Following much discussion and deliberation, here are the submissions that will be awarded the cash prizes: NASA wanted to highlight a couple of honorable mentions as well: Congratulations to the winners! Head of the challenge tells The Verge it was messy when they went to the bathroom before. Anything that is very time intensive or complicated to use will generally be less attractive to NASA. Participants must be at least 18 years old. Toilets will operate in a nominal spacecraft environment with an air pressure of 14.7 psia (sea level like on Earth) or 8.2 psia, and the toilet storage systems could experience 0 psia (vacuum) during Extra-Vehicular Activities (EVA). You can register your attendance here. Void wherever restricted or prohibited by law. Three different welding processes were tested using a hardware unit called Vulkan. Circumnutation data for the main stem in light showed a doubling of the amplitude and a longer period at 0.8 g than in microgravity (c. 80 vs 60 min). Microgravity is when there's weightlessness in space, and NASA's toilet tech has taken care of that problem already. But they are also inviting ideas from the global community, knowing that they will approach the problem with a mindset different from traditional aerospace engineering. Submissions must be made in English. Questions marked with an asterisk (*) are required. See more. WASHINGTON: Located in Europe's Columbus module, the NASA experiment is the latest in the study of plants growing in microgravity. Humanity is going back to the Moon to establish a presence that will enable eventual crewed journeys to Mars. Now we have to unload it. While only 3 winners were awarded, the team was very impressed with many of the proposals that were reviewed. Microgravity is what is generally considered “zero-g” and is experienced as weightlessness. The tests included welding aluminum, titanium, and stainless steel.. See the Resource Tab for more information about TRLs. Artemis is NASA’s program to land the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024. You’ll get to learn more about the winning entries, how they were developed and the teams who submitted them. We want to encourage the next generation of space explorers, engineers, and scientists, and we know that students may think about this design problem without the same constraints as adults. Proposed designs should at least meet them and will preferentially be lower than them. The media talking about the space program uses the term “micro gravity” - a misnomer as explained below - for things in orbit around the earth. Objects in orbit are not perfectly weightless due to several effects: In Low Earth orbit, the force of gravity decreases by one part per million for every three meter increase in altitude. All ineligible applicants will be automatically removed from the competition with no recourse or reimbursement. NASA Centennial Challenges Program, NASA's Human Landing System (HLS) Program, https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Pages/Programs.aspx, Recording: Meet the Winners of the Lunar Loo Challenge, Webinar Reminder + Winner Announcement Update. Revealed: microgravity. But why do scientists need microgravity? We understand everyone is eagerly awaiting the results so we appreciate your patience! Help sustain America’s reservoirs. Although the preferred method for capturing vomit will be emesis bags (“throw up” bags), bonus points will be awarded to designs that can capture vomit without requiring the crew member to put his/her head in the toilet. Microgravity is what is generally considered “zero-g” and is experienced as weightlessness. Additionally, toilet designs should conserve water and help maintain a pristine environment inside the lander that is free of odors and other contaminants. In order to respect any intellectual property contained within the winning submissions, we will not be releasing them to the public. Defines how often the collections system must be replaced or disposed of in the mission. All applications will go through a process of due diligence; any application found to be misrepresentative, plagiarized, or sharing an idea that is not their own will be automatically disqualified. Click the hyperlinked challenge title to check them out: __________________________________________________________________________________, Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload, The Sequel. Likelihood that it can successfully meet the performance specifications when prototyped, capturing: Likelihood that it can accommodate the needs of 2 crew members for 14 days. All rights reserved. Today we're playing with ZERO GRAVITY RAGDOLLS and ANTI-GRAVITY RAGDOLLS.. Why do you believe this could be developed and integrated into a lunar rover in the next 2-3 years? We look forward to highlighting these winners further and seeing you all at the winners’ webinar in a few hours! NASA is calling on the global community for novel design concepts for compact toilets that can operate in both microgravity and lunar gravity. We’re looking for ways to remove sedimentation that regularly accumulates in reservoirs. To be ready for deployment in 2024, the timelines for development and integration work are quite tight. Submissions must be made online (only), via upload to the HeroX.com website, on or before August 17th , 2020, at 5:00 pm ET. Include a design concept as both a PDF file and a neutral 3D CAD file, such as: Thoughtfully discuss how your design meets the various specifications listed above and provide supporting sketches, calculations or analysis, Feces (accommodating simultaneous urination and defecation), Please enter your full name and email address. We've successfully collaborated winning and fulfilling on NASA contracts through their Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. If you are under 18, please submit to the Junior Category (www.herox.comm/LunarLooJr) or have an adult complete this application on your behalf * (3000 characters), Please discuss in detail how your design will: (i) work in both microgravity and lunar gravity, (ii) accommodate female and male crew, (iii) be easy to use and maintain, with low noise, low odor, and fast turnaround time, (iv) allow for transfer of collected waste to storage or external vehicle disposal (6000 characters), Please discuss in detail how your design will: (i) capture and contain urine, feces, vomit, diarrhea, and menses, (ii) Stabilize urine, (iii) accommodate simultaneous urination and defecation, (iv) accommodate the needs of 2 crew members for 14 days, (v) accommodates the use of toilet hygiene products, (vi) clears previous waste content prior to next use, (vii) defines how often the collections system must be replaced or disposed of in the mission  (6000 characters), Please discuss the safety measures in place to ensure that during nominal use or in the event of a system failure: (i) crew handling of waste materials during maintenance or system use is minimized, (ii) crew members are not exposed to vacuum  (5000 characters), Please discuss the technical maturity of your proposed toilet design. Parabolic Maneuvers. The less confusing term is ‘micro-g’ or ‘micro g-forces’. The authors of the three most compelling submissions in this category will each win: This challenge will also recognize the top three submissions from the Junior category, one per age group. The majority of processes on Earth are influenced in some way by gravity, which means exploiting microgravity environments for research is a clever way to learn more about the way in which the world around us works. This massive effort is able to stay on track thanks to intensive collaboration between NASA and its commercial partners. At a minimum, crew using lunar toilets should not be exposed to vacuum during use, and toilet designs should be able to: Additionally, in the event of a system failure, the toilet designs will ensure that: This challenge has two categories: Technical and Junior. Toilets will be integrated into landers developed by commercial partners. This Challenge seeks solutions to distribute, store and manage power in space. This challenge hopes to attract radically new and different approaches to the problem of human waste capture and containment. Getting back to the Moon by 2024 is an ambitious goal, and NASA is already working on approaches to miniaturize and … Specifically, the contest calls for designs that work in lunar gravity, which is about one-sixth Earth's gravity and microgravity. With plans to visit the Moon … if so how could this be achieved? History. The g-force is not actually zero in microgravity; it is just very small. Overall technical feasibility of the proposal toilet design. Designing and developing new lunar toilets may not be as exciting or intriguing as developing tools to support the exploration of the lunar surface, but the need is just as important. One downside of using neutral buoyancy to simulate microgravity is the significant amount of drag presented by water. Compatible for use by both female and male crew members. Alternatively, how could you generate a near enough 1g environment to avoid the detrimental effects of low lunar gravity? Don't forget to join us on October 22nd @ 9am PDT to meet the winners of the Lunar Loo Main Challenge! With the Artemis program, NASA will land the first woman and the next man on the Moon in 2024, and the goal is to do this in a way that uses less mass, occupies less volume, is more energy efficient, and has streamlined processes. NASA's Lunar Loo Challenge asks the public to design a toilet to be used when astronauts go back to the moon. Complete solutions will be ones that can support a crew of two astronauts for 14 days, while controlling odor, accommodating different types of waste (urine, feces, vomit, diarrhea, menses), and different gender users (female and male). Such prizes could include a video call between the winner’s science class and an astronaut, or NASA-logoed specialty items (patches, pins, etc). No specific qualifications or expertise in the field of waste management  is required. The process for using proposed toilet designs must be relatively straightforward. If you were unable to join the webinar, you can watch the recording below to meet the winners, learn more about their solutions, and how they developed them. Quality of the explanation and supporting evidence for why a solution is designated at a particular maturity level. To be eligible to compete, you must comply with all the terms of the challenge as defined in the Challenge-Specific Agreement. Register now for the Lunar Loo Challenge - Technical Category Winner Webinar! I'm Noel King. Their team is great to work with, we've had the pleasure of hosting webinars and other joint initiatives. Microgravity definition, a condition, especially in space orbit, where the force of gravity is so weak that weightlessness results. While astronauts are in the cabin and out of their spacesuits, they will need a toilet that has all the same capabilities as ones here on Earth. To advance beyond the preliminary evaluation rounds, your submission must, at minimum: Submissions that pass the preliminary evaluation rounds will be reviewed by NASA’s evaluation panel, and winners will be selected using the Judging Criteria listed below. The likelihood that proposed toilet design can be developed and integrated in the next 2-3 years. The Prize is open to anyone age 18 or older participating as an individual or as a team. See the Challenge-Specific Agreement for complete details. Submissions to both categories are due no later than 5pmET on August 17, 2020. The appropriately named Lunar … After multiple rounds of rigorous judging, we are excited to share the winners of the Lunar Loo Challenge - Technical Category! While we are only able to award three winners, we would like to commend and recognize the over 2,000 other submissions that were received. This is the first way to “get rid” of gravity: free fall! There were many innovative designs and approaches to solving our toilet challenge that made it difficult for our judging panel to select the top 3 winners. Micro-g could be defined as a very little amount of g-forces experienced by an object in free fall due to some non-gravitational forces acting on them. NASA will be discussing what will happen with their designs during our webinar today. Given that the moon has a gravity 1/6th of earth, would it be possible to enhance or augment this so as to provide close to 1g earth standard for any proposed lunar base? When microgravity (μg) is used as a unit of measure, a specific environment can be characterized as … Each parabola began with ∼20 s of hyper-gravity (1.8 g) known as the pull-up phase, followed by a partial-gravity or microgravity phase of 32 s (Mars gravity), 25 s (Moon gravity), or 20 s (microgravity).The parabola ended with a second period of hyper-gravity known as the pull-out phase. How were astronauts going to the bathroom before? NASA seeks new designs for a toilet that will work both in microgravity and lunar gravity. To submit to the Junior category, you must be less than 18. Another important update: NASA is excited to promote the winners announcement through their channels and for this reason we'll have to delay the announcement until the following day. Lunar gravity is approximately one sixth of Earth’s gravity, so urine and feces will fall down. The thousand changes in throughout the C. elegans transcriptome, or all the messenger RNA expressed by particular genes, were what ended up warping many of the worms’ functions.Most surprising was that many of the same changes, happened in both hypergravity and microgravity. HeroX is positioned as the social network for innovation and therefore has a broader and more uncredentialed crowd, which pairs well with our Topcoder crowd of experts in development and design. These designs may be adapted for use in the Artemis lunar landers that take humanity back to the Moon… (pdf, doc, docx). No late submissions will be accepted. But the new toilets need to be able to work in lunar gravity as well. Microgravity is what is generally considered “zero-g” and is experienced as weightlessness. Also, we would like to take this moment to send a sincere thank you to everyone who participated in this challenge. Winners will now be published October 22nd @ 6am PDT. The head of the Lunar Loo Challenge told The Verge it was messy. Zero gravity is another term referring to the phenomenon of weightlessness. There's no gravity in orbit and very little gravity on the moon, which raises a question. NASA is calling on the global community for their novel design concepts for compact toilets that can operate in both microgravity and lunar gravity. During the Soyuz 6 mission of 1969, Russian astronauts performed the first welding experiments in space. Function in both microgravity and lunar gravity, Have a mass of less than 15 Kg in Earth’s gravity, Operate with a noise level less than 60 decibels (no louder than an average bathroom fan), Accommodate users ranging from 58 to 77 inches tall and 107 to 290 lbs in weight, Accommodate simultaneous urination and defecation, Collect up to 1 liter of urine per use, with an average of 6 uses per crew per day, Accommodate 500g of fecal matter per defecation, with an average of 2 uses per crew per day, Accommodate an average of 114g of female menses, per crew per day, Stabilize urine to avoid the generation of gas and particulates, Accommodate crew use of toilet hygiene products, like toilet paper, wipes, and gloves, Be clear of previous user’s urine and feces in preparation for the next use, Allow for transfer of collected waste to storage  and/or provide for external vehicle disposal. Confidence that proposed design will minimize the crew handling of crew waste during maintenance or system use in all mission environments, and will not expose crew to vacuum in the event of a system failure. The quality and caliber of the entries submitted is impressive. Due to the parallel development of components, the exact dimensions and performance specifications of lunar toilets are still unknown. Generally, drag effects are minimized by doing tasks slowly in the water. … Please note that additional rankings or judges' scores will not be released. Help astronauts go back to the Moon in 2024! The toilet design should: We are looking for a design that captures all the functionality of a toilet on Earth. Support NASA's efforts to explore the solar system. The recording of the webinar is the best place to learn more about the winning entries. These partners are designing and developing different elements that are part of the overall program, including lunar landers and rovers. These designs may be adapted for use in the Artemis lunar landers that take us back to the Moon. The Technical category has a total prize purse of $35,000 USD. by NASA is already looking at ways to make currently-used space toilets smaller, lighter, and functional in lunar gravity, so your ideas should not be based on current waste management technology. All challenge-related communication will be in English. The authors of these three submissions will each receive: public recognition from NASA and from HeroX, a winner’s certificate, and an item of official NASA-logoed merchandise. NASA Tournament Lab has two other challenges currently running on HeroX that you don't want to miss out on! NASA Needs A Toilet That Works In Microgravity And Lunar Gravity Jun 30, 2020 at 4:00 am By. The space agency wrote, “NASA is looking for a next-generation device that is smaller, more efficient, and capable of working in both microgravity and lunar gravity. 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