High-Level Project Summary
We’ve developed a website to help humans understand the problems and stresses in Space. Our website’s and project’s name is RIDGE. It comes from the 5 hazards of human in Space, Radiation/Isolation/Distance from Earth/Gravity/Environment. Our website contains Texts about the 5 hazards, and videos to help them understand better, 3D Models of organisms, a forum that everyone in the site can write their opinions and researches. And as the 2nd mission we’ve created a superhero that will live on Mars. We’ve especially searched Mars because it may contain life in the future. So our superhero will help people to understand “What abilities would a living being have if it was living on Mars?”
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
OUR SUPERHERO B-GLASS’22:
Our challenge is “Build a Space Biology Superhero” and the main purpose of the challange is: “To design a platform that allows users to explore space travel stresses, understand how diverse organisms deal with these stresses, and then build a ‘Space Biology Superhero’ by combining features from these organisms.”
We started with learning the most important problems and stresses in space that astronauts deal with. We’ve discovered that there are 5 main problems that can cause the biggest results: Radiation, Isolation and Confinement, Distance from Earth, Gravity, Hostile/Closed Environments. And by exploring how these conditions are important as much as life is worth, we decided to create a website and make our website's name RIDGE, the first letters of all the 5 hazards.
We’d like to start with explaining our Biological Superhero “B-GLASS22”. We’ve discussed about where will our superhero travel to and how will its journey be like. And as our main aim is helping humanity by helping human’s researches to understand space, we think that landing on Mars and exploring Mars and its conditions is the best space travelling scenario for our superhero. Mars is the most important, discovarable and evocatory planet for human’s researches nowadays. Mars may contain life in the future because it's the most similar planet to Earth and is the 2nd most “liveable” planet in Solar System after our home, Earth. Like NASA, there are a lot of important agencies and companies that are tying to explore Mars so as a result we’ve created a biological superhero that can live with Mars’ conditions.
As the next step, we have listed the primary problems our superhero will experience in Mars:
Radiation, as NASA said, radiation is one of the most important reasons why living beings couldn’t settle down on Mars.
95% of the atmosphere of Mars is CO2
Another problem is Mars’ surface pressure. Mars atmosphere has a pressure of 0.095 psi as compared to the Earth's sea level atmospheric pressure of 14.7 psi.
Mars’ average temperature is -63°C. This temperature is low for enzymes to work.
After prepearing this list we started trying to give an answer to “How can we solve these problems so our superhero won’t got affected from these extreme conditions?”. And we listed our biological answers and systems that our superhero will contain.
Our Biological Superheroes Features:
Our Hero, B-GLASS22, is a microorganism and it's an animal. It will have specialized systems for related biological actions.
As we mentioned Radiation is a really important problem in Mars, B-GLASS’22 will have more than a one copy of its genome and will have a strong and fast DNA repairing system so if any radiation causes a degradation of it’s DNA it will fix it very fastly. We were inspired by the repairing system of the world’s most radiation-resistant organism, Deinococcus Radiodurans, as the Guiness World Records said.
95% of Mars’ atmosphere is CO2 so producing food by photosynthesis is the best way for our superhero. We will manipulate our organism so its photosynthesis speed will be nearly 10 times higher than its respiratory speed. So it will be able to produce more O2 when it has the sources to do it. When it doesn’t have them it will use the Oxygen that has been produced before. With this system, It will be able to meet its vital needs easily.
Because of Mars’ surface temperature our Superhero should protect it’s body temperature, especially at nights. During our research we’ve learned about human’s and Tardigrades’ body temperature protection systems and we’ve benefited from them.
For cell-based temperature protection system, when the surrounding temperature starts to drop, cell will transfer the water inside the cell to the outside. This increases the intensity of the cell and cell’s the freezing point reduces. Through the antifreeze proteins outside the cell, it binds to the formed ice crystals and prevents them from growing into larger crystals and damaging the cells.
For organisms’ temperature protection system, we especially looked at “How Tardigrades’ protect their body temperature?”.And we found that normally 85% of Tardigrades’ body contains water but when the temperature starts to reduce it reduces the amount of water in their body by up to 3%. When this system is not enough, it produces “Trehalose”, a special protective sugar that creates a gel-like environment that suspends and protects the organelles and membranes that make up cells. Inspired by the working of this system, B-GLASS’22 will reduce it’s water ratio when the temperature starts to reduce.
As you can see in our B-GLASS design, when B-GLASS’22 expels water from its
inside through one-way pass filters, filters will refine the water.
Circadian rhythm is really important for living things’ life and behaviors so we should create a Superhero that has a regular circadian rhythm. As we said previously, Our Superhero should expel water from its body when outside is cold. In Mars’ night it's really freezing so taking advantage of the power and order of the circadian rhythm in a living thing, we decided to combine temperature protect system and circadian rhythm. It means B-GLASS’22 will always make a discharge when it’s night. Superhero’s circadian rhythm will be regular (with no problems) and at the same time Superhero will make a discharge and protect it’s temperature balance.
In human body, there is a balance in internal and external pressure. By equalizing the internal pressure to the external pressure, it ensures that you are least affected by the pressure in the world.
But in Mars, pressure is 1/100 of the earth. Human body evolve for 14,70psi so we can’t evolve human body to Mars directly. But if we create our Superhero with 0,095psi pressure your superhero won't need years to get used to the pressure. We can produce it in lab environment.
The Website Part:
Reflecting a project to the public is actually one of the most important parts of the project. If a work cannot reach it’s potentialers, it means that it has not reached its main purpose. Means of ”reach it’s potential users” is give them a reason to visit website.
In our website we tried to users can express their opinions about current research under the RIDGE topic. But only scientifically sourced and accurate information can be uploaded to the site. We want to keeping away website from information pollution as much as possible.
Space Agency Data
We mainly used NASA’s website to learn about the 5 hazards of human in space, learned the important problems of humans, Explored Radiation, Isolation etc. added NASA’s YouTube videos to our website.
Hackathon Journey
Our Space Apps Experience was beyond magical in most ways. We’ve learned about how organisms deal with the problems in space, designed and created a website just in 24 hours, and just had fun. It was a really great experience to stay the night in the Space Apps Area, talk with other people about our challenges and develop our projects together.
References
We used Wix.com to create our website,
the list of all the other resources and web sites that we used:
SMITHSONIAN, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-does-the-tiny-waterbear-survive-in-outer-space-30891298/ SPACE, https://www.space.com/tardigrades-on-space-station-extreme-survival
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, https://hos.ifas.ufl.edu/spaceplantslab/
NASA LIFE SCIENCES, https://nlsp.nasa.gov/view/lsdapub/lsda_experiment/0070cb47-aa18-5825-8a9c-7af244b43754
BARIŞ ÖZCAN, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX6E5mQ1XP0
BARIŞ ÖZCAN, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVpl3doIAPs
EVRİM AĞACI, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z3cGzGCFrk&t=269s
EVRİM AĞACI, https://evrimagaci.org/radyasyona-en-dayanikli-canli-thermococcus-gammatolerans-4045
NASA, https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/5-hazards-of-human-spaceflight
NASA, https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/resources/
NASA, , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJDWHm_ZjoM.
TÜRKİYE UZAY AJANSI, https://tua.gov.tr/tr/blog/gunes-sistemi/mars
Tags
#biology #youth