Artemis II tackles a minor plumbing issue on its way to the moon

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. Later in the hour, a decades-long controversy making headlines again– I’m talking about should Pluto be a planet– and how spiders and humans use silk in surprising ways, from lassos to cutting-edge sensors. But first, the Artemis II mission to the moon had a smooth launch on Wednesday, and last night performed what’s called a translunar injection. That’s a rocket burn to leave Earth orbit and send the astronauts on course to the moon.

Back with us to talk about this and other science news this week is Maggie Koerth, science journalist and climate editor at CNN based in Minneapolis. Great to have you back, Maggie.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Thank you so much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: How’s the mission going so far?

MAGGIE KOERTH: So far, it is going really well. We got Artemis launched. They’re not going to land any astronauts on the surface this time. But they’re doing a flyby before swinging back home. And this is a project that has been in the works for decades. And then the launch itself was delayed for weeks because of all of these different fuel leak concerns. And then it was almost delayed again because of a problem with the onboard toilet.

IRA FLATOW: Wait a minute. As the toilet repairman in my house, I’m very interested in this toilet problem. I can’t let you go on until you flush this out for me, please.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Let’s get down into the nitty-gritty and the dirty-wordy here. So the toilet is really cool, actually. It’s in the wall, in the floor of the thing. If you’ve watched the videos of it, it’s amazing. And I’m going to spoil this and say that it has a happy ending. But let’s pull up that clip, Ira, so that you can hear the astronauts talk about it themselves.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– I’m the space plumber. I’m proud to call myself the space plumber. I like to say that it is probably the most important piece of equipment on board. So we were all breathing a sigh of relief when it turned out to be just fine. But we did originally think that there could have been potentially something fouling up the motor. And luckily, we are all systems go.

[END PLAYBACK]

IRA FLATOW: I’ll bet you you didn’t think she would have to do that once you got into space.

MAGGIE KOERTH: You don’t really expect that, no. So that was Christina Koch. And she is one of the astronauts flying on Artemis. But everything is going great. They did have a tiny, very relatable Microsoft Outlook issue, also. But that seems to be fixed as well.

IRA FLATOW: Even out in space?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Even out in space, you can’t escape it.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– And I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks. And neither one of those are working. If you want to remote in and check Optimus on those two Outlooks, that would be awesome.

– All right. We will join in on your PCD. And we’ll let you know when we’re done.

[END PLAYBACK]

IRA FLATOW: Let’s get back here on Earth because I want to go to the Great Salt Lake, where something really mysterious has happened, right?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah. So this is super cool. The Great Salt Lake is drying up. And it has been drying up for, basically, my entire life. Since 1986, it’s lost 22 feet of water. And during that time, it has started to develop these places where the ground is not just exposed, but caked and cracked dry. And as that’s happened, people noticed that in these super dry areas, you get these mounds of thick stalks of reeds, almost like hairy moles across the landscape.

And some of these things could be dozens of meters wide. And over time, that has gotten scientists curious because it sort of implies that there is water underneath the ground there. And now, thanks to a recent study, we know that there is a deposit of fresh water underneath the dying saltwater lake.

Researchers flew over about 10 square miles of the Great Salt Lake’s Farmington Bay in a helicopter, shooting electromagnetic pulses into the ground and analyzing the signals that bounced back. And they found this huge reservoir. It’s probably in the form of freshwater-saturated bedrock or sediment. And it’s up to two miles below the lake, coming off of ancient snowmelt that’s been accumulating for thousands of years.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. Could they get the water to bubble up and fill the lake again?

MAGGIE KOERTH: So there’s a lot to learn here. There’s still a lot we got to figure out. This is just supposed to be a pilot project. And it turned out more successful than they were even expecting. So now they need to expand the survey and figure out just how big this thing really is.

And one of the things that’s really great, though, is if there’s enough fresh water down there, it could provide a solution to this toxic dust problem where the dry lake bed is letting off this dust that is polluting the air and harming people. And you could keep things damped down enough to prevent that air pollution.

IRA FLATOW: Wow, that’s terrific. All right, let’s turn to a different kind of pollution. I’m talking microplastics. We’ve heard a lot about them. They’re everywhere. Scientists still don’t know exactly what effect they have on our health. But we have an update that could make the picture more complicated. Tell us about that.

MAGGIE KOERTH: So I think this falls into the category of maybe good news. The microplastics– they’ve been found everywhere, from your brain to Antarctica. But there is a possibility that at least some of that pollution is not real. It’s just a figment of laboratory work.

So nearly all scientists in a lab are wearing nitrile latex gloves when they work. These gloves shed a thing called stearates. They’re a type of hydrocarbon that the manufacturers coat the gloves with at the factory so they’re not sticking to molds, so they’re not sticking to each other. And according to this new study, it’s really, really easy for those stearates to be mistaken for microplastics.

IRA FLATOW: No kidding? So we might be getting false testing in the laboratory?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yes. Yeah. So every time we find microplastics in places we don’t really want to be finding them, there’s a possibility that some of what we found came from the researchers in the lab doing the study.

IRA FLATOW: All right. Well, I guess they’ll compensate for that.

MAGGIE KOERTH: It doesn’t mean that the microplastic pollution doesn’t exist. That’s something that they want to emphasize here. But it could mean that we’ve been overestimating the scale of this bad problem, which is great.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s move on to energy. I know you have two stories about recent Trump administration moves on both oil and wind power. Tell us about those.

MAGGIE KOERTH: So the first one is about endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico that are not going to be protected anymore because when the Endangered Species Act was written, it included a provision for a committee that’s been called the “God Squad.” It’s six federal appointees. They’re, effectively, given the power of life and death because they can grant exceptions to the Endangered Species Act.

And on Tuesday, the “God Squad” met for the fourth time in its entire history and decided to exempt oil and gas drilling from following endangered species protections in the Gulf of Mexico. And that puts– the species most at risk here is this thing called a Rice’s whale. It’s the only whale that lives in the Gulf year-round.

It’s critically endangered. There’s probably fewer than 100 of these things, maybe as few as 50. And oil and gas drilling can really harm them. It changes the habitat of the fish they eat. It makes a ton of noise and disrupts their feeding. And that’s even before you get into things like hitting a whale with a boat or killing them with oil spills.

IRA FLATOW: And any way to overturn this plan?

MAGGIE KOERTH: There is. The last time the “God Squad” met was back in 1992. And this is probably why you know about the Northern spotted owl, because the “God Squad” had exempted logging companies from protecting it. And in that case, environmental groups sued and got the exemption overturned. And that outcome could happen again because the environmental groups have announced that they will sue to overturn this decision as well.

IRA FLATOW: I guess a little bit of good news is this wind farm off the coast of Virginia that has been resurrected, or it’s never going away?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah. Now, that is definitely a good thing. So the Trump administration has been working overtime to stop offshore wind projects. Back in December, they suspended all five offshore wind projects that were in development in federal waters off the East Coast. And that included the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, or CVOW, which is this massive thing that’s going to be the biggest offshore wind farm in the US.

But those efforts have not been working particularly well. They lost a whole big series of lawsuits. Construction resumed on all five of the closed projects over the last few months. And on March 23, CVOW began producing power for the grid, just as intended.

IRA FLATOW: And it’s a really big project, isn’t it?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Oh, yeah. It is massive. It’s the largest offshore wind farm in the US, possibly the largest wind farm in the US. It is really, really big. So this is something where the Trump administration’s efforts to stymie renewable energy have failed.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s go to the medical breakthrough we’ve all been waiting for, pig semen eye drops. Tell us about this monumental discovery.

MAGGIE KOERTH: So this is good news. Sometimes, children can get a cancer of the retina. And it has to be treated with things that damage parts of the eye that aren’t cancerous– so injections, chemotherapy, laser treatments, that kind of stuff. And scientists have now figured out a way to deliver medication past the barrier that surrounds the retina without damaging the eye. And it is an eye drop made from pig semen, which, obviously, I’m sure, brings up a lot of questions.

IRA FLATOW: It certainly does. It’s certainly a marketing challenge, for sure.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah. And the reason that we are using pig semen is because we have these things called exomes. They’re tiny particles that are released by all cells. And scientists can engineer them to carry cancer-killing molecules. But the exomes that you find in semen are extra special because they are able to cross physical barriers in the female reproductive tract. So they can get through the surface of the eye, too.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. If it works, why not?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Right. And this new study comes from research in mice. Scientists gave the mice with retinoblastoma eye drops with and without the pig semen exomes. And the ones who got the pig semen eye drops successfully kept the cancer from growing. And they didn’t lose their eyesight. And the ones who got eye drops with no pig semen ended up with their cancers continuing to grow because the treatment could not get through the eye’s barrier. They’re saying it could improve drug delivery for other kinds of treatments, as well, including crossing the blood-brain barrier for conditions like Alzheimer’s.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. We’ll have to keep watching this. This really is interesting, soon to be available in drugstores everywhere. No, no, just making that up. Maggie Koerth, thank you for taking time to be with us today.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yes. Thank you so much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Maggie is climate editor at CNN.

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