>> Pat Ryan: We're talking this morning here with Vic Cooley,
who's the lead increment scientist
for Expeditions 33 and 34.
Vic, appreciate hanging with us as we've waited to find
out when this is going to happen.
Let's start by getting you
to explain what this small satellite deployer demonstration
is all about.
>> Dr. Victor Cooley: Well, thank you, Pat.
Good morning to you.
Yes. It's a pretty exciting day to be here
in the flight control room.
The demonstration of the Small Sat Deployment System is all
about adding, yet, one more capability
to our wonderful Space Station.
You know, the Small Sat, or otherwise known as Cube Sat,
that design was actually engineered by Cal Poly back
in 1999, and it included a deployer.
Now, JAXA has modified that slightly and has launched it
to the Space Station on the HTV vehicle earlier this summer,
and now there are five satellites there,
and they will be ejected when we get to this activity,
which is now probably postponed because of the ATV situation
and the dam, but it is to demonstrate that capability
from a permanently manned orbiting vehicle.
So far, these satellites have been ejected
from non-manned vehicles, which are very expensive to launch,
and the whole idea is about lowering costs.
If we can lower the costs
by these payloads being a secondary payload
on a rocket or, in this case,
on the HTV which is already carrying cargo
to the Space Station, then that makes it even lower costs
for the Small Sats to be deployed.
>> Pat Ryan: So it is a matter of expense as well
as the efficacy of deploying them.
You don't have to have a dedicated rocket
to launch what's really a small payload.
>> Dr. Victor Cooley: That's correct, and, you know,
we want to continue lowering the costs as much as possible.
The costs was lowered substantially just
by having this design that we've had over the last ten years,
and many Small Sats have already been launched that way
from unmanned vehicles.
We would like to have that capability
for the Space Station also.
It's possible to conceive that you might want
to have satellites ready to go that needed some kind
of tweaking or adjustment before you launch them.
They can be positioned on the Space Station,
and then that adjustments,
mechanical adjustments could be made
by the crew members before they launch them
for such dedicated purposes as monitoring disasters
or other natural events.
I'll talk about some of these satellites later
and their monitoring capabilities.
>> Pat Ryan: And is that what the crew members have been
doing, making those preparations,
those adjustments to it?
>> Dr. Victor Cooley: No.
They haven't adjusted any of the satellites.
So we're just in the early stages of demonstrating
that these satellites can actually be launched
from the Space Station with this Japanese SSOD,
the Small Satellite Orbital Deployer -
>> Pat Ryan: OK.
We saw a piece of animation here while you were speaking a minute
ago that I'm hoping we can get set up to run again
because I want to ask you if you can talk us
through the deployment procedure and tell me how the crew
and the flight controllers on the ground are going to work
to actually set these satellites out into orbit.
>> Dr. Victor Cooley: Well, first,
let me talk about the JEM Airlock
and the JEM Remote Manipulator System, or JEM RMS.
The JEM is the Japanese Experiment Module.
It has an airlock which allows the crew to position,
in this case, the satellite deployer in the airlock
when it's, and this is connected and opened
to the pressurized environment.
Then they close the hatch behind the satellite deployer,
and then they can depressurize that airlock
such that now the deployer can slide out into the vacuum
of space and be retrieved by the JEM RMS
and then positioned for deployment -
>> Pat Ryan: So it, to recap that.
The crew members have the satellites inside the Station,
but they attach it to this slide and through the airlock,
present it outside so that the Japanese robotic arm can grab it
and begin to manipulate, put these out to be deployed -
>> Dr. Victor Cooley: Yes, and that's a,
it's a choreographed sequence of steps between the ground
and Aki Hoshide on the Space Station.
So there's, the way it starts
out is Aki will position the satellites on the table,
and he will then close the hatch such that the satellites are now
in the airlock, and the hatch is closed on the inside.
He will then command the airlock to be depressed,
and he will open the hatch on the outside of the airlock,
and this is all by commanding.
He's not physically doing this -
>> Pat Ryan: Right -
>> Dr. Victor Cooley: Himself,
and he will then command the table to slide out, and now it's
out in the vacuum of space,
and the ground will then command the JEM RMS,
or Remote Manipulator System,
much like our Space Station arm which,
but the Space Station arm is much bigger.
This is a smaller arm just on the JEM section,
just for handling external payloads.
So the ground, Sipsy [phonetic] control
at the JAXA Control Center
in Scuba near Tokyo will command the JEM arm
to grapple the extended slide table
with the satellite deployer on it.
Aki will then release the lock
that holds the multi-purpose experiment platform, or MPEP,
onto the slide table, and then the RMS is,
now it's being commanded from the ground,
it extracts that deployer from the airlock slide table.
Now at this point, Aki retracts the table into the airlock,
and the JEM RMS then moves
to the deployed position for the satellites.
The deploy position is pointed 45 degrees away
from nater [phonetic] and retrograde
such that it won't interfere with the Space Station
after the satellites are released.
>> Pat Ryan: What is it
that these satellites are going to do?
You said there were five satellites.
In general, what's the mission of these,
so that satellites once they're deployed?
>> Dr. Victor Cooley: Well, let me talk a little bit
about the satellites first.
As I mentioned, the satellite design has been a standard
for over ten years now, and they are ten centimeter cubes
weighing no more than 1.2 kilograms, or about 3 pounds.
So in this particular case,
there are five of these satellites.
One of them is actually two
of those ten centimeter cubic units.
Each of the, there are two shoots
or JEM satellite deployers,
and tree of the ten centimeter cubes can fit in each shoot.
The first deployment will be done by Aki,
the second deployment will be done
by the Sipsy ground control, but in this case,
the five satellites consists of,
all of them with one exception were designed and built
by students at universities.
One of them was built by San Jose State University,
and that's called [inaudible], and it will,
I need to refer to my notes here.
It transmits elapse time, temperature, voltage,
and current and any error messages
that the microprocessor has encountered over a ham radio.
All of these satellites have solar panels on them
to produce power, and they all transmit signals of some sort,
in this case ham radio signals.
Another satellite which is provided
by the company called Nanoracks, who in turn goes out
and gathers customers who want to launch small satellites.
In this case, their customer is a Vietnamese university,
and that, the students from that university have designed a
satellite that will take images of the Earth
and possibly capture images of and be able
to do shift tracking, track forest fires,
and do atmospheric research.
The other three satellites were designed by Japanese students
or companies, and one of them
that is very interesting is the [inaudible].
This satellite actually has LED's on it
that flash very brightly, but flashing is the key here
because they're not on continuously.
They don't consume that much power, but when they are on,
they're very bright, so bright that you might be able
to see them from ground sites within Japan.
They're described as 100 watts of LED's.
Now a watt is an amount of energy per time unit.
So since they're flashing, you really have to take
out the time aspect of it, but they're extremely bright
if you know how bright LED's can be compared
to regular light bulbs.
The second satellite from JAXA, or from the Japanese side,
is that the one that's actually twice
as big as any of the others.
It's a two-unit satellite,
and it transmits Earth images taken with a fish eye lens.
And the last satellite from the JAXA side takes infrared
pictures of the Earth and transmits those to ground.
>> Pat Ryan: So it could be interesting
to see when it happens.
As we mentioned, the plan was that these satellites were going
to be deployed tomorrow morning, possibly about this time.
That plan is probably going to change as a result
of the ATV not undocking as well as the planning
for a possible conjunction,
but it's another interesting scientific aspect
of what's going on.
Very briefly, give me a sense of what we're going to look forward
to in science during Expedition 33 and 34.
>> Dr. Victor Cooley: Well, in the near term,
I noticed you were talking
about the Space X Dragon vehicle docking soon.
There are two experiments coming up on that vehicle,
one is called micro 6.
This looks at the yeast fungus, also known as the thrush fungus,
which people can get in their mouths.
It turns out that the yeast fungus is actually present
on all of our bodies.
It's an opportunistic pathogen.
It's just waiting for a chance to flourish
when a person's immune system becomes compromised.
And we know from other studies that astronaut's immune system,
just because they're out of their natural environment
and in a micro gravity environment,
their immune system does become compromised.
So there is, you can understand
that there would be a very serious health risk
of the yeast infections -
>> Pat Ryan: Yeah -
>> Dr. Victor Cooley: In this case.
So this experiment actually grows yeast
in the micro gravity environment,
and looks at the genetic changes that happen
with that yeast growing in a micro gravity environment.
Another Sorty [phonetic] experiment, as we call it,
which will go up on the Space X vehicle and come
down approximately 25 or 30 days later on the same vehicle,
looks at plants and their resistance
against gravity on the Earth.
It turns out, this experiment is called resist tubial,
and the act of resisting the pull of gravity and being able
to hold itself up is where the resistance come from.
The tubial refers to structures inside plant cells
that give those cells their strength
so that they can resist gravity.
So there are Earth applications as well
as space applications for this experiment.
On Earth, a plant can spend up to 50 percent
of the energy it acquires from the sun just resisting gravity,
but as we continue to use genetically modified organisms
for our food, plants may not need to spend
that much energy resisting gravity
because they've changed their shape and so forth,
but they still may grow these structures to resist gravity.
So if we can control how much energy the plant puts
in resisting gravity, we might be able
to increase food production for plants on Earth.
In space, obviously, for long duration trips,
it would be very desirable to be able to, for the astronauts
to grow their own food in space,
and that it has space applications also.
>> Pat Ryan: That's great.
We look forward to seeing all that.
Vic, thanks for coming this morning.
Appreciate it.
Vic Cooley is the lead increment scientist
for Expedition 33 and 34.
>> Dr. Victor Cooley: Thank you.