Short Wave - Houston, We Have Short Wave On The Line

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

Speaking to Short Wave from about 250 miles above the Earth, Josh Cassada outlined his typical day at work: "Today, I actually started out by taking my own blood," he said. The astronauts aboard the International Space Station are themselves research subjects, as well as conductors of all sorts of science experiments: Gardening in microgravity, trapping frigid atoms, examining neutron stars. Then, there's the joy of walks into the yawning void of space. Speaking from orbit, Cassada told fellow physicist and Short Wave Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber about research aboard the station, what it takes to keep the ISS going and which countries' astronauts make the best food. Curious about the other goings-on in space? Beam us an email at [e-mail] — we might answer it in a future episode! See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Station, this is Houston. Are you ready for the event? You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. NPR, this is Mission Control, Houston. Please call Station for voice. Recently, I got to do something I'd only dreamt of. Talk to an astronaut who's hanging out on the International Space Station, that global party house and space lab orbiting Earth 16 times a day. Station, this is Regina Barber with NPR's Shortwave podcast. How do you hear me? Hi Regina, I've got you now. I've got you loud and clear. How me? Yeah, you sound great. I want to think I talked to astronaut Josh Cassida, a fellow physicist. And honestly, before anything else, I had to know. Can you describe the ISS? Like, can you run us through your day today?

Yeah, absolutely. So let me do my best to try to describe this place, but I'll be honest. I feel a little guilty sometimes because I just want to bring everybody I know up here and show it to them and just have them experience this. But my day today, just a typical day, I actually started out by taking my own blood. You know, we tend to be the subject of a lot of different experiments. So we get trained and being able to do that. And then Josh says the specifics kind of vary. Some days it's big ticket items like a spacewalk where he's tethered to the ISIS but outside, fixing the station itself, or doing a robotics operation, capturing a cargo vessel with fresh supplies. And then there's the equally important but much more low-key tasks.

We work a little bit on different experiments. We do a lot of things just to maintain the International Space Station. This is an orbiting laboratory, but it's really hard to keep this thing going. So it requires the effort of the people up here and the hundreds and thousands of people down on the ground to make it happen. So right now, while you and I are talking, all of my crewmates are doing something to keep the space station going. I've got my friend Frank, who's working on the interface between a cargo vehicle and the space station. My friend Nicole was just working on some of the smoke detectors and our friend Coichi from the Japanese Space Agency. He right now is floating around the space station and taking samples on surfaces to make sure we don't have any kind of bacterial growth or anything we need to be concerned about.

And the biggest question of all for a day in the life on the space station? Astronaut food, which in my book is definitely as important as all the science. I have a former astronaut Captain Wendy Lawrence who lives in my neck of the woods in Washington State. And she's been on the ISS, and she said her favorite thing was they had one international potluck, where the other countries, like, shared food with each other. She said Japan had the best food. Have you all done that? So Japan does have some amazing food.

Kouichi tends to really like seafood, like really, really fishy seafood. And I'm at the other end of the spectrum, so I love the guy. I just don't love his food. But we do share a lot of different foods when we can, you know, on Krujee. Christmas Eve, we made pizza. Kooichi and I were slicing really thin slices of Romano to put on a pizza crust with some sauce, and it turned out much better than we had expected. So we definitely over ate on Christmas Eve.

Today on the show, life in orbit. We dive into NASA's experiments on the International Space Station and why sometimes routine maintenance to keep the place running is an existential affair. I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast. podcast from NPR. So Josh, since we're a science podcast, we want to know like what science is happening on the ISS. And there's a few experiments underway. And I know that there's the pick and eat salad crop initiative. So can you like tell us about that program? Can you walk us through like what garden detail is like if you've done it? At any one time, there are literally hundreds of

experiments going on. And so we are essentially the eyes and ears and hands of the researchers on the ground as we hop from one experiment to the next, as well as juggling that maintaining of the space station job. But yes, we are currently right now growing dwarf tomatoes. We just started that, I want to say, two weeks ago, and they are already taken off. What's really interesting there is we're using a variety of different lighting and soil conditions so that we can optimize that for future missions. I'll tell you, we get really excited when we get fresh fruit and vegetables that come up on a cargo vehicle. And so to be able to do that in situ is going to be a huge, huge, not only moral boost, but also a nutritional boost for future crews. So what is the biggest challenge

with growing these plants in very low gravity? You know, the first time I took these out and essentially started the process. They come up in pillows of different kinds of soil. And I think it's containing that soil. You know, it doesn't take much to have just a little bit of a hole there. And then the soil starts coming out. And so I had to be a little bit proactive. And I'm making sure that stuff just didn't get all over the cabin. As you can imagine, it can get to be a mess in a hurry. Next up, let's talk about physics, because I'm guessing that may be what you're most excited about, since we're both physicists. What kind of physics experiment are you doing up in the ISS,

and what are you most excited about? Well, I'll tell you, Regina, the experiments that I'm most excited about, of course, yeah, you guessed it. I'm a little biased here towards some of the more fundamental physics experiments. Not that the others aren't exciting. They just aren't where I grew up. But my favorite one is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. It's a big detector that's on top of the space station,

and what it's doing is just sifting cosmic rays. looking for signatures of anti-matter and dark matter. And, you know, it's gotten some really exciting physics result in that we found this excess of positrons, which, as you know, as a physicist, you know, when you find something that's unexpected, it's a signature potentially of new physics, and that is always exciting in our line of work.

Another one that I really like is the Cold Atom Lab, which is really very much the same kind of atom. trap that we've got on the ground, but the beauty is we've got it up here, and so we don't have to put any energy into holding these really cold atoms in the middle of the chamber. Like right now, as you and I are talking, I'm just floating. You know, this is why we end up having to work out two and a half hours a day. We're incredibly lazy the other 21 and a half hours of the day, because we don't have to do a lot. I'm not stressing my muscles. That ability to just exist without having to put energy in the system is how we get to such low temperatures on the cold

of atom lab. And the dwell time of those atoms interacting is fairly significant, like on order of 10 or 20 seconds, which is really a benefit that we can't really experience in 1G. Wow. Yeah, without dropping it. So the cool thing for me is, you know, that's an experiment where you can see quantum mechanics happening on the macroscopic level. We've got a bozines, like condensate, and you can see the quantum mechanics happening. I'm really excited about that one. The other one that really gets me excited is more in your neck of the woods, this really cool x-ray telescope that, again, is out in the neighborhood of the AMS on top of the space station. And it's doing really detailed analyses of neutron stars,

you know, where the density is so high that we've got all four of the fundamental forces at play interacting. And it's just a really cool experiment. Wow. And I wanted to ask you about your spacewalk. Like, I just watched you and Frank go on a spacewalk. recently, seven hours long. Can you tell us what that was like? Yeah, it is the coolest and somehow the dumbest thing that humans beings do. You're out there thinking, oh my gosh, I cannot believe this is what we're doing. But yeah, you go out the door and I'll tell you, you know, there's a point at which you've got your head down and you're working and you take a peek at the backdrop and, you know, it just doesn't feel real. It's just amazing to see that.

had a gorgeous planet going below us. There was a point on our first spacewalk where we were out at the very far edge of the space station and then actually had to go around that edge and kind of hang off of the space station. And I remember thinking, well, this is it. This is the line. This is the end of humanity.

It stops here and I need to go just past it. Yeah, when I was watching your spacewalk, I was listening to one part where you were asking him for moral and physical help and he was like, I got you. There's a point where your brain, just for a half second, says, no, I'm not doing this. We're putting our foot down. We're not doing this.

But you see it. You take your path and you fall back on your training and you know all the people on the ground are making it happen. And it's an amazing, amazing machine to be a part of. Did everything go as planned on this last spacewalk? Well, it never goes exactly as planned, but I will say these last two spacewalks where we deployed new solar arrays, this really cool technology of these solar rays that unroll, they unfurl, and they're adding more power generation for the space station as these legacy, these older, 22-ish-year-old solar arrays start to age. And there were a couple times when Frank and I had to get a little creative

and to get this giant solar ray mounted, that took a lot of coordination between the two of us. And, you know, he was working one end. I was working the other. It worked out really well for us, and we couldn't be happier because it's that kind of stuff that helps us do the science here on the space station. I like the visual. What are you most looking forward to in the new year while you're aboard the ISS? What we were able to do in that spacewalk campaign was to make the space station a little bit better than when we found it, and that's going to continue.

Frank and I are going to take on a new role for the next EVA, and we're going to be the ones doing the really hard work of trying to get Nicole and Cuechie, ready to go, get them all suited up and get them out the door, and they're going to go do another spacewalk that's going to build the infrastructure that we're going to plug a solar array into a couple months or maybe a year or so down the road. So to continue to do things that improve the space station, but test bed for the deep space exploration. So if we can contribute in any small way to what the next generation of space explorers are going to do, I'll tell you what, this is definitely a successful career.

That'll make me feel really good. been amazing. Dream come true. Thank you so much, Josh. Regina, the thanks are all mine. Today's show was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Gabriel Spitzer, and fact-checked by Rebecca and Abbey Levine. Maggie Luthor was the audio engineer. Brendan Crump is our podcast coordinator. Beth Donovan is the senior director of programming, and Anyi Runman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. See you tomorrow. Are they going to kick us out?

Thank you to all participants from NPR Shortwave podcast. Station, we are now resuming our operational audio communications.