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UPDATE # 4 - November 21, l997

PART 1: Upcoming Chats with NeurOn Experts
PART 2: Email questions and get personal answers
PART 3: Field Journals Explained
PART 4: Spacelab: The Final Mission
PART 5: Suiting up for Neurolab
PART 6: Subscribing & Unsubscribing: How to do It!

UPCOMING CHATS WITH NEURON EXPERTS


We've had two chats already, and although they weren't heavily attended,
we had some terrific questions asked and got some insightful answers. The
archive of past chats is now in place, and will be kept up to date.

The best part of chats, though, is being in touch LIVE with the expert, so
join us for an exciting hour of give and take about Neurolab and related
subjects.  Our upcoming chats will feature:

Thursday, December 4, 1:00-2:00 p.m. Pacific Time:
Wally Welker, Neuroscientist
Wally is Emeritus Professor from the Dept. of Neurophysiology at the
University of Wisconsin Medical School. He describes himself as,
"eternally curious about the neural bases of behavior, thought, emotions,
and perceptions." Wally maintains the web pages entitled Comparative
Mammalian Brain Collection and one of his great concerns is the lack of
adequate understanding of the brain. We hope to be able to learn much by
asking questions at this chat.

Wednesday, December 10, 10:00-11:00 a.m. Pacific Time:
Louis H. Ostrach, Ames Research Center Project Scientist
Louis is responsible for making sure that the ground crew, flight crew and
administrators (and whatever other organizations are involved in the
mission) understand the requirements of the 13 principal investigators'
experiments and have the resources to meet the experiment objectives.

To participate (ask questions), you will need to pre-register for the
individual chats. Go to:  http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/chats

EMAIL QUESTIONS AND GET PERSONAL ANSWERS

The opportunity to send email questions to the men and women of the
Neurolab team is available now through May 1998. We are grateful to the
Neurolab folks for generously volunteering their time to support this
service. To avoid using their time for duplicate questions, we would ask
you to please check the archive of previously asked questions before
submitting yours. As a matter of fact, you can find a series of tips on
how to formulate "good" questions, even in this process simulating the
teamwork that is used by NASA personnel at:
  http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/question/ask.html


K-12 students and teachers can email questions to researchers, engineers
and support staff and receive their answers both through personal email
and on the Web. This interaction will be supported by a "Smart Filter"
system which protects the professional from Internet overload by acting as
a buffer. The actual email addresses of the experts will remain unlisted.
Also, repetitive questions will be answered from an accumulating database
of replies; thus the valued interaction with the experts will be saved for
original questions.

We believe that the email Q&A service is a good compliment to the bios,
Field Journals and other materials. Students have an opportunity to
follow-up on any NeurOn information that sparks their interest.

FIELD JOURNALS EXPLAINED

The stories below are examples of NeurOn Field Journals. The intent of
these journals is to show the diversity of real tasks involved in
putting together a mission like Neurolab and give snippets from the lives
of Neurolab team members. Each journal that is sent as part of the
Updates will include a sentence or two to help orient you toward the story
that follows. You may also find it helpful to look at the team member's
biography online. The URL will be provided.

Still, when reading some of these journals, you may feel like you've
come in during the middle of a play and are leaving before it's over.
It is our hope that these quick peeks into the busy lives of NASA
personnel will still help to give some insights into what it is like to be
a part of Neurolab on a day-to-day basis.

[Editor's note: Robert works as an experiment processing engineer at the Kennedy Space Station. His job is to test scientific experiments that are scheduled to fly in space.]

SPACELAB: THE FINAL MISSION

by Robert Kuczajda http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/team/kuczajda.html September 3, l997 Things have been pretty busy around here lately. Some of the Space Station engineers, including myself, have been asked to help out on the final Spacelab mission. The mission name is "Neurolab" and it will fly on the Shuttle next year as STS-90. Neurolab is a Life Sciences mission focusing on how the human body functions in space. I have been assigned to work on the ALFE experiment that will fly on Neurolab. ALFE stands for "Astronaut Lung Function Experiment" and it's purpose is to conduct a series of breathing tests in zero gravity. Last week, I flew to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas to put the final touches on a procedure that I am writing to check out the experiment before it launches on the Shuttle. The test will be conducted next month here at the Kennedy Space Center. It is customary to test all experiments at the Kennedy Space Center before they launch. The reason I was in Texas was because that is where the experiment is being designed and managed. I met with some of the engineers and scientists from the Johnson Space Center who work on ALFE and they helped me with my procedure. We powered up a back-up ALFE unit and ran through the procedure in a simulated Spacelab module. While I was there I got to meet one of the astronauts who will fly on STS-90. The next step is to get all the ALFE flight hardware to the Kennedy Space Center and perform the final test before flight. That test is currently scheduled for October 6, 1997.

[Editor's note: Dave is a mission specialist, the Canadian Space Agency member of the Neurolab crew. Below you will find the description he sent with a photo journal as he and the other astronauts train for STS-90. In the first three photos he's suited up for the ALFE experiment Robert Kuczajda writes of above. Naturally you'll have to go to the Website to see the pictures: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/team/journals/williams
The pictures and description illustrate the crew members as both experimenters and objects of experiments on this mission]

SUITING UP FOR NEUROLAB
by Dave Williams November 18, l997 I have attached some digital photos of the FD 15 simulation. The first three are from the ALFE (astronaut lung function experiment). This experiment is part of the sleep team and is designed to evaluate how respiration changes in space. In particular, the experiment is designed to evaluate the neuronal control of ventilation in response to high levels of carbon dioxide as well as low levels of oxygen. Normally both of these stimuli will cause an increase in respiratory rate. It is interesting that patients with chronic bronchitis, who have high levels of carbon dioxide in their blood because their lungs no longer exchange gas as efficiently as normal, are stimulated to breathe by low levels of oxygen (not by CO2 as you and I are). If you give them oxygen to breathe, it can actually decrease their respiratory rate!! (medical trivia not related to space flight). I am particularly proud of my RIP (respiratory impedance plethysmography) suit - the black suit that I am wearing in the photo. This allows the investigators to determine the movement of my chest and abdomen while breathing. There are a number of other sensors that I have to wear on my left hand to record the amount of oxygen in my blood and my blood pressure. There is also a shot of me working in the general purpose work station, essentially a glove box to allow us to perform the animal experiments in a contained environment. The kinelite, or catching, experiment is designed to look at how catching (representative of a stored complex motor response) changes in microgravity. The electrodes that I am wearing on my right arm allow recording of the muscle activity before and during the catching activity. I am also wearing a number of reflectors on my right arm, leg, and head so that the position of my body can be analyzed as well. [ Do take the time to look at the pictures at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/team/journals/williams ]

SUBSCRIBING & UNSUBSCRIBING: HOW TO DO IT!

If this is your first message from the updates-nrn list, welcome! To catch up on back issues, please visit the following Internet URL: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/updates To subscribe to the updates-nrn mailing list (where this message came from), send a message to: listmanager@quest.arc.nasa.gov In the message body, write these words: subscribe updates-nrn CONVERSELY... To remove your name from the updates-nrn mailing list, send a message to: listmanager@quest.arc.nasa.gov In the message body, write these words: unsubscribe updates-nrn If you have Web access, please visit our "continuous construction" site at http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron