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Missed moonshot and Covid care
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Private lunar lander from Japan crashes into moon in failed mission
A private lunar lander from Japan crashed while attempting a touchdown Friday, the latest casualty in the commercial rush to the moon. The Tokyo-based company ispace declared the mission a failure several hours after communication was lost with the lander. Flight controllers scrambled to gain contact, but were met with only silence and said they were concluding the mission.
Communications ceased less than two minutes before the spacecraft's scheduled landing on the moon with a mini rover. Until then, the descent from lunar orbit seemed to be going well.
Two years ago, the company's first moonshot ended in a crash landing, giving rise to the name “Resilience” for its successor lander.
Resilience carried a rover with a shovel to gather lunar dirt as well as a Swedish artist's toy-size red house for placement on the moon's dusty surface.
Launched in January from Florida on a long, roundabout journey, Resilience entered lunar orbit last month.
Lunar Rovers: Landing right?
Resilience shared a SpaceX ride with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, which reached the moon faster and became the first private entity to successfully land there in March.
Another US company, Intuitive Machines, arrived at the moon a few days after Firefly. But the tall, spindly lander face-planted in a crater near the moon's south pole and was declared dead within hours.
Resilience was targeting the top of the moon, a less treacherous place than the shadowy bottom. The ispace team chose a flat area with few boulders in Mare Frigoris or Sea of Cold, a long and narrow region full of craters and ancient lava flows that stretches across the near side's northern tier.
Plans had called for the 2.3-metre resilience to beam back pictures within hours and for the lander to lower the piggybacking rover onto the lunar surface this weekend.
Made of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic with four wheels, ispace's European-built rover — named Tenacious — sported a high-definition camera to scout out the area and a shovel to scoop up some lunar dirt for NASA.
The rover, weighing just 5 kilograms, was going to stick close to the lander, going in circles at a speed of less than one inch a couple centimeters per second. It was capable of venturing up to two-thirds of 1 kilometer from the lander and should be operational throughout the two-week mission, the period of daylight.
Besides science and tech experiments, there was an artistic touch. The rover held a tiny, Swedish-style red cottage with white trim and a green door, dubbed the Moonhouse by creator Mikael Genberg, for placement on the lunar surface.
Minutes before the attempted landing, Hakamada assured everyone that ispace had learned from its first failed mission. “Engineers did everything they possibly could” to ensure success this time, he said.
Two other US companies are aiming for moon landings by year's end: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Astrobotic Technology. Astrobotic's first lunar lander missed the moon altogether in 2024 and came crashing back through Earth's atmosphere.
IIT-Guwahati uses clay particles to develop affordable COVID-19 testing method
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati, have found that clay particles interact differently in the presence of SARS-CoV-2 -- the virus that causes COVID-19 -- a finding they used for developing a simple, affordable testing alternative.
The approach developed looks at how quickly particles of clay settle in a salt water solution containing the virus.
"Due to changes in inter-particle forces of clay in the presence of the virus, the sedimentation rate of the clay-electrolyte system changed," the authors wrote in the study published in the journal Applied Clay Science.
The findings offer a "simple and affordable" alternative to the complex, expensive methods currently used for detecting SARS-CoV-2, the team said.
"Current methods, such as Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), are highly sensitive but time consuming and require heavy equipment. Similarly, the antigen testing is fast but lacks accuracy, while antibody testing is used after the infection has occurred, highlighting limitations at various levels," lead author T.V. Bharat, professor at IIT Guwahati's department of civil engineering, said.
Further, many of the currently available methods are not practical in resource-limited settings or during large-scale outbreaks. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed a critical gap in how we detect and track viral infections, he added.
For the study, the researchers used Bentonite clay because its unique chemical structure allows pollutants and heavy metals to be easily absorbed.
"Previous studies have shown that clay particles can bind with viruses and bacteriophages, making it a promising material for virus detection," Bharat said.
The team looked at particles of Bentonite clay interacted with viral material in a saline solution.
They found that a Coronavirus surrogate and Infectious Bronchitis Virus (IBV) bind to the negatively charged clay surfaces at a controlled room temperature and neutral pH of 7.
Bharat said the study offers a "faster, more affordable, and an accurate" alternative method -- "as simple as watching sand settle in water" -- to current methods, paving the way for a better disease monitoring and treatment strategies, especially during pandemics.
The method also "holds great promise for improving how viral outbreaks are monitored and controlled, especially in regions where expensive lab equipment and trained personnel are not readily available," the lead author said.
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