John: Good afternoon from Kennedy Space Center, and welcome to a webcast series, the International Space Station, the home of microgravity. My name is John Rau and I'll be your host for the next hour.

Today's topic entitled Flight Support Hardware, which is how NASA transports life science experiments to and from the International Space Station, and also how they preserve the experiments for the ride home for analysis back on Earth.

Before we talk about flight support hardware, let's see what else we have in store for today.

How does science in space differ from science on Earth? This will give you a better view of that. There you go.

Why should we do life science experiments in space?

How can we simulate reduced gravity here on Earth, and what is flight support hardware and how do we use it?

These questions and more will be answered during the next hour, but before we do that, I would like to introduce our guest for today. Her name is Debbie Wells. She works for the Kennedy Space Center as a flight experiments project manager and her main responsibility is to actually take care of the experiments that teachers or scientists suggest and try to find a way to get them into space by using hardware.

Okay. Debbie, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do for Kennedy Space Center?

Debbie: Sure, I'd be happy to.

John: Great.

Debbie: I guess my biggest role in my life right now is I'm a mom. I have three kids. I'm also a biomedical engineer and that may sound strange to some of you who have parents who are mechanical engineers or electrical engineers, but a biomedical engineer is someone who takes those same equations and math problems and applies them to living systems, so humans and plants and animals.

I came to Kennedy Space Center in 1988, and I've been working on several different projects. I started out helping scientists to prepare their specimens, everything from chicken eggs to rodents to plants.

Also, the next job I moved into was actually doing tests on the astronauts before launch and after launch. So that was a very exciting job. I did a lot of traveling, though, because in those days, we were still landing at Edwards Air Force Base all the time, so I spent a lot of time out there.

And now, I work with a group and we take an experiment that a scientist might do in their laboratory, and we take experiment and turn it into something that can be done in space. Doing things in a lab and in space are a little bit different, and so we're kind of the expertise that help those scientists learn how to do that.

John: Okay. Well, thank you very much. We'll start that off, by the way, the question segment of the webcast. We'd like to start off by asking how is science in space different from science on Earth?

Debbie: Okay. If you think about someone doing an experiment in a classroom or in their laboratory, you kind of have a temperature. The temperature in your classroom or your lab is probably going to be right around 26 degrees Celsius, 27 degrees Celsius, but it's pretty controlled. But in the space shuttle, like at launch, they cool it down, so they can be as cold as 17 degrees Celsius, which is really cold for us. It's around 65, and then, once we get on orbit, they warm it up and it can get as hot as 32 degrees Celsius, which runs about 88 degrees Fahrenheit. So, there's a wide swing in temperature, for one thing. There's a lot of other things that are different. We talk about humidity, talk about water, how water moves in space is a lot different, so, if we're trying to water plants, that's a lot different.

Just being in the shuttle where it's a close environment and you've got lots of equipment running, so the noise levels are a lot higher than they would be, say, in a ground lab or in your classroom. So there's a whole variety of things that we have to take into consideration when we're doing an experiment in space versus in a lab.

John: So, it's mainly colder, usually. It's not hotter up in space. It's so much colder.

Debbie: Well, I think really it's the wide range that you have to be able to warm things as well as cool them. You know, your hardware has to be able to do both, and so that makes it a little bit tricky when you're designing equipment.

John: Now, is fluid a hazard or a problem in space?

Debbie: Yeah, it is. We do a lot of things with water to provide nutrients, but we also use some hazardous chemicals. If you were working in your lab in your classroom and you were dealing with something that had a lot of fumes, you might use what we call a fume hood that would suck all those fumes up and take them out so that you wouldn't be breathing them all the time.

We don't have one of those in space, because we can't vent from where the crew is. We can't pull that air out and vent it outside.

John: Right.

Debbie: So we have to do different things with fluids to protect the astronauts so that they don't get sick from the fumes of those chemicals.

John: How about radiation? Is that [talk over]?

Debbie: Yes. Radiation can be quite…

Debbie: That's another big change. If you're going to go outside the shuttle and the space station, they usually reduce the inside where the crew is to get ready for going outside. It helps them prepare to breathe the different atmosphere that they're going to breathe when they're in the suit. So that change in pressure can affect the plants.

If you've ever done the experiment or seen the experiment, if you take a balloon with you into an airplane, when the plane takes off, the pressure in the airplane actually goes down and the balloon will get bigger. And the same thing would happen, so the air that's trapped inside the plant or the cells or this water is going to expand, and so the plants recognize all these things.

John: Okay. And the last one actually, let's talk a little bit about gravity a little more. Okay? And how that really affects everything that we do here.

Debbie: That's right.

John: So the lack of gravity would be a big effect on all the plants.

Debbie: Sure. And, you know, one thing, we've done. It's easy to study an animal or a plant and understand how gravity interacts with their ear and how they can keep their balance and things like that. But one of the things that the folks working with plants are really trying to understand is how do plants sense gravity? And how do these other things that we've talked about affect the plants, and how can we see those things.

John: Right.

Debbie: And I think you've got a couple of slides here for us.

John: Absolutely. Let's take a look at those real quick. There's two examples. What kinds of cells are those? Would you elaborate on that?

Debbie: Ooh. They're some kind of plant cell. I'm not sure. I don't remember. They're what we call electron micrographs. We've taken a cell in a plant and we've blown it up really big so we can see the things that are inside the cells.

John: Okay. Actually, you could point them out to us.

Debbie: Sure. No problem.

John: Thank you.

Debbie: Okay. We're looking, here on this picture, we have a couple of plant cells and you can see, hopefully in the cell walls, are these long straight areas, and you've got your nucleus here, and the feature that we're really looking at are these back [duals], they're sacs, if you will, and these we call amblyoplasts.

John: Okay.

Debbie: Okay? Now these hold starch and starch are these big white grains that you see inside these sacs, and you can see some more up here at the top.

John: Now, this would be on Earth, right?

Debbie: This is on Earth. This is a plant from an Earth-based experiment. So, notice the starch is really big. It fills the sac, and it's in within the cell, okay? So, now, when we grow this same plant in space, it's going to look a little bit different.

John: Okay. Let's take a look at that.

Debbie: Okay. Here is the same type plant, again grown in space. The cell walls. I'll point those out again. You've got your nucleus, and here, again, are sacs with the starch in them, and what you'll notice here is the starch is smaller. It doesn't fill the sac as much as in the Earth-based plant. And also, you'll notice there's a lot more of these little black dots, and these little black dots are oils, so what we're seeing here is the plant is not storing the starch the same way, this energy, this food, the same way. It's starting to store it as oil, instead of starch.

Now, one of the real interesting things about plants and one of the ways that the scientists think that plants can sense gravity is using these sacs that are full of starch.

John: Okay.

Debbie: If I were to take this plant and turn it in one direction, these little sacs are going to fall to that side of the plant that's on the bottom.

John: Right.

Debbie: Okay? So that movement of that little sac inside the cell tells the plant that, hey, gravity's down this way.

John: Right.

Debbie: Okay. So, in space, where there's no gravity, these don't move when the plant moves, okay? So it senses that maybe it doesn't need these as much and maybe starts to reabsorb.

John: So, how would that benefit us here on earth? Would there be anything we could learn from that or?

Debbie: Well, one of the reasons we need to understand this mechanism of how plants sense gravity is really for a long-term space flight expedition. If we wanted to be able to grow food to go to Mars or to live on Mars or live on the moon, we need to be able to grow plants as well as we can grow them here on Earth. And some of that is dependent on gravity.

So, we're looking at trying to understand this and then maybe find ways that we can counteract the lack of gravity so that the plants grow as well as they do on the Earth.

John: Okay. Let's go to another picture, actually. Thank you very much, Debbie.

Here's a picture of a salad machine. Actually, this is what Kennedy Space Center grows these type of leafy plants. What type of plants do they grow here at KSC?

Debbie: Well, in our studies, working towards advanced life support, we have used lettuce, radish, wheat, also potatoes. So we're doing something where we're actually growing something that's underneath on the root zone, so it's quite a variety of things because we want to be able to provide a good diet for the astronauts for a long-term flight.

John: Well, you said long-term flight. Here's a little example of what it might look like in,

say, Mars, and actually they're growing plants in those [mora] stones, is that what they're called?

Debbie: That's right.

John: Okay.

Debbie: Yeah, we're doing some experiments right now on the ground with those, to see what it takes to be able to do that, when we get to Mars.

John: Okay.

Debbie: Now, one of the other reasons that we would do these experiments are for benefits for people on Earth. Okay? We're not doing things just to go to Mars or to live on the moon.

John: Right.

Debbie: We also do a lot of experiments that it helps us develop new pharmaceutical drugs to counteract diseases for people here on Earth. For instance, the space flights - one of the things they found about astronauts is that they lose bone. They lose some of the calcium that's in your bones, which makes your bones weaker, more easy to break.

And that's the same kind of thing that happens when you have osteoporosis. So by studying astronauts or animals that go to space, we might be able to learn something about that process of removing the calcium from the bone that will help us develop a cure or at least a counter acting to the osteoporosis.

John: Okay. Let's take a break and go to the chat room real quick and answer a few questions here. [Thenny] is asking, what is the difference between growing plants in outer space than growing plants on Earth? We've covered that, but let's go over that again a little bit.

Debbie: Sure.

John: Okay.

Debbie: Let's think about if I wanted to grow a plant in space, I've got to find someway to keep the seed from floating away.

John: Right.

Debbie: Okay? And we do that a couple of different ways. One way we do that is we use floral foam. If you ever got a bunch of flowers from a florist, it has that green, squishy foam in the bottom of it that they pour the water in, and that's exactly what we use. We cut a little slit in that foam and you can plant the seed right in there, put some water and the nutrients in there and then you can grow it. You guys can do that in your classroom and do kind of the same thing that we're doing.

John: Right.

Debbie: The other way we do that. We have tubes. They're called florist tubes. And I think we've got a picture here on the wall, hopefully, and the plants can actually grow right on the tube. Put the water through the tube and the seed sits on the outside of the tube, and the roots grow around the tube. And so that's another way we can do it, and we have better control with that system over the nutrients in the water, making sure we can deliver. It's not just a foam block, but we can actually control the water flowing through the tubes. So, really, if you think about it, there's not really a difference as far as what you have to provide to that plant. You still need to provide light. You have to provide nutrients. You have to provide the right temperatures. We just do it, maybe in a little bit different way, like the lights, the fluorescent lights, or the sun. We don't have the sun in space to use.

John: Right.

Debbie: Because we only get it for a certain period every orbit, so we couldn't rely on that. So normally, we'll use fluorescent lights just like the ones we have here or in your classroom.

John: And that's sufficient enough to grow these plants?

Debbie: And that's sufficient enough to grow the plants.

John: Okay. Here's another question from Johnson. How many days will it take until the space seed grows. How long?

Debbie: Most of the time when we're flying experiments, we're looking at a plant called [Arapidopsis], and that one will grow from seed to seed. It's usually about 36 days, but what we find is that the plants on orbit in space grow a little bit slower than the ones that we grow here on Earth.

John: Okay. Let's see if there's anything here. One second. I want to answer all the plant-related question here real quick, while we're doing this. Okay. All right. I'll answer the rest of them in one moment.

Debbie: Okay.

John: Let's go back to the schedule here. Let's talk a little bit about how can we simulate reduced gravity here on Earth. What are ways to do that?

Debbie: When we fly experiments, it's expensive. It's an expensive process, and we don’t' want to wait until we get to space to find out there might be a problem with that experiment.

So, we have a couple of different ways that we can simulate microgravity. And, no, there's not a room that you can go into and flip the switch and you have no gravity. It's a little bit more difficult than that.

One of the ways is through a KC-135 aircraft that there's a picture of right behind me.

John: Yeah. I'll get you a better look at that.

Debbie: NASA at Johnson Space Center takes the KC-135 and flies what we call parabolas. It's a steep incline and you go over the top and at the top of that parabola, you get about 20 seconds of zero gravity. It's kind of like riding a roller coaster. If you've ever rode your roller coaster, you go over the top and you kind of float out of your seat. Well, it's the same kind of thing, but it's just a lot bigger hill, so we get about 20 seconds.

John: How many of these parabolas are there?

Debbie: Usually, on one flight, you'll get about 40 parabolas, and sometimes we do as many as 80 in one flight.

John: Wow.

Debbie: And it's very -

John: That's quite a ride.

Debbie: It's quite a ride. It's very provocative. A lot of people get sick because it messes up your, it gets you motion sickness, just like when you're on a boat.

John: So, it's a little more exhausting than actually being in space. I mean, going up.

Debbie: Yes, it is.

John: Okay.

Debbie: So, you know, you get the 20 seconds of zero G, but then you also get 20 seconds of 2 G, so you get a change going up and over the hill and then coming back down and going up again, so that's pretty much the exhausting part.

John: There's actually another way we do, simulate gravity here on Earth.

Debbie: Right. Yeah, there's two more.

John: Well, actually, here's the way the parabolas work. We've already had that picture.

Debbie: Yup.

John: Okay. Let's show that real quick. And actually that's 45 degrees and then.

Debbie: Yeah. You don't want to look out the window when you're doing that. It really looks like you're diving at the ground. You really don't, you know.

John: Okay. And actually, there's the experiment that was flown on the KC-135.

Debbie: On the KC-135. We're testing here. On the one side we're testing actually the porous tubes that I was talking about a few minutes ago that the plants grow right on the tubes, and on the other side is something more like the floral foam, what we call a substrate. It's the plants are planted in something like dirt or foam or something like that. So, we're comparing the two to see which one we expect.

John: Okay. Now, there we go.

Debbie: Yeah. It's a little. One of the other ways is what we call drop towers, where we have a really tall tower and you put your experiment and you drop it and you get a couple of seconds of microgravity, but it's usually 2.5. Some of them are taller and you get 5 seconds out of it. But that's a really short period of time when you're looking at living systems. So, we usually like the longer KC-135 flights to get the longer amount of microgravity.

John: Okay. Actually, now we're going to step into the main portion of our webcast. It's talking about hardware and how we use it. Okay?

Debbie: Great.

John: Actually, where is it stored as far as when we bring hardware up to, like, say on the shuttle or to International Space Station?

Debbie: Well, in the space shuttle, there's actually three decks, if you will.

There's the flight deck where the astronaut, the pilot and the commander sit, and then the second level is what we call the mid-deck.

John: Right.

Debbie: Okay? And in the mid-deck, this is actually the spot in the shuttle where they get in and out of it.

There's all these boxes and I would say that one of these boxes is about the size of a small suitcase. Okay? Like one of the carry on suitcases. It's about that size.

And I think we counted. There's probably about 50 of those in the mid-deck, and we put experiments in there, but we also have to put the food that the astronauts are going to eat, the clothes that they're going to wear, and all of the equipment to take pictures, so all the cameras, all of the. If they're going to go out in their space suits, all the equipment for that is in there. So there's only a few spots.

John: So, it's not just experiments.

Debbie: That's right. There's just a few spots for experiments, and this is a picture of the mid-deck. This is from STS-29, where one of our experiments flew.

John: All right. There is actually something that's. Now, what is this? This is a rack, correct?

Debbie: That's correct.

John: And this goes up on station?

Debbie: Right.

John: Okay.

Debbie: This is what we call the express rack. It's up there. Right now, there's experiments in it. It's in the U.S. Lab, part of the space station, so we would take those boxes that we had in the mid-deck that we brought up on the shuttle, and we'd transfer them into the space station and they would go into this express rack for the time on the space station.

John: Okay. And here's actually an experiment that's put into the rack, and.

Debbie: Yes. This is an experiment that goes into one of those little boxes. It's called advanced astroculture, and it's actually getting ready to launch at the end of this month on STS, I think it's 108. It'll go up and we're going to be growing [Arapidopsis], and this particular experiment is kind of neat because they don't use fluorescent lights to grow their plants with. They're using what we call light emitting diodes or LEDs in order to grow their plants, and that's why you see the red light in this chamber instead of fluorescent light. Because plants really only use the red part of the light, so we can use just the red part and get them to grow just as well.

John: Do they grow as well? I mean, better than a normal plant would. I mean, as far as, because they. Is there a lot of red light?

Debbie: Yes. If you had a fluorescent bulb growing plants, the plants use the red part, what we call wavelength of the light.

John: Okay.

Debbie: And so we can just grow them under the red light and they grow almost as well as they would with the fluorescent. Now, you might ask, well, what does it matter? Why can't you just use the fluorescent light.

Well, the reason is because fluorescent lights take a really lot, take a lot of power, and LED lights take a lot less power, which is something that's very hard. Because you can make all of your power when you go into space, so the less we use, the better it is all around.

John: Let's go back to the chat room real quick and answer a few questions. From Justin, what are the particular applications of these microgravity experiments?

Debbie: Most of the plant experiments that I'm working with are looking at how gravity affects the plant growth. So long term, those are really focused on going long term, going to Mars, going to the Moon and living there. So how can we grow the food? If you think about going to Mars, they can't load up a vehicle rocket or a space shuttle with enough food to get us from here to Mars. It will be too long. It's something like a year or two years to get to Mars. So, we can't take all the food with us. We've got to be able to grow it on the way there. So we have to understand how to grow the plants, what environment it takes, how can we get the most, the biggest potatoes or the largest amount of wheat so that we can make enough food to get to Mars.

John: So an answer to this before, actually we can go off to another question. How do you get the components on the ISS? I know that's with the hardware.

Debbie: Right. The things that you are going to see or you've seen in some of these pictures, we put in those boxes that I showed you go in the mid-deck. They have doors on them and our experiments fit right in there. And we close up the door, it launches on the space shuttle, and then the astronauts unbolt it and carry it over to the space station and bolt it back into the other rack, the Express rack that you saw on the space station.

John: Here's a question that's interesting from Max. Can you tell every name of every space shuttle?

Debbie: Okay, Max. I think I can do that. The first orbiter was Enterprise, and that was actually a test article that they did a drop test from the B52s that dried them. Then we had OB99, which is Challenger which is the one that we lost. Everybody remembers that one. We have Columbia and Discovery, Atlantis, and then our newest one is Endeavor. I hope I got that right.

John: Sounds good. Here's another question. How do microgravity acceleration, and altitude fluctuations affect energy storage device batteries operation?

Debbie: This is an interesting question. One of the things that we look at when we're flying experiments, we have to be very careful of safety. And batteries can pose quite a bit of issues when it comes to safety because they are a storage device for energy. So they could blow up, they could leak chemicals if you've ever left a battery and a flashlight, when you put the flashlight away for the winter or whatever, you get it back out and the batteries are all corroded because they've been leaking things.

And also when you get into space, air movement is a little bit different so things can get heat up more and sometimes you get things catching on fire because they get hotter in space than they might on the ground. So, batteries are real important.

One of the things that we take a really close look at, we do a lot of tests on them before we launch to make sure that they are not going to leak, that they're from a manufacturer that we trust, who understand their process from making batteries. And operationally, we have to provide a special circuits to keep them from charging themselves, things like that. So, batteries are actually something that we take a really hard look at whenever we fly.

John: Okay. Now, let's go back to our schedule here, one second. Let's take a look at some of these smaller type pieces of hardware.

Debbie: That'd be great.

John: Let's pull this up real quick.

Debbie: This is a BRIC canister and people always laugh but we had to come up with a nickname for all the things that we fly. This one is called a BRIC and that stands for Biological Research and a canister. So this is basically just a container. You could do something like this in your classroom with say, like an oatmeal container that you get at the grocery store that has oatmeal in it.

It's just a container that we can put either petri dishes in, or you can grow seeds rolled up in say, like brown paper that has been watered so it's dark. So, these experiments that we do in here are done in the dark, there's no light. And this particular piece of hardware can go into our freezer that we're going to talk about in a few minutes. So that's important because we need to be able to preserve these specimens.

John: Now, this is the smallest one we have now?

Debbie: That's right.

John: So, how many experiments can actually fit to this?

Debbie: Usually we'll use four of these in one experiment. And inside these you can get about 10, what we call petri dishes, they're 16 millimeters in diameter. So they're smaller petri dishes than most people use. Most people use a larger, a 100 millimeter petri dish.

John: Okay, let's go to the larger one here.

Debbie: So, then we had a scientist who said, "Well, I want to fly the bigger petri dishes," so we developed a new BRIC, and this one is called the BRIC 100 because it holds 100 millimeter petri dishes. And we've flown plants, we've flown tobacco hornworms in this hardware. Again, it can be, it's sealed so it's in the dark. There is a little bit of air exchange in the cabin with this one. But it's basically meant to do the same kind of things, whatever you can do in a petri dish, you can do in this hardware.

John: Okay.

Debbie: This is a picture, John, of our third set of BRIC hardware. This one is a little bit unique because it involves providing a light to let in the petri dish, so that's why it's called the LED, BRIC LED because we have a light emitting diode as part of this hardware. So on the one side here you see a petri dish sitting in the hardware and once it's all assembled, the light shines into the petri dish while the specimen is growing, and then at a certain point, the astronauts can come and preserve this element with a chemical that's already loaded into the hardware.

John: So the chemical is not out in the environment running around?

Debbie: That's right. We're protecting the astronauts from that chemical. When we fly nasty chemicals in space we have to provide what we call 3 levels of containment. So, it's basically a box, in a box, in a box. So that there's three chances for things to leak before it ever gets out and could interact with the crew.

John: Okay, let's go to the next one here. This is actually the whole case. There's many of these little containers inside this case.

Debbie: Right. And this is basically a complete experiment what you're looking at here. And this, what we're getting ready to slide it into in this picture is the little box. The locker that goes in the mid-deck. So you can see it's not really very big, we don't have a lot of space to work with.

John: All right. So, let's talk about preserving. What exactly is this container here that this gentleman is working on?

Debbie: Sure. Let me explain first. When we fly an experiment in space, we grow the plant or the bacteria or whatever it is. And if I were to just bring that back to Earth on the space shuttle without doing anything else to it, as soon as it lands, it's going to start registering the fact that it's back in gravity. There's gravity again, and it's going to start changing. If I took a plant right now and I set it on this table, I turned it on its side, it's going to start to grow back up. It's going to curve. And so I'm going to preserve it.

We have two ways of doing that. We do it with a chemical or we do it with the freezer. And in this picture, we're training Dan Bursch for the next mission to use what we call our gaseous nitrogen freezer. And like I said, this is going to fly starting the end of this month.

John: Okay. Actually we have a very short film clip of what we're talking about. Let's go to back and it's actually a video clip of the freezer. Here you go.

Debbie: So, this is STS95 and our freezer is on orbit in one of those boxes in the mid-deck and he's opening it right now, getting ready to get some samples ready to put inside it. And you notice he's wearing gloves because it's really cold.

John: I noticed he put the top of the container on the mid-deck. Is that done by Velcro or is it that way it's done?

Debbie: That's right. If he just let go of it, it would float around so it's got Velcro on it so you can stick it on the door of one of the adjacent blockers. Now, you can see, it looks smoke coming out of that freezer. But it's the gaseous nitrogen, and it's nitrogen just like what's in the air so it's not toxic to the astronaut. It's just part of the air that he's already breathing so that's okay.

We're getting a close up now. He's handling one of the little canisters that we put the samples in and he pulled it out and take a look at it, and now he's putting it back in the freezer.

I was very interested to see this video for the first time to see exactly how they handle, how they work with the freezer once they get on orbit.

John: And you trained them actually to pull those petri dishes out of the freezer, correct?

Debbie: Yes, yes.

John: So it looks like he's really searching around in there.

Debbie: Well, the ladles, the little scoops that he's pulling out, they're a little bit difficult to work with in microgravity because they float around in there. When they're on the ground, they don't float around inside there, but when you get in space, they float around inside, and so it's a little bit more difficult to pull them out than it is on the ground.

And this is one of the things that we learned by watching this video. We didn't really understand how it worked in space until we actually saw this video. This is one of the fun things about what we get to do. In our freezer, we launched ice cream for the astronauts to eat so they have to eat our ice cream so they can put our samples in there after they're done eating the ice cream.

John: Okay, and we come back actually from that. That was a very interesting video clip. Thank you for bringing it in. It really added to the Webcast. Now, they actually do eat the ice cream, right?

Debbie: Oh, definitely.

John: They have to wait a little bit.

Debbie: That's right, the freezer is really cold. It's got liquid nitrogen that's changing into a gas so it's very cold. It's 196 degrees Celsius, minus 196 degrees Celsius inside that freezer. So you can't just take that ice cream out and start chomping on it. You've got to let it sit for a little while and warm up.

John: Actually, you've brought another experiment with you. Let's show the viewers what exactly this is. And actually I've got a picture of it real quick and we'll pull that up. We can talk about it.

Debbie: As I mentioned before, if we deal with hazardous chemicals, we have to provide a way for the astronauts to be able to do that, work with that and be safe. And we need to be able to preserve a sample. And to do that, we have to use a chemical that's kind of nasty and you wouldn't want it getting in your eye or on your hands.

This piece of hardware is called the Kennedy Space Center Fixation tube. And what's intended to do is allow the astronaut to harvest plants and put them in this tube and then preserve them and bring it home so that we can actually look at the plant and see exactly what it looked like in microgravity.

And so that it's not returned to the ground and gravity starts changing it before we get to look at it.

So, I brought with me some, these are actually hibiscus leaves. I wanted something big so everybody could see it. So the astronaut would harvest the plant and he would fold it up or roll it up and place it inside the tube. He can do this with their fingers, sometimes they use forceps, little tweezers, if it's a little bit smaller. And right now, at this point, the chemical would be down here in the bottom and I have water in this one. But we have 3 "O" rings and you can't really see them too well, but there's three on this side of the water and three on the other side of the water. So, we're providing three levels of containment on that chemical right now. So, this is safe for the crew.

So he would come by and this is the little lid that goes on here and put the lid on. And once he puts the lid on, there's three now seals on this side. So you've got three seals on either side of where the plant is at this point. So now this is as easy, all I have to do is turn the handle and I have to release these three seals

and then I'll be able to press the plant right then into the fixative, into the chemical and preserve it. I’m going to show you how that works.

John: Sure.

Debbie: Okay. So, it's just turning it. It might take eight to ten turns. And the really neat thing about this is that the astronaut can do this right in the crew compartment. We don't need any other special hardware in order to do this, which is really kind of exciting because it takes a lot less power and space and things like that than in some of the other ways.

John: You've trained these astronauts on this piece of hardware, too?

Debbie: Yes. So, now the seals right here are now broken. They've released the "O" rings and so now I have to do is push. And I'm basically pushing the plant now down into that chemical.

John: So now it's preserved?

Debbie: Now it's preserved and you can put this back in the little box and it can sit there until they're ready to come home.

John: Very good. So that will protect, once you get back into gravity, the gravity will not affect the plant?

Debbie: That's right. Basically, everything is just totally frozen now just like it was in microgravity. And it'll stay that way and then when I get it back, I can take a look at it.

John: Very good. Let's step to the chat room at this time.

Debbie: Sure. Hope we've got some more good questions.

John: Let's see what we've got here. From Alexandria, why do the seeds need a fluorescent lamp?

Debbie: Well, you can grow seeds two ways. You can grow them in the dark, and you can grow them with light. And it depends on if you want to study what we call photosynthesis. Now, photosynthesis, a plant, that’s how it makes its own food. And to do that it needs light. So you can grow them in the dark but you usually like to provide the sugars that the plant needs in whatever you water them with.

So if I want them to photosynthesize, which is use the light in the carbon dioxide and make water and oxygen which is what the plants here on Earth do, and I have to provide light in order for them to do that.

John: A question from Jeff. Do they still have programs for high schoolers to get an opportunity to ride in the KC135?

Debbie: Jeff, I'm not sure about high school students. I know that there are college level programs that allow you to do that. And I don't have that Web site here but I know that there's a Web site for college students where they can propose experiments, and it's a competition, and they can get so much than actually fly on the KC135.

Now there are a variety of programs out there where you can do similar experiments, too. Let's say these kids are working on a KC135. So while you may not be flying with them, you could do the same experiment that they're doing in your classroom.

John: So, eventually if you persist in this, you would be able to?

Debbie: Sure, definitely.

John: From [inaudible name]. How is it decided where something is best tested in a KC135 drop tube, etc?

Debbie: It really depends on the amount of time that you need of the microgravity. Because let's say the drop powers, they're very short, a couple of seconds. You're here from two to five seconds of microgravity. So we do a lot of things like combustion, experiments where you light up fire and you see how it burns. Those kinds of things you can see and get the data very quickly.

For a lot of things, you need a little bit longer time like the 20 seconds that you might get on the KC135.

There's also something that we call a clinostat that we didn't talk about before. And that's a way we can do a little bit of longer-term study. It's not exactly microgravity but the plant thinks that it's microgravity. It basically is spinning the plant. And we spin it very slowly so that the plant senses gravity all the way around and, therefore, it thinks gravity is the same. It doesn't see it in one direction. And we use that for a longer-term study. And there are similar effects of microgravity.

John: They could actually build a clonistat?

Debbie: Sure, they could. It'd be very easy. You just have to take whatever you were looking at, you have to spin it continuously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for as long as you wanted to do your experiment. And it would simulate some of the effects of microgravity.

John: Actually on our Web site, there's a link for a page that will take you to how to build a clinostat.

Debbie: Oh, great.

John: So, it's all there for you.

Debbie: It's a good science experiment.

John: Yes, it is. Okay, from Janice: What kind of things are drop tested in the tube or tower? What kind of information is learned from this?

Debbie: One of the experiments that I'm familiar with is understanding how fire behaves in space because you can ignite the fire and the flame can start and you can watch that happen. You can video it as it's dropping in the tower. So those are the kind of things that happen very quickly, changes that you want to see very quickly are kinds of things that you would do in a drop tower. Other than that, I'm not real familiar so I apologize for not having more examples.

John: Okay, from Shelly. What is the fixative used in the K at T? What's the tube made of?

Debbie: We fly a couple of different things. On the next flight, we're going to use a chemical that's called RNA [later]. It's actually a nearly saturated salt solution. And that's going to preserve the plant for looking at the DNA that's inside and the RNA that's inside the nucleus of the cell. We also use [gluteraldihide] which will preserve everything and allow us to look at the cells like the pictures that we saw earlier today. So those are the two main chemicals that we're using in there.

John: Let me refresh here one second. Question from Bridgette, what's the most difficult thing had ever had to prepare to fly in space?

Debbie: Bridgette, I think the experiments that we worked on that I would say was the most challenging for us so far, was an experiment with the Ukraine. It involved five different experiments that we're all flying together as a single, what we call payload. And the reason that it was so challenging is because most of the hardware for those experiments was brand new hardware. It was plant growth facilities, it was this work LED hardware that I've shown you here. But it was also, we were working with folks from Ukraine and so there was a language, you had to have a translator to speak with them, to understand their requirements. To be able to even do their experiments, you had to understand [talkover]

John: The way they do things, too.

Debbie: That's right. And we went to visit in the Ukraine, and light bulbs were a commodity that were very hard to come by. But it's a whole different culture than we're used to here so, it was challenging from a variety of aspects but actually one of our probably most successful experiment also.

John: What are the different kinds of things have you had to prepare to go into space that came along?

Debbie: Lots of different stuff came along. Probably one of the most interesting things was slime mold that flew on STS69, and we also flew chicken eggs. That was my very first experiment that I worked on, sponsored by Kentucky Fried Chicken, and it was a student experiment that was proposed by actually a student when he was in high school. And it flew, it was actually on Challenger, and then he got to re-fly it once we returned to flight. So it was really a neat opportunity for him, and that was one of the, I guess, most interesting ones also. Let's see, we've done a lot of plants. We've done fish, snails, bacteria, moss, ferns, all different kinds of stuff.

John: Back to the clinostat question. Brian wants to know what exactly is [talkover].

Debbie: Sure. Let's say that this was one of those canisters that we saw in the picture earlier. You know, a BRIC canister.

And I had my petri dishes stacked up in the canister. What I'm going to do is I'm going to turn it like this and I'm going to put a motor and put it on a stand so that it turns it continuously in one direction. It's just going to keep turning it. So what happens is as my specimen in the petri dish is growing, gravity is in this direction, as I'm turning it, each area of the plant is seeing gravity.

John: So, it's fooling it.

Debbie: It's fooling it. That's right. And it's changing at just the right speed that the plant doesn't sense it changing. And it's a kind of a difficult concept to understand. It has a little bit of some engineering statics and dynamics. But basically what happens is it fools the plant into thinking that there's no gravity, by turning it around in the gravity field.

John: A question from Jackie. She would like to know how do we preserve human samples of blood, say, for like medical?

Debbie: Right. They do a lot of that, Jackie. They do blood samples. Sometimes they take saliva samples, they sample in their mouth. All different kinds of things. And normally those are frozen in something like our freezer that we talked about. Sometimes we have a freezer more like the one you have at home that we can put the samples in. It just depends on what happens to be available on that flight.

John: From Brian, do the BRICs allow plenty of oxygen to circulate within the hardware?

Debbie: That's a good question, Brian. Yes and no. The BRIC 60, the black one that you saw, it has vent holes in it that allows some air exchange. When you get to space, air doesn't circulate the way it does here on Earth. Usually, air on the ground rises and falls because of temperature. And in space, when something is warmer, it doesn't rise because there's no gravity. So you don't get that mixing of air like you might on the ground. So, in space, unless we are providing a fan that kind of circulates the air, the air doesn't move around like it does here on Earth. It's just very stagnant, it stays in one place.

So with those experiments, we're usually working with something that's in a petri dish that doesn't require any more oxygen than is available in that dish.

John: And then you preserve it right away anyway so it doesn't have a chance to get sicker?

Debbie: Right. But we've had experiments where we’ve put something in one of those canisters and that it needed more oxygen than was available in the canister, so we had to come up with a way to vent the canister and add oxygen. Sometimes it's as easy as just taking the lid off, letting it sit for a few minutes, and then putting the lid back on. So, we've had to come up with different ways to do that.

John: Here's another question. How does it feel to experiment with any projects?

Debbie: It's challenging, especially if they're all going on at the same time. We do a lot of what we call project management, and that's keeping track of all the little tasks and making sure that we're not forgetting anything and that keeping things on a schedule. And you'll get there one day when you have to worry about more than just being a student.

John: I have a question from Scott. What was the neatest experiment you had to prepare for a space flight? Would it be your first one?

Debbie: Well, I think my first one always will have a special place because it was a really neat experience, having been a re-flight of something that was on Challenger to begin with, to be a totally new experience and introduction into how to fly something on the space shuttle. And plus it was a student experiment so here was somebody who proposes, it's a high school student and who was finally getting to finish it so that was really, really neat. And I really start to think about all of these things that gravity plays a role in. And things that you take for granted everyday, I think that was really neat.

John: From Emily, what is the purpose the plants growing go into the international space station?

Debbie: Emily, a long duration is really the big thing, the benefit, if you will, for the International Space Station. Right now on shuttle, we can grow plants for up to 16 days. And as I mentioned before, a plant growing it from seed to seed takes longer than 16 days. So in order to be able to grow plant from a seed and then have it make seed, we have to be able to do that on a space station where we can stay up there for longer than 16 days. We need to be able to stay for 36 days or longer, depending on the flight.

And that's important because if you want to go to Mars, you need to be able to take a certain number of seeds, grow them, and then gather more seeds and keep going.

John: Actually to close the chat room portion of the Webcast, I'd like to answer one more. From Stephanie, have you always been interested in space? The science in space?

Debbie: Well, space is something that I really got introduced to. I remember when I was younger, I saw the ninth Apollo launch. And I still remember that to this day. And then when I was about 6th grade, I remember making a space station model. And having to think about, okay, they need a place to sleep and a place to eat and how to place to do experiments. So that always kept my interest there. And I think having had that more to experience and the Apollo program watching the space shuttle come on line and seeing the first launch, I always kind of kept track of those things and what was going on. And come to find out, my dad actually worked out there years before me, and so maybe it's in the family now. Let's see what my kids do.

John: Before we close up here, she actually brought a freezer unit with her. And it was exceptionally heavy. Could you show it to the people?

Debbie: Sure, I'd be happy to. This is the freezer that you saw in the video. It's not cold on the outside, you might be wondering, I can touch it on the outside because it's insulated. But whenever we do open it, we have to wear gloves. So I'm going to put those on because I don't want to freeze my fingers. And it has a little lid on it that keeps the cold in. I don't know if you can see, it's smoking a little bit but not nearly as much as that one we saw in space, mainly because gravity is pulling all that gas back into the freezer. It's not coming out.

We have what we call little ladles where our samples go into. And this is one, oh, this one doesn't have samples in it. This one's got ice cream in it, John.

John: How long do we have to wait before we can sample that?

Debbie: Oh, we should probably wait a couple of minutes before we try eating that. We don't want our tongues to stick to it. But you can see it's very cold. You can see, it's not steam, it's the liquid nitrogen coming off the bottom of it. Here on Earth, it falls to the ground because it's heavier than the air. But in space, as you show on the video, it kind of came out and floated around because there's no gravity in space. We're listening to it crackle as it's warming up sitting here. So, I'm just going to set that there as it warms up a little bit and have some samples of that.

John: Okay. I'd like to thank Debbie here for coming by and taking time out of her busy schedule. Thank you very much.

Debbie: No problem. I really enjoyed it.

John: You're welcome. I'd also like to thank NASA Quest fundamental biology and Kennedy Space Center as well. But most importantly, I'd like to thank our viewers for participating in today's Web cast. Once again, my name is John Rau. Have a good day.