 Oh, we had done everybody. If you want to put in the chat, tell us where you're calling in from tonight. Make sure to put the to change that from all panelists. A little carrot going down and make it all panelists and attendees and then everybody else will see it to not just the four of us. Hi everybody. Yeah. Although it still looks like there's two of you, Vivian. Oh, Pratt. If only I could do that. Well, Hermione can figure it out and so I'm sure you can too, so. I hid non video participant. I don't know if that works for everyone, but there's now one Vivian on my screen. They got an error when starting to stream and then it said congratulations your stream is running. Are you streaming? Well, it is the top of the hour and so I think we should start so hello everyone and welcome to the May NASA night sky network webinar. We're hosting tonight's webinar as usual from the offices will actually not in the offices of the astronomical society, the Pacific, but close to the offices of the ASP in San Francisco, California. We're very excited to present the savings webinar with our guest speaker Brandon Radell from NASA Johnson Space Center and welcome to everyone who's joining us on the live stream. We're very happy to have you with us. These webinars are monthly events from the night sky network though we look forward to live streaming them now and into the future for more information about the NASA night sky network and the astronomical society, the Pacific. Thanks in the chat and I think that Vivian will add those at some point here before we introduce Brandon here's Dave prosper with a couple of announcements Dave. Alrighty, I folks wrote this a little earlier and I have to make a slight revision because the big news today was the launch of demo to and Doug and Bob, but that is now delayed due to weather until a Saturday. But if you're still looking for some educational outreach tools to use in conjunction with the launch. That's the stem has released the commercial crew crew launch toolkit, and I'm going to put the link in the chat for everyone here. And I'm going to get the folks on YouTube in their chat for a second to a second to chat. And there we go. You guys just go to NASA stem engagement on social media and they have it right up there too. And the nice kind of work social media pages. And I just wanted to add I also attended a couple of virtual events Friday evening which was actually a wonderful way to close out my week. I just want to wish everyone good luck for doing your own virtual outreach and just remember if you're worried about having a rough start or having a buggy event. That's fine because we learned by doing and we're all learning right now. And. And again if you need to reach us for anything with questions with the program or whatever. You can find us at night sky info at astro society.org, or on a message and social media at night sky network. And of course the awesome Andy Sherwood can also help you out with some program and website tips as well and you can always find Andy at a Sherwood at astro society.org. And that's it for me. Thanks Dave. So for those of you who are on zoom, you can find the chat window and some of you have found that, please make sure that you select all panelists and attendees, it defaults to just panelists, but all of your friends out there would like to know who you are and where you're from, and that way you get a chance to greet them. So again, select all panelists and attendees. Also at the bottom of your zoom window is the Q&A window. Please make sure that you put your questions for Brandon into the Q&A window. We're going to take questions throughout and so if some pertinent ones come up at the time that he's talking about them, we will bring those up at the time when it's very timely with his presentation. So again, put your questions for Brandon in the Q&A window. If you have, let's see, let's track where we were here. So again, welcome to the May webinar of the NASA night sky network. This month we welcome Brandon Radell to our webinar who will share with us some of the, some of the exciting science that's going on the on the International Space Station. We're hoping that we were going to have a launch that was going there. So he's going to be talking about the science, some of the science that's taking place on the destination for the launch that is now going to be taking place on Saturday. So Dr. Radell currently works in the International Space Station Research Integration Office, helping investigators get their research onto the ISS platform. He's also spent over 15 years working with ionizing radiation environments and effects for various NASA missions. He has a PhD in physics from the University of Houston and an MS in applied physics from Johns Hopkins University, with his interest being in high energy physics and space physics. He's only teaches physics and astronomy at the University of Houston at Clear Lake, and he's an amateur astronomer and so I'm sure he could maybe even tell us which club you're associated with if you're associated with and then maybe some of your friends are on. So please welcome Brandon Radell. Okay, hello everybody. Yeah, as you said. I'm going to start my presentation here in presentation mode, feel free to ask questions. So Brian, when I'm presenting, I don't see the Q&A so you may have to interrupt me. I don't see the question list right here, but hopefully everybody can hear me okay right now. Yep, we can. Okay, so yeah, I'm Brandon Radell I work for NASA at the Johnson Space Center in the ISS Research Integration Office and it's actually kind of funny just last week I was out at the prude ranch in West Texas where they normally have the West Texas, or the Texas Star Party, but it was canceled because of the COVID but I was still able to get in about a week's worth of observations so normally here in town we have three clubs in the Houston area and I'm part of the Johnson Space Center Astronomical Society. There's also the Houston Astronomical Society and the Fort Bend Astronomical Society. So let's get on with the talk I have a lot of information so like I said feel free to interrupt. So as we know the ISS is an orbiting laboratory. It's a space station going around the earth it's been in continuous presence with humans for at least 20 years now. We conduct research to aid basically in space exploration and to bring benefits down to you know for human benefits here on earth as well as develop new technologies. I'm going to start our talk I'm going to be. It's really an ISS 101 right it's kind of what why do we do research why the ISS what's so great about it that we can do the research. What are we learning from the ISS and then I'm going to have several examples to kind of go over what we are learning and it's really a broad scope of science range anywhere from human health to black holes, basically, and so that's probably an interest to the astronomy group but really, as you'll see we hit on all subjects and science. So, so why do we, why do we explore. So in order to advance the human race, you know, we must explore it's in our history, specifically Brandon. Do you need to have your slides up, or you resist the pre slides section. Now you've done it Brian. I think so. Oh, no. We just wanted to find a dance time. Yeah, do you. Okay, hold on. You don't see them. You are not. We are not. Okay. I'm just checking the funny here again. It's been doing that lately. It may drop out and then come back and let's see here, because I don't see. Usually I get an indication that of who it is that's sharing their screen and I don't see that at all for Brandon to reconnect this is a great time to mention that spot the station website is a great resource to use to see to check out when the next station flyby is going to happen over you. And that is that I actually saw the station last night, and wasn't sure if I had actually seen it. And I was able to confirm it at spot the station dot NASA dot go. Okay, I'm back. Sorry about that. Sorry about this from home locations rather than the studio works. Okay, so let me share my screen. Okay, let me know if you see my presentation popping up here. Yeah. No we do now here it comes. All right. Sorry everybody. So I should have an presentation mode let me know if the looks good. Yep, looks great. Okay, looks perfect. And why do we explore right we must explore specifically human space exploration helps to address fundamental questions about our place in the universe, our history in the solar system and our the development of the earth. Through addressing the challenges related to human space exploration we expand our technology we create new industries and help foster peaceful connection among nations which is one of the big things that we've done with space station curiosity and exploration are vital to the spirit and in accepting the challenge of going deeper into space will invite the citizens of the world today and generations tomorrow we're aspiring new new people, the young generation. So, kind of looking back in the late 1700s scientific discovery and, you know, people have always been curious but around this time we study trains or maybe even more than even interested. They didn't. Can you guys still there. Okay, dropped out for a moment. I'm going to blame it on the thunderstorms that you've been having. Yeah, it's we've yeah we've had a lot of thunderstorms here. So also funding funding sources weren't around so one of the first ones though after some of the early late 1700s explorations by James James Cook. Kind of led to the first funding of Charles Darwin's expeditions on the on the Beagle. So what kind of benefits come from research and space. So we're enabling future exploration we're making scientific discoveries. We're impacting life on earth with with those discoveries there's all sorts of spin offs that are used to advance our scientific knowledge and inspire new science. The ISS represents the most substantial capacity to do research and lower orbit today and probably for the next decade or so. When we look at the ISS as a whole people really want to know what is the benefit of the, what's the return to the people the taxpayers who pay for this. And it just, it doesn't just rest on science alone. And real quick just in case you don't know the ISS is very big so here here's an image of what it would look like over, let's say the size of a football field, or for the European friends over the size of a soccer field. It's 925,000 pounds. So it's approaching a million pound craft in space. Very large volume 32,000 feet I've heard people quote that is saying it's equivalent to the five bedroom house a story a five bedroom house. Lowered orbit so we're orbiting every 90 minutes at 17,000 miles an hour and it's basically got laboratories laboratories from our for international space agencies the US Europe Japan and Russia. So let's talk a little bit about the engineering achievement. So, so the first area. I want to talk about is this engineering achievement and again this kind of relates to what taxpayers might be interested in. So as you saw in the last picture the station is very modularized right it was built in elements brought up on various vehicles. These individual modules were actually built from different countries they never were fit checked on the ground and they were first time was brought up on orbit and made it together on orbit so had it been very remarkable tolerances to make this sort of work out. The modules also are interchangeable. We work through different engineering processes between the different countries and so forth to build something this large is quite an achievement in itself. And on top of that just the operation of this which continues on to today. Working 24 hours a day seven days a week, 365 days a year just continuous the amount of planning the logistics to support. Not only all the science but but the folks living on board. And so, we have a question from Jason that seems to fit in here he asked, yeah, how much power does it use and generate each Earth Day. So I'm going to talk about that on a later slide but it's around 80 kilowatts of power. So we have four large solar array cells, big wings, 160 volt arrays generating power and I'll show you a chart later on where we talk a little bit about that but it's in a kilowatt range. So another achievement the international achievement. So this has been really important for the American people. So think about this for a minute, you know, when this was first starting up, you know, we're shortly after the Cold War. I think about what it means to work with the Russians. You know what we hear on the news is quite a different story than our actual work in relationship with them. And, you know, some of the younger folks in their 20s and so forth might not remember what it was like but certainly a lot of us in our 30s 40s 50s 60s and older can probably appreciate that that there was a lot to overcome there just just on that alone. We'll make it look easy now, working with them and our international partners but there's a lot of diplomacy involved and international meetings and agreements and barter agreements and so forth. Yeah, that's another achievement that we have. I'll just keep going if there's any more questions. We have a question from Steph but I suspect that you might get to it. A little bit later she has power experiments chosen or selected for the ISS is there a petition process. There it is so there's a proposal and I'm going to talk like you said a little bit about this but the short of it is is that, you know, we have sponsors of research. You know, there's usually a proposal research call and people respond to those and get funding that way. Usually, working through academic institutions or NASA themselves or other government agencies. And then I'll mention some some of the details of working with the US National Lab that allows the folks from industry, also academia and other locations to bring science on board station as well. That's a good question. So, excuse me, let's go back scientific achievement. So, I guess, you know, the question is, you know, the stations built we're not really building it anymore. So what's carrying this forward and that's really the scientific endeavor that we're in right now. We're currently in this era of research and technology demonstration. So the value, the value from this alone will carry the ISS forward and help us convince the government, you know, for more funding to continue these bringing these benefits down to earth and so forth. We'll always get questions about, you know, the universe and science in general so there will always be a spark of interest to do the research. And then on top of that we're seeing a huge benefit on the ground and improvement for humans here on earth as well so there's additional benefits, both for our health reasons and for business sense and so forth. And so those are the kind of questions that are driving us forward as well. Speaking of the commercial side, here's a picture. So this is a Cube set being launched off of space station. So we're just now seeing, I mean, we've been working with commercial companies for a while. You know, we have SpaceX as you talked about today, you know, launching our first crew, we'll also have Boeing and soon we'll have Sierra Nevada. The company is bringing up commercial cargo for five five years or more now so it's just continuing to spark the government and other eight commercial industry partnerships as well as new businesses to. And also I'd like to mention this summer, this last summer, NASA basically announced plans to basically to expand commercial capabilities and low work orbit and, and introducing these, this concept called private astronaut missions where companies can actually send up their own astronauts or even purchase time with with the current astronauts to achieve some of their business goals up in space. Okay, so, so here's some interesting stats for you. So this is basically through increment 60 which pretty much was through the end of last year. We're currently in increment 63 right now. 61 62 we don't have the numbers in yet, but you know they'll go up just a little bit from what I'm showing here. But basically we have 108 countries participating. Basically any other research or education on the ISS. When you look at the total number of investigations at any given time we're up around 300 at any given instant, but over the course of the lifetime of the station we've had almost 3000 different investigations. So in general, almost half of them are US led, you know, closer to 40%, maybe but with each with each increment pair we have generally new investigations coming on maybe as much as a third or so. We've had over 4200 investigators involved in in last count I've seen from our statistics is eight over 1800 scientific journal publications. And a lot of factors and flowing influencing research on the ISS. So we have a suite of factors that, you know, can decrease the demand for using ISS as a laboratory. Some of these are resource limitations like how much up mass we can bring up on each rocket launch and down mass and then the premium is crew time how much crew time do we have available for the astronauts to help in the science. Operational things like, like, like EVAs for instance, and last year we did the AMS EVAs and that's a, that took a big hit and science crew time available for science last year. And so there's also various cost impacts. The cost of the payload development itself or, you know, the processes involved to bring experiments up on station and working through the safety processes and all the hardware integration issues and things like that. So we've been working to streamline that quite a bit and made tremendous progress and we continue to always streamline this and make it reasonable but at the end safety is a real big issue for all experiments going up on the space station. So you can think of that as the weighty side pushing, you know, the teeter totter down but on the opposite side there's several factors that increase the demand. You know, one of them is just research demand that NASA funds research on ISS, so we get grants to do research and people come in and do the research. There's also non NASA funding. That's very important to especially coming in from industry. We have pharmaceutical companies are good examples of this. They see strategic and advantage advantage and contribute something that they get to produce and prove their products and market here down on earth. And then also there's the big visible science the big breakthrough science that drives a lot of the research demand. And so usually that comes with full funding on the NASA side and so forth. And so it's a finally tuned balance beam if you will of balancing all these pros and cons. So I mentioned that national lab. So in 2005 Congress passed, you know, basically law stating that, you know, designating the ISS as a national laboratory so it's very much like something like Los Alamos National Laboratory right so this this is a laboratory that's up in space. And with that, there's an organization called ISS National Lab. And through them, we can do non NASA research where, like I was talking about like, so folks from industry and academia have a way to bring science into the national lab side and I'm going to talk a little bit about where we draw the dividing line between these two here in a few minutes. Oh yeah here we go. So, so yeah if you look at this picture here. This is sort of a graphic. And it's not exact right but it's showing the, the disciplines of where we do science. It's a wide range from bio, biology and biotechnology human physiology and performance under human research. We have technology demonstration we have physical science, and then earth and space science and education. And so you can think of these boxes here that, you know, the more they are on the blue side is more weighted towards the type of research that NASA does whereas on the orange side, more what National Lab seems to focus on so you know, if you look at earth and space science, it's kind of like a 5050 mix between the two. The way the crew time works on Space Station. Basically, after we honor our international agreements with our partners, the remaining crew time is split basically 5050 between NASA and National Lab. So the National Lab tends to focus a lot more on education whereas if you look NASA is mainly focused in human research tech demos and physical sciences. A lot of that's because of our exploration balls. So, why do we do research Brandon here's an interesting question and so William asked a question. If Tom Cruz really does go for and I'm belushing this a little bit if Tom Cruz really goes makes a movie how are they going to code their time for, you know, hosting him and the movie crew. Yeah, that's actually a good question I don't know but I suspect coming in through these private astronaut missions there's there's a lot of guidelines and I'll show you the link towards the end of the talking and you're welcome to go look at that but there's actually a document that breaks down what it costs, you know, to use the crew and, you know, because it takes resources to bring other people up there right they have to. There's living space there's like food and stuff like that right but but then there's the time, you know, it may take away from other systems level work and things like that so. There'll have to be an agreement of some sort work and to be honest I don't know how that that is this will be the first time right but it's my I suspect it'll come through on this private astronaut and commercial agreement. It's one of the first kind of uses of that. That's a really good question, but to be honest I don't have the full answer. That is a good question. So, so yeah why do we do research on ISS. So the first and most obvious reason is the microgravity environment. You know gravity is a constant force on earth, right we can't get away from it it affects everything on earth. It cannot be completely controlled or removed in the experiments here on the ground. It often dominates and sometimes it masks other forces and play during our experiments. It provides a laboratory environment where gravity is essentially gone. And so that opens up the visibility into deeper science and mechanisms operating research. Also the ISS is a low earth orb, you know, in low earth orbit it has an amazing view. So that's a very attractive for earth observing instruments as well as deep space instruments and we'll talk a little bit about those. And then technology demonstration. You know there's a whole suite of investigations looking to use test, you know ISS here in low earth orbit where we're relatively close to the earth where we can have the flexibility to bring instruments back and forth, you know make make tweaks here and there and send them and try them out, you know before we actually have to do this for real on a four day mission to the moon or somewhere like that. So that's very important for technology demonstration and then also we're exposed to very harsh conditions. Not only do we have the vacuum of space, we have very extreme thermal conditions from being in full insulation versus the, you know, shadow, and we're exposed to the trapped radiation belts and galactic cosmic radiation. The upper atmosphere we have atomic oxygen that has huge effects on materials and then there's also micrometeoroids so we're exposed to all these things and we'll encounter these on any long duration mission. So it's a good place to test out materials and how well our instruments work. So let's talk a little bit about, let's see cell biology on ISS. So this is a kind of interesting graphic. We know cells live in a fluid environment, and they respond to the force of gravity here on earth right through the typical mechanisms or convection and something called sedimentation. So this graphic is a nice demonstration or summary of what happens when you bring a cell to space cells have funny shapes on earth. They're not perfectly spherical but when you bring them up in the into microgravity they suddenly become very spherical. They swell up too. It looks just like blobs of water you see you know the astronauts playing with on TV how you see them when they push water out into the cabin and make the surface tension forces pull that water together and it makes a perfect sphere. And so what we see in cells though is that but but inside cells there's we see that gene expression changes in the cytoskeleton or the structure inside the cells. So we see changes in signal transduction on the way cells talk between themselves. We see differences in their differentiation. You know what kind of cell turn it turns on what it what does it grow into we see totally different processes than we do on on the one grab one gene on the on the ground. So one of the most important changes we see in terms of earth applications is this process called tissue morphogenesis which is a fancy way of saying the way that you know the way that lots of cells kind of come together to make tissue for instance that that's totally changes in space tissue morphogenesis looks more like it does on on the ground than it does in one G what we're trying to show here on this bottom right side is to grow tissue on the ground you have to have some kind of structure to have the tissue to form a shape around something like that so in space you don't need that internal structure. So that lets you actually grow tissue in a manner that looks more like the way our organs really are for natural processes so that's very important. Why do we use model organisms. So you may know that we we bring animals flies worms and so forth fish up there. You know so research on bacteria yeast insects worms fish rodents plants. They also basic operating principles that are nearly the same in all living beings. That's one reason why they study them in general whether you're on the ground or in space. So bringing up convenient ones in space is very helpful. You know, for instance, looking at rodents, right that can shed light on if we can shed any light in space and the absence of gravity on biological processes and rodents, there's a good application for humans here on earth. Organisms generally grow quick quickly compared to earth samples. If you think about the lifetime of the human versus the lifetime of rodents, the typical one day, a typical expedition on the space stations about 180 days. That's somewhere around 30% of a rodents lifetime so so you get, you know, a lot more testing done throughout their lifetime processes and that can be attributed and studied and applied to earth humans as well. One is there's a NRC decadal survey 2011 had strong recommendations for bringing rodents, really for the emphasis of understanding human physiology and processes, ultimately, the benefit us for long duration flight. So, basically in a response to that NASA's developed a rodent research program it's been operating now for quite a while. First launch was I believe in space X four. We're currently on space X 20 was the last cargo ship. The visit station so it's quite a while ago but on that mission we brought up 10 NASA mice and 10 cases or national lab mice, looking at different. We just sort of had different objectives the NASA side is evaluating sort of hardware and, you know, how do you really do rodent operations in space and and on the national lab side they're had pharmaceutical companies already kind of looking into evaluating like muscle atrophy or something like that. Animal research can be a touchy subject when we talk to folks, but we often remind people when you look at all the Nobel Prize winners and medicine, you know 70 out of the last 100 have been involving human or animal research stuff. So this is well in line with processes and studies and research on the grounds. So plant biology. Plants are quite interesting so I got a couple pictures here I'd like to walk you through. So plants growing on the right. On earth we know plants you know like roots like to grow down and leaves and branches grow up right towards the sun. And so what people know is that there's basically some redundant systems that kind of make this happen. But what we see in microgravity is that things get confused and what I mean by that is if you look at the top right. Well actually before I talk about this the systems that we're talking about is basically like a light sensing system. And a gravity sensing system right by sensing gravity roots know up and down right and same thing with the source of light where it's coming from and so that helps plants orient themselves and that's important. So if you look on the top right here. Excuse me. This is a picture of moss grown in the dark. And so on this is on a this was a space shuttle flight actually my microgravity just like space station. So we don't have the advantage it was grown in the dark. So no light and no gravity. And so what happens the mouse doesn't know where to grow so grows in all directions and so you get this funny kind of shape here. On the bottom, you can also see sort of this middle graphic here with the earth and like a gravity soil structure. So on earth, if you think about it, when you have these particles in the soil and you have surface tension of water in the rocks in the soil, water tends to attract to the gravity tends to pull it down but also attract to the rocks but once you're in microgravity you're only stuck with surface tension around the rocks and so you don't get water settling down you sort of get it evenly distributed. So, this can, this has had a hard time for us, given us a hard time and growing plants on space. We've often drown drown plants because too much water, not being able to respond properly with a root system that's oriented the right way so this this is a big issue. And if we're trying to grow our own food sources on a long duration mission, this is, this is something we need to understand for a long duration of flight. Let's see how am I doing on time about 836. Okay, we're doing good we've got a couple questions here that this looks like a good time and so we have one that said, and this might apply to any of the organisms that are send up. How do the mice or the plants survive the trip up to the ISS from the earth. So, so they, they're launched. You know they, they, they survive the trip, just like humans do. You know, they try to the individuals craft or certified for, you know, low frequency vibrations and so forth and they try to minimize that on the well, the well padded and so forth and they're they're put in containers that, you know, protect them as well. And so, it's really not a whole lot different than you know the human surviving the short duration transit to station they're often in a pressurized vessels so there's an atmosphere and so forth so it's really not all that different. I know I, I know the scientists look at this but there's an adaptation phase just like the humans have and you know so they have to take that into consideration as well but but the animals are well, well kept and it's not as dramatic as some of the older films showing these high speeder entries it's it's kind of quite the opposite on the up, up flight so so it's not all that different is what I would say. Okay, we've got one other question that seems to fit in in here and so I'm guessing that the astronauts on the ISS are probably very rarely the ones who actually designed the research experiments that they're doing. And so, how are they trained to conduct the selected experiments on station. Yeah, so yeah so they're, they're trained on the ground before they go so they spend, depending on the experiment and the procedures. They spend a lot of time working with the principal investigators going through actual procedures. So they, they're trained pretty well. One of the science is, you know, crew time is very limited up there so they tried to optimize the procedures. Try to involve the crew as little as possible but there's, there's some, there's some times where they have to do some work on the animals and so forth so. So they're well trained and doing this beforehand so. Yeah, just say it's good training. So one last question then we'll move on here and so this this actually sounds like a really interesting when Suzanne says it. It sounds like the plants, like our plants are genetically pretty predisposed to grow with gravity and or son would we need to genetically modify these plants to be able to grow without gravity. Yeah, so so that's a good question I don't know that answer and I don't know if that's really a true statement if it's a genetic thing rather than just an environment. Consideration so I do know. You know there are a couple experiments looking at, especially like radiation effects I'm going to talk a little bit about that but affecting the seeds and what what that might do to the growth of certain plants, especially the ones for food or something like that but so that that's still active and brand new research but as far as. So there's been a lot of experiments where we've done good plant growths and you may have seen on the news plants, like, like the astronauts eating lettuce various types of lettuce and cabbage and so forth. So, so we have a good understanding of how to grow grow the plants now but in the first stages, really not understanding the surface tension forces and soil and maybe over watering them and overcoming things like that. They can still grow plants even if the light sources are off to the side if you think of it that way. So, balancing the direction they grow in by the light source location and developing a good water watering filtration system. They're able to still grow the plants. So I'm not sure if it's more of a genetic thing or not that's a little bit outside my expertise. I'm more of an astrophysicist but I would say that all that knowledge is very active research right now so there's still a lot to learn in that for that to grow that and look at the genetics of plants. Okay, so let's see I'll try to speed this up something so I got about 1520 more slides here. So real quick on on human physiology. You know so the human body really puts all these things that I've been talking about together right we're looking at physical forces fluid physics forces cell responses. And complex systems and internal and so, again, long duration human performance in space is a big research area and so what I have bulletized here on the right side or are sort of the major areas that we're looking at the neuro vestibular system cardiovascular bone muscle and immunology nutrition behavior and of course radiation. Those are all active research still going on to this day. And we're learning quite a bit. So, let's move over a little bit to the physical sciences so hopefully this video in the bottom right will be playing. And I have it in loop mode so let's keep playing it if it doesn't. Great. So, and I'll talk about that here. So, so, so if you think about on earth. So how do your rises cold air kind of fills in from underneath and you get circulation that's sort of what the bottom or the top left corner showing right that that's sort of how, if you think of airflow that drives that's what we call buoyancy forces and so in microgravity we don't have these. So that's a big problem. So when you're talking about convection or combustion, like in the bottom left, the far left is a standard candle frame that we're all familiar flame that we're all familiar with but in space that same plane looks like that on the right. So it's here, it's become spherical. On the bottom right now. Again, looking at buoyancy, and we play this again. So we, on the, on the left side of that right bottom right frame you see what water boiling on earth would look like but in space, you can see that you just kind of get one large bubble, right it doesn't, it doesn't move up. The air kind of gets bubble trapped in and one larger bubble and it just builds. And so that's kind of behaves a lot differently when they started first seeing this. And so this affects a lot of systems that have. We had to deal with phase changes between gases and fluids. We also see the same buoyancy effects or lack of them affect how combustion works in space so these are big areas of investigation. So we've got lower, lower earth science, lower earth orbit science, in particular earth observation. ISS platform is a great place to look at the earth. We do all sorts of from anywhere from still camera images to hyperspectral imaging using high def cameras and so forth. The unique orbit of space station let's us see about 9096% of the populated portion of the earth. Basically about 85% of the total earth surface. So it makes it a great platform to sense and look for all sorts of effects, seasonal effects. It's different from a geo satellite that looks that hovers over the same spot and just sees the same location all the time. Space station doesn't do that. So we were able to respond to look at natural disasters as well as look at climate change effects and all sorts of things. As far as these remote sensing. This is just sort of a graphic showing all the possible types of things that we have instruments looking for. So, like I already mentioned climate science and hazard assessment, and there's a lot of mapping, soil mapping hydrology, all sorts of things like that. We haven't, we haven't experiment looking at water content in the rain for instance. So, so it's a great platform to look at the earth and do this. See, so astrophysics and fundamentals so if we look in the other direction, depending on the location on the station, we have great views to deep space or, you know, towards the sun. It kind of depends on the science but we're above the earth's atmosphere where we miss all that interference from the atmosphere that a lot of us ground astronomers often see. So that makes an ideal location for astrophysics instruments. And so forth. So, and I'm going to talk a little bit about these but in particular the nicer instrument which is the top left picture and the ams instrument on the top right. Just giving you an idea on the outside of the space station. I'm going to give you the space station flying towards you. And these yellow circles are the various external payloads locations pointing with arrows pointing to various experiments out on the space station. So I'm not going to talk about all these in detail but later on I'll give you a link if you want to find out more information. So in the experiments, you might be interested in on some of the externals. And then also, so in lower orbit. As far as I kind of mentioned this earlier looking at these external environment effects and how they affect some of our technology development and demonstration. So there's been a huge surge in the focus of technology development and demonstration area, especially the more we're focused on exploration. The reason we do, we do the development and demonstration is really because the reliability is so important. The further we get away from earth and more critical that reliability is. And so the ISS is a place where we can prove some of this and raise what we call this technology readiness level. There's enough to that we can use it maintain and understand it and implemented in some of our art was there like our lunar missions or even our Mars missions coming up. Some of the technology demonstration areas just just snapshot. But we have, we have technology demonstration experiments and hardware and just about all these categories. And from human rated systems robotics communications and entry entry descent and landing systems space power and injury all sorts of all sorts of things like that. And so a lot of this can be linked to we have an ISS technology demonstration plan plan. And it's also linked to NASA road maps and visions for the future, developing future technology for missions. And finally in the education outreach area. Astronauts are some of the most iconic and recognizable spokespeople for NASA right we inspire, we inspire students to get excited about stem science technology engineering and math. You know through interaction and observation of the ISS astronauts performing scientific and research experiments and interacting with them. Students and educators learn stem through lots of different examples some of which are partnerships that we have with the National Center for Earth and space science education. Also, a program called established program to stimulate competitive research EPSCORE. There's competitions robotics kind of, you know, there was something called spheres robotics competitions and something called genes in space. And then we have all sorts of programs where students can. There's something called the Sally ride earth cam students can task the require images and astronauts run this camera system and it's almost automated and they can capture images and use them to study geology and some of the climate stuff. There's also other programs like hunch, engaging high school students to help build ISS hardware and so forth. So there's a lot of outreach and education area. So what what we do on ISS in terms of research is so broad that really nobody can really know everything there is what's going on and what comes from all the research we're doing it's just too hard to quantify. The knowledge on these experiments is often used to produce outstanding products or processes that benefit life here on earth, as I mentioned, when we talk about the benefits there's really three types there's what we call peer discovery, future space sex, you know, stuff benefiting enabling future exploration and then there's earth benefits. I'll talk real quickly. I'll try to wrap it up here but I got a few a couple of examples here. So, for instance, what are some of the benefits so. So for vision, for instance. So one of the important things we've learned on a long duration missions in space which will apply for long durations. I'm going to take a moment or Mars is about 60% of long duration astronaut mission current astronaut missions and 29% of the short duration astronauts have experienced significant decrease in eyesight. A portion of that is a portion of those percentages, you know, some of the some of that's been recovered but a lot of a lot of it they haven't. And so that's our last prescription. There's been changes up to a half to one and a half the two diopters on your prescription side. And so that that's a big deal for vision loss and vision changes. This is still an active area of research. We have various experiments looking at eye pressures and so forth so here's a picture of Karen Nyberg using this fundoscope to image her own eye for ocular health. So, so this is this has the opportunity to help both, you know, not only for the astronauts on these long duration missions but also for ground base and regularly us regular folks here on the earth, trying to understand what's going on with their eyes and how that changes over time. Another area, drug development. And this is really big, especially given the commercial, the commercial demand and increase that we're trying to promote one area. We call it crystal growth protein crystal growth PCG really when you're microgravity you can grow more uniform and larger crystals than you can on the ground and so some of the drug companies have been studying these since 2002. Some of the Japanese have identified new molecules by growing these proteins and in space. These new molecules that are more effective at reducing expansion of muscle necrosis. For instance, that's just one example. So, these particular results have led to improvements in like the study for muscular dystrophy, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, for instance, these are just some of the examples. PCG experiments can also lead to new therapeutic drugs and delivery methods that can reduce or eliminate the visits to the doctors, for instance, here on earth. Given that it's right prescription and dosage and so forth. The company works used ISS research to develop subcutaneous formulation of the immunotherapy drug ketendra ketudra, which is currently administered via an IV. So, if that's successful this helps reduce pain and discomfort inside effects and cost as well. So these are just some of the applications. An area called regenerative medicine. The US Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 22 people die every day while on the transplant list due to organ shortages. So manufacturing organs is a big deal for for that and for a really long duration flight. I kind of talked a little bit about the problem of growing tissues and microgravity on earth because you need a support structure so in microgravity. They grow. It's all connected and it looks more like a normal human tissue it doesn't you don't have to worry about dissolving or removing and damaging the tissue by support structure like we would on the ground. There's something called the bio fabrication facility. It's a platform for researchers to do to print organs we call it a human it's like a 3D printer for human organs. And so that that's under development it's up there and we're the first stepping stones to, you know, long term plan to manufacture organs, human organs in space, using 3D printing techniques. And also, if you look on the bottom, sort of bottom middle right, an astronaut holding this chip on a glove that's called a tissue chip. They're basically miniature models of living organ tissues that the model structure mechanical forces and physiological function of various human organs so those are sent up quite frequently and study those interactions, which all have benefits on the ground. Let me skip. I know we're running out of time here but let me go to. So this is an astronomy group so let me talk a little bit about some of the astrophysics here on ISS. We have something called maxi nicer am so to and Cal a maxi is a basically an all sky X ray observer. You may have come across and literature it's been up there for quite a while. It's looking at x-ray sources and it has it's responsible for the first documented evidence of a supermassive black hole consuming a star. Because of the need to monitor and detect x-ray events maxi is really important for the astronomy community for when it detects them it through the astro telegram it alerts the all the ground base and other satellite community to sources is quick in a very quick manner so that they can target their own instruments. It's revealed the evidence of a hypernova the first one we believe to be in our galaxy it's got a couple papers on that. Also, one of the brightest black holes ever seen since 1999 there's a lot of studies on that and so forth so if you also some links here in a few seconds that lets you go and find where some of this research is but I encourage you to do that if you have more time. The ams experiment alpha magnetic spectrometer is looking for evidence of dark matter. It's also looking for anti matter from the original big bang creation. You know, when when matter was created in the first moments of the big bang. Where did it all go that's a big question is all we see is regular matter. And also looking at cosmic with propagation and understanding of cosmic rays, because those are problematic areas for radiation and long duration space travel and stay to. And then finally there's this instrument called the nicer instrument. It's the neutron interior composition explorer and it's probably has dozens of papers in the last six months. It's just finding so much information it's a another x ray imager. It's 56 x ray tubes, finally tuned and can target various portions of the sky. But we're looking at with this instrument we're looking at how maybe new states of matter might with very high densities and temperatures such as that is the interior of a neutron star. We're also looking at how cosmic accelerators work and especially looking at x ray events and so forth. And then really what controls a mass radius and spin of certain stellar quantities nicer when it's combined with other instruments, other satellite instruments. We're looking at x ray binaries, black hole binaries, all sorts of processes. And then we're looking at what the march and the nature magazine made the cover nicer did where they actually had the first sort of evidence of the shrinking corona of a black hole being detected, going from about 100 kilometers down to 10, and nicer through its precise timing was able to detect this, this, this effect. So, I don't have a lot of time to go into all these details, maybe we can talk to that about another time but the next question is. I know we're just about done here but where can you find a lot of this information so I'm kind of scrolling through this pitch that we can make available. I'd like to encourage you to go to. So there's, there's a web page called the space station research explorer. That lets you, basically you can put in, you can do a keyword search on any type of science or there's tabs, you look on the right side picture here there's tabs that let you look in different disciplines and and you can just type insert words you'll find experiments and that leads you to. We lost you there for a moment. So you think we lost Brandon back in a second, the story. Here's just as Dave, I also have storms in my area but it's been okay so far. Well, we could have looked at the weather radar to see whether there were hope we really lost him. The weather radar to see whether or not there's, you know, some really big cells going through his area. And he's back. Actually, okay, I'm back, you guys there. Yep, we're here. We figured you must have had a big cell come through or something. Yeah, I just really have one more slide and then I can take some questions but let me put it back in presentation mode. There's also this, if we're, you know, we just kind of hit the very light surface. Yeah, share your screen so that we can see. Yeah, let me do that here. Let me just talk it you guys still there. Yeah, if you want to turn that way that way we can see you too. I'm trying to act and funny you on me right now. But be thinking of some questions while I try to get this working but here we go. Let's see. So we've got a, do you want to just walk that through and then I'll go to a couple of questions. Oh, here we go. Excellent. Excellent. Sorry about that zoom kind of went flaky on me there for a second. I just wanted to show just so that you guys can see it. There's a, we're in our third edition of this ISS benefits for humanity book and so it really goes into a lot of detail to really a lot of some of our group members put a lot of effort in producing this this has got some really good information of what we're doing on station and if you just go to www nasa.gov slash station benefits you can get access to that. If you want email access, you just go to this website at the top here. It takes you to a forum you just put in your email address and you can get live updates. I think it's almost weekly or could be daily. I can't remember what it is now but you'll get updates on current research results and activities going on currently on station and you have it all right there so that I'll just leave this page up and try to answer some questions but this is really the meat of it I have a lot more information but not enough time to go through it so I hope you got something out of it. But I'll be happy to take questions. Yeah, this is great. And so I know that we've got a number of questions here about just kind of the orbital mechanics and dynamics of the station but since this is about the research let's kind of stick with those questions and so the idea of the vision loss seemed to resonate with some of the people. And so there was a couple of questions I'll kind of lump them. Did the research tend to show that they were my more my op or more presbyopic and was there a correlation between the vision loss and the age of the astronauts. Yeah, so that's a good question. I probably have to defer you to the research on some of that because number one is still an active area of study and I don't believe it's correlated even between male and female I'm not sure if they're I think there's kind of distributions on both sides I'm not sure if they have enough data points to make a, you know, stick, significantly statistic of fine like that but there's certainly what's interesting I think I'm trying to look up the numbers I was quoting. So there's been a suite of astronauts that have stayed on what we call long duration missions, you know anywhere from six months to a year or over a year and then certainly shorter missions and you have sort of different percentages of folks and then even within those different distributions of results. So I can't really give you a better answer on that it's probably tied up in the research and it's still a very inactive a very active area of research right now. Okay, so one of the areas I know that the radiation environment and space is a concern. So do the ISS astronauts where those simitors during their time on station. Yes, definitely. So they, they all have personal dissimilars and we have a lot of dissimilars mounted all around the interior of space station and we, we have new ones coming up and going all the time. And we even have some coming up with some, some of the experiments to help correlate some of the findings, you know, with particular radiation events and so forth. So, yeah, radiation is very well, well documented and we have good models now that we can predict a lot of it, given solar conditions and so forth. So one of the things I know is a concern is, is if there's a coronal mass ejection or an event on the sun, and they have a protective space that they can go to that's a little more protected is that true. Yeah, yeah, there's certain, yeah, there's certain areas in station that are more shielded than others and so there's there's a group called the space radiation analysis group that essentially sits on console and monitors solar weather and they're they're tied into some of the actual assets and so forth and when, when there's a sense of solar storms coming and that it's going to be a problem for, or not really a problem but that they'll be elevated levels. They can make recommendations to the flight team and, and, you know, if it's, if it's high enough it doesn't happen often they can direct the crew to take shelter for a certain amount of time. And so that's, you know, as we branch out into demonstration, and we're developing radiation dissimilars and instruments that are tied into like the caution and warning system of the spacecraft so that kind of get more of a real time warning to the crew as well so we're working on things like that too. Okay, we're going to go for just a couple more questions here and so we apologize for all of the really great questions that we're not getting to. So we have a question about what kind of behavioral changes do we do you sometimes see with the astronauts due to the microgravity and the environment in on station. You mean like once they return or while they're up in space. Yeah, or both. Yeah, so to be honest, it's a little bit outside my expertise area but what we all know that, you know, exercise is a big thing right so we know that they pretty much wrecked exercise every day and we find that the more they exercise, the better they are from when they return to Earth. We lost you again. Dave Vivien are you with us. Yes, I am. So Brandon stop sharing. Okay, so that's gone so I'm back. So why don't we go ahead and let me do one more question because I think that this is probably and we'll call this this good. So Suzanne and maybe this is more of a statement than anything else so Suzanne notes that she wishes that the news idea would emphasize some of these really cool research and layman terms that people can understand. So the general public would understand the importance of the research done on ISS I had no idea the extent of the advantage of doing research up there. So, yeah that's that that's always been a big problem so we're we're making a big effort in our group and working with better websites for instance the benefits for a humanity book. Let's get the word out. We're doing our best but you're right I mean it could be better. You know within the research community, obviously a lot of folks understand the benefits and so forth but you know I would say for the lay person, you know the average person not hearing a lot of this that that could be, you know, there, we could be better at advertising that, but that that is a good point and we need to be better at that for sure. So that's why we have you on with this group to so to help better, you know, distribute and disseminate all this great research that's going on so. Appreciate it. All right. Well that's all for tonight thank you very much Brandon for for joining us this evening and thank you everyone for tuning in. This webinar along with many others on the next Sky Network website in the outreach resources section. Each webinars page also features additional resources and activities. We will post tonight's presentation on the night sky network YouTube channel within the next few days, and then join us for our next webinar on June 16, when and you actually alluded to this a little bit. I'm going to share with you an announcement from the NASA's space portal office is going to share with us the present and future of commercial ventures in space. And so that kind of goes right along with some of the things that Brandon was telling us in this presentation. So, it all fits together eventually doesn't it. Oh yeah. What's exciting times right now to so it is. Well thank you very much Brandon this is, this is wonderful. I'm so happy that we were able to connect with you I'm sorry that we had a couple of technical glitches but let's blame it on those pesky thunderstorms. Moving through the Houston area. Yeah, I'd be happy to come back another time, you know, and elaborate more on some of the more specifics. Thank you very much for going a little bit over I know we try to protect the time especially because not everyone is in the Pacific time zone like we are so it does have an impact. We had one of our presenters actually was in Pakistan they were exactly 12 hours opposite of us and he was up at 6am. Well thank you so much and I will send you and rose I think it is the final numbers for this so that you guys can add it into your. Okay, outreach numbers. Sure. It sounds great. Well thank you so much Brandon. Okay. Take care and we'll look forward to seeing you again in the future. Yep. Appreciate it. Thank you for the opportunity. And keep looking up everyone and we'll see you next month again that's on June 16 for our next webinar. Good night everyone.