New face mask prototype can detect Covid-19 infection

Engineers at MIT and Harvard University have designed a novel face mask that can diagnose the wearer with Covid-19 within about 90 minutes. The masks are embedded with tiny, disposable sensors that can be fitted into other face masks and could also be adapted to detect other viruses.

The sensors are based on freeze-dried cellular machinery that the research team has previously developed for use in paper diagnostics for viruses such as Ebola and Zika. In a new study, the researchers showed that the sensors could be incorporated into not only face masks but also clothing such as lab coats, potentially offering a new way to monitor health care workers’ exposure to a variety of pathogens or other threats.

“We’ve demonstrated that we can freeze-dry a broad range of synthetic biology sensors to detect viral or bacterial nucleic acids, as well as toxic chemicals, including nerve toxins. We envision that this platform could enable next-generation wearable biosensors for first responders, health care personnel, and military personnel,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering and the senior author of the study.

The face mask sensors are designed so that they can be activated by the wearer when they’re ready to perform the test, and the results are only displayed on the inside of the mask, for user privacy.

Peter Nguyen, a research scientist at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and Luis Soenksen, a Venture Builder at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health and a former postdoc at the Wyss Institute, are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Biotechnology.

Wearable sensors

The new wearable sensors and diagnostic face mask are based on technology that Collins began developing several years ago. In 2014, he showed that proteins and nucleic acids needed to create synthetic gene networks that react to specific target molecules could be embedded into paper, and he used this approach to create paper diagnostics for the Ebola and Zika viruses. In work with Feng Zhang’s lab in 2017, Collins developed another cell-free sensor system, known as SHERLOCK, which is based on CRISPR enzymes and allows highly sensitive detection of nucleic acids.

These cell-free circuit components are freeze-dried and remain stable for many months, until they are rehydrated. When activated by water, they can interact with their target molecule, which can be any RNA or DNA sequence, as well as other types of molecules, and produce a signal such as a change in color.

More recently, Collins and his colleagues began working on incorporating these sensors into textiles, with the goal of creating a lab coat for health care workers or others with potential exposure to pathogens.

First, Soenksen performed a screen of hundreds of different types of fabric, from cotton and polyester to wool and silk, to find out which might be compatible with this kind of sensor. “We ended up identifying a couple that are very widely used in the fashion industry for making garments,” he says. “The one that was the best was a combination of polyester and other synthetic fibers.”

To make wearable sensors, the researchers embedded their freeze-dried components into a small section of this synthetic fabric, where they are surrounded by a ring of silicone elastomer. This compartmentalization prevents the sample from evaporating or diffusing away from the sensor. To demonstrate the technology, the researchers created a jacket embedded with about 30 of these sensors.

They showed that a small splash of liquid containing viral particles, mimicking exposure to an infected patient, can hydrate the freeze-dried cell components and activate the sensor. The sensors can be designed to produce different types of signals, including a color change that can be seen with the naked eye, or a fluorescent or luminescent signal, which can be read with a handheld spectrometer. The researchers also designed a wearable spectrometer that could be integrated into the fabric, where it can read the results and wirelessly transmit them to a mobile device.

“This gives you an information feedback cycle that can monitor your environmental exposure and alert you and others about the exposure and where it happened,” Nguyen says.

A diagnostic face mask

As the researchers were finishing up their work on the wearable sensors early in 2020, Covid-19 began spreading around the globe, so they quickly decided to try using their technology to create a diagnostic for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

To produce their diagnostic face mask, the researchers embedded freeze-dried SHERLOCK sensors into a paper mask. As with the wearable sensors, the freeze-dried components are surrounded by silicone elastomer. In this case, the sensors are placed on the inside of the mask, so they can detect viral particles in the breath of the person wearing the mask.

The mask also includes a small reservoir of water that is released at the push of a button when the wearer is ready to perform the test. This hydrates the freeze-dried components of the SARS-CoV-2 sensor, which analyzes accumulated breath droplets on the inside of the mask and produces a result within 90 minutes.

“This test is as sensitive as the gold standard, highly sensitive PCR tests, but it’s as fast as the antigen tests that are used for quick analysis of Covid-19,” Nguyen says.

The prototypes developed in this study have sensors on the inside of the mask to detect a user’s status, as well as sensors placed on the outside of garments, to detect exposure from the environment. The researchers can also swap in sensors for other pathogens, including influenza, Ebola, and Zika, or sensors they have developed to detect organophosphate nerve agents.

“Through these demonstrations we have essentially shrunk down the functionality of state-of-the-art molecular testing facilities into a format compatible with wearable scenarios across a variety of applications,” Soenksen says.

The researchers have filed for a patent on the technology and they are now hoping to work with a company to further develop the sensors. The face mask is most likely the first application that could be made available, Collins says.

“I think the face mask is probably the most advanced and the closest to a product. We have already had a lot of interest from outside groups that would like to take the prototype efforts we have and advance them to an approved, marketed product,” he says.

The research was funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency; the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group; the Wyss Institute; Johnson and Johnson Innovation JLABS; the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard; and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

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Agustín Rayo named interim dean of SHASS

MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt has named professor of philosophy Agustín Rayo PhD ’01 as interim dean of MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), effective Aug. 18. The appointment comes in response to the announcement that SHASS Dean Melissa Nobles will become MIT’s chancellor later this summer.

Schmidt also appointed a 10-member advisory committee chaired by Caspar Hare, professor of philosophy, to select the next SHASS Kenan Sahin Dean. The committee members are Stephanie Ann Frampton (Literature), Malick Ghachem (History), Jonathan Gruber (Economics), Sabine Iatridou (Linguistics), Graham Jones (Anthropology), Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga (Science, Technology, and Society), Janet Sonenberg (Theater Arts), Kathleen Thelen (Political Science), and Jing Wang (Comparative Media Studies/Writing).

“Agustín is an experienced, thoughtful, and engaging leader who values excellence and carries with him a sincere respect for the SHASS community,” says Schmidt. “I am grateful to him for accepting this interim position during this time of transition. I am confident that the advisory committee members are well-positioned to identify a slate of top candidates for this important post. On behalf of our community, I thank them for their service to SHASS and look forward to the results of their work.”

During his service as associate dean of SHASS from 2016 to 2019, Rayo served as the chair of the Digital Humanities Steering Committee, the SHASS Faculty Diversity Committee, and the SHASS Educational Advisory Committee. He joined the faculty in 2005 after earning his PhD from MIT in 2001. Known for his expertise in “mathy philosophy,” his domain of study focuses on the intersection of the philosophy of logic and the philosophy of language. Prior to joining MIT, Rayo served as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego and as a postdoc at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Rayo, who showed an interest in math and logic from a young age, grew up in Mexico City. He earned his undergraduate degree in 1996 from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He was elected to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 2018 and was a Burkhardt Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Professorial Fellow at the University of Oslo from 2015 to 2020. His textbook, “On the Brink of Paradox,” won the 2020 PROSE Award for best textbook in the humanities.

“My main job as interim dean is to ensure the school can carry out its mission with minimal disruption and that the transition from Dean Nobles to her successor happens as smoothly as possible,” says Rayo. “Even as we move to a more active campus in September, I’m mindful that the pandemic affected our community in many ways. As part of this interim role, I want to make sure that staff, faculty, and students have the support they need as we continue our transition to a post-pandemic normal.”

The committee will widely engage the MIT community, soliciting feedback from a diverse set of internal and external stakeholders across SHASS and beyond. It will assess the short- and long-term needs of the school as well as seek candidates with proven track records in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that seek to create and maintaining a welcoming community for all.

The committee is scheduled to provide Provost Schmidt with its recommendation of candidates later this fall.

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MIT welcomes six new assistant deans for diversity, equity, and inclusion

As an important step forward in MIT’s ongoing efforts to create a more welcoming and inclusive community, the Institute has hired six new assistant deans, one in each school and in the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, to serve as diversity, equity, and inclusion professionals.

Set to be in place by the fall of 2021, these new positions are a result of the February 2020 recommendations of the MIT working groups charged with implementing the findings of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) report on sexual and gender harassment of women in academia. Together, these reports called for “a network of support, advocacy, and community-building expertise across campus to improve our community culture.” MIT President L. Rafael Reif echoed these commitments to new staff and resources in his July 2020 letter to the community addressing systemic racism.

“MIT’s success in developing solutions to the world’s greatest challenges depends on our ability to attract and retain a diverse and collaborative community, and these appointments will help us strengthen that vibrant community,” says Provost Martin Schmidt. “This talented group will be an invaluable resource to everyone in our community as we roll out and implement our DEI Strategic Action Plan. I welcome them to MIT and look forward to engaging with them in this work.”

All six searches were conducted simultaneously and coordinated through the Institute Community and Equity Office (ICEO). John Dozier, who heads the ICEO, will serve as a “dotted-line” supervisor for all six assistant deans. Dozier, along with ICEO Deputy Director Maryanne Kirkbride and Associate Provost Tim Jamison, interviewed the candidates during the search process; together, they are also co-leading the creation of the DEI Strategic Action Plan.

“The search process itself was like a trial run for the kinds of collaborative practices we hope to move ahead with this group,” Dozier says. “We want this team to build on what we have already learned about working together. But we also want them to add their ideas and fresh perspectives to the challenges we face,” he adds. “This is a tremendously exciting opportunity for building community at MIT.”

The new assistant deans are:

• Alana Anderson, assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the
  MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. She began her role on June 14. Most recently, Anderson served as the director of programs for diversity and inclusion in the Office of the Provost at Boston University. She has spent her career in higher education with roles focusing on student engagement, diversity, and inclusion at Babson College, Bentley University, and MIT’s Student Activities Office. Anderson earned her bachelor’s in politics at Brandeis University, a master’s degree in higher education and student affairs from Indiana University, and a PhD in higher education from Boston College.
• Nandi Bynoe, assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the School of Engineering. She will start on July 6. Bynoe was the associate dean of diversity and inclusion at the Tufts Schools of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering since 2019. She helped create and establish Tufts’ bias education and resource team to address incidents of bias, discrimination, and hatred on campus. Prior to her current role, she worked in student services and student affairs and served as the first sexual misconduct resource specialist in the Tufts Center for Awareness, Resources and Education. Bynoe earned a BA in international relations and an MA in educational studies from Tufts.
• Kuheli Dutt, assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the School of Science. She will start on Aug. 1. Most recently, Dutt served as assistant director for academic affairs and diversity at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where she oversaw diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts related to appointments and promotions, salary structures, mentoring, awards and recognition, governance, and the advancement of junior scientists since 2008. Her research on implicit bias, gender, race, LGBTQ+ awareness, and STEM has been published in many notable journals and been widely covered by the media. Dutt has a BA in economics from Lady Shri Ram College and a PhD in public policy from Northeastern University. 
• Tracie Jones, assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. She will start on July 1. Most recently, Jones was the director of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. In this role she worked to advance initiatives and develop programming for faculty, staff, and students. She earned a BA in liberal arts in extension studies and sociology from Harvard University and an MEd in higher education administration from Northeastern University. She also has certifications from the Social Justice Training Institute, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Harvard Kennedy School.
• Monica Orta, assistant dean for diversity, equity, belonging, and student support in the School of Architecture and Planning. She will start on June 28. Orta served as the director of diversity and student support at the MIT Media Lab since 2014. Gathering data, both quantitative and qualitative, she laid out a bold strategic plan that required new admissions processes, increased faculty participation, and community programming. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Boston University and a master’s degree in education from Northeastern University. Before joining the Media Lab, Orta worked on diversity initiatives, including the MIT Summer Research Program, in MIT’s Office of Graduate Education.
• Bryan Thomas Jr., assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the MIT Sloan School of Management. He will start in August. Thomas served as the associate director of the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Doctoral Fellowship Program at Stanford University since 2019. Previously, Thomas was assistant director of graduate education programs and diversity at the Stanford School of Medicine and worked as an academic success and retention specialist at Drake University. He earned a BA in communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MEd in higher education administration from Florida International University, and is currently pursuing a PhD in higher education leadership from Colorado State University.

This cluster of new hires is significant, Dozier notes, and there are more in the works. A search is underway to create a senior-level position in the Office of the Vice President for Research, and several academic departments have either already hired diversity officers or have searches in process.

“I look forward to seeing this group come together and to helping connect it with the many other community-building efforts across MIT,” Dozier says. “There are a lot of people in the MIT community who are already working in this area, and this is starting to feel like critical mass.”

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Looking for similarities across complex systems

How does the motion of individual cells give rise to the structure of biological tissue? How do an embryo’s wrinkles relate to an animal’s shape? And what does the stability of knots have to do with the way spaghetti breaks?

These are some of the questions Jörn Dunkel has explored at MIT, through the lens of mathematics.

“There are many problems where, if you look at them from the right way, you can treat them in a similar manner because they have a common structure at some abstract level,” says Dunkel, who received tenure in 2020 as an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics. 

Dunkel’s work is planted in theory, and numerical principles of geometry, mechanics, and pattern formation. From this base of mathematical operations, he has explored wide-ranging fields, looking for ways to bridge seemingly disparate systems through what he sees as the “common language” of math.

“What’s helpful for me is to talk to people from many different fields,” Dunkel says. “This kicks me out of my comfort zone, and it’s almost like an algorithm for generating new ideas: Talk to people to get new perspectives, and then you try to combine that with what you know. And in this way you can make progress.”

A system resettled

Dunkel was born and raised in East Berlin, Germany, and vividly remembers the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, as a time of both disruption and possibility.

“It was a big, big change,” Dunkel recalls. “When my sister and I were little, our family couldn’t travel anywhere except for a small number of countries in the Eastern bloc. And when the wall came down, suddenly there were a lot of opportunities, and also uncertainties. There was more freedom to travel and see and learn different things. At the same time, people had to reestablish themselves, and many things were in limbo. You learned to adapt to a new system.”

As the country’s schools restructured and settled into a unified, national education system, Dunkel was able for the first time to explore beyond East Berlin’s now-dissolved borders. After graduating from high school, he began to study at  Humboldt University of Berlin. Dunkel’s undergraduate mentor, who worked in the area of active matter, introduced him to concepts of math and physics, and how to apply them to questions of biology, such as ways to describe how cells interact to give rise to macroscale tissues and whole organisms.

“You start to see how things come together, and the way I was taught in those days had a big influence on how I think about systems today,” Dunkel says. “I was lucky many times along my path to have met people who helped teach and guide me.”

Honest data

After graduating with master’s degrees in math and physics, Dunkel dabbled briefly in astrophysics as a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics before moving to the University of Augsburg, in Germany, where he joined a statistical physics group headed by Peter Hanggi. There, he studied thermostatistical concepts in special relativity, and also in Brownian motion (the random motion of discrete particles), looking for ways to connect large-scale transport phenomena to their microscopic, single-particle machinery.

He took the mathematical tools he developed in his PhD work to Oxford University, where he did a postdoc with a group working in theoretical physics and exploring ways to mathematically model the individual and collective dynamics of bacterial cells. From there, he moved to Cambridge University, where he joined an experimental biophysics group as the only theory-oriented postdoc at the time. The researchers there were carrying out experiments on  bacteria and algae and looking for patterns in the data to describe mathematically how the organisms swim.

“What I learned there was, if you start working with a dataset that’s fundamentally new, it keeps you honest and forces you to think in new ways, because you have to explain that data,” Dunkel says. “So, even today when I advise my students, each one no matter the project, gets a real dataset to work with. Because as you try to understand the dataset, you can get new ideas that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.”

Conscious capacity

In 2013, Dunkel moved from the “other” Cambridge, to MIT, where he joined the Department of Mathematics as a junior faculty member in applied mathematics. In setting up his research program, he looked to develop mathematical tools to describe and predict the behavior of real-world phenomena at both the small and large scale, and to seek ways to mathematically bridge the two scales in various systems.

He has primarily applied this thinking to understanding problems in developmental  biology and soft matter, and has collaborated with experimentalists at MIT — especially professors Nikta Fakhri and Adam Martin —  and elsewhere, looking through data they collect, for instance on the spiral waves in starfish eggs, for patterns that can be described and predicted through math. Dunkel has also intentionally left room to explore questions that might appear at first glance to divert from his main path of research.

“For me it’s a conscious effort to leave capacities for new unexpected things,” Dunkel says. “This is what makes MIT special that you have this unique combination of people here who are excellent in so many areas and also very open to collaborating across the boundaries of disciplines.”

A recent diversion sprang from a question that some of his students posed in class: Could a dry spaghetti noodle be broken in two? In addition to experimentally testing the idea, Dunkel helped the students develop a mathematical model to describe how the feat could be accomplished, with a precise bit of twisting.

The work could have ended there. But it caught the attention of MIT Professor Matthias Kolle, who had developed a new type of fiber that changes color with strain. Kolle wondered whether the spaghetti model could be adapted to softer materials, to predict the strength of his fibers when knotted in certain configurations. He and Dunkel struck up a continuing collaboration, which has since drawn interest from surgeons looking to understand the stability of surgical knots, as well as biologists who are applying the model to predict the behavior of colonies of worms.

“Though many of these systems are different, fundamentally, we can see similarities in the structure of their data,” Dunkel says. “It’s very easy to find differences. What’s more interesting is to find out what’s similar.”

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Engineered yeast could expand biofuels’ reach

Boosting production of biofuels such as ethanol could be an important step toward reducing global consumption of fossil fuels. However, ethanol production is limited in large part by its reliance on corn, which isn’t grown in large enough quantities to make up a significant portion of U.S. fuel needs.

To try to expand biofuels’ potential impact, a team of MIT engineers has now found a way to expand the use of a wider range of nonfood feedstocks to produce such fuels. At the moment, feedstocks such as straw and woody plants are difficult to use for biofuel production  because they first need to be broken down to fermentable sugars, a process that releases numerous byproducts that are toxic to yeast, the microbes most commonly used to produce biofuels.

The MIT researchers developed a way to circumvent that toxicity, making it feasible to use those sources, which are much more plentiful, to produce biofuels. They also showed that this tolerance can be engineered into strains of yeast used to manufacture other chemicals, potentially making it possible to use “cellulosic” woody plant material as a source to make biodiesel or bioplastics.

“What we really want to do is open cellulose feedstocks to almost any product and take advantage of the sheer abundance that cellulose offers,” says Felix Lam, an MIT research associate and the lead author of the new study.

Gregory Stephanopoulos, the Willard Henry Dow Professor in Chemical Engineering, and Gerald Fink, the Margaret and Herman Sokol Professor at the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research and the American Cancer Society Professor of Genetics in MIT’s Department of Biology, are the senior authors of the paper, which appears today in Science Advances.

Boosting tolerance

Currently, around 40 percent of the U.S. corn harvest goes into ethanol. Corn is primarily a food crop that requires a great deal of water and fertilizer, so plant material known as cellulosic biomass is considered an attractive, noncompeting source for renewable fuels and chemicals. This biomass, which includes many types of straw, and parts of the corn plant that typically go unused, could amount to more than 1 billion tons of material per year, according to a U.S. Department of Energy study — enough to substitute for 30 to 50 percent of the petroleum used for transportation.

However, two major obstacles to using cellulosic biomass are that cellulose first needs to be liberated from the woody lignin, and the cellulose then needs to be further broken down into simple sugars that yeast can use. The particularly aggressive preprocessing needed generates compounds called aldehydes, which are very reactive and can kill yeast cells.

To overcome this, the MIT team built on a technique they had developed several years ago to improve yeast cells’ tolerance to a wide range of alcohols, which are also toxic to yeast in large quantities. In that study, they showed that spiking the bioreactor with specific compounds that strengthen the membrane of the yeast helped yeast to survive much longer in high concentrations of ethanol. Using this approach, they were able to improve the traditional fuel ethanol yield of a high-performing strain of yeast by about 80 percent.

In their new study, the researchers engineered yeast so that they could convert the cellulosic byproduct aldehydes into alcohols, allowing them to take advantage of the alcohol tolerance strategy they had already developed. They tested several naturally occurring enzymes that perform this reaction, from several species of yeast, and identified one that worked the best. Then, they used directed evolution to further improve it.

“This enzyme converts aldehydes into alcohols, and we have shown that yeast can be made a lot more tolerant of alcohols as a class than it is of aldehydes, using the other methods we have developed,” Stephanopoulos says.

Yeast are generally not very efficient at producing ethanol from toxic cellulosic feedstocks; however, when the researchers expressed this top-performing enzyme and spiked the reactor with the membrane-strengthening additives, the strain more than tripled its cellulosic ethanol production, to levels matching traditional corn ethanol.

Abundant feedstocks

The researchers demonstrated that they could achieve high yields of ethanol with five different types of cellulosic feedstocks, including switchgrass, wheat straw, and corn stover (the leaves, stalks, and husks left behind after the corn is harvested).

“With our engineered strain, you can essentially get maximum cellulosic fermentation from all these feedstocks that are usually very toxic,” Lam says. “The great thing about this is it doesn’t matter if maybe one season your corn residues aren’t that great. You can switch to energy straws, or if you don’t have high availability of straws, you can switch to some sort of pulpy, woody residue.”
 

The researchers also engineered their aldehyde-to-ethanol enzyme into a strain of yeast that has been engineered to produce lactic acid, a precursor to bioplastics. As it did with ethanol, this strain was able to produce the same yield of lactic acid from cellulosic materials as it does from corn.

This demonstration suggests that it could be feasible to engineer aldehyde tolerance into strains of yeast that generate other products such as diesel. Biodiesels could potentially have a big impact on industries such as heavy trucking, shipping, or aviation, which lack an emission-free alternative like electrification and require huge amounts of fossil fuel.

“Now we have a tolerance module that you can bolt on to almost any sort of production pathway,” Stephanopoulos says. “Our goal is to extend this technology to other organisms that are better suited for the production of these heavy fuels, like oils, diesel, and jet fuel.”

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health.

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A new chapter for space sustainability

Each day, new and innovative space technologies are being developed in countries around the world, and with that, a steady stream of satellites, rockets, cargo ships, and crew vehicles are being launched into the Earth's orbit and beyond.

So what happens to these systems when they come to the end of their functional life, or malfunction and break?  

Some are programmed to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere where, if all goes well, they incinerate safely upon entry. Some are programmed to use their last bit of fuel to launch further into outer space, into so-called graveyard or disposal orbits. Other chunks of space debris are left to float in Earth's orbit, and as a result, millions of pieces of space junk circulate our planet, traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour. It's not hard to imagine how, at that speed and velocity, any kind of collision with a working satellite or spacecraft could mean instantaneous destruction.

To help address this real and ever-growing concern, in 2019 the World Economic Forum launched the Space Sustainability Rating (SSR), and held a competition to select teams to design the tool. The organizations selected were the European Space Agency along with a U.S. team led by Assistant Professor Danielle Wood, director of the the Media Lab’s Space Enabled group, in collaboration with Minoo Rathnasabapathy of Space Enabled, Professor Moriba Jah at the University of Texas at Austin, and Simon Potter of the space analytics and engineering company BryceTech. 

The rating system under development by this team over the past two years has been designed to score the sustainability of manufacturers and operators, and is based on factors such as plans to de-orbit systems upon completion of missions; choice of orbital altitude; ability of systems to be detected and identified from the ground; collision-avoidance measures; size and number of objects left in space from the launch vehicle; and sharing of data. By voluntarily participating in the SSR system, missions will earn a certification and rating that verifies their level of sustainability.

“The development and deployment of the SSR comes at a crucial time in the ongoing efforts to encourage responsible behavior among a growing and increasingly diverse group of space actors,” says Potter. “Satellites are being launched in dramatically greater numbers, increasing the threat to the long-term sustainability of the space environment. The SSR aims to incentivize space actors to consider sustainability as a critical component of mission design and operations, in the same way that ESG [Environmental, Social & Governance] considerations are becoming increasingly embedded in activities on Earth.”

Now, with the progress made by this foundational team, the SSR is poised to move from the design stage to prepare for operations, and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Swiss Institute of Technology of Lausanne) Space Center — known as eSpace — has been tapped to lead the SSR rollout following a competitive selection process.

For this next chapter in space debris mitigation, the original SSR design team, including Wood, Rathnasabapathy, Jah, Potter, Stijn Lemmens and Francesca Letizia of ESA, and Nikolai Khystov of the World Economic Forum, will serve on the SSR's Advisory Council. This role includes serving on the team that makes recommendations and approves changes to the SSR definition, helps to communicate the value and benefits of the rating, and advises countries on how they can incorporate SSR guidelines into their national policies.

"The transition of the SSR from design to operations is an exciting milestone, and just the start of a new era of space sustainability research at MIT and with our collaborator Moriba Jah at the University of Texas at Austin," notes Wood. 

Wood and her research team are building new alliances to expand research impact in space sustainability. Both Jah and Kevin O’Connell are newly announced affiliated researchers with Space Enabled. O’Connell served as the director of space commerce in the U.S. Department of Commerce and is a recognized expert on the global space economy. In addition, a research collaborative has been formed together with Jah and Richard Linares at MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics to design next-generation methods that support space traffic management. 

Wood explains, "At Space Enabled, future research will continue our work to create models to estimate how challenging it is to detect, identify, and track an object in space; build tools that invite new countries and firms to help shape sustainable space operations; study economic, social, and legal trends that influence the accessibility of space; and develop new methods to ensure that human activity — in our own orbit, on the moon, Mars, and beyond — is environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable.” 

To celebrate this new season of research on space sustainability, Wood hosted Jah to discuss his views on space environmentalism in a public, virtual event on June 24 as part of the MIT Media Lab Perspective series.  

The collaboration between Space Enabled and Jah leverages the capabilities of the Advanced Research Collaboration and Application Development Environment (ARCADE), a digital commons that Jah developed with the Texas Advanced Computing Center and IBM. ARCADE provides a platform to perform analysis related to SSR while leveraging ASTRIAGraph, a free tool that enables and encourages scientific and policy inquiries regarding space safety, security, and sustainability. 

“The SSR is one of several pillars required to solve the wicked problem of uncoordinated space traffic activities,” says Jah. “Space operations knowledge is uneven across space actors, and thus the practice is also uneven as a consequence. The SSR aims, in part, to harmonize the currently existing gap between knowledge and practice in the space operations community. The University of Texas tool ASTRIAGraph contributes to this endeavor by creating a public platform to visualize and analyze estimates of the locations of human-generated space objects.”

Wood notes that with the leadership role that Space Enabled has played in designing the SSR, the group has established a collaborative research portfolio in space sustainability, and collaborations with key experts in the field. “We can build upon this in exciting ways,” she concludes, “and MIT will continue to innovate new ways of thinking and designing to preserve the environment in space and on Earth for generations to come.”

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3Q: Why “nuclear batteries” offer a new approach to carbon-free energy

We may be on the brink of a new paradigm for nuclear power, a group of nuclear specialists suggested recently in The Bridge, the journal of the National Academy of Engineering. Much as large, expensive, and centralized computers gave way to the widely distributed PCs of today, a new generation of relatively tiny and inexpensive factory-built reactors, designed for autonomous plug-and-play operation similar to plugging in an oversized battery, is on the horizon, they say.

These proposed systems could provide heat for industrial processes or electricity for a military base or a neighborhood, run unattended for five to 10 years, and then be trucked back to the factory for refurbishment. The authors — Jacopo Buongiorno, MIT’s TEPCO Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering; Robert Frida, a founder of GenH; Steven Aumeier of the Idaho National Laboratory; and Kevin Chilton, retired commander of the U.S. Strategic Command — have dubbed these small power plants “nuclear batteries.” Because of their simplicity of operation, they could play a significant role in decarbonizing the world’s electricity systems to avert catastrophic climate change, the researchers say. MIT News asked Buongiorno to describe his group’s proposal.

Q: The idea of smaller, modular nuclear reactors has been discussed for several years. What makes this proposal for nuclear batteries different?

A: The units we describe take that concept of factory fabrication and modularity to an extreme. Earlier proposals have looked at reactors in the range of 100 to 300 megawatts of electric output, which are a factor of 10 smaller than the traditional big beasts, the big nuclear reactors at the gigawatt scale. These could be assembled from factory-built components, but they still require some assembly at the site and a lot of site preparation work. So, it’s an improvement over the traditional plants, but it’s not a huge improvement.

This nuclear battery concept is really a different thing because of the physical scale of these machines — about 10 megawatts. It’s so small that the whole power plant is actually built in a factory and fits within a standard container. The idea is to fit the whole power plant, which comprises a microreactor and a turbine that converts the heat to electricity, into the container.

This provides several benefits from an economic point of view. You are completely decoupling your projects and your technology from the construction site, which has been the source of every possible schedule delay and cost overrun for nuclear projects over the past 20 years.

This way it becomes sort of energy on demand. If the customer wants either heat or electricity, they can get it within a couple of months, or even weeks, and then it’s plug and play. This machine arrives on the site, and just a few days later, you start getting your energy. So, it’s a product, it’s not a project. That’s how I like to characterize it.

Q: You talk about potentially having such units widely distributed, including even in residential areas to power whole neighborhoods. How confident can people be as to the safety of these plants?

A: It’s exceptionally robust — that’s one of the selling points. First of all, the fact that it’s small is good for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the overall amount of heat that’s generated is proportional to the power, which is small. But more importantly, it has a high surface-to-volume ratio because, again, it’s small, which makes it a lot easier to keep cool under all circumstances. It’s passively cooled, to a point where nobody has to do anything. You don’t even need to open a valve or anything. The system takes care of itself.

It also has a very robust containment structure surrounding it to protect against any release of radiation. Instead of the traditional big concrete dome, there are steel shells that basically encapsulate the whole system. And as for security, at most sites, we envision that these would be located below grade. That provides some protection and physical security from external attackers.

As for other safety issues, you know, if you think about the famous nuclear accidents, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, all three of these issues are mediated by the design of these nuclear batteries. Because they are so small, it’s basically impossible to get that type of outcome from any sequence of events.

Q: How do we know that these new kinds of reactors will work, and what would need to happen for such units to become widely available?

A: NASA and Los Alamos National Laboratory have done a similar demonstration project, which they called a microreactor, for space applications. It took them just three years from the start of design to fabrication and testing. And it cost them $20 million. It was orders of magnitude smaller than traditional large nuclear plants that easily cost a billion-plus and take a decade or more to build.

There are also different companies out there now developing their own designs, and every one is a bit different. Westinghouse is already working on a version of such nuclear batteries (though they are not using that term), and they plan to run a demonstration unit in two years.

The next step will be to build a pilot plant at one of the national laboratories that has extensive equipment for testing nuclear reactor systems, such as the Idaho National Laboratory. They have a number of facilities that are being modified to accommodate these microreactors, and they have extra layers of safety. Because it’s a demonstration project, you want to make sure that if something happens you didn’t foresee, that you don't have any release to the environment.

Then, the plant could go through an accelerated program of testing, subjecting it to more extreme conditions than would ever be encountered in normal operation. You essentially abuse it and show by direct testing that it can take all those external loads or situations without exceeding any failure limits. And once it’s proven there under rigorous conditions, widespread commercial installations could begin quite quickly.

These nuclear batteries are ideally suited to create resilience in very different sectors of the economy, by providing a steady dependable source of power to back up the increasing reliance on intermittent renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. And, these highly distributed systems can also help to alleviate pressures on the grid by being sited just where their output is needed. This can provide greater resiliency against any disruptions to the grid and virtually eliminate the issue of transmission losses. If these become as widespread as we envision, they could make a significant contribution to reducing the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

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