A large number of scientific teams will board the International Space Station this week on the 25th SpaceX payload service mission to the orbital lab.
The unmanned flight, known as CRS-25, will begin on Friday (June 10), when a Falcon 9 rocket launches a Drac Cape Canaveral Florida space force station capsule. The Dragon is full of a variety of cargo and supplies, including lots of scientific experiments.
With a generalized approach, science turned to International Space Station (ISS) includes research on the aging and recovery of the immune system, the overall composition of dust and its effect on the climate, how communities of soil microorganisms are affected by microgravity and more.
Related: Construction of the International Space Station (photos)
In a call with reporters on Thursday (June 2nd), NASA officials expressed enthusiasm for the number of experiments conducted in the orbital laboratory, as well as the increased capacity of astronauts to carry them to term.
For almost a decade after NASA retired in 2011 space shuttle fleet, the agency relied on the Russian spacecraft Soyuz to carry its astronauts to and from the ISS. That of three people Soyuz it is always commanded by a cosmonaut and can therefore carry a maximum of two spacecraft to the US section of the station.
But now there are more people (NASA, European and Japanese astronauts) who can go from the US section, thanks to the success of SpaceX astronaut missions for NASA. The manned version of Dragon is equipped to carry four astronauts at a time, and SpaceX it has now launched four manned operational missions to the ISS.
And this increase in crew numbers has allowed for more research opportunities, NASA officials said.
“Because we’ve had four crew, and not too many five crew on board the ISS … we’ve been aligned with the time of the crew,” said Kirt Costello, chief scientist of NASA’s ISS program, during the briefing on Thursday. “We’ve seen our ISS research sponsors respond and use all available time.”
Here’s a rundown of some of the experiments heading into orbit next week. You can learn more about them and other research flying at CRS-25 through NASA here (opens in a new tab).
On January 14, 2022, strong seasonal winds carried dust from northwest Africa over the Canary Islands, causing visibility to decline and air quality to decline. EMIT will measure the mineral composition of dust in arid regions of the Earth, creating a map that could improve understanding of how dust affects individuals and communities. (Image credit: NASA)
EMIT
Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation, known as EMIT, will spend the next year measuring the mineral composition of dust in the driest landscapes on Earth. During Thursday’s briefing, Robert Green, EMIT’s lead researcher, explained what he called the planet’s “mineral dust cycle.”
Blown dust inside Earth’s atmosphere by the strong winds of the desert it travels thousands of kilometers. The mineral content of this atmospheric dust affects the interconnected global climate system, and the composition of these minerals is key to figuring out how. Depending on the minerals present, for example, atmospheric dust will absorb and reflect sunlight in different ways, heating or cooling areas, affecting cloud formation and atmospheric chemistry. This type of dust can also serve as a rich nutrient deposit when installed in the ocean or on land.
Right now, according to Green, there are only a total of 5,000 mineral samples from the Earth’s global dust cycle in the hands of scientists. EMIT intends to leave that number in the dust. The EMIT module is loaded into the Dragon trunk on the CRS-25 and is the largest payload of the mission. Once Dragon arrives at the ISS, EMIT will join the station’s external logistics module 1, where it will spend the next year spectroscopically analyzing more than a billion dust samples from around the planet. Scientists hope to use this data to update global systems models for things like weather forecasting and climate research.
Climate change: causes and effects
Flight hardware for biopolymer research for in situ capabilities, an investigation of how microgravity affects the process of creating a concrete alternative made with an organic material and in situ materials such as lunar or Martian dust. Each module is made of two bricks, for a total of six bricks made in space. (Image credit: James Wall)
Biopolymer space concrete
from NASA Artemis program it seeks to establish a permanent human presence on and around the Moon. However, the question of how best to build sustainable habitats from locally sourced resources remains unanswered. Building materials such as steel and concrete are heavy and very unprofitable to launch into orbit, much less the moon.
Stanford University students are investigating how microgravity affects the formation of a specific alternative that mixes an organic compound with water and “in situ” resources, such as lunar regolith or Martian dust, to create a soil biopolymer compound. (BPC). Instead of using a chemical reaction, heat or pressure, the compounds used in PCBs allow the mixture to dry with “about half the strength of Portland cement,” according to Stanford student Jocelyn Huang Thai, one of the leaders of the Biopolymer Research team for on-site capability research.
This experiment will use a compound called bovine serum albumin (BSA) to create six bricks aboard the space station, each about 0.3 inches (7 millimeters) long. On Earth, BSA forms protein bridges that connect dirt particles during the drying process. Researchers hope to compare bricks mixed in space with homologues made on Earth to determine their influence microgravity on the drying process and the formation of protein bridges, and how this affects the density and strength of bricks.
This image shows cultured skin samples on the Suture in Space hardware before flight. This ESA research examines the behavior of sutures and the healing of wounds in microgravity. (Image credit: University of Florence)
Space points
He European Space Agency (ESA) and the University of Florence in Italy are sending skin samples to the CRS-25 space station. But these are not just small flakes in a test tube. A set of tissue chips, containers designed to store human cells for microgravity study, contain samples of human skin and ethically derived blood vessels that have been injured and then sutured to study the mechanical forces of the points. suturing in the microgravity curing process. .
It is reasonable that, like the increases the rate of human spaceflight, someone will be injured at some point. Monica Monici of the University of Florence, principal investigator of the Suture in Space study, highlighted the benefits of studying sutures in space during Thursday’s call.
“Previous experiments on cell cultures and animal models have shown that wound closure is delayed under microgravity conditions,” Monici explained. “From space evacuation time to Earth [on future missions] could be very long, the need to implement care for trauma and surgeries increases … Wound healing should be considered a major issue for research as it is critical to the survival of the crew “.
Pre-flight preparation of tissue chips for immunosenescence research, which studies the effects of microgravity on immune function to determine the mechanisms behind the aging of the immune system. (Image credit: Sonja Schrepfer, University of California at San Francisco)
Aging of the immune system
Immunosenescence, the aging of immune cells, occurs at a higher rate in microgravity, and this aging can inhibit the ability of cells to repair tissues. Like the suture experiment, Immunosenescence research also uses tissue chips, but this time to study immunocellular aging.
Do you know the phrase, “Are you just as big as you feel?” Well, according to Sonja Schrepfer, the project’s lead researcher, you’re just as big as your immune system. “An aging immune system is not necessarily correlated with the patient’s age, but with the state of the immune system,” Schrepfer, a professor of surgery at the University of California at San Francisco, said during Thursday’s call.
Project researchers will also be able to observe these cells in flight and back on the ground. A similar experiment flew on a cargo mission in December 2018, but its mission parameters did not predict a return. Scientists will be able to observe the reaction of the immune tissue after the flight, after the immunosenescence samples return to Earth in September.
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