Amber Abbott-Hern and Deena Dombrowski from ZIN Technologies discuss conducting research and getting samples on the International Space Station (ISS) being conducted in cooperation with NASA Glenn Research Center. — NASA — Life Aboard the Space Station Source: NASA (https://images.nasa.gov/) Licence: Public domain (work of the U.S. federal government, 17 U.S.C. §105) Audio is served by the publisher; Budi does not host or modify it.
0:10Potential PIs will speak with me when we evaluate their science. The environment of the space station is extremely sensitive to any sort of introduced chemicals. All sample compositions will be evaluated by the International Space Station Environmental Safety Group and Johnson Space Center Toxicology to evaluate any possible toxicity of your samples. Your samples will be evaluating by the EQIS group or the Environmental Safeties Group to make sure that your samples do not affect the environmental control system on the space station, just to make that there are no possible effects to the equipment. It's also very important to evaluate whether or not your samples will adversely affect the health of our astronauts.
0:58Toxicology is important and we have several levels of it. Toxicological level one or TOCS-1 requires two levels of containment. This means that samples must be contained even if they leave their first level of containment. These samples are usually something as simple as minor eye irritants. For LMM, or the Light Microscopy Module, we have one level of containment within the auxiliary fluids container. That is the glove box that contains the samples that are on the microscope. This contains frangibles. This will not contain your sample fluids. For the advanced colloids experiment, we seal your sample cells with either wax or Viton plugs. These are then sealed with cover slips held by epoxy. We like to personalize the sealing methods for each PI sample fluid type due to compatibility issues and what the sample type is made of.
2:01Then, once the samples are sealed and cover-slipped, we ship them to SpaceX in a BITRON bag and they will be shipped to the International Space Station. For the Advanced Colloids Experiment, you'll be sending your sample compositions to me so I can evaluate whether or not they are properly matched with our sealing methods. For example, many of the organic materials are not compatible with our wax. Other samples may be compatible with our bi-ton plugs or possibly for sealing through other methods. As a chemist and as an engineer, it's exciting to see how these samples react in the absence of gravity. It's amazing to see what this can do for technologies here on Earth, anything from cosmetics and
2:53shampoos to possible building blocks of future materials. Thank you for attending our session. If you'd like more information, you can visit our website or you can meet us at our booth at the ASGSR. Thank you.
This transcript was generated automatically from the recording, so it will contain mistakes — especially around names and places.