Today Terry and I had some introductory classes on the JAXA payload racks, which provide resources to run different types of experiment in the microgravity environment of ISS.
One of the racks is Saibo, which means “living cell” in Japanese. Just like the Biolab rack in ESA’s Columbus laboratory, Saibo provides an environment to run life science experiments, for example involving plants or cell cultures.
The temperature, humidity and CO2 content of the atmosphere are controlled and continuously monitored. Saibo, just like Biolab, also includes a centrifuge: in this way, while part of the samples are exposed to weighlessness, a 1G control group can be put in the centrifuge, which recreates the “weight” conditions of Earth.
In the afternoon Terry and I had a very interesting robotic simulator in which we practiced the interaction with Tsukuba mission control with an actual J-COM, the Japanese capcom. Tami, our J-COM today, could count on the help of a JEM flight controller (J-Flight) and a JEM robotic controller (KIBOTT). That was especially important when we ran into malfunctions that caused the arm to stop.
In our simulation today we practiced the relocation of an external payload from one location to another on the Exposed Facility. In the picture you can see how a typical payload looks: it’s the element sticking out to the left and towards the solar array (although the array is really far behind).
(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/
27/02/2014