 John Jackson and I'm with the students, you know, we have here John Bellinger who is a student with the chicken embryo and a sponsor here, Mark Duzer, who represents Kentucky Prime Chicken. And we appreciate all the support the crew gives us, and we're happy to have the sponsor and the students here. And with that, I'll turn it over to you, John, and you can tell us about your experiment. Well, I'm very excited to be here because it's really one of my dreams that I've been working on for a long time. When I started out in the ninth grade, I thought to myself, imagine this chicken egg in the back of the barnyard. Gravity is causing yoke to fall to the bottom of the egg. Now the hen has a natural instinct of turning that egg around, so therefore the yoke will go back up to the top and gravity pulls it back down to the bottom again. Now what would happen to that egg up in space when you don't have gravity pulling that yoke down to the bottom? How would that embryo develop? From that basic hypothesis, I developed a little broader range of what I'm trying to accomplish with my experiment since the ninth grade. I've gone into what I consider four key areas of science that I'm looking for. The first one is embryo development. Can we maintain embryo development up in space? Can an embryo develop up in space? We can grow a better crystalline space. Is Earth the best place to have children? The second area of interest that I'm looking at in my project is one of bone calcium. I'm sure you're all aware of the bone loss that astronauts experience up in space when they're up there for an extended period of time. And what I'm going to do with my experiment is look at the mineralization and the demineralization process of the bone development and see how the calcification process occurs within the developing embryos of the chicken egg. The third thing that I'm going to be looking at is what I call production performance. I'm going to actually let some of the eggs hatch. Take them through the launch, the space environment, the landing, and see what results. Okay, can we have an egg go through that type of environment and hatch? What type of chicken is produced after it's been in that kind of environment? And we can compare and see, okay, does the bird grow faster? What type of blood quality does it have? The semen production and all kinds of different areas of interest that we can look at as far as the production performance is concerned. Another area that we can look at is what I'd like to term the inner ear. That's one that's responsible for your equilibrium and your motion sickness. And we're going to look at the inner ear of the developing chicken embryo and see, okay, what kind of effect does this weightless environment have on the developing embryo and how the inner ear develops. To obtain the optimum amount of data from this project, I had to divide the age of the eggs into two groups. It takes 21 days for an egg to hatch. There would be 16 eggs. In two days old, there would be 16 eggs that are nine days old. All the studies, I have two identical hardware units. All the studies will be done on a comparative basis. The only variable that will be different is a weightless environment of space. For this project, I have composed a team of seven of the top scientists in their respective field. Two of them are from Purdue, one of them is from Tulane, and four of them are from Boston University. They serve as my scientific advisers for this experiment. As a mechanical engineering student, I enjoy working with the hardware. And the hardware, we have given you all a folder and where we have a hardware, we have outlined what we call a hardware description. And I would just like to take you through some of the things that we've highlighted in that report and explain to you why the hardware is here, how it works. The first thing we have is what we call the ECS, is our environmental control system. What this is composed of is we have an on-off controller that hooks up to the shuttle 28 volt DC power. The controller is on the backside of the front plate. We have five silicon rubber heater strips. The on-off controller functions in conjunction with the silicon rubber heater strips that produce the uniform temperature. By locating the heater strips in that location and by putting the fan and having to act like a ceiling fan, we've created uniform temperature so that all the eggs are seeing the exact temperature. We have what I call a humidity control system, which is down below the fan on the bottom I have what is called a humidostat that senses the humidity on the inside of the incubator and it's an on-off controller. When the humidity gets over a certain level, it turns on an air pump located directly below the squirrel. That air pump circulates air through a desiccant tube. So when the humidity gets over a certain level, the humidostat turns on, turns the air pump on, circulates the air through the desiccant, the moisture is removed and when the air, the humidity in the air gets below the desired level that it'll shut off and it'll maintain the uniform humidity. Because what we're trying to do is duplicate the conditions that the hen provides in the back of the barnyard. And the normal humidity would be 65% and the temperature would be 99.5. Okay, I've put in a timeline within the crew integration. The timeline starts when we load the incubator in the laboratory. The first crew interaction would take place at 24 to 30 hours. The first thing we want to do is what we call a unit operations check. And that's nothing more than making sure that the switch is on, that the power on light is on, and just checking the system out to make sure the fan is running, the system is running. The second thing that needs to be done is temperature and humidity recordings. Now this will be done with the squirrel meter logger. And as you can see, there's three buttons on the squirrel meter logger, A, B and C, like I've outlined in the integration plan. Button A will be pushed once, which will bring up the display. If button A is pushed again, it'll have to be pushed the second time, and it'll come up and it'll say 2-1. And there, at that point in time, this first temperature can be recorded. When button B is pushed, there's four channels, because there's two humidity probes and there's two temperature probes. And once you put push button A to get it to channel two, and then button B will be pushed to switch from channel from the first temperature, second temperature, first humidity, second humidity, and that's a continuous cycle. You can sit here and push button B, like for example, there's humidity, there's humidity, temperature, temperature, and you can just go around the clock rotating temperature and humidity before just by pushing button number B. Button number C will not have to be used at all. That's just strictly to program the squirrel meter logger. Are you manually recording the temperature? Or is it when you say you record the temperature, you're actually recording it in your squirrel meter logger? Right. As an egg develops, it requires more oxygen. So therefore, as the mission increases, the amount of oxygen consumption increases. That's why the crew interactions become at a closer interval towards the end of the mission, whereas at the beginning of the mission, the incubator does not have to be attended to quite as frequently. Because of the oxygen consumption, the eggs are getting larger, requiring more oxygen. So at the crew interaction, what you have to do is open up the hatch door. This is done just strictly by pulling up the airplane fasteners and removing the hatch door. It's tethered, 10 what I call capillary pads. The first pad will be removed at the first crew interaction. The pad will be opened up and exchanged. This packet will be airtight and pre-charged with about 5cc of moisture. The pad will be exchanged. This will be taken off the back of the hatch door, put back on the side, and the fresh one will be taken off, opened up, and put on the back of the hatch door. After the 5 minutes, the hatch door will be put back on. Is it going to affect the moisture content of that if you, I assume you prefer to leave the pad until the last? Right. Close it out. Before the hatch doors close back up. And then what that will do is that will recharge the system with the right amount of moisture. And then the humidity control system will compensate if it goes over or goes under. That will keep it in line. You're saying normal humidity, you're trying to maintain a 65%? Right. What do eggs do in Houston, mate? They get wet feet in mold. Any questions that you'd like to ask? Let me ask a dumb question, John. Because I'll get it from the kids. If you put the eggs in two days before launch. Right. Where do you get the eggs from? Well, we have... Are we talking Florida eggs or India eggs? Yeah, we're talking Florida eggs. What happens is there's a lot of logistics involved in trying to have two different age group of eggs. We have a supplier to Kentucky Fried Chicken at Live Oak, Florida, which is called Gold Kiss Hatchers. And they have rooms full of eggs probably the size of this room right here. And what we will do is we have them set back eggs, like starting 10 days before the mission. So that they have eggs at every day from 10 days on in case there would be any kind of delay. And what we do is we have designed and built a portable generator, an incubator system to carry the eggs from Live Oak, Florida down to the Cape. Then we'll load them up in Hangar El and it'll be loaded like 12 to hours prior to flight. You want us to record the temperatures and the humidity right before we open it. Right. Would it not be interesting since you really don't know what's going to go on in there to record them after you close it? Sure. So you really want to understand how the thing works from an engineering standpoint. Right. You really get an idea for how much mass exchange you get. Right. That'd be great. I mean, as long as you're right in a day, I mean, I understand this way you really wouldn't know. That's right. I mean, I don't know, it's probably not... I mean, as long as you're doing it. Channel 2, second temperature. Channel 3, first humidity. Channel 4, second humidity. Third channel, that is if you want to play back, but that's something you don't have to worry about. You can kind of get a feel. This was from a previous test that we ran. In other words, that's all the temperatures that the incubator would be seeing. That's the time. Now, we're calling the first number, the channel, and then the sub-number, 1, 2, 3, 4, where we call that. That's mode. Yeah, it's a mode. This would be a mode, and this would be... Yeah, the channel number. Yeah. So you go modes, 1, 3, 7, and channels, whatever. 1 through 4. Actually, there's nine modes. Yeah, there's nine... Okay. Yeah, those are kind of... 2's on, channel 3's on, channel 4's on, but that's the thing you have to... That'll be we'll have that done before we start. And then the first channel, it'll flash off. And that's off. Right, it's off. So, okay, I'm going to just... Sure, do it. You're a normal... Party of training. Party of turning on. Right. The mode on the channel... Right. That comes off. Right. We didn't include it. Right, right. Well, what you want to do is once you call it up, then you want to push it again. Otherwise, it's going to disappear. Go ahead and try it. Better feel it. You got it? Yeah, we can do that. And now you've got to hit it while it displays... Right, right, exactly. Okay, that's what I was trying to say. I said sure. I'm going to tell you a bunch of that. Perhaps. Now to step it through... Right. I don't know who runs the... What's the difference? Now see, go ahead and push that again. And you see it goes back to channel 1. You can just stand that. Yeah, you can... Now, this will stay on forever. Right. This won't disappear. Right, exactly. Once you get out of mode 1, it's going to stay whatever mode you're at. Right. And you'd see that piece of Velcro would be going this way. We'd see it in there also. Right, right. There's a Velcro on the outside of the bag. And then there's a Velcro on the sponge. Exactly. This one does not have it. I understand. Because we want to save the NASA-proof Velcro. No, it's okay. Maybe that's all for five minutes. Is there any particular way this goes in? Not really. What we've done... We can maybe mark it if you guys would prefer. But we've... I put that towards the bottom corner. Okay. You would like that. Yeah, right. Is there any reason you want it that way? No, it just... It's just, you know, just to keep consistency, I guess. Okay. Not that we want to change that. Too-produced guys. Can I do this? Sure. I'll just tell you. Anybody at any time, but no... No, we're floating around. I think we've seen that red line all. Right. That's better. Right. Exactly.