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UPDATE # 9 - January 16, l998 PART 1: It's hard to keep a secret! IT'S HARD TO KEEP A SECRET!
It seems that showing off the hardware developed here at NASA Ames Research Center is extremely appropriate as the time to ship and test is upon us! So, how am I supposed to keep from showing our young designers in the classroom working on the Great Hardware Debate? (Pssst: You can see a part in the new bio online for Paul Espinosa, project engineer for the development of hardware. See http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/team/espinosa.html And then there's Chris Barreras' journal below (RAHFs are Research Animal Holding Facilities - Sounds an awful lot like like a habitat to me!) More about this project below... Don't forget the Logo Design Contest! One teacher wrote to me: "This is becoming a great project for my class!" As you've heard from our NeurOn team members, this is the large and diverse payload. The Logo Design Contest was designed to help classrooms break down the complexity into "teachable" segments. We hope you're enjoying it also. See: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/events/logo.html Speaking of helping to simplify, below I have quoted from Stefan Rosner's bio because I felt he did a great job of helping me to understand some aspects of this exciting yet sophisticated mission. Hope it helps you too. I'm sorry we were not able to have the chat with Chris Maese this past week. Unfortunately, he was sick in the early part of the week, so the end of the week has been a dash to catch up. He still promises to do it soon! Keep watching here and in the News section online. We'll let you know as soon as we know. Yours in NeurOn, Linda CHAT FEATURES ANIMAL CARE
Join us on Thursday, January 22, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time. Mary Williams from our Animal Care Facility here at NASA Ames Research center will join us to answer your questions on animal care. Mary is responsible for making sure the Animal Care Facility runs smoothly, that it supports everyone we need to support, and that the animals are all well taken care of. She also makes sure that all the staff is properly trained in how to take care of the different types of animals. I know if I were "designing" a habitat for Space, I'd be there! http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/chats/index.html#chatting Mark your calendar: Thursday, January 22, 10:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m. Pacific Time: Chris Barreras, Payloads Engineer (see journal below) will join us to discuss -- you guessed it: Animal Habitats for Space! GREAT HABITAT DEBATE UPDATE
This month we will continue to drop some helpful hints through
the maillist specifically in response to material submitted
from classrooms working this project. We are anxiously anticipating
some pictures of classes doing their work or of habitat designs!
Our chats will be centered around animal care in general (see above
chat with Mary Williams). And inevitably, our Team members' journals will
continue to leak some information that should help you with your designs.
See Chris Barreras' below, and Tracy Gill's new pictorial bio at:
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/team/journals
That last one we gave through the list last week.
[Editor's note: Chris is Payloads Engineer working on rodent hardware to make sure that water, food, air, and "bathroom" facilities are adequate for the rodents flying on Neurolab.] MORE ABOUT RAHFS
by Chris Barreras http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/team/barreras.html December 31, l997 Permit me to pass on some RAHF [Research Animal Holding Facility] history: This system was designed many years ago through Lockheed Martin [a contractor to NASA]. Each RAHF is designed to hold up to 24 adult rodent animals for space flight experiments. The original design included two configurations, one designed to hold rodents and another configuration to hold primates or monkeys. We have no plans to fly primates. The RAHF provides environmental control, food, water, lighting and waste management for the animals. The RAHFs have flown on the Shuttle Columbia twice before (maybe a third) in previous missions. The RAHFs on Neurolab will be flying with new electronics and a computer system that we call the MPCS (Monitoring and Process Control System). This is a major redesign and we, here at Ames Research Center, are eager to see it work in the microgravity of Earth orbit. The RAHFs include a cage module that does the actual cage holding. This module also includes all the lighting systems, air ducts, water system components, temperature and humidity sensors. Each RAHF holds twelve cages in the modules. Removal of one cage removes two adult rodents. RACK 3 will have cages with not two adult rodents, but one mother rodent and a rodent litter of eight baby rodents (neonates) in each cage. I like to call this the nursery or maternity ward. The neonates will be about seven days old when loaded into the orbiter Columbia. That's all for now... I will talk to you again next week.... Chris B. out...... [Editor's note: Stefan is payload systems engineer and works to make sure that the connections of the experiments in Spacelab to the power, data and thermal/environmental control systems will function properly on orbit. He is also a liaison with Neurolab's international partners] A PAYLOAD SYSTEMS ENGINEER'S ROLE FOR NEUROLAB
Stefan Rosner http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/team/rosner.html Neurolab is the last planned Spacelab shuttle mission, and it is a large and very complex life sciences payload. It involves many domestic and international partner agencies from the commercial, government and academic sectors to perform the many diverse scientific and technical engineering tasks needed for such a ground-breaking investigation of this scale. Spacelab is a pressurized module which is flown in the payload bay of the shuttle and provides a "shirtsleeve" environment for performing life and materials sciences experiments. This facility is operated by the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). As Payload Systems Engineer, I work closely with the design engineering teams at ARC and the Mission Management Office (MMO) in Houston. Working together as a team, we ensure that all of the power, data and thermal interface requirements of the ARC Life Sciences payload are properly documented and implemented so that everything works as planned during the precious on-orbit phase of the mission. In addition, I work closely with the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Experiment Engineers throughout the integration process to ensure that each of the rack-mounted experiments is operating correctly and to verify all of the interfaces to Spacelab electrical, data and thermal/environmental control subsystems. By interfaces, I am referring to the electrical power and signal, air and water fluid line connections which connect the experiments to the Spacelab systems. For this mission, ARC is considered a Payload Element Developer (PED). In this context, "payload" refers to the individual experiments and supporting flight hardware which are flown on a Spacelab mission, while to the Space Shuttle Program (SSP), the Spacelab itself is the payload. For this mission, in addition to the ARC payload in which a variety of animals are test subjects for 15 experiments in 4 experiment groups, the MMO is managing another set of experiments developed by the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in which humans (the astronaut crew of Neurolab) are the subjects. I am also the primary ARC liaison and point-of-contact for our international partners, the German Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, and their technical support contractors for coordination needed for the integration of hardware elements provided by them into the ARC payload in support of two aquatics experiments, and one neurobiology experiment. THE BIGGER PICTURE
For those of you who were able to join Tracy Gill's Web chat this past week, it is no surprise that NeurOn is only one of Quest's projects. Tracy has been a long-time Team member of Space Team Online (formerly Shuttle Team Online), and since Neurolab is for some the Shuttle mission of the hour, Tracy has doubled his communication with classrooms by joining NeurOn as well. During the month of February, NASA's Quest Project will be featuring Black History Month, and I would like to invite you to check the Quest Events Calendar and participate in one of next month's special events. You'll find it at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/common/events 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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