Student Experiments on the Space Station

good morning welcome to the space station flight control room i'm brandi dean with nasa public affairs office and i'm joined today by lisborne who is with the space station program science office and uh we are going to be joined remotely by students from fayette academy in somerville tennessee and i believe they have some questions for us can you all hear us okay all right well tell us a little bit about you and then we'll get started on your questions good morning i'm the principal research inv

estigator for the student spaceflight experiments research project that was selected to go to the international space station in october our research project focuses on the reishi mushroom's effect on chronic myeloid leukemia's biological model e coli and microgravity my question is what type of research has been done in recent years on the international space station that will help to make it possible to keep people in space for prolonged periods of time with minimal negative effects on the spa

ce travelers well first of all i want to say hello and greetings uh brandon and i had a communication with butch wilmore who's going to be on orbit when your experiment gets there and he wasn't able to be here today he's actually on his way to russia but he did say that he's going to take real good care of your experiment so that's pretty cool i also think it's fantastic that you guys are participating in this space in the ssep program it's it's fantastic to see young people be interested in sci

ence and then propose an experiment and i'll tell you what if i was your age and i was able to have an experiment on the space station i would just i would be over the moon so i'm i'm proud of you guys thanks very much for participating and i hope you get excellent results now to answer your question so we've actually done a tremendous amount of work studying what happens to the human body in space and some of those changes that happen to the human body they're not very good for us so we try and

mitigate those changes and some of those changes include some of them you may have heard of astronauts tend to lose bone or bone density while they're in space the lack of the loading of gravity is removed so microgravity is what we say the astronauts are living in in space and microgravity causes your bones to get weaker it's also true for your cardiovascular system and your muscles and even the immune system gets weaker so living in space isn't all that great for the human body fortunately we

've learned a lot over the 50 some odd years that we've been doing space flight and we've learned to mitigate a lot of those changes so astronauts exercise a lot on orbit we allot them about two hours a day to to work out and that includes a little bit of time for hygiene and getting changed but that exercise helps them maintain bone strength and cardiovascular fitness and muscle strength and has some other beneficial effects for just improving their mood and it's kind of a stress relief as well

so that's that's kind of a high level overview of of what we do to keep our astronauts safe while they're in space next question hi um i wanted to know if you've ever performed any uh research on metabolism if they had any effect with the anti-gravity and if you have what kind of research experiments have you done well when i was a university student and then in grad school i was really interested in metabolism and metabolism is sort of how your body controls how much energy it takes in through

the form of calories so eating food how much energy you expend so daily metabolic rate and exercise and how those things balance out to maintain our body mass and i was interested if going to a different gravity level would affect metabolism different gravity all the way from maybe more gravity than is on earth to less gravity than is on earth and so i actually was able to perform some experiments here on earth using a centrifuge to expose my subjects to more than one gravity actually two times

earth gravity and i found that not surprisingly that caused more energy expenditure so there was a little more uh intake requirement the more energy you expend the more food you have to eat to maintain normal energy balance and the reverse was true in space sort of it wasn't exactly what i wanted was hoping to find so my hypothesis was not exactly supported but that's kind of one of the cool things about science you ask a question you form a hypothesis what you think the answer is going to be t

hen you perform the experiment and sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong but either way you have learned something and so i had that experience and that opportunity when i got to college and part of my um part of my experiment was done on a space shuttle mission it was sts-90 it was a neurolab mission it was called neurolab mission and so that was a great opportunity for me you guys are getting to do the same thing now when you're in high school so you guys are you guys are well ahea

d of the game sounds like you're the perfect person to answer that question too good job so uh next question hi arch school was mentored by dr rafael collins underwood a researcher from saint jude children's research hospital during our student space flight experience program my research team designed a project that focused on what effect would microgravity have on the growth rate of chronic model of leukemia we were one of our school's finalists but our experiment will not be going to the inter

national space station do you know that there has been research on the iss that focuses on the effect of microgravity on the growth rate of lithium cells so first of all let me say you know the fact that your exact experiment isn't going to make it to the space station don't let that discourage you the whole fact that you came up with an idea and proposed it to nasa is something to be very proud of it certainly doesn't preclude you from being involved in the future and i hope that you'll conside

r to do that research and science is something that is so much fun and i'm again i'm proud of you all of you for being involved and asking a question please don't ever lose that curiosity it it keeps it keeps us all keeps us all going keeps me going as a scientist so to answer your question about leukemia cells in space i think a lot of examples have been flown a lot of cells have been flown in microgravity in space including leukemia cells and you asked specifically about growth rate from the l

iterature that i'm aware of i think we've actually seen that growth rate of some leukemia cells is arrested or stopped in microgravity that doesn't mean it's always going to be true or it's going to be true for all cell lines so we still have a lot to learn but from what i'm familiar with we have seen microgravity affect multiple aspects of cell life growth cytoskeletal activity meiosis or separation and division of cells so we've seen a lot of changes but we still have a lot to learn so so i sa

ve that experiment and propose it another time that's fascinating y'all are asking great questions i think we're ready for the next one hi my name is bowman i want to know would the lack of gravity change the development of a chicken egg so that's a fascinating question and it's been proposed and it's actually been flown on a several space flight experiments chicken eggs quail eggs and different kinds of bird eggs and i think that our findings have been a little bit inconclusive but for the most

part we have actually seen that chicken eggs are able to develop when you launch them to space and incubate them and there's actually been some hatching of bird eggs on the mere space station which was the precursor to the international space station so we've had some success it hasn't been a perfect system the reason we ask questions like this and i assume this is why you're asking the question as well is it's un it's understanding is there a role of gravity in the development of an embryo and

i think the jury is still out on on for sure knowing if gravity is important or not there's two schools of thoughts one of course is that gravity is um required and for you know early in gestation for development of like the neural tube of the organism but we've seen success without it so i think the jury's still out we've seen some success but it hasn't been perfect i think we still have a little bit to uh to understand maybe some more experiments to do okay next question um i was wondering wh

at effect does micro gravity have on the human body well a little bit earlier i talked about um some of those effects and i'll go ahead and repeat them again because it's really what's very very interesting to me i am a physiologist and i'm interested in how the human body works which is fascinating itself but when you take the human body and you put it in an extreme environment like space or under the ocean those environmental changes cause a lot of cause a lot of problems for the human body in

some cases but we are extremely adaptable it's one of the wonderful things about the human body we can live in a number of extreme environments and it's really fun to study what happens so when you go into space microgravity is one of the one of the largest environmental changes there's no gravity or no measurable gravity on the human body there's also radiation so the environment is pretty different than what we experience here on earth and the changes that the human body undergoes includes li

ke i mentioned before some bone loss some muscle atrophy loss of muscle some cardiovascular deconditioning that's your heart and your lungs and your cardiovascular system getting weaker some immune system changes even some neurovestibular changes without normal gravity your inner ear gets a little bit confused usually that resolves itself pretty quickly but so there's a number of changes that the human body has to accommodate and adapt to but again because we're such an adaptable species within

a couple days people get very used to living in space when they come back to earth they have to re-adapt to gravity as well but if if they've been exercising and eating right and and taking care of themselves that adaptation back to earth gravity isn't so bad and like i said we really want our astronauts to be healthy when they get back to earth or when we get to whatever terrestrial environment we're going to when we go to the moon or an asteroid or mars again we want our we want our astronauts

to be healthy when they get to where they're going and so it's very important that they exercise eat right and take care of their bodies same thing for you and i eating and getting enough exercise is important for our our bodies as well it sounds like we're really starting to get a good handle on that right yeah i think you know we're really starting to get a good handle on it we're still learning a lot however um you may be aware that next march we are going to be launching two people that are

going to live on the space station for an entire year a one year mission most of our experience is about six months the the people that are in space right now they're going to stay there for about six months on the international space station we've had a lot of experience many people have stayed on the international space station for six months we're going to learn some more when we go to one year it's twice as long so there's we're pretty excited to to do this and undertake this mission and le

arn about the changes in the human body that occur over a year and we we hope to learn a lot we also hope to find out that what we're doing for six months works for a year as well okay i think we're ready for the next question do you believe that there are planets similar to our past our galaxy and if so do you feel like there's intelligent on so nasa has a spacecraft it's a telescope called the kepler space telescope and its entire job is to search for planets that are maybe like earth outside

of our galaxy and i think many have been found well over a thousand probably closer to 1500 planets that are somewhat similar to earth in habitable zones near stars but do i believe intelligent life exists out there ah not really but i do believe that certainly even maybe in our solar our own solar system like on mars at some point may have supported some bacterial life or some kind of little cyanobacteria the conditions for life have to be pretty precise you have to as we know it you have to ha

ve some kind of water you have to have something for for the life to to consume and life has to produce waste and when you find water and you find moderate temperatures and you find minerals and resources i think there's a good chance that some type of life bacterial life could have existed or will exist and so i think i think it's only a matter of time before we find some other place in the universe where potentially life could be next question uh what type of training is required to be an astr

onaut and how long does it usually take brandy do you want to take that yeah i can take that one um so there's there's several different kind of layers i guess to that question uh first of all to even become an astronaut you have to have some experience in working in some um degrees and in math or science fields and really be pretty good at what you're already doing but then once you are selected to be an astronaut you've got a little ways to go from there you've got the initial training that al

l the astronauts go through that takes a couple of years um just getting them kind of caught up and up to speed on on what astronauts do and all the different kind of activities they might be called on and then once you actually get assigned to a mission you've got some more training to do so um you have to you have to learn a lot to be an astronaut it's not an easy job um but i think they would mostly probably all tell you that it's definitely worth the time that it takes they seem to have a lo

t of fun up in space so and there there are pilots who have become astronauts they're medical doctors who've become astronauts engineers um and lots of different types of scientists geologists and uh alex gerst an east astronaut in his face right now he's a volcanologist he's interested in volcanoes and so all kinds of different um backgrounds can be fields that contribute to the space program and being selected as an astronaut one of the things i've heard a lot of them say is pick a field that

you really enjoy because if you enjoy what you're doing you'll be really good at it and being really good at all kind of raise you to the top of of your your class and and help you stand out when it comes time to actually apply to be an astronaut hope that answers your question uh next one hi i was wondering why time on earth was different from time and space okay that's a pretty complex question and i'm probably not the best person to answer it but i'll give it a shot um so the einstein uh in h

is theory of relative relativity stated that um gravity affects time and when you're close to a gravitational field time uh slows down a little bit so the further you are away from a gravitational field the faster time goes so we've actually measured this in spacecraft just in low earth orbit and so just a little bit away from earth there's just slightly less gravity and that actually affects time and so that somewhat answers your question and i know it's not perfect because i certainly don't ha

ve the best explanation but i will tell you that an astronaut living in space for six months will actually age .007 seconds less than us here on earth and so i'll point out that one of the astronauts that is going to be living in space for one year on that one year mission he has a twin brother so scott kelly is the astronaut who will be living in space for a year he has a twin brother who's gonna stay here on earth his name is mark kelly and so they're twins so there's a slight age difference b

etween them anyways just probably minutes i don't know exactly but when scott gets home he's going to be you know just a little bit younger than mark will have been all right next question we here on the news that mars and earth have similar environments even though there is no proof of life existing on mars today is there a possibility that humans might when they live there oh i sure hope so we're going to live on mars one day i think we're going to have a colony and there's people that are goi

ng to be staying there and living there it's a little ways off though because it's very challenging to do we're going to need to bring with us some pretty technologically advanced life support equipment we have some very technologically advanced life support equipment on the space station right now you can't live in space without bringing air and water in an environment and pressure and radiation protection you're going to need all of those things on mars too so mars is somewhat similar to earth

and size and and the amount of sunlight it gets but there's more radiation more uv radiation it's really cold there the the atmosphere is very thin um and it's a lot of carbon dioxide we have mostly nitrogen in our atmosphere and they have mostly carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide is not really the most beneficial things for human to humans to breathe in high quantities so when we live on mars we're going to have to bring a lot of our own equipment um but that's part of the fun right it's part o

f the fun of exploration and and learning so yeah i think we're definitely gonna live on mars one day but we're just gonna have to bring a lot of uh a lot of comforts of home with us and you know we're we're building right now the spaceship that will take us there orion and it's getting ready um to go on its first test flight it won't go to mars the first time or even the second or third time um but we're gonna we're gonna send it 3 600 miles into space to test out a lot of its systems that we r

eally want to make sure work before we put people on it and that test flight's coming up in december so we've just about got the spacecraft finished it's being built in florida at kennedy space center and it's supposed to launch on december 4th and we're also working on the rocket that would let us go to mars as well so that'll be launching in 2017-2018 next question hello and good morning my question for y'all is uh what changes do you see coming to research aboard the in-n-out space internatio

nal space station so right now we've had about fifteen hundred and fifty different uh research investigations on the space station and uh come october we'll be counting you know your school as having one of those investigations so that's a lot and there's a lot coming and some of the changes that we see coming are we always have new facilities going to the space station that allow for new capabilities in fact one of those new capabilities is going to get there this fall where we're going to brin

g a 3d printer to the space station and that um we're actually doing research with it because we're not absolutely absolutely positive that it's going to work so we're going to bring it to the space station to test it out and once it's there um we're going to be able to perhaps build spare parts i know that that butch wilmore is pretty excited to get that 3d printer up there because he's a very handy guy he likes to build stuff and i think he's pretty excited to have that up there that's one exa

mple of a capability we also have a new habitat for fruit flies and we're going to be able to do a lot of genetics type of genomics experiments on them so we always have new equipment going to the space station new capabilities and new areas of research that we're looking forward to performing and that's that's just a quick highlight but if you go to our website which is www.nasa.gov iss hyphen science you can see there's we put out a lot of information there about the new facilities that are go

ing to the space station the facilities that already exist there you know we have a centrifuge for spinning fluids down bodily fluids and otherwise we have some freezers really deep freezers minus 80 degrees celsius for storing samples we've got a combustion furnace for for doing combustion research we've got a fluids research rack for doing fluids research so we've got all types of equipment that is open for all kinds of scientists all over the world to propose their science and sometimes they

have to have their own specialized equipment we have a lot of equipment mounted outside the space station as well so it's just more and more there's room for more science on the space station and that's something that we're interested in attracting and i'm glad that we're starting with students like yourselves we'd like we'd like for more people to propose experiments for the space station next question what kind of v-technology is being used to keep astronauts safe well in the international spa

ce station well um one type of new technology is is we're always trying to improve the amount and the types of exercise that the astronauts do we have three different devices up there we have a type of treadmill and we have a stationary bike and we have an advanced resistive exercise device which is kind of like a solo flex it's it's a it's like a modifiable gym equipment where you're not lifting weights but you're working against a resistive load and that's been up there for a little while but

we're really kind of learning how best to use it by having really high intensity exercise and that's seeming to maintain astronaut bone very well and other technologies include better nutrition as well we've found that we have to reduce the amount of salt sodium intake that the astronauts are getting and that involves a whole team of food scientists here on the ground because the food has to taste good so it has to be palatable it has to have low salt but also has to have a good shelf life becau

se once the food gets packaged and then launched to the space station we want it to be able to stay good and viable and all the nutrients are still available in the food for a while and so there's technologies that we're working on the ground as well to help keep astronauts healthy in space okay next question what planets outside of this solar system would be able to sustain human life i don't think we have found any just yet but um i think we're you know we're searching we're looking um we've f

ound planets that are similar in size to earth we've found planets that are similar in distance to a star as earth is so we're looking and you know i think one day we might find that we're not quite so unique there are there are billions and billions of stars and billions and billions of galaxies so i think you know the the longer we look the more we're going to find but uh those those places are pretty far away and fayette academy this is nasa's digital learning network uh mike o'hare um just w

anted to say that we're running out of time so i just wanted to see if you guys want to say any final words or thank you uh to dr warren and miss dean there in mission control thank you sorry we didn't get a chance to get everybody's question but uh i'm sure glad you guys called today i'm glad we could answer some of your questions and uh good luck with your experiment i'm very excited to see it get up there i know butch is as well and stay curious keep asking questions be scientists thank you v

ery much you