International Space Station Crew To Assist With APEX Investigations

April 23, 2014

Imaeg Caption: Project manager John Carver prepares the Advanced Plant Experiment (APEX) at the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The study will launch with the SpaceX-3 mission to the International Space Station. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

NASA

Growing knowledge in a given field takes time, attention, andwater? It does when youre talking about plant studies aboard the International Space Station (ISS). All of these things and some scientific know-how come into play as astronauts find out just how green their thumbs are while assisting researchers on the ground.

The crew will assist with the Advanced Plant Experiments (APEX) investigation, a series of studies on the effects of the spaceflight environment on biological systems. Next in the APEX series is the APEX-02-2 study that launched to the space station aboard the Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Dragon capsule on the SpaceX-3 resupply mission.

SpaceX-3 is the third station resupply flight under NASAs Commercial Resupply Services contract.

Using Petri plates of common brewers yeast, or Saccharomyces cerevisiae, scientists hope APEX-02-2 will help them pinpoint specific changes in the yeasts genetic expression when exposed to microgravity conditions.

Given that yeast is an eukaryotic organism, as are humans, the results will be applicable to organisms higher in the evolutionary chain than bacteria, which are prokaryotic cells. Researchers anticipate that their observations of yeast as a model for how cells adapt to microgravity will help them to better understand how more complex organisms evolve.

Ground testing and processing of the payload took place inside the Space Station Processing Facility at NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Overseeing the project is payload manager Jose Camacho, who previously managed the Biological Research in Canisters-17 (BRIC-17) space station study, which launched on SpaceX-2 in 2013.

Camacho started his career with NASA as an electrical engineer working in the ISS Electrical Power Systems group and then migrated to integration engineer, or systems engineer. I would say my experience as a systems engineer along with an engineering management degree was what qualified me for this position, Camacho explained.

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International Space Station Crew To Assist With APEX Investigations