ISS potential ammonia leak creates delays

As you may be aware, the ISS crew is reacting to a potential ammonia leak. They have evacuated to the Russian module while the situation is resolved. Experiments are minor compared to crew safety so there will be some delay in all experiments till the situation is safely resolved.

Docking and Unloading

Dragon has met up with ISS and things look excellent for unloading tomorrow. During the unloading of Dragon the UFSpacePlant plates will be kept in their cold stowage, to stay dormant. At present the start of the APEX-03 experiment will be on Wednesday morning.

Yahoo! Headed to orbit and the ISS!

We are all smiles here at UFSpaceplants! Holy cow it is great to see Dragon headed to the ISS, finally, and we are all both relieved and excited. We watched the launch from Gainesville and were lucky enough to have weather to see it very clearly.

Now we get down to the business of conducting the experiment: Finalizing schedules, lining up flights to Glenn Research Center for the LMM work, getting the ground controls started, and generally making sure that we effectively move from the grind of get-ready-stay-ready-for-launch and onto the regular cadence of doing the science. A great combination of relief and excitement!

Our thanks go out to all the folks at SpaceX, NASA KSC and NASA HQ that bring this grand event to reality. A lot of work, done by a whole lot of people, makes this happen. We are fortunate to be a part.

SpaceX-5 headed to orbit. Taken from Gainesville on Anna-Lisa's iPhone

Or the 10th!

Seems that SpaceX is working hard on the actuator issue that scrubbed the flight yesterday. The current plan is to prep for launch on the 10th.

UFSpacePlants are still all set with the Cold Stow team.

Scrub today and reload for the 9th

As you are likely aware, Spx-5 did not launch today. Current plans are for launch on Jan 9.

So what happens to the APEX plates that were sitting in Dragon? For this scrub scenario, the APEX kits (the blue Nomex bags with the plates) will be destowed from Dragon but will stay in the care of the Cold Stow team until the next load. What this means for the APEX launch team (us from UF and also the KSC folks) is that only part of the long process of loading will be undone - rather than reset from the beginning we re-back only to the point where the plates and kits are safe in the hands of Cold Stow. That is a benefit of dealing with seeds, seeds that are primed to germinate but that will stay dormant until they get to ISS,

Other experiments are not quite so fortunate and will have to completely reload all their samples. So they will be hustling to re-prepare for the 9th. We have about another week of time before we would have to reback all the way to planting new plates.

If wishing could make it so...

Dragon is loaded and ready to go!

Through the weekend, we from UF and all the folks at KSC have been working through our loading checklists and procedures. Taking care of checking and packing the plates, signing the official documents, and loading the plates into their nomex bags that then get packed by the Cold Stow folks for launch. It is a long process for sure, but it is fun to see it all come together. And not just for our experiment either! As the turnovers proceeds, more and more science teams see each other as the packages are combined for loading.

Here are the UF Space Plants all dressed up and ready to go. The plates are grouped and stowed for each experiment segment. All were then packed in a cold bag for launch and then will be brought out to ambient when the astronauts initiate the APEX-03 experiment on the ISS.

Launch Date is January 6

As you are likely aware, the launch of Spx-5 did not occur in December. It slipped - also called a Launch Slip or Scrub or Push, but they are all ways of saying it didn't happening on time. What happens when a launch scrubs or slips so close to the actual launch date? What does this mean for a biologist with experiments set to launch on that flight?

Well that answer depends mostly on how long the launch has been delayed before the next expected launch is to happen.  Usually when a launch slips right before lift-off, it is usually only delayed a day or so, and most of the time the experimental set-up can accommodate this sort of short delay.  In our case the plants are prepared and turned over to launch as seeds in a dormant state and can easily accommodate short delays. However this dormancy cannot be maintained indefinitely. 

What did this mean for our experiment? Bear with me while I delve into our timeline - Sterile, dormant seeds  are placed on sterile petri plates (see earlier post) approximately 10 days before turn-over to NASA so we can make sure they can be tested, confirmed and generally are good to fly. By the time the dormant plates make it up to the ISS and the astronauts get them unpacked, it will be about 2.5 weeks before the seeded plates are inserted into the plant growth hardware to initiate germination and growth. However the seeds will not stay viable indefinitely, and if the experiment does not get started within 4 weeks of the time the seeds are planted, we start to compromise germination. This means that for a launch delay of three weeks, we replanted the entire experiment this week. Fun!

Stay tuned. Those freshly replanted plates are headed to KSC this weekend for loading into Dragon.