by Ray Oyung

September 28, 1998

A lot has been going on since my last journal about STS 95, the shuttle mission scheduled for launch on October 29th next month. For background, the group I work with at Ames is part of a team of researchers and scientists from the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and UC San Diego. We are studying how well astronauts sleep and breathe in the microgravity environment of space. Also, we're studying the effects of low doses of melatonin that the astronauts will take during the mission to see if it will help them obtain better sleep. Melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone that's secreted from the brain at specific times. Certain companies have been able to create melatonin in a synthetic form. They determine the chemical building blocks that make melatonin and manufacture it in the lab in the form of a pill.

Our experiment on this shuttle mission is only one of over 80 experiments in the shuttle payload. These experiments are important to life science research but there are other objectives for this mission too. Other items on the agenda are to deploy a satellite that will collect data from the sun and retrieve this satellite at the end of the mission before coming back to Earth. For more information about the entire STS 95 mission and the shuttle crew, click on the following URL: http://shuttle.nasa.gov/index.html/95synop.html

For the past couple of months, our "Sleep Team" has been collecting data on 2 of the astronauts on three different occasions. We are going to use this data to compare the astronauts on earth before the mission, in space during the mission, and then again for several days after landing. During all of the data collection periods before the mission, we have trained 4 of the astronauts how to operate all of the equipment.

Here are 2 of the astronauts training to operate the equipment that will collect physiological data when they're sleeping.

This is the digital sleep recorder that will store much of the physiological data from this experiment.

The astronauts will use a laptop just like this one to make sure they are collecting certain data properly. The squiggily lines on the screen are brain, eye, and muscle signals that are collected from the blue electrode cap that fits on top of the head. Also displayed are heart signals at the bottom of the screen.