ISS Science Operations status report for week ending 05-01-02
An
experimental vibration dampener passed its first operational test in
support of a payload aboard the International Space Station during the
past week.
The
Active Rack Isolation System (ARIS), which uses eight actuator
rods to “float” EXPRESS Rack 2 inside the Destiny lab module, provided
vibration isolation for the Zeolite Crystal Growth (ZCG) experiment,
which is located in the rack. Many Station experiments are designed
to take advantage of the near absence of gravity’s influence on the
Station. ARIS is designed to damp out random vibrations caused by crew
movements, operating equipment and under certain limited conditions
even docking spacecraft.
“The most critical hours for the experiment were the first 30, which
have now just passed and we were able to provide the necessary microgravity
environment,” said Naveed Quraishi, project manager of the ARIS-ISS
Characterization Experiment (ARIS-ICE) with NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
“ARIS support of ZCG has been and continues to be successful. We have
now been in orbit over one year and are very close to concluding the
ARIS-ICE on-orbit experiment. We have one more test to do, and then
we come home.”
The
Zeolite experiment, activated April 22, continues to function well during
a planned 15-day experiment run. This Expedition 4 experiment arrived
on the recent STS-110 mission. It will be completed and samples will
be unloaded around May 10.
Zeolites
are used in many chemical manufacturing processes on Earth, including
gasoline production. Insights from the Station experiment could lead
to improvements in manufacturing processes.
On
Friday (April 26) and again on Tuesday, Flight Engineer Dan Bursch pollinated
Brassica plants in chamber 4 of the Biomass Production System.
Ground controllers also attempted one more time to power up the Experiment
on Physics of Colloids in Space. The experiment did not respond,
and the payload team is planning to return it on an upcoming Shuttle
mission.
Bursch
and fellow Flight Engineer Carl Walz on Monday performed the monthly
session of the Pulmonary Function in Flight (PuFF) experiment.
This recurring research tests changes in lung function during long duration
space missions. One more session is planned for this Expedition in May.
The
crew and ground controllers on Monday made a fourth attempt to restore
the Medium rate Communication Outage Recorder (MCOR), which serves as
the main science data storage unit during Loss Of Signal periods when
the Station is not in satellite contact with the ground. The device
has been unable to record data since April 18. The crew replaced the
computer battery and later switched to the backup computer. Controllers
were unable to restore the recorder to full operation and currently
are planning another effort at a later date. This temporary loss of
the recorder has limited the data return during this time from the Microgravity
Acceleration Measurement System (MAMS), which is documenting disturbances
to the Station’s acceleration environment. However, it has had minimal
impact on the remaining suite of experiments.
On
Tuesday, Bursch and Walz completed the final in-flight session of the
Hoffman Reflex experiment. This investigation into how neurovestibular
reflexes are altered during long-duration space flight has been highly
successful during the three Expeditions on which it was conducted. The
crew will perform sessions after their -More-return to Earth to document
the re-adaptation process.
Today
(Wednesday) the crew took documentation photos of the Commercial
Protein Crystal Growth experiment. All three crewmembers completed
their Crew Interactions surveys on the Human Research Facility
laptop computer.
Ground
activation and checkout of EXPRESS Rack 5 was completed today
(Wednesday). The rack will then be shut down following this check. It
is not scheduled to host any science payloads until Expedition 7. Four
EXPRESS racks and the Human Research Facility rack are currently operational
in the Destiny lab module.
Scheduled
for Thursday is the crew’s regular 90-day check of the Gasmapexperiment
and documentation photos of the Commercial Generic Bioprocessing
Apparatus.
Crew
Earth Observations (CEO) photography targets for the week include
the interaction of Saharan dust, Mt. Etna gas and ash, the Po River
valley, smog in the Western Mediterranean, coral reefs of the Palawan
and the Sulu Sea west of the Philippines, fires in Malaysia and Sumatra,
fires in central Cuba, fires in the Colorado Rockies, flooding and construction
along waterways in Egypt and Turkey, human development in Bombay, India
and Dhaka, Bangladesh, air quality around the Great Lakes of the Eastern
United States, and snow and ice in the Canadian Rockies.
Results
from CEO photography aboard the Space Station were recently published
in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The April 25 issue of the weekly
American Geophysical Union’s EOS journal contains an article concluding
that the Station crew using hand-held cameras have routinely achieved
6-meter resolution, compared to commercial Earth imaging satellites,
which advertise 10-25-meter resolution. Among other cameras, the CEO
experiment uses an electronic digital camera with a 400 mm lens with
a doubler attachment, yielding an effective 800 mm focal length.
