We're going to burn some small fuel samples, solid fuel samples in a wind
tunnel aboard the International Space Station. So what happened here is shortly
before the incident the building had gone through some renovation so
cladding were added to the building facade for for energy and cosmetic
consideration. So when fire entered this cavity space the thermal expansion of
the compacting gases and the flow confinement forced the flame to accelerate
and so it spread way faster than usually seen. We know that on Earth hot gas rises
right, so fire is hot so you unavoidably associate it with a buoyancy flow. The
problem about buoyancy flow is it's really hard to characterize and this complex
flow may mask the underlying physics we want to observe. On the other hand in
microgravity conditions we eliminate the the buoyancy flow and instead we can
impose, like in a controlled manner, impose a flow externally. And it's a
small wind tunnel so we actually force air flow past a sample because without
gravity if you just left it burning it would probably go out by itself to be
honest so you need some airflow. But the nice thing that, as Ya-Ting said, we
can control the airflow from zero to any arbitrary value so we can actually probe
that scientifically, get resolution in regions we can't study on Earth at all
so it's very useful. So the main idea here is we would have the astronauts
change the spacing. We moved the black walls in and out and we could change the
amounts that the the distance from the fuel sample to the walls effectively
making a narrow space or a wider space as you heard earlier that the importance
of the fire that we saw on Earth was a confined space so we're looking at that
effect on these flames. The focus of this project is a protein that we call
myostatin which we discovered many years ago and we showed that myostatin normally
acts to limit muscle growth and the dramatic illustration of this was that
when we genetically engineered mice to lack myostatin entirely the muscles in
those animals grew to be about twice the normal size. So all of this immediately
suggested to us the possibility that drugs targeting myostatin that is
blocking myostatin activity could be useful in a wide range of conditions
in which muscle loss or muscle wasting is a problem. And one way to mimic that
type of muscle loss is in microgravity as you've heard where you get the
systemic loss of muscle because of the inability to bear weight. By testing this
experimental drug we are hoping to be able to test a novel therapeutic method
of combating really both muscle loss and bone loss, not only in astronauts in
space but really for a lot of people here on Earth. Imagine if you will you're
responsible for operating a satellite that's orbiting our beautiful planet and
you need to track it and command it so that you can bring down data from it
and then it comes right above you and then it leaves you and that takes about
three to seven minutes. So you get a couple of opportunities a day and that's
it. About a decade ago we started
investigating well what about using infrastructure that's already in space
and guess what have our data downloaded 24 hours a day seven days a week. This
gave us an opportunity to formalize our first spaceflight collaboration with
Mexico through Mexico's space agency. So mission objective number one demonstrate
that we can use the infrastructure already in space, that we
can connect with the global star constellation and have it download our
data. Objective number two is give an opportunity a spaceflight project
hands-on opportunity to the next generation. There is an electronic board
that we actually designed and it's in charge for the communication with global
star satellites and for me to be participating in such a huge project was
like only in my dreams, so it's actually like a great opportunity because it's
also a new career in Mexico. HISUI is named after the bird is an imaging
spectrometer for Earth observation. It can observe more than 100 spectral
bands. Using this technology we can identify minerals and other things from
space. Minerals have its own specific absorption band in spectra. Using this
signature we can distinguish and identify minerals. Distribution of
minerals are strongly related to natural resources. The sensor developed
in Japan is transported to United States and launched by United States rocket and
attach to Japanese experimental module.