Varda space successfully completes three missions
Commercial company Varda Space has successfully accomplished three low-Earth orbit space missions in the past two years, with each capsule returning safely.
Varda is currently developing the first remote pharmaceutical manufacturing platform off of Earth.
The company has been launching capsules into orbit to conduct autonomous research, including experiments in the pharmaceutical and hypersonic travel industries.
The company’s focus is on increasing the number of successful missions and the pace of launch. Nicholas Cialdella Chief Technology Officer and Head of Vehicles at Varda Space Industries, said getting back data from the crystals they’re making helps them understand the space environment and how it affects drug manufacturing. He said Varda is hoping to become the first company to commercialize this technology.
“We do that with, you know, cheap, fast and reliable re-entry capsules and really advancing that technology into an autonomous state,” said Cialdella. “Unlike the International Space Station, where you have to have humans in the loop operating these processes, we run it with, you know, robotics effectively from control on the ground.”
Varda Space does have some control over how much time these capsules spend in space. Cialdella said they can sit in orbit for either a few weeks or months to perform the manufacturing portion of the mission.
“On our command, we'll do a series of burns,” Cialdella said. “And those series of burns ultimately lead into the deorbit trajectory. So it can last up there for effectively as long as we would like but, after that then we determine when it’s time to come back.”
NASA is planning to retire the International Space Station in 2030, anticipating that commercial space stations will take its place. Cialdella said he believes Varda is the perfect platform for post ISS.
“We don't have to have a human rated space station ready to go for us to really bridge that research gap between the International Space Station and the next time that a commercial space station is available,” Cialdella said. “So we can be that autonomous platform while not risking human lives to continue that research.”
Decades-old data reveals new findings on Venus’s crust
New research from old data is giving scientists more insight into the makeup and formation of the crust of Venus – and an even better understanding of the evolutionary paths of both Earth and its planetary neighbor.
Despite both planets having a few similarities such as size, density, and composition, Venus does have different geological and atmospheric qualities. For example, it has a very dense and thick atmosphere, and the surface is much hotter than Earth's.
Justin Filiberto, NASA’s Deputy Division Chief of Astro-Materials Research and Exploration, said that because Venus’ crust gets thicker, scientists originally interpreted Venus would cool. However, what they have found is the opposite.
“What our new results show is that this isn’t the case,” Filiberto said. “That as the crust becomes thicker, because Venus is so hot that crust becomes unstable, and either the bottom of the crust breaks off and goes back into the planet's interior or gets so hot that it remelts and makes lava and can cause eruptions.”
The discovery of these findings was found through using new models of old data to look deeper at the interior of Venus.
“If we go down into the crust, what would those rocks mineralogically look like with depth?” said Filiberto. “And what we noticed was, when we calculated the density of those rocks, at some point, they became so dense that they were denser than the interior.”
NASA hasn’t sent a probe to Venus in decades, and in the coming years there is a plan to change that.
NASA has selected the DAVINCI and VERITAS mission to uncover more details about the planet.
“As we look at other planets, they can tell us about what happened early in the Earth's evolution that got us to where we are today,” said Filiberto.
