Hello, I'm Jason Hatton and I'm responsible for coordination of Biology and Exobiology
in the SciSpacE Team of the Human Spaceflight and Robotic Exploration programme.
So I'd like to give you a little bit of an overview of the research that we do using ISS.
So the International Space Station, as its name suggests, is international. And basically
it allows you to do very long duration experiments in the spaceflight environment.
So looking at the effect of microgravity, low gravity, also exposure to the direct space environment.
So you can do research in all fields, you can study, of course, the astronauts, how they
react to the space environment. So studying changes in their physiology, you can study
biology, so the cells - which would be cells from say the human body, microbes, plants.
You can study also physical sciences, material science, fluid physics, and also, of course,
you can look outside from the Space Station. You can look at the Earth, so you can do Earth
observation, you can do also observation of the space environment.
The nice thing is because it's an international platform all of the facilities all of the
instrumentation is shared, so that allows you then to do a lot of research and very
internationally. So there's been about 3000 experiments done over the lifetime of ISS,
and those gave about 2000 scientific publications.
One of the areas of interest is astrobiology- microorganisms or microscopic animals in dormant
state, can they survive exposure to the space environment? This is very important to see
whether life could be transported from one planet to another on an asteroid, or whether
if you have, for instance, microbes on a spacecraft coming from the Earth to Mars - how do you
prevent contamination? The other aspect is also how did life originate? There's a lot
of studies on the chemistry which led to life, which may have been going on the primitive
Earth or on the surface of a comet. So we developed an instrument called "Expose" and
this was put on the outside of ISS and allowed exposure to the direct space environment for
typically 18 months to 2 years. And what was found was in fact that many of the microbes
and even simple animals, such as tardigrades (water bears), could actually survive direct
exposure to the space environment for 18 months or so. So that was a very interesting finding.
The other area of course is plant biology. There was actually a whole series of experiments
done over a 10 year period by a team of European and US scientists and they looked at all sorts
of aspects of plant biology. They looked at how plants responded to gravity, because what
you can do onboard of the ISS is you can effectively look at what happens in the absence of gravity
and you can apply, using a centrifuge, artificial gravity and then see what is the perception
threshold for plants to gravity. And that was actually found to be hundreds of normal
Earth's gravity, so plants are very sensitive. One of the experiments which was particularly
nice was an experiment which studied a process called circumnutation. So when a plant grows,
if you look very carefully, it doesn't just go straight up it does a sort of circular motion.
This circular motion was actually observed by Charles Darwin.
Although he observed this, he couldn't figure out what the mechanism was.
You always have gravity on Earth, but
going to the Space Station it was possible to do an experiment where we could take away
gravity, we could apply gravity, we could turn the light on and off, and answer this
question. What was found was, it is internally driven, but it is very strongly affected in
terms of the period, and the intensity, by gravity and by light. So that was a very nice
result answering a question that Charles Darwin has proposed over 100 years earlier.
A lot of the research which is done onboard
of ISS is basic research, but it has relevance to a number of applications. Material sciences,
for instance, you can do much more precise measurements.
Also research, which is relevant
to health. While I'm standing here my body is working against gravity, and of course
in spaceflight, in microgravity conditions, you don't have that. So what happens is, unless
you do exercise or some kind of countermeasures, that could also be with diet, you will lose
a lot of your bone and muscle mass. This actually parallels some of the changes which occur
when people are very inactive, so sitting at a desk or in the eldery, who also have
trouble with mobility. You can look at the transfer between the techniques you use as
what we call countermeasures against bone and muscle loss for astronauts and what you
would do for people on the Earth who also have problems with bone and muscle loss. You
can also do research with things such as nematode worms - these small microscopic worms, they
also have muscles and they lose muscle mass in spaceflight. It turns out that the genes
that control the muscle proteins and the muscle growth are actually very similar to the genes
which humans have. So you can actually study and you can manipulate that process and that
gives you some clues into the mechanisms. So there's a whole series of experiments which
have been done on that. The final thing is, of course, if you're going to Mars you either
take a lot of tinned food with you or you grow your own food during the mission to Mars.
Also to regenerate your atmosphere by converting CO2 back into oxygen. So there's a project
we have called MELiSSA, which is a bioregenerative life support system, so it has plants in there,
it has algae in a bioreactor, it also has a waste-based treatment system. All of the
technology that goes into that also has application on the Earth, if you want to do agriculture
in a very intensive environment- so in a greenhouse, you want to do that very reliably. So that's
also an area where there's transfer. There's many many different transfers of knowledge
which are possible.