Feeling weighed down? Feeling the constant pull to the Earth? We all are.
It's gravity, and it's a part of every single thing we do including our science.
But what if we're 250 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station - a
laboratory like no other that offers something we can't get on our home
planet.
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My name is Dr. Serena Aunon-Chancellor, NASA astronaut. I recently flew to the
International Space Station aboard Expedition 56 and 57. My relationship
with microgravity is that I got to live in microgravity for a hundred and ninety
seven days when I was on orbit. So many people ask what is microgravity.
Why do you float onboard the International Space Station? Gravity acts
upon all objects. We're never truly in zero gravity onboard the space station
but because the space station is traveling so fast around the surface of
the Earth, we're actually in a constant freefall and that's why everything and
everybody appears to float onboard the space station.
We are experiencing the
Earth's gravity. In fact we're actually experiencing about 90% of what you all
experience on the surface of the Earth. The difference is we're just moving so
fast that as we fall we actually fall around the earth and that defines orbit
so microgravity means we're not, you know, it's not the absence of mass which of
course creates gravity, but all the objects together are in the same
gravitational field and all falling together. So yes it is a lot of fun
floating around of course it's one of the exciting parts of being up here on board
and being an astronaut, but even more importantly it lends itself to all the
amazing experiments that we can do on board that take advantage of that
microgravity environment to do things that we can't do on Earth but that can
benefit life back on Earth.
The important thing is it's so different than what we
have here on the ground where everything is pulled by the Earth at what we call
one force of gravity. And what that does is it allows you to see the small forces,
the small processes, the small effects of what goes on in life cell development or
technical processes like combustion or fluid flow, and it helps you understand
things that you may not have fully understood on Earth where you see
something happening, something assembling or disassembling, or the shape of
something now going into three dimensions and you learn ah that's really what was
driving this thing on Earth that we didn't really understand.
On Earth, gravity is affecting
all research we do and sometimes that can get in the way.
Studying things in different environments can give a better picture
of how they work. From diseases to fires, and even things that make up products
like milk or shampoo.
One of the main things we perform on the ISS is science
in fact probably 70 to 80 percent of our day is performing scientific experiments.
The International Space Station is a great place to do research for several
perspectives. One of those is it's a big huge satellite orbiting the Earth, so if
you have an instrument that wants to look at the Earth or look out at space
we provide the power, we provide the data, the platform for it. You don't have to go
do your own new satellite. The outside of the ISS is also a very extreme
environment and sometimes you learn things by exposing your hardware, your
your polymers, or whatever to a different environment you'll see something happen
different than what is on the Earth, but probably one of the most pervasive uses
of the ISS is just the microgravity environment. The things that we do inside
the ISS to be able to do your experiment in space without gravity which we've all
lived with forever here on the ground which we live with every day and we
don't even realize how it governs so many things that happen around us. If you
take gravity away now some of the small phenomena, some of the small processes
and forces start to come out and you can see them and you can see the behaviors
of your experiment happening differently in space and in microgravity than you
would on the ground.
It takes a lot of people to make all of that microgravity
science happen. Four thousand scientists companies and students from over 100
countries have sent more than 2700 experiments to the orbiting laboratory.
Over the past 20 years, these studies have unlocked new discoveries and even
kicked off hundreds of new microgravity experiments.
We're studying the
physiology of how blood flow and the fluids in our body shift as the result
of microgravity.
Yesterday I spent some time setting up a Veggie experiment. We'll
actually be growing mizuna lettuce up here.
Drew and I actually have been
helping start a new experiment called the Cold Atom Lab which will create one
of the coldest places in the universe right here on the space station, almost
at Absolute Zero.
But who are these scientists? And how do they get their
research to the space station? This season we'll take you behind the scenes
of the years of preparing an experiment for space. You'll see it launched off the
planet and splash back down in the ocean, and hear what it's like to hand off your
research to the astronauts who serve as the eyes and hands of the scientists
aboard the International Space Station.
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This is our first project that is going up to the station, and our first project
working with anyone involved in the space program, so it's a very exciting
time for us. It'll be interesting to see how all of our planning is played out
when someone else has the experiment in their hands.