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UPDATE # 6 - December 12, l997 PART 1: Have a terrific holiday break! HAVE A TERRIFIC HOLIDAY BREAK!
This will be our last NeurOn Update for 1997 as most schools will be on vacation from next Friday through New Year's day. My plan is to have a new NeurOn Update waiting for you when you return for classes in l998. In the meantime, there are several projects to work on now and to look forward to: * The Design a Logo competition described below can help students understand the science of Neurolab and set the stage for the 1998 countdown. * The Great Habitat Debate: Start planning now! This activity is designed to encourage classrooms from around the world to collaborate as they design animal micro-habitats (cages) for use in space flight. See the summary below. * As the countdown continues we hope to share more biographies and journals with you as the eyes of more NASA team members turn toward STS-90. Columbia, the shuttle vehicle Neurolab will be using, has now landed, and preparations are beginning for "our" mission. My hope is that you'll have a restful, happy holiday and return refreshed and ready to begin to design your habitats. Let us hear from you. Linda DESIGN A LOGO COMPETITION
Inspired by Alexandra Buckey's design of the Neurolab Logo featured in our Student Gallery: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/kids NeurOn invites students to submit logo ideas for the eight scientist teams that will be flying experiments on STS-90. Winning designs will be featured online in the background section of NeurOn as the official logo for that team. The project is suggested as a classroom activity. It is our hope that students will be grouped in teams much as the scientists are, become experts in their particular fields, and then share this expertise with other classmates in the spirit of "divide and conquer." Deadline for design submission is January 10. See complete project description at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/events/logo.html THE GREAT HABITAT DEBATE
Any student who has kept and cared for an animal of any kind can relate to this project. Those who have not, can learn a great deal! We hope the Great Habitat Debate will be a fun way to talk about animal care while learning about the special environment of space flight. As students brainstorm the needs and requirements for caring for animals in space, they will begin to understand microgravity and its effects on animals and humans. The challenge to your classroom is to design a habitat that will allow for the care and safety of animals for a 16-day trip in space. Additionally, students will collaborate with classrooms around the world as they become life scientists and engineers designing a space-worthy animal habitat for our furry friends. The habitat design can be as easy or complex as your grade level dictates. Lower grades may choose to submit a simple drawing while upper grades may prepare detailed designs with justification for each element in design. All designs are due (with text explanations of all features if appropriate) by February 2, l998. Designs will be posted online, and top designs will receive expert feedback from NASA. For more information and some important considerations see: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/events/habitat Please register your interest in participating by sending me email at: lconrad@mail.arc.nasa.gov NEUROLAB T-SHIRTS: WE'RE SHARING NASA
Wear the experience! Your NeurOn t-shirt will share with others your involvement in sharing the NASA experience. They make great gifts (for yourself or others). For details, please see: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/common/shirts/neuron.html [Editor's note: Tracy works in Experiment Integration, where he gets experiment hardware ready for launch. He installs the hardware and then tests all the power, video, cooling, and data interfaces. All this testing helps makes sure that the experiment will work successfully once the mission begins. This is a continuation of Tracy's journal from last week] WORKING AND RELAXING WITH THE NEUROLAB CREW http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/team/gill.html November 12, l997 The astronaut crew arrived to participate in the test, and on October 28, we did the pre-test setups of stowage hardware to ready the experiments for testing on October 29. It was the astronauts' first experience with the assembled flight hardware, and quite a few of us engineers here were kept busy that day between doing our setups and helping answer questions for the flight crew. The astronauts also took many, many pictures of the experiment hardware to take back to JSC to study while they trained back there. On the night of Oct. 28, quite a few of us from KSC, the astronaut crew, and our experiment providers from JSC and the Ames Research Center (ARC) all went out to eat dinner and to get to know each other a little better. We went to a local favorite in Port Canaveral, a place called Frankie's which is famous for hot wings. A grand time was had by all. The MST consisted of five 30-minute time "slices" where we simulated different portions during the on-orbit mission when the Neurolab experiment complement places its maximum demands for power, data, and thermal cooling on the Spacelab. We take measurements to quantify this data, and we also look for incompatibilities between experiments running at the same time. We did three time "slices" on October 29 and two on October 31 and used October 30 to do reconfiguration between the test days. The slices are actually the easy part of the test. The hardest part is getting everything activated and configured to start a time slice, and then deactivating some things while activating others and then mechanically reconfiguring for the start of the next time slice. Fortunately, the KSC Level IV test team working with me to help write the procedures and run the test did a great job, and we made the MST a rousing success. After the MST, we had to power up three more times to work off some problem reports from testing, but on November 10, we completed the last Level IV power up for Neurolab. With no more planned Spacelabs, it was an ambivalent day with joy at the prospect of being ready to move the rack and floor train into Level III/II for integration into the module, but sadness at performing the last activity ever in Level IV. Late today, the Neurolab rack and floor train was rolled into the Spacelab module. Over the next two weeks, it will be readied for test activities, and I'll be busy incorporating comments into the procedures now out for review that I wrote for experiment testing in Level III/II which starts December 1. So, that gives us a few weeks to catch our breath from Level IV and get ready to go at it again when we start the Level III/II testing. That's all for me till then. 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
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