Saffire is really a series of six experiments all aimed at spacecraft fire
safety fire safety has been a a big concern ever since we started flying you
know crewed vehicles into space a lot of research has been done the trouble is
there's always a crew around and you've got to put it into a into a chamber and
keep it confined and safe from the crew well that's where Northrop Grumman the
Cygnus vehicle comes in it's it's the perfect vehicle for us to do what we
really want to do and that's burn larger samples because it docks to the station
it ends up being filled with trash the crew closes the hatch and when it does
it's at 1 atmosphere and 21% oxygen and then it goes away and nobody's on it
when we ran Saffire 1 2 & 3 the sizes of the samples instead of running
something you know the size of a note card was really something about the size
of this about a meter long and about four tenths of a meter meter wide what
we really want to do for Saffire 4 5 & 6 is to take what we've learned here and
really make a more sophisticated experiment and then also some of our
tests are going to be conducted at a low pressure about 8.2 psi a and 34% oxygen
and if you know things about combustion you start increasing the oxygen level
the fire should become more energetic and those are the kinds of things that
we're going to be doing on Saffire 4
a bacteria phage is a virus but it's a
virus that only targets bacteria not ourselves not human cells so it's these
bacteria that are the prey to this predator this predator being the virus
phage technology and looking at in trying to develop phages can be a new
and novel approach to targeting and getting rid of pathogenic bacteria if
you take a general antibiotic right now most of the bacteria get targeted well
what if you could develop a phage that was highly specific to just the
pathogen now you keep your gut microbiome intact you don't harm
everything else but you get rid of that harmful bacteria now when you put it in
space now we get a new environment because in space the one commonality
about space is at biology changes so in this interaction we know that the target
the host the bacteria which is e coli grows faster will the phage become more
lethal will it become more specific to its its prey its host it's the target
the bacteria or will the bacteria win and become more resistant and be able to
shed away and get away from that that virus how does this happen in space we
have no idea that's why we go to space to do this project space provides a
really unique environment to study the phenomena like like bone and muscle loss
because things happen so much faster and that increases the our ability to assess
drug therapies and and exercise programs that can mitigate the loss of bone and
muscle bone is a living tissue it's not a static piece of rock that's in your
body what we're looking at is that pre osteoblasts those cells are on the verge
of being a mature bone saw which can produce a lot of the bone matrix that
mineralize is it comes south bone the question is how the spaceflight in
microgravity specifically affect the the changes in gene expression but the other
thing we're going to be looking at is metabolic pathways that's occurring on
the space station and that actually follows on with the genomic studies that
we're doing so it gives you a more complete picture of what's happening to
the cells this flight is a second time up for us we flew an experiment using
these cells back in 2016 in this case we're looking at a much tighter
environment and we have a greater number of
the cultures as well this is a scanning electron micrograph that I took from
some debris that was collected by our crew members so currently the ISS has a
blind spot in which we cannot perform this analysis on orbit and it takes
quite a while to get this debris back on Earth and it's an even bigger problem
when sample return is not an option such as for deep exploration of space flight
so for the past few years my small company Vox has been working together
with NASA to extend the capabilities on ISS to be able to identify and study the
structures a very small scale for small scale we're talking about things that
are on the order of one to ten microns and maybe even smaller than that and
this is a terrestrial instrument that we developed initially and extended his
capabilities with NASA the strengths of electron microscopy are twofold the
first is the ability to see very very small structures and down to the nano
scale and secondarily it has a capability of identifying the chemical
composition in particular the atoms and the quantities of atoms inside that
structure looking ahead when we start going to the
moon building gateway and eventually to Mars
this platform which is really a research platform for future exploration will aid
in a number of different ways