[ Sound Effects ]
Hello. Welcome to the Space Experiments Laboratory
where we have a breadboard
of the light microscopy modules set up.
The breadboard is a great facility.
It's easy to work on.
We can do optical characterizations
of the confocal add on and the upgraded cameras
and the whole ball of wax in an easy environment.
Why don't you come inside and see the equipment?
[ Sound Effects ]
The Space Experiments Laboratory is part
of the Zero Gravity Facility.
Zero Gravity Facility is a subterranean drop tower,
which gives you about five seconds
of high quality microgravity environment.
I suspect, however, that you're interested
in a lot more than that.
And that's where the space station, the fluids
and combustion facility can give you days, weeks,
even months of microgravity.
A little plug, plug for ASTSR.
So, let's talk about the LMM enhancements
that we've been working on.
They are slated for flight in 2016.
And last year you saw it set up in the GIU rack
in a different building that is a more
flight-like configuration.
But this year we have it configured
on the breadboard microscope that is more amenable
to taking optical characterizations-measuring the
point spread function, looking at the depth of field
and how a particular PI sample looks with the unit.
So, we have the engineering model and confocal unit attached
to the top port of the microscope.
And the engineering unit gives you the standard interfaces
that we've changed around to work better
with the flight hardware.
We have a high resolution digital camera.
A 2K by 2K pixels with a 14-pixel bit depth.
And the second similar camera is attached
for wide-field fluorescence imaging if you would
like to use that as well.
So, as you know, the confocal capability brings finer 3D
sectioning to the table with higher contrast and the ability
to look deeper into a more turbid sample.
But remember that, in addition to the 3D sectioning,
the 2D imaging is also much better with higher contrast
and allows you to look just with a single image deeper
into the sample rather, otherwise you might have a lot
of scatter or flare reducing your contrast.
The last thing we want to point
out is the laser luminator that's coupled here
with the single mode optical fiber.
And we'll go around the table and look
at that on the other side.
So, here we have the neodymium YAG laser package, which couples
over 60 milliwatts of 532 nanometer light
to the confocal head via the single mode optical fiber.
You can see the green laser light on the wall.
Note that it's important
that your samples have a floor four fluorophore
that couples efficiently to 532 nanometers, which is,
works well the filters that are in the confocal head.
So, in addition to the laser head
with their frequency-doubling crystal, we have an attenuator,
which will bring the power potentially down to some tens
of microwatts to avoid any photo bleaching
or saturation of your sample.
And the power of measurement fiber as well
as the main output fiber coupling.
The package also has power conditioning, control
and commands interface, and cooling of course.
The whole box resides on the back of the through rack
to avoid taking up space that the microscope needs.
And the other component here is command and control computer,
which emulates the ground-to-station communication
interfaces, which we use here for testing on the ground.
So, we look forward to seeing your samples and looking at them
on the confocal system.