Busy day of science and logistics for me to start the week.
Dragon unpacking continues, yesterday I had one hour of transfer ops on my schedule. Looking at Dragon you may think we have made quite some progress already in the unpacking, but in reality we have cheated a bit. Many bags have been retrieved and temporarily stowed on ISS, so that we could access other cargo with urgent science. But of course, they won’t unpack themselves… and some of them are huge, believe me. We call them MO bags and I could comfortably fit inside the smallest of them!
Today I also dealt with a special type of cargo, the Polar fridges. They need to be transferred to ISS, but since they are powered up inside Dragon and contain refrigerated goods and science samples, they need to be moved and reinstalled quickly, to minimize the time they remain unpowered.
Also today I had two science activities for the experiments BRIC 21 and Synthetic Muscle. BRIC stands for Biological Research in Canisters: you can see one the BRIC units in the picture.
This particular run investigates microbes and how they adapt to the space environment, with special attention to the development of antibiotic resistance. You’ve probably heard that this is quite a source of concern in healthcare these days and we really need to understand better how pathogens become resistance to antibiotics.
Doing research with pathogens on ISS carries some complications, because you need to provide the microbial culture with a growth medium: if the crew has to do this manually, as it’s often the case, the operation has to happen in the glovebox to ensure containment of the hazardous microorganisms. Here’s where BRICs come in handy: using a dedicated tool, as you can see in the photo, astronauts can push a piston and inject the necessary mediums without ever breaking the three levels of containment required by ISS safety standards. It’s very quick and efficient!
But I bet you want to hear about Synthetic Muscle… well, turns out that Dragon brought us some samples of a special material that could be used to replicate muscle tissue. It’s an electroactive polymer: you can make it contract and expand by applying different electric currents. It sure sounds a lot like muscle to me, doesn’t it?
Applications on Earth are in the field of prosthetics, of course, but we’re also testing how this material reacts when exposed to cosmic and solar radiation up here, because it could potentially be used in robots to enhance their mobility. Cool, ah?
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 FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha
(Trad ES) Tradducción en español por
+Carlos Lallana Borobio aqui: https://laesteladegagarin.blogspot.com.es/search/label/SamLogBook
(Trad DE) Deutsch von https://www.logbuch-iss.de
21/04/2015