due?
DANIEL: NASA's website says the deadline is ongoing.
DETROW: OK. Second topic, which was intriguing, sugar in space. What - what's going on here?
BARBER: So researchers have long wondered how life on Earth started. Like, where did the ingredients come from, and how did they get here?
DETROW: Big questions.
DANIEL: Some of the biggest. Some scientists have been trying to answer it by scanning our galaxy for the building blocks of life and their precursors. One particularly good place to look is something called the interstellar medium, which is basically the space in between the stars.
DETROW: So this might be a dumb question.
BARBER: (Laughter) No.
DETROW: But are there things in that space, or - I thought it was just...
BARBER: A vacuum.
DETROW: ...Space.
BARBER: Right? Yeah.
DETROW: I thought space.
BARBER: So in certain areas, there is. So my first research project was on the interstellar medium. Shout out to Kristen Larsen (ph), my adviser. It basically consists of all kinds of compounds in the form of dust particles and ices.
DETROW: OK.
DANIEL: It turns out that this interstellar medium, Scott, is an amazing chemical factory that can produce a range of organic molecules, including ones needed to fashion RNA, proteins and cell membranes.
DETROW: And I assume a kind of sugar, perhaps?
DANIEL: That's right.
BARBER: (Laughter) Yeah.
DANIEL: A team of scientists pointed two telescopes in Spain at the interstellar medium, that rich chemical brew in the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. And they scanned it for radio signals of different molecules, which is how they found a four-carbon sugar called erythrulose.
BARBER: I've heard of, like, glucose and fructose, but, like, how do you say that, Ari?
DANIEL: Erythrulose.
BARBER: Erythrulose? Yeah. I don't - I've never heard that.
DETROW: That feels like an "Odyssey" character.
BARBER: Yeah (laughter).
DANIEL: It's not that common, but it's found in raspberries.
BARBER: Oh.
DANIEL: Izaskun Jimenez-Serra, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrobiology in Spain, says the discovery, which was published in Nature Astronomy, was thrilling.
IZASKUN JIMENEZ-SERRA: Your heart starts beating super fast, like a (imitating fast breathing). You get super excited (laughter). A very nice feeling.
DETROW: Why exactly is she so excited, though? Why is this such a big deal?
DANIEL: Well, living things make and use sugars, but we don't know how they come about without life around. These results suggest that sugars may have been made inside a molecular cloud before stars or planets formed. They could then be incorporated into, say, an asteroid as it's being built from the material in the interstellar medium. And then such a space rock could've struck the early Earth, perhaps delivering a subset of key ingredients, sweetening the stage for the emergence of life here and potentially elsewhere.
DETROW: So let's talk about a spacecraft on an ongoing journey from here to elsewhere, this - the spacecraft on the edge of our solar system.
BARBER: Yeah. So this is the NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. It's famous for taking those first detailed images of Pluto's surface.
DETROW: Right. That heart on...
BARBER: Yes.
DETROW: ...Pluto. Those pictures were so vivid.
BARBER: They were so beautiful, Scott. So since then, New Horizons has continued to travel towards the edges of our solar system.
DANIEL: Then last year, it went into about 11 months of hibernation. It does this periodically to save energy. And now it's woken up about 6 billion miles away from us and counting.
DETROW: Not unlike Ryan Gosling...
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: ...In "Project Hail Mary."
BARBER: He was even further (laughter).
DETROW: What is this spacecraft doing?
DANIEL: It's studying the edges of our solar system.
BARBER: So it's in the Kuiper belt right now, and this is the region where Pluto lives. There's a lot of other icy objects. The end of this belt is basically the end of our solar system. So our solar system is in this bubble that the sun makes called the heliosphere, and that heliosphere protects the solar system from high-energy radiation coming from other parts of the galaxy.
DANIEL: Both of the Voyager spacecrafts have traveled out of the solar system, and they studied the edge of that bubble along the way. But scientists still don't know too much about this sphere of protection that the sun creates. And as New Horizons sails through the limits of our solar system, it might be able to gather more clues on how that bubble works or even what it is.
DETROW: We talked earlier about how it can take 20 minutes for a message to go back between Earth...
BARBER: Right.
DETROW: ...And Mars. This is something that is 6 billion miles away. How does this spacecraft communicate with Earth?
DANIEL: Scientists can talk to spacecraft this far out because of NASA's Deep Space Network. It's this array, Scott, of three radio dishes on Earth - one in California, one in Spain, one in Australia - and these things are giant.
ALICE BOWMAN: The 70-meter antenna would - if you put it in the football stadium, it would take up the whole space.
BARBER: Yeah. It's huge. So that's Alice Bowman, a spacecraft engineer and the mission operations manager for New Horizons. And she was just so excited to be part of this New Horizons mission, which is truly a testament to human ingenuity.
DETROW: Much like this recurring ALL THINGS CONSIDERED segment is my thing (ph).
BARBER: It's true. It's a testament to human...
DANIEL: (Laughter).
DETROW: Absolutely.
BARBER: ...Our ingenuity. We thought it up.
DETROW: That is Regina Barber of Short Wave and science correspondent Ari Daniel. Thanks to both of you.
BARBER: Thank you.
DANIEL: Our pleasure.
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