 Hi, good morning. I'm Charles Brady from the Space Shuttle Columbia, mission specialist number three. I'm standing in front of today an experiment developed by Dr. Reggie Edgerton at UCLA laboratories. It involves measuring arm, wrist, and hand strength. It is well known that in space, over long durations of time, our muscles and our bodies grow weaker. It's felt, however, that the hand and wrist and arm muscles stay essentially the same. Here aboard Columbia, myself and my crewmates are going to accurately measure exactly whether or not this is true. This device I have in my hand right here accurately measures our hand, wrist, and arm strength. It's pointed out on the graph here and given a curve which we can exactly duplicate over time. We measure this pre-flight and four times in-flight and post-flight. Basically involves grabbing the hand-grip diameter and squeezing in various levels of contraction, ranging from 10% to 100%. These are layer plotted out on curves that we're asked to follow in graphs that spike and we're asked to trace these. This will give Dr. Edgerton and his assistants all the data that they need to accurately measure whether or not the muscles in our wrist and arms continue to stay the same or grow weaker. Thanks for joining us aboard Space Shuttle Columbia today and we'll be continuing with some examples of muscle and ball experiments in the succeeding days. Thanks. Welcome aboard Columbia and STS-78, the Life Sciences and Microgravity Space Lab, or LMS for short. My name is Rick Lenahan and I am the MS-1 on the flight and this is Alfie, short for Astronaut Lung Function Experiment. Now Alfie is the brainchild of Drs. John West and Elliot and Kim Prisk from UCSD, University of California, San Diego. And it is designed to measure the physiological processes of gas exchange in the human lung, on Earth, and in space for freefall. Now there are discrete differences which will occur in space and there are four payload crew members who are participating as well as the orbiter crew members in Alfie experiments throughout the 17-day LMS flight. And what we hope to ascertain from these experiments is how the gas flow rate in the lung changes due to microgravity or freefall in terms of how gas dissipates or aligns itself in the lung. Now when we learn things like this, we'll be able to predict how the lung will function obviously in space and we can use that knowledge to determine how things should function on the ground. And with this information we can also hope to understand various pathological processes which occur in the human lung, different diseases that we might be able to study when we have better controls. And additionally we'll use this information for long-term stays in space on the space station and hopefully for long-duration space flight, maybe one day to colonize the planets. All this information will be put to use in one way or the other for long-term space flight and stays on space. Now this router debonair suit that I'm wearing is now called the Mark I mod of the RIP suit. And RIP basically it's a respiratory plasmithography suit which will measure our rib cage and abdomen contractions and expansions while we breathe. And this is measured over on our Alfie KDT here. And with that signal that is routed to the ground, the PIs, Dr. Elliott, Dr. Westman, Dr. Prisk, we're able to determine differences in how we expand our chest and how our muscles function in space when we breathe. It's a very, very important experiment and one of the best experiments I believe to fly on the SLS series flights. We're going to get a lot of good data from it and I'm really excited to be able to participate in this experiment. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. I'm delighted to be speaking to you today on the occasion of Canada's 129th anniversary. Your Excellency Governor-General LeBlanc, to the right Honorable Prime Minister, Taitan, to my fellow astronauts, to all the other distinguished guests there today and to all Canadians. Je vous emploie à tous mes maillons-vous, à la location du Sainte-Ben-Noudium-Anibus Air du Canada. Actually, I'm not that far away. I'm 280 km, but straight up. And in fact, the last time I looked, we were just about to head over Hawaii, which, from my perspective, is not that far from Ottawa. Je suis très heureux de représenter la Canada au sein de cet équipage qui régroupe des hommes et des femmes situés tellement de vous aller travailler. And the Canadian Astronaut Program as well has the same type of spirit as my group of astronauts here on board the Life and Micrography Space Lab mission. I'm proud to be a member of the Canadian Astronaut Program, and internationally, they're also quite well respected. Gianni Trigmasen, one of the Canadian astronauts, has recently been selected for a payload specialist flight. Julie Payette and Steve McClain are recently announced mission specialist candidates, and Dave Williams has recently completed his mission specialist candidacy as now eligible for flight assignment. I'm living an incredible, extraordinary experience on board the Space Shuttle Columbia. This is probably the highlight of my career as an astronaut and of my personal life as well. I feel very privileged. Marc Garneau, who is there with you today, can tell you all about that. De mon poste, dans la fenêtre de la navette, je vois une grande partie du Canada. En fait, ce matin, j'ai vu clairement les villes de Windsor, Toronto et Ottawa. Je sais que le métier est beau aujourd'hui-là. J'ai donc le privilage de souhaiter à tous les Canadiens d'un bout à l'autre du pain, d'une très belle vette et en ce premier juillet. Et je crois que j'ai le meilleur pied dans l'hôtel pour vous souhaiter bien, pour mon vue ici de Canada et de la côte à côte. J'ai partagé avec vous toute la prière et la joie d'être un Canadien sur ce Canada Day. J'aimerais remercier tous les organismes de la Festival Canada Day. Et maintenant, je vais passer au gouvernement Jean-Noir Leblanc. Columbia, c'est WBBM. Comment m'as-tu entendu? WBBM. Loud and clear. We're ready for your questions. Tell me about your conducting medical tests up there and scientific experiments. If you might give me an outline, first of all, of what kind of science experiments. I understand you have a lot of critters up there, rats and fish and such. Four that are being used for an adrenal gland study, but they are taking a back seat to the primary life science experiments, which are the human experiments. We've got four people on this flight that have volunteered to dedicate their bodies to science, if you will, and ever since we launched, and even before then, we've been taking data on these guys from start to finish. They've been doing some circadian rhythm studies, which means that their body temperatures have been measured and their sleep patterns are being monitored. In addition, they're being monitored for their moods and their work performance. On top of that, these guys are also giving blood and saliva samples to contribute to metabolic studies, which are very comprehensive and very complete. On top of that, we've got a lung function experiment, which is helping us understand the mechanics of the lungs in the very basic sense. We can get some data up here in microgravity that you just can't do on Earth as far as that experiment is concerned. Actually, all seven members of the crew are participating in that experiment. One of the workhorses of the life science aspect is the tort velocity dynamometer. We have four separate principal investigator teams that are studying the musculoskeletal system. Everything from very basic muscle function studies, everything down to the microscopic level. These guys have had biopsies on their legs before and after the flight. With all that complete data on the muscles, we're going to learn quite a bit about what happens to muscular structures as we launch into space and stay there for extended periods of time. That's a life science aspect. Would you like to hear about the microgravity side? Well, tell me a little bit more about the reason you're doing that in part is conducting a lot of these studies is because of the concern about atrophy. When you go up into space, you don't have gravity so that you have problems than with your muscles or at least the potentiality for problems. Is that right? Up here, it's really not a problem until you go back to some gravity field to try to stand on the surface. On the shuttle side, we haven't had many problems per se but the shuttle missions themselves don't really last longer than two or three weeks and that's not enough time to incapacitate anybody. In addition to that, we're also doing exercise up here to prepare for the return to Earth. What's the most interesting part of that whole question is what are we going to do when it comes time to travel to Mars? And the trip to Mars as we currently have it scoped out is going to be approximately one to two years and that's quite a bit of time. If you would like to get out and walk around on the surface of Mars when your spaceship arrives, you've got to make sure that your muscles are in good condition and ask what we're trying to capture with these studies, our preventative measures in order to understand how we can do things in the future to keep people from being incapacitated for long-term space travel.