Skip to main content
<p>Written by Melissa Kacena The second and fourth scheduled procedures were on Tuesday, July 30 and Saturday, August 3, when astronaut Tyler Nicklaus “Nick” Hague “feeds” our cells. While most of the hardware is automated, during our practice experiments completed at NASA Ames, we discovered that the volume of “fresh” media provided to the cells [&hellip;]</p>

Crew Procedures

Crew Procedures

Written by Melissa Kacena

The second and fourth scheduled procedures were on Tuesday, July 30 and Saturday, August 3, when astronaut Tyler Nicklaus “Nick” Hague “feeds” our cells. While most of the hardware is automated, during our practice experiments completed at NASA Ames, we discovered that the volume of “fresh” media provided to the cells was inconsistent between the 10 samples and would impact our science.

This variability would be like providing some people with one meal a day and other people with five meals per day and then studying who gained more weight. Clearly different results will be observed. We felt the best approach was for the astronauts to manually feed the cells using a syringe to deliver the same amount of media to all the cells.

The third scheduled procedure is Friday, August 2, where the astronauts will swap out the gas tank that is providing oxygen to our cells.

The final procedure is for the astronauts to terminate our experiment and store all of our specimens in freezers prior to packing samples back into the dragon capsule for delivery back to Earth at the end of the mission. After splashdown, the specimens will be sent to Johnson Space Center where they will be repackaged and returned to both IU and the Army for further processing and analysis.

Default Author Avatar IUSM Logo
Author

Katie Duffey

Katie Duffey joined the Indiana University School of Medicine Office of Strategic Communications as assistant director in 2018 after a 14-year career in newspaper journalism. Contact Katie at kaduffey@iu.edu.

The views expressed in this content represent the perspective and opinions of the author and may or may not represent the position of Indiana University School of Medicine.