General Information Rome 28/2 - 3/3 1999 Final Program
Plenary Lecture   Invited Lectures
Life Sciences Materials and Physical Chemistry

Physics of Fluids
Microgravity Technology & Applications Posters Participants

 

MICROGRAVITY TECHNOLOGY AND APPLICATIONS

OPTICAL TOMOGRAPHY: A NEW TECHNOLOGY ONBOARD ISS

J.Becker(*), M.Cecconi(**), L.Gatti(**), F.Solitro(**)
(*) ESA ESTEC, Keplerlaan 1, 2200 AG Noordwijk, NL
(**) Alenia Aerospazio, corso Marche 41, 10146 Torino,I – e mail: lgatti@to.alespazio.it

The fact that there is a future for micro-gravity experiments in the frame of the utilization of the International Space Station (ISS) has already generated ideas for new scientific and technological experiments. Also triggered by the progress in non-invasive optical measurement techniques, more complex experiment geometry, i.e. more realistic three dimensional scenarios are coming into mind. Optical tomography based on interferometry is potentially useful as a non-invasive diagnostic tool to measure three-dimensional refractive index distributions representing concentration and/or temperature fields in different kinds of experiments in the field of crystal growth and fluid physics. In the past year a study was carried out by Alenia Aerospazio, under ESA Contract, which led to first specifications of scientific requirements concerning the application of the optical tomographic technique. Furthermore, a quantitative trade-off among different tomographic reconstruction algorithms was made. Mathematical phantoms representing typical refractive index distributions/situations were used to simulate the measurement process.
Optical tomograph hardware, based on the interferometers offered by the Fluid Science Laboratory (FSL) for the ISS and matching with the Experiment Container (EC) concept, is now under realization at Alenia Aerospazio, sponsored by ESA. The tomograph will have six coplanar, equally spaced observation directions over about 180º. The outer dimensions of the squared test cell are about 40x40x20 mm and the sample volume will have a cylindrical shape with a diameter of about 10mm. Convective motions inside the cylindrical fluid column heated from below will form the Model Experiment. The inner cylindrical shape is chosen in such a way, that the fluid region will be completely covered by the intersecting object beams. The refractive index of the test fluid chosen will match with the refractive index of the cell material, so that the light beams will not suffer from high optical distortions passing the cell, because of its potential "lens effect". A collimated 80x80 mm2 FSL-like laser beam, entering the Experiment Container (fig.1), will be shaped in such a way, so that six object beams will cross the center of the test cell. The same technique will be used for the recombination of the beams. Different beam splitting and recombining techniques can be chosen, like a prism configuration (fig.2) or a mirror configuration or a combination of both. All optical surfaces will be polished to about l /10 to assure a low distorted wavefront and to obtain fringes with high contrast. A more compact design can be obtained by a splitting / recombination technique based on Holographic Optical Elements (HOE). For that reason the last technique has the potential to aim for a higher number of tomographic views, being mandatory concerning an application to crystal growth. All those configurations will be designed modular and will become reusable in the future for a wider range of scientific applications.



fig. 1 - sketch of FSL Experiment Container envelope and inteferometric laser beam

fig. 2 - tomographic system exploited by a prism set

 

 

NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR SPACEPROTEIN CRYSTAL GROWTH

J. Cornier
INTOSPACE GmbH, Hannover, Germany

INTOSPACE GmbH in association with SPACEHAB Inc.,Washington and the University of Alabama at Birmingham proposes to interested pharmaceutical industry and research institutes to use the High-Density Protein Crystal Growth(HD-PCG) unit contained within a Commercial-Refrigerator Incubation Module(C-RIM) mounted on SPACEHAB on the occasion of the STS-107 Shuttle Mission(two weeks duration) in September 2000.

BENEFITS OF MICROGRAVITY PCG
- Growing protein crystals in space may provide severaldistinct advantages over Earth-grown crystals like the elimination of sedimentation problems and the strongreduction of convection.
- Therefore microgravity crystal growth technology can help drug researchthrough the growth of superior crystals for macromolecular structure determination andstructure-based drug design.
THE HD-PCG HARDWARE
- The vapour diffusion process is used for the experiments.
- The High-Density Protein Crystal Growth (HD-PCG) unit includes 1008independent crystal growth chambers assembled on four trays.
- It is placed into a Refrigerator Incubation Module of standard singlemiddeck locker size to maintain a constant temperature environment (22¡C).
- Cells containing the samples are grouped in blocks of six independentchambers. Blocks are offered to customers as a whole, so chambers (cells) are available inmultiples of six.
- Due to the large number of cells being flown a pre-mixing of theprecipitant and the protein will be performed on the ground before hardware accommodation in thespacecraft.
- The protein reservoir holds up to a 40 microliter drop, and theprecipitant reservoir holds up to 0.5 milliliters.
EXPERIMENT INTEGRATION SCHEDULE
- The candidate protein and precipitant list is requested 4to 6 months prior to launch
- Ground units are provided for testing after candidate list submitted
- Proteins will be delivered one week before launch
- Experiment duration will be two weeks
- Unloading of samples occurs within 8 hours of landing

TOXICITY QUESTIONNAIRE/CONFIDENTIALITY
- A short questionnaire must be filled by each customer forNASA.
It requests "generic name" of the substance(s) to be crystallized inspace.
- Strict confidentiality about the data is guaranteed for commercialcustomers.

BASIC SERVICES OFFERED
- Microgravity environment at constant temperature formacromolecular crystal growth
- Ground hardware test chambers
- Scientific expertise and technical support

OPTIONAL SERVICES ON SPECIAL REQUEST
- Photography of chambers
- Morphometric analysis of space-grown crystals
- X-ray diffraction data collection at UAB
- Crystal transportation to customer labs

COSTS
- One block of six cells is priced at US$ 24,000.
- Recommended minimum sales is fixed to three blocks (18individual chambers).
- For each additional block purchased a preferential price will beproposed.

ADDITIONAL FLIGHT OPPORTUNITIES AND HARWARE
- Regular missions will be soon available for continued research especiallyon the International
Space Station (ISS) with longer growth periods.
- Other equipments like the VDA-2 (vapour phase) or the PCF (temp. ranking)can also be offered.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT INTOSPACE GmbH
Fon ++49 511 30 10 90 Fax ++49 511 30 10 928 e-mail:cornier@intospace.de

 

SPACEHAB STS-95 MISSION REPORT, FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES AND RESOURCES FOR USERS

C. Mirra
INTOSPACEHAB JCSO
Newtonweg, 1
2303 DB Leiden (NL)
tel. +31.71.5245-468
fax +31.71.5245-475
The twelfth SPACEHAB flight occurred on the Space Shuttle Discovery under the STS-95 flag. More than 80 payloads were operated during that mission, most of them hosted in the SPACEHAB Single Module.

This presentation summarizes the data taken during this mission to provide a post-flight summary of SPACEHAB subsystems and payload performances. Subsystems and experiments nominal and contingecy operations will be introduced and performances will be assessed in accordance to the various experiments Interface Control Documents.
At the same time, a snapshot on SPACEHAB future missions and services will be also reported. In particular, the continuity of flight opportunities during the International Space Station assembly, the new Research Double Module and additional services developed for the users will be addressed.
In conclusion, an introduction to the forthcoming STS-107 Research Mission (2000) will be also provided.

 

EXPERIMENT HARDWARE FOR SPACE BIOLOGY AND RELATED GROUND RESEARCH


R. Huijser
Fokker Space B.V., Leiden, The Netherlands

A presentation will be given of the experiment hardware for space biology that has been developed under ESA contracts during the last few years. The following topics will be addressed:
Re-usable, reconfigurable mini-fluidics systems, based on the LIDIA technology presented before (Ref. 1). Recently, new developments have been made in preparation for a future ‘Cells in Space’ sounding rocket mission (CIS-6 on MASER 9, Autumn 2000), for the future ESA BioPack facility, and in the context of the development of ‘Experiment Support Equipment’ for use on the International Space Station
Miniature microscope systems for use in the ESA multi-user facilities BIOLAB and MCS, developed together with Dutch and Belgian project partners (NLR, DSS/OIP and Logica)
Furthermore, technical details and operational aspects of instruments and platforms for ‘ground research’ will be presented, on which the experiment hardware mentioned in the above may be applied immediately. These instruments and platforms have been developed under contracts with ESA and Dutch national space agencies SRON and NIVR and include:
Research Centrifuge for longer duration static g-loads
Random Positioning Machine (RPM), which is a 3-d ‘random walk’ clinostat (Ref. 2)
Cessna-Citation parabolic flight facility
The instruments are available for use at the Dutch Experiment Support Center (DESC), located at the Free-University Amsterdam, or can be manufactured at attractive recurring cost by Fokker Space. A second RPM is owned by the University of Sassari and has been used during 1998 by the Space Biology group at the ETH-Zürich for experiments on human lymphocytes. Recently, also gravitational biology investigators from the US have shown interest in the purchase of RPM systems.
The Cessna-Citation is a laboratory aircraft, jointly owned by the Technical University Delft and the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR, that is operated by Fokker Space for parabolic flight missions. For this purpose, a so-called ‘Flight Director’ prototype instrument has been developed that allows for manually flown low-g parabolas of unrivaled accuracy. Starting in February 1996, seven campaigns have been flown in total - six for ESA supporting the preparation of various sounding rocket missions and one for SRON. Use of the facility and its infrastructure can be negotiated readily.

References
1) van den Bergh, L.C., Schelling, R., van Ravestijn, S.A. & Huijser, R.H. (1996)
LIDIA: A New Biological Experiment Unit for Microgravity Research
Proc. 6th European Symposium on Life Sciences Research in Space
ESA SP-390, pp. 345-349
2) Mesland, D.A.M. (1996)
Novel Ground-Based Facilities for Research in the Effects of Weight
Microgravity News from ESA, Vol.9, No.1 (April,1996) pp. 5-10

 

ESA MGDB MICROGRAVITY EXPERIMENTS DATA BASE: THE EUROPEAN EXPERIENCE

V. De Chiara
MARS Center
Ph. +39+81-2347151 - Fax +39+81-2347100
http://www.mars.unina.it
dechiara@mars.unina.it
80144 - Naples (Italy)

MARS Center, sponsored by European Space Agency (ESA), developed a depository of scientific abstracts covering the main results of experiments performed under microgravity conditions. This information was collected and harmonised in order to respond to the need of the scientific community to constantly search for sources in their publication process.
As an User Operations Center, MARS is managing a large amount of data of different nature and format.
Many different data types are collected and limited quantity of these data are available to users. This situation may differ from discipline to discipline being less critical for Earth Observation and more problematic for microgravity experiments.
The objective of the creation of ESA European Microgravity Data Base (MGDB) was to make easy the access to these last data types (microgravity data).
MGDB aims at helping the scientists and students to find the information they need and electronically access textual, graphical and animated information independently from the location of these sources.
MGDB consists of extended abstracts including the objective, the sample, the procedure and the major findings of the experiments in a particular research area. In addition, general information such as the title of the experiment, the name and affiliation of the investigators, the facilities which were used are also collected.
For each experiment, a reference list enables the reader to get more detailed information.
A new phase is envisaged, aimed to:
- collect and insert new abstracts related to experiments performed during recent missions;
- update the existent abstracts with recently published data;
- enrich the existing abstracts with multimedia features;
- submit these abstracts to Principal Investigators to obtain signature and validation in order to ensure the scientific high quality of the same abstracts.
A new very important feature of MGDB is its on-line presence over the Internet and the possibility to perform the "Full Text Query Search" by key words input.
The objective of this paper is to report on the availability and evolution of the European Microgravity Data Base (MGDB), and on the experiences gained.
Presently the future development of the database concept is under study.
The effort will lead to the creation of the so-called I.D.E.A.
The microgravity International Distributed Experiment Archives is a concept under development born from a joint-venture between NASA and ESA aimed to the creation of a database architecture collecting several national database.
In a such way it will be possible to provide the scientific community with a powerful tool for microgravity research and education through the utilization of WWW technologies for on-line access.
User retrieving and consultation of HTML records independently from their data physical location and nationality will be possible.
Information redundancies and overlaps will be avoided.