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Photo Manipulations of Justin Peters

Happy May the 4th! 

How many connections does America’s space program have with the fictional world of Star Wars? More than you might think…

Join us as we highlight a few of the real-world TIE-ins between us and Star Wars:

Space Laser

Lasers in space sounds like something straight out of Star Wars, but it’s also a reality for us. Our own GEDI (yes, like Jedi) instrument will launch later this year to the International Space Station.

GEDI stands for the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation lidar. It will study the height of trees and forests, using three lasers split into eight tracks, and create a 3D map of forests around the planet.

With GEDI’s new tree maps, we’ll get a better understanding of how much carbon is stored in forests all over Earth, and how forests will be able to absorb increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The Jedi knights may help protect a galaxy far, far away, but our GEDI will help us study and understand forest changes right here on Earth.

Another JEDI

There’s another Jedi in town and it happens to be orbiting the planet Jupiter. Our Juno spacecraft, which arrived at the gas giant in July 2016, has an instrument on board that goes by the name of JEDI - the Jupiter Energetic Particle Detector Instrument. 

While it doesn’t use a light saber or channel “the force”, it does measure high-energy particles near Jupiter. Data collected with the JEDI instrument will help us understand how the energy of Jupiter’s rotation is being funneled into its atmosphere and magnetosphere. 

Death Star Moon

We know what you’re thinking…”That’s no moon.” But actually, it is! This is a real picture taken by our Cassini spacecraft of Saturn’s moon Mimas. In this view taken on Cassini’s closest-ever flyby of Mimas, the large Herschel Crater dominates, making the moon look like the Death Star. Herschel Crater is 130 kilometers, or 80 miles, wide and covers most of the right of this image. 

We Actually Do Have the Droids You’re Looking For

We have robots roving and exploring all over the solar system, but it’s our own “R2” that’s most likely to resonate with Star Wars fans. Robonaut 2, launched in 2011, is working along side humans on board the International Space Station, and may eventually help with spacewalks too dangerous for humans. Incidentally, an earlier version of Robonaut bore a strong “facial” resemblance to enigmatic bounty hunter Boba Fett.

Another “droid” seen on the space station was directly inspired by the saga. In 1999, then Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor David Miller, showed the original 1977 Star Wars to his students on their first day of class. After the scene where hero Luke Skywalker learns lightsaber skills by sparring with a floating droid “remotes” on the Millennium Falcon, Miller stood up and pointed: “I want you to build me some of those.”

The result was “SPHERES,” or Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites.  Originally designed to test spacecraft rendezvous and docking maneuvers, the bowling-ball size mini-satellites can now be powered by smart phones.

A few more TIE ins…

When space shuttle Atlantis left the International Space Station after 2007’s STS-117 mission, it caught a view of the station that looked to some like a TIE fighter. 

The “TIE-ins” go beyond casual resemblance to real engineering. We already use actual ion engines (“TIE” stands for “Twin Ion Engines”) on spacecraft like Dawn, currently orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres. In fact, Dawn goes one better with three ion engines. 

Want more Star Wars connections? Check out THIS Tumblr to learn about the REAL planets we’ve found outside our solar system that resemble planets from the movie. 

Take THIS quiz to see if you know more about the Milky Way galaxy or a galaxy far, far away. 

Swirls of Jupiter

Jupiter is a very stormy, turbulent, violent planet. The planet completes a day (or one complete rotation) within roughly 10 hours, which creates massive winds, producing these swirls, and violent storms. The fast rotation coupled with the fact that the planet is nothing but gas greatly multiplies the Coriolis effect. Earth too has a Coriolis effect, this creates the characteristic hurricane shapes and also contributes to the fact that storms will spin the opposite direction in different hemispheres. Luckily, our rotation is slower - our storms are less frequent and less violent than they would be if our days were shorter.

The number of known species of geckos has just jumped upwards, with 15 new species being formally described this week.

“And if you count the four I’m looking at right now it’s 19,” says Lee Grismer of La Sierra University in California. “When you called I was in the process of describing them.”

This is a big increase, as there are only around 1500 known species of these lizards, famed for the sticking power of their feet.

The Christmas Island pipistrelle, a bat species found only on an Australian island, has been declared extinct. The final nail in the coffin was hammered in as part of the latest update to the Red List of Threatened Species, which is maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Why we need GMOs to survive climate change

Genetically modified organisms get a bad rap for many reasons, but we’ve actually been genetically altering what we eat since the dawn of human history.

“For 10,000 years, we have altered the genetic makeup of our crops,”explains UC Davis plant pathology professor Pamela Ronald.

“Today virtually everything we eat is produced from seeds that we have genetically altered in one way or another.” (You can read more about Ronald’s thoughts on genetically engineered food here.)

Right now her focus is on rice. It’s one of our basic crops and without it, we would struggle to feed much of the world.

With climate change, we’re seeing an increase in flooding in places like India and Bangladesh, which makes it harder to grow this important food staple.

So Ronald and her lab have developed a flood-tolerant strain of rice. It’s known as Sub1a or “scuba rice” and millions of farmers in South Asia are now growing it in their fields. 

Today is National Food Day, a day dedicated to hunger awareness. But as we focus on food insecurity, we need to talk more about how global warming will make the problem worse.

As our climate continues to heat up, it has huge impacts on what foods we are able to grow. Will our crops be able to survive droughts and floods? The University of California leads six labs that are working to develop other climate-resilient crops including chickpea, cowpea and millet.

Spider webs are already strong enough to restrain small insects unlucky enough to fly into them, and soon, they may be capable of carrying the weight of a person.

In a new study published in 2D Materials, Nicola Pugno at the University of Trento in Italy and his team detail how they cranked arachnids’ already impressive metabolic process up to 11 by adding graphene and carbon nanotubes to a spider’s drinking water.

Afterward, the spider produced silk as it normally would, but the silk was five times stronger, putting it on par with the likes of pure carbon fibers and Kevlar — the strongest materials on Earth.