NASA's Curious Universe - Our Laboratory in Space

Episode Date: October 12, 2020

Orbiting 250 miles above Earth, astronauts aboard the International Space Station explore farther into our solar system and work on thousands of studies that will help us back here on Earth. Join ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and NASA scientist Sharmila Bhattacharya on an adventure to our “orbiting laboratory.”

For the past 20 years, we have been a space-faring civilization, which is something that when you say it, you kind of have to stop and let it sink in and realize that really shouldn't be taken for granted. Welcome to NASA's curious universe. I'm Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide. 250 miles above Earth's surface, a scientific laboratory orbits around our planet. Here, astronauts serve as the eyes and hands of researchers on the ground. This is the International Space Station. And 2020 marks the 20th year since the first humans occupied it. One, we have ignition and lift off,

beginning the first expedition to the International Space Station and setting the stage for permanent human presence in space. Following that first crew, there has been a continuous human presence aboard the station. So if you were born after November in the year 2000, someone has been living in outer space throughout your entire life. Over 240 humans from 19 countries have lived aboard the space station, including European Space Agency, or ISA astronaut, Samantha Christopher Reddy. The International Space Station, the way I like to refer to it as humanity's outpost in space.

In 2014, Samantha became the first female Italian astronaut and the second Issa female astronaut to go to space. And once she arrived at the space station, she stayed for a long time, 119 days and 16 hours to be precise. Hours spent aboard an ever-changing station with parts from around the world fit together like Lego pieces. It's like big soda cans. They're called modules and they're like joined to one another

in what we call a stack. You might imagine the station as a cramped space. But the way Samantha describes it It's like a really long hallway. Sometimes people tell you, you know, how do you deal with claustrophobia being confined in such a small space? And I never had a feeling of being confined just because of how big and spacious it actually is.

It's gigantic, actually. If you were too late on the ground, it's about as big as a football field. And of course, people float in it. So, you know, you'll be floating around. You are inhabiting it in the three dimensions. Just a few hours from Earth. the space station whips around our planet in low Earth orbit. The station and everything inside is in a constant freefall towards Earth.

That's why Samantha and her crew members float while aboard the space station. They're experiencing something called microgravity. Which is nothing else than a fancy word to say weightlessness. Microgravity is what makes the International Space Station such a special lab. and it's a condition that you can't simulate for long periods on Earth. There is no way of get rid of gravity. The only thing that you can do is free-falling. And so on Earth we can do it for a few seconds and drop towers.

You can build a tall tower and drop things. And for a few seconds, guess what? They will be weightless, but eventually the ground. They're going to hit the ground. So if you want that exposure to microgravity for a longer time, then the only way is to go. in orbit and so that's why we need the international space station. Microgravity changes everything.

Like the kind of physics you can observe and the way the human body operates. That's why so many countries come together to oversee the orbiting laboratory. It's a way for humans to do science that can't happen anywhere else. That's what astronauts on board spend the majority of their day doing, working on experiments. You can go from doing investigations on human physiology where the human being, the astronaut, is actually the object of the investigation, or plants, small animals, cell cultures, to the physical sciences. So we have a lot of experiments on combustions, on materials, on fluid mechanics. The work that a space station crew member does, conducting experiments in space, is not a solo operation.

There's a whole other team of people that design the experiments. People who have their feet planted firmly on the blue planet. Like Sharmila Batacharya, Sharma leapt at the opportunity to be a scientist at NASA because of the novelty of doing experiments in space and what her findings might mean for humanity. It's something that you can't easily simulate on Earth, and what you usually find are so unique and different,

Not only is there that factor of, oh my God, you know, look at these changes that we saw, who would have thought? But there's another aspect to it. The science that you get from it helps us understand those physiological changes that are happening in humans better, which means that it helps us come up with better countermeasures for astronauts and for the people who are going to be in space now and in the future. Sharmaila studies the effects of space on the immune system. Our immune system is the way the body protects us against disease. We know that when astronauts spend time in space, their immune systems get a little weaker, but we don't yet know why.

To understand this effect better, Sharma and her colleagues use tiny research subjects that you might find in your own kitchen. The fruit fly, which, you know, this unassuming little, you know, creature that will buzz around your rotting bananas and so on, actually proves to be a very useful model organism for science in general. We share a lot of our genetic code with fruit flies. In fact, six Nobel Prizes have been awarded in physiology and medicine for discoveries made in fruit flies. But one of the main advantages of researching fruit flies is just the show. sheer number that you can use.

We have sent up more flies into space than we have had humans. With astronauts, you may have only a few subjects to study. But with fruit flies, you can study thousands at a time and get a better understanding of how outer space affects animal biology. In some ways, the science Sharmaela does is very similar to other biologists. In other ways, it's completely different. Like the moment when Sharmila must wave goodbye to her flies. I still remember the feeling that I had as I watched something that I had touched and worked on just a few hours before

beyond this gigantic space shuttle that was taking off in front of my eyes and going way beyond where, you know, we couldn't see it anymore. You know, up to that point, I had focused really more. on the day to day of getting the experiment to work. And then on launch day, when you just get to, for the first time probably in days or weeks or maybe even months, you get to really sit down and take a deep breath and watch the launch in front of you. And I just remember feeling that sonic boom just sort of go right through my chest. I remember thinking, this is why I do what I do and this is why I work for NASA. and this is what makes all of that hard work absolutely worth it.

On launch day, Charmiela watched as parts of the experiment she spent months preparing, soared out of her reach. But in space, there was someone to greet Charmela's fruit flies and run the experiment. Samantha. It doesn't happen every day that you get little flying animals on space stations. Samantha had to help by collecting data, feeding the flies, taking pictures of the flies over time, and the fly lab had one essential piece of equipment that she had to keep an eye on.

We had centrifuges, probably one of the most important aspects of hardware that we could use in science. The centrifuge is a machine that spins around and around, like an amusement ride, the gravitron. You know, the one where people are standing on the edge and spinning so fast that they all become a blur, In the gravitron, the force of the spin makes you feel like you can't move, like you're experiencing

hypergravity. The centrifuge creates a similar effect. On station, there is so little gravity that by using the centrifuge, you can mimic what we call normal gravity. The force of gravity felt on Earth. So to monitor changes that might happen due to spaceflight, it's important to split the fruit flies into two groups. One set that would be in static positions and one set that would be in a centrifuge. To see what the actual changes were in space and what was contributed by gravity

and what was contributed by the other factors. Without the centrifuge, Charmila wouldn't be able to conduct her research properly. But things don't always go according to plan. Every now and then, just like it does on Earth, things don't go the way that it's been scripted. It turned out that the motor couldn't quite get the centrifuge started. It was one of those small glitches that one could not predict,

that just that one time the centrifuge decided it was not going to turn on. So Samantha started troubleshooting, seeing if anything was in the way of the centrifuge that could be stopping its motion. And the whole time she was communicating her process with people on the ground. Can't blend the concrete for the centrifuge? Yes, Sam. What did you find out? We didn't really see anything conclusive. Capial Sam, I think you've done as much as you can.

No luck there. But Samantha wasn't giving up. She needed to think of something else. What the astronaut did, it was brilliant. I would have to kind of like find a way to go in and attach this piece of tape. She stuck it on the side of the centrifuge. You know, kind of treading it out and reclose the rag. And she gave it a yank.

A real nice. Just the way you would kickstart your lawn mower. And she got the centrifuge going. It turned, and there was no problem with the centrifuge thereafter. It looks like it's working fine now. On behalf of all the little fruit flies, we thank you. The fruit flies and the scientists were thankful for Samantha's quick thinking. Having the astronauts there to help us was a critical part of being able to do more complicated science,

to get higher signs yield out of the science that you were doing. And also, frankly, they were incredible as people who were there to troubleshoot your experiment, should you need anything. The human ingenuity and the ability to think on the fly is why humans will stay aboard the orbital outpost for many years to come. People sometimes make it a little bit too easy when they say, we can replace all that by robots or we can do all that automatically. maybe possibly you could do that,

but then you really need to hope that you predicted everything, that nothing is going to go wrong. It's the humans that make the space station, not the equipment itself, the people that for the past 20 years have been in space and on the ground designing experiments and making sure everything goes smoothly. Together, they've made scientific discoveries

about heart health, bone loss, growing plants in space, material science, and they've worked on over 3,000 research projects. But there will be many more discoveries to come. We've been doing genetics for a little over 100 years. If you compare with the fact that we've been doing research on the International Space Station as a laboratory for less than 20 years, we have a lot more information that we're going to find out,

a lot more information that we're going to need to find out as well in order to get us prepared for long-term exploration. I mean, I think, frankly, that right now, we are just at the tip of the iceberg. What we've learned in the past 20 years goes even beyond the science. It gets to the heart of what makes us human, dreaming big and making those dreams a reality through collaboration. For the past 20 years,

we have been a space-faring civilization, which is something that when you say it, you kind of have to stop and let it sink in and realize that it really shouldn't be taken for granted. You know, I have great respect and admiration for the previous achievements of the past, you know, Apollo and the space shuttle and so on. But, you know, people should not think

that the space station is less than that. You know, we have demonstrated as a community for 20 years. We've shown every day that it is possible to live in space with continuity, without interruption, with an international community. And I don't know how many people would have bet 20, 25 years ago that it was going to work in the end so smoothly. For me, it's just humbling to think that I had the privilege of being part for a short time of, of, of, of it. of this amazing success story. During her stay on the orbiting laboratory, Samantha traveled 84 million miles

and helped oversee almost 100 experiments. Charmila continues to launch fruit flies into space, where the latest rotation of station astronauts are there to greet them. Most of us won't make it onto the space station. But that doesn't mean we can't see it. The big array of solar panels that power the station reflect some of the sun's light. That means around dusk or dawn, you may be able to see it zooming through the sky.

Humanity's outpost and laboratory in space. A global collaboration that persists through conflict. A beacon of hope. This is NASA's curious universe. This episode was written and produced by Margot Wohl. Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson. The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold, Michaela Sosby, and Vicky Woodburn. Special thanks to Erin Anthony, Rachel Barry, Rylent Heggy, Nicole Rose,

the International Space Station Research Integration Office, and the European Space Agency. To keep up with current space station research, follow the at-ISS underscore research on Twitter. If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing with a friend. Still curious about NASA? You can send us questions about this episode or a previous one, and we'll try to track down the answers. You can email a voice recording or send a written note to NASA-curious Universe at mail.nastnaut.gov. Go to NASA.gov slash Curious Universe for more information.

Hey, Curious Universe listeners. I'm Gary Jordan from NASA's Houston. We have a podcast. I hope you enjoyed this first episode of the new season of Curious Universe. We have some more great content coming your way, so make sure you're subscribed to Curious Universe to get the latest when they post. Maybe this episode has scratched an itch

and you're dying for more space between your ears this month. Well, you're in luck because Houston, we have a podcast, has some special content coming up just for you. This week and next, we're diving into the crew one mission, the first crew rotation mission to the International Space Station on the SpaceX Crew Dragon. We're talking with the astronauts flying on the spacecraft and the flight director that's leading the operations from Mission Control in Houston. And we'll be posting double episodes. That's right, two episodes per week for the weeks leading up to the 20th anniversary of continuous human presence on the International Space Station coming

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