NASA ISS Crew: Living and Working in Orbit

Commander Dan Burbank (right) and Flight Engineer Anton Shkaplerov work in the Destiny laboratory of the International Space Station. Credit: NASA TV

The International Space Station’s Expedition 30 crew – Commander Dan Burbank and Flight Engineers Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin – performed science experiments and participated in an emergency drill Tuesday.

Burbank, a NASA astronaut, began his workday almost immediately after the crew’s regular 1 a.m. EST wakeup time as he conducted the Reaction Self Test.

This 5-minute test helps crew members objectively identify any impacts to their performance caused by sleep loss, fatigue and disruptions to circadian rhythms.

Following the crew’s daily planning conference with flight control centers around the world, Burbank spent his morning setting up equipment for the Integrated Cardiovascular experiment and participating as its test subject.

Investigators use the data from these tests to measure the atrophy of the heart muscle that appears to develop during long-duration spaceflight and to develop countermeasures to mitigate those effects.

Experiments like this one are crucial to understanding and maintaining crew health as NASA moves towards space exploration beyond low-Earth orbit.

Meanwhile, Shkaplerov participated in a Russian cardiovascular study known as Pneumocard and later performed routine maintenance on the life-support system in the Russian segment of the orbiting complex.

His fellow cosmonaut, Ivanishin, conducted preventative maintenance on the ventilation system of the Zvezda service module.

After a break for lunch, all three Expedition 30 crew members teamed up for an emergency egress drill to remain familiar with the location of emergency equipment and hatches as well as the evacuation route.

In cooperation with the mission control centers around the world, the crew worked through the response procedures as if there were an actual emergency requiring a rapid departure and tagged up with flight controllers afterward to review the results.

ESA Rotunda centrifuge opens door to high-gravity worlds

ESA Large Diameter Ceentrifuge facility at ESTEC. Credits: ESA.

Astronauts' jobs sometimes weigh heavy on them: crews returning from space briefly endure 'g-loading' more than four times Earth normal. Scientists interested in hypergravity need to create it for minutes, days or even weeks at a time.

Fortunately, ESA's Large Diameter Centrifuge does just that.

Based at ESA's ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, the centrifuge is designed not for astronaut training but for research.

Jointly financed by ESA and the Dutch government, the centrifuge is available for a variety of applications.

"People propose all kinds of experiments - we assess them for scientific relevance, feasibility and safety," explained ESA's Jutta Krause.

"We perform physical, biological, geological and even astrogeological tests - one team investigated how crater impacts vary under higher gravity.

"In addition, the centrifuge is open for industrial users to test and qualify hardware."

"Last week, we hosted student teams from the latest round of 'Spin your Thesis', organised through ESA's Education Office."

The 8 m-diameter centrifuge can create up to 20 g, with four gondolas holding up to 80 kg of experiments.

Two more gondolas can be attached half way along the arm to provide different g-levels at the same time.

"Experiments can be spun for up to six months at a time non-stop, at changing g-profiles if needed," Jutta added. "After that, we have to stop for routine maintenance."

Video: A scientist makes cheap, effective medical devices from toys

As you may remember, I interviewed Jose Gomez-Marquez for this blog in October of last year.

He’s certainly one of the more creative scientists I’ve come across.

In some ways, Gomez-Marquez is like the MacGyver of medical inventions.

Gomez-Marquez is program director for MIT’s Innovations in International Health, an initiative that shows medical professionals in the developing world that they can use ordinary household items to make their own medical devices.

Playing with toys allows Gomez-Marquez to think outside the box and dream up new solutions to new vaccines and other medical technologies.

The Boston-based MIT scientist was in the Bay Area, so I asked him to come in for an interview at CNET’s headquarters (which is also home to SmartPlanet).

During the interview, Gomez-Marquez shows off several products, including a nebulizer powered by a bike pump, printable diagnostics and lab-on-chip devices made in the mold of Lego bricks.

Check out a more detailed blog post on CNET.

Cassini and Amateur Astronomers Chase massive Storm On Saturn

With the help of amateur astronomers, the composite infrared spectrometer instrument aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft has taken its first look at a massive blizzard in Saturn's atmosphere. The instrument collected the most detailed data to date of temperatures and gas distribution in that planet's storms.

The data showed a large, turbulent storm, dredging up loads of material from the deep atmosphere and covering an area at least five times larger than the biggest blizzard in this year's Washington, D.C.-area storm front nicknamed "Snowmageddon."

"We were so excited to get a heads-up from the amateurs," said Gordon Bjoraker, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Normally, he said, "Data from the storm cell would have been averaged out."

Cassini's radio and plasma wave instrument and imaging cameras have been tracking thunder and lightning storms on Saturn for years in a band around Saturn's mid-latitudes nicknamed "storm alley." But storms can come and go on a time scale of weeks, while Cassini's imaging and spectrometer observations have to be locked in place months in advance.

The radio and plasma wave instrument regularly picks up electrostatic discharges associated with the storms, so team members have been sending periodic tips to amateur astronomers, who can quickly go to their backyard telescopes and try to see the bright convective storm clouds.

Amateur astronomers including Anthony Wesley, Trevor Barry and Christopher Go got one of those notices in February and were able to take dozens of pictures over the next several weeks.

In late March, Wesley, an amateur astronomer from Australia who was actually the first person to detect the new dark spot caused by an impact on Jupiter last summer, sent Cassini scientists an e-mail with a picture of the storm.

"I wanted to be sure that images like these were being seen by the Cassini team just in case this was something of interest to be imaged directly by Cassini or the Hubble Space Telescope," Wesley wrote.

Goddard's LVIS (Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor) instrumentation

Goddard's LVIS (Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor) instrumentation ready to load into the DC-8 at Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility.