Yesterday Terry, Anton and I spent the morning in a five-hour routine ops sim, in which we got to practice daily activities like maintenance tasks, urine transfer, cargo ops. I’ve talked in the past about these types of training events, for example in this logbook.
In the afternoon I was trained on the experiment Micro-5, which will require a lot of crew activities in the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG). This is a sealed volume with built-in gloves in which you can operate on toxic substances or living samples without fear of contaminating the Station. In fact, as you can see in the picture, in its latest version you don’t have to use the bulky rubber gloves, but can use regular lab gloves instead: the seal is made around your wrist.
The purpose of Micro-5 is to study the development of an infectious desease in space. Unfortunately, it has been observed that spaceflight induces both an impairement of the immune system of living creatures, as well as an increased virulence of pathogens. While both these phenomena have been studied separately, Micro-5 will study both by observing the development of disease in tiny “worms” (Caenorhabditis elegans) that will be infected with Salmonella bacteria in flight.
Training for this experiment was a lot of fun. Managing all those living cultures, mixing, separating, worrying about the sterility, carefully taking the samples.. all this in the peculiar MSG environment really made me feel like a scientist. Of course, I only went through the sequence once. In flight, I will have to do it dozens of time. By hey, as they say… scientific progress is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration!
Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42
avamposto42.esa.int
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
08/07/2014