PRESS RELEASE

Winners samples of "Una Idea Para Cambiar la Historia" return from the space
 
During the celebration of Talent Land 2019, History Channel Latinoamerica announced the strategic alliance with Aplicaciones Extraordinarias Aeroespaciales (AEXA), this allowed the winning ideas or projects to be sent in "Una Idea Para Cambiar la Historia" to the research test center at the International Space Station to perform tests in Earth orbit, with the subsequent return to Earth for a post-analysis of those results.
 

The projects' representatives selected in the 2020 Awards delivered all the technical documentation requested by NASA during the month of February 2020 and, in April of the same year, the samples of their materials to AEXA. 
The winners of this edition upload 3 equal samples of a maximum size of one square inch to be sent and tested in space. The exemplars of the materials were previously tested and studied in laboratories in Houston, Tx. To confirm their resistance and ensure that they do not pose any danger when exposed to the space environment.

The MISSE-14 mission shipped the samples in an Antares rocket from the NASA's Pad 0A Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia, to the MISSE module on the International Space Station, where samples spent a year subjected to extreme conditions that helped test the strength of these materials, which circled the earth 5,408 times and covered 221,934,975 km from launch to return.


"The experiments exposed to the ISS in 1 year have the equivalent wear and tear of 15 or 16 years on Earth" explained Octavio Flores Correa, AEXA´s general director.
 
This wear and tear were due to space vacuum, high solar radiation, UV, electromagnetic, and 16 thermal cycles a day ranging from 60°C to -40°C in each of them. 

If materials withstand extreme conditions in space without significant disruption, a minimum life span can be guaranteed on Earth, saving many years of traditional research.Furthermore, depending on the results obtained in the post-return search, these samples may lead to new product developments or, in the event of failure, to improvements or substitutes.

The selected projects were:
 
DOMO WORLD: It is the design and construction of an eco dome, a semi-spherical housing made from recycled plastic. The material sent to MISSE was plastic wood, a material created with plastic for constructing ecological habitats.
 
"Visually you can check the durability of the plastic in our environment, but now experimentally we can calculate the estimated number of years that the material is reliable for the structure of the domes and, possibly other types of alternative construction in the world" comments Eng.Alexis Navarro creator of DomoWorld

 
RADIAL BIO MATERIALES: It is the creation of biomaterials generated by the natural processes of fungi, bacteria, algae, and microorganisms that grow biomaterials. The material sent to MISSE was mycelium, a specimen created from the natural growth of fungi to transform local agricultural waste into sustainable materials for different applications.