International Space Station Science Operations Status Report #5 – 14 Mar 2001

Over the past 24 hours, the Payload Operations Center at NASA’s Marshall Space
Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., supported the transfer of payloads and
equipment from the Multi Purpose Logistics Module, Leonardo, to the
International Space Station Destiny laboratory module.

On Tuesday night, the Expedition Two crew — James Voss,
Yury Usachev and Susan Helms — performed a second test
of the Hoffman Reflex neurological experiment. The first
session was completed last Friday on the second day of the
STS-102 Space Shuttle mission. H-Reflex studies how the
nervous system adapts to the microgravity environment
inside the Space Shuttle and Space Station. Dr. Douglas
Watt, of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, is the
principal investigator for the experiment.

These early sessions conducted on the Space Shuttle are
important because the body often changes quickly when
exposed to weightlessness. The crew transferred the H-reflex
experiment equipment to the Space Station, where they will
perform more sessions of this experiment later in the
expedition.

On Tuesday morning during the previous crew shift — ahead
of schedule — astronauts transferred the Human Research
Facility from the logistics module to the station. This phone
booth-sized rack will support radiation detectors and other
experiments to study the physical and chemical changes of
the human body in space.

In the weeks ahead, the crew will finish hooking up the rack
and checking out its systems — including a computer
workstation and a laptop computer used to collect and
transmit data to the ground. The second and third science
experiment racks will be delivered to the Station by the next
Shuttle mission, STS-100, set for launch in mid-April. These
racks were built by the Boeing Company at the Marshall
Center, and a second, complementary Human Research
Facility rack is under construction here now. It will be
delivered to the Space Station on a later expedition. The
human life sciences investigations are managed by the
Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Science operations using the racks and other equipment are
managed by the Payload Operations Center. Controllers here
eventually will be scheduling activities and monitoring science
in some 23 U.S. payload racks. NASA’s European,
Japanese and Russian partners also will be providing
payloads for the Station.

Today, the Expedition Two crew completed their move to the
station as the Expedition One crew completed their transition
to the Shuttle.