Space Exploration, spelling & surgery!

This is Europa Clipper, the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built to explore other planets and moons in our solar system. Its mission, due to launch on October 10th, is to travel to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Scientists believe there may be twice as much water on Europa than there is on Earth, including an enormous ocean beneath its surface.

With this much water, Europa might be one of only a few places in the solar system capable of supporting life, but Europa is located far from the sun, which makes it very cold and causes any water on its surface to freeze solid. This makes it hard to know what’s underneath the ice!

So Europa Clipper is being sent to find out more. It will take the spacecraft nearly six years to travel to Europa. Once there the spacecraft will fly by Europa 50 times to collect valuable data about its surface and the possibility of an ocean beneath it—helping scientists to discover more about Jupiter’s icy moon, and the potential for life existing there.

Meanwhile, closer to home, NASA and the US Geological Survey’s Landsat satellites have been photographing Earth from space for nearly 50 years. These images provide scientists with information about changes happening to our planet. From the expansion of cities to the melting of glaciers.

Now the Landsat teams have created an online tool that showcases these photos in a unique way—people can display their names and other words using satellite imagery. Once a word, like Landsat, is entered, the tool reveals a series of photographs taken by the satellites. Each photo represents a letter of the alphabet! The team behind this online tool hopes it encourages us to think about the changes happening on Earth, while also having some fun at the same time.

Astronauts don’t spend as much time in space as most satellites do, but their missions are getting longer. That means they might need emergency medical help more often, and it can be hard to find a hospital in space!

But this year surgeons from Nebraska successfully completed a simulated surgery in space, using a robot they controlled from Earth! The robot was set up on the International Space Station.

It had a camera and two robotic arms; one for gripping and one for making cuts. Since this surgery was only a simulation the team used elastic bands to act like human tissue. During the two-hour operation, the six surgeons on Earth successfully performed surgical tasks like delicately controlling tools and making precise cuts, despite being 250 miles away from their “patient”.

Those involved believe this success marks the first step toward remote-controlled surgeries on humans in space being possible, and that this technology could also be used in places on Earth where expert surgeons are not available.

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