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Surprise! Astronauts eat in orbit!

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Space Today Online: Astronauts Eat in Orbit

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STO covers Space from Earth to the Edge of the Universe

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Space Food History

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Space Station | The Station | Living in Space

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Top 5 Foods Astronuats Request

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How Space Suits Work

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Think about how you suit up when you go outside on a cold winter's day. You have your shirt, pants, sweater, perhaps long underwear, jacket, gloves, hat or hood, scarf and boots. You put on quite a bit of clothing to protect you from the cold.

Now, imagine what you would have to put on to protect you from outer space. Space suits must provide all of the comfort and support that the Earth or a spacecraft does, addressing issues like atmosphere, water and protection from radiation.

Outer space is an extremely hostile place. If you were to step outside a spacecraft and you weren't wearing a space suit, the following things could happen:

You could become unconscious within 15 seconds because there's no oxygen.

Your blood and body fluids could "boil" and then freeze because there is little or no air pressure.

Your tissues (skin, heart, other internal organs) could expand because of the boiling fluids.

You could face extreme changes in temperature. For example, in the sunlight temperatures might reach 248 degrees F (120 degrees C) and plummet to -148 F ( -100 C) in the shade.

You would be exposed to various types of radiation, such as cosmic rays, and charged particles emitted from the sun (solar wind).

You could be hit by small particles of dust or rock that move at high speeds (micrometeoroids) or orbiting debris from satellites or spacecraft.

So, to protect you from these dangers, a space suit must:

Have a pressurized atmosphere

Give you oxygen and remove carbon dioxide

Maintain a comfortable temperature despite strenuous work and movement into and out of sunlit areas

Protect you from micrometeoroids and from radiation to some degree

Allow you to see clearly, move easily inside the space suit and outside of the spacecraft, and communicate with others (ground controllers, fellow astronauts)

That's a big job. In this article, we will examine the problems of walking in outer space and how space suits are made to cope with them.

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Think about how you suit up when you go outside on a ­cold winter's day. You have your shirt, pants, sweater, perhaps long underwear, jacket, gloves, hat or hood, scarf and boots. You put on quite a bit of clothing to protect you from the cold.

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Why Wear a Space Suit?

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Space Station | The Station | Living in Space

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History

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As previously explained, they are similar to the modern diving and/or gas protective suits. But in contrast to these two suits, the space suit garment must not only be airtight, resistant to external influences and built in such a manner that it allows movement to be as unrestricted as possible; additionally, it must have a large tensile strength because a gas pressure (overpressure of the air in relation to empty space) of one full atmosphere exists within the garment.

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Sanitation

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Space Station | The Station | Living in Space

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12 Cool Experiments Done in Space

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As an orbiting laboratory, the International Space Station (ISS) offers researchers around the world the unique opportunity to perform experiments in microgravity and under the rigors of the space environment. Scientists have used the station for everything from testing technology for future space exploration to studying human health. Sometimes their work involves some pretty unusual experiments. Here are 12 cool ones.

On Earth, flatworms can regenerate their own cells, replacing them as they age or are damaged. Scientists cut the heads or tails off of flatworms and sent them to the station in September 2014 to study whether the cell signaling mechanisms behind this regeneration work the same way in space as they do on Earth. The results should provide insight into how gravity affects tissue regeneration and the rebuilding of damaged organs and nerves, which is important for understanding how wounds heal-both in space and on the ground.

For humans to explore deep space or live on other planets, we must learn how to deal with the effects of long-term exposure to potent space radiation, which can cause cancer and gene mutations, affecting subsequent generations. Lab mice are important tools for studying radiation effects, but currently, mice can't go to the station. So instead, this investigation will send frozen mouse embryos for a ride in space and implant them into surrogate mothers on their return to Earth. Scientists will use these space mice to study longevity, cancer development, and gene mutations.

In 2012, Astronaut Don Pettit wrote blog posts on behalf of a zucchini plant that was grown from a seed on the space station, one of many investigations on growing greenery in space. The ultimate goal is using plants to provide oxygen and fresh produce for crews on long-term space missions. Gravity plays an important role in normal plant growth and development, though, and not only is gravity nearly nonexistent in space, but plants also are affected by radiation, changes in light, and other factors of the space environment. The anthropomorphic Zucchini and its blog were a way to engage students with space-based research and encourage the next generation of space station scientists.

Fire behaves differently in space, thanks to complicated interactions of fuel vaporization, radiative heat loss, and chemical kinetics. Effectively extinguishing flames in space depends on understanding those interactions. This investigation, performed earlier this month, tested various fire suppressants in microgravity. Researchers found that flames in space burn with a lower temperature, at a slower rate, and with less oxygen than in normal gravity, meaning higher concentrations of materials must be used to put them out. The most surprising discovery was the way heptane droplets seemed to continue to burn under certain conditions even after the initial fire was extinguished. This phenomenon is called "cool-flame extinction." Those who understand conventional theories of droplet combustion say those theories don't explain this behavior, making the cool flames a unique observation with significant theoretical and practical implications.

This two-armed humanoid robot torso mounted in the station can manipulate hardware and work in high risk environments to give crewmembers a break. Robonaut is operated via remote control and can be directed by ground operators through cabin video and telemetry. The half-a-mechanical astronaut also can be controlled by a crewmember wearing a vest, specialized gloves, and a 3D visor. Through this technology, Robonaut mimics the wearer's movements in Wii-like fashion. In the future, the torso will be given legs and used to perform tasks both inside and outside the ISS.

The publicly-accessible, online Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth contains photographs from space beginning with the early 1960s up to recent days. A million-plus of these images were taken from the space station, approximately 30 percent of them at night. These photographs are the highest-resolution night imagery available from orbit, thanks to a motorized tripod that compensates for the station's speed-approximately 17,500 mph-and the motion of the Earth below. Scientists are asking for help cataloging the images through a crowd-source project called Cities at Night. It includes three components: Dark Skies of ISS, which asks people to sort images into cities, stars, and other categories (something computers aren't good at); Night Cities, which relies on people to match the images to positions on maps; and Lost at Night, which seeks to identify cities within 310-mile-diameter images. Ultimately, the data generated could help save energy, contribute to better human health and safety, and improve our understanding of atmospheric chemistry.

Famous explorers kept journals that give us insight into what it took to survive extreme missions, such as reaching the South Pole. Spending months confined in cramped quarters orbiting the earth is one of today's extreme missions, and for this study, researchers asked 10 crew members aboard the station to keep journals. Crew members wrote on a laptop at least three times a week, and investigators identified 24 major categories of entries with behavioral implications. Ten of those categories accounted for 88 percent of the text: work, outside communications, adjustment, group interaction, recreation/leisure, equipment, events, organization/management, sleep, and food. Men and women from various specialties such as science and engineering and both military and civilians participated. Studying small groups living and working in isolation and confinement is like studying social issues with a microscope, scientists say.

This project evaluated funky footwear designed to measure exercise load. NASA developed the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device, which supplies resistance through the power of vacuum cylinders, to give crew members the ability to do weight-bearing exercise in space. Weight-bearing exercise is critical to helping reduce the loss of bone density and skeletal muscle strength that astronauts experience during spaceflight. Four crew members exercised while wearing the high-tech, spring-bottomed sandals, which, like a kind of enhanced bathroom scale, measured the loads and the torque, or twisting force, they applied. The data will help determine the best exercise regimens for safe and effective bone and muscle strength maintenance during spaceflight.

Hawaiian bobtail squids and their symbiotic luminescent bacterium take a ride to the space station. Rather than the start of a joke, this was part of an experiment, performed in September, to look at the effect of microgravity on microbe-dependent animal development and its implications for human health. The squid were inoculated with their symbiotic bacteria once in orbit on the space station and allowed to develop for approximately 24 hours. Researchers closely examined them and found that the bacteria were able to colonize squid tissue in microgravity conditions. The experiment also illustrated the feasibility of using these animals as subjects for microgravity research, so expect to see more squid in space in the future.

For this project, people collected swabs of micro-organisms from museums, historical monuments, football stadiums, and weird places like Sue the T. Rex at Chicago's Field Museum, the set of the Today Show, and the Liberty Bell. Scientists at University of California - Davis transferred those samples to Petri dishes, incubated them to see which grew into colonies, and identified 48 to send to the space station. Scientists need to know how various microbes behave in space before we seal up people and their microbes in a spacecraft for a long trip together to Mars. The 48 samples and identical cultures on Earth will be analyzed to see how their growth differs between microgravity and the ground. Each microbe has an online trading card that tells where it was collected, how well it grows, and some interesting facts about it.

In space, liquids move differently than they do on earth, but the physics of this motion are not well understood. Researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA's Kennedy Space Center performed a series of experiments on slosh dynamics in the station using robotic, free-floating satellites that can independently navigate and re-orient themselves. Researchers hope to design an externally mounted fuel tank that is driven from inside the station by two of these devices to simulate a launch vehicle upper-stage propellant tank and the maneuvers of real vehicles. The experiments will improve computer models of how liquid fuel behaves to make rockets safer.

This investigation compared the behavior of groups of ants in normal gravity and in microgravity and measured how interactions among ants depend on the number of ants in a given area. Eight ant habitats with approximately 100 residents each launched to the space station, where scientists used cameras and software to analyze their movement patterns and interaction rates. Ant colony behavior is a combination of responses by individual ants to local cues, and previous studies suggest ants use the rate at which an individual meets other ants to determine how many of them are in the area. This estimation of group density is needed in many different situations, such as searching for food. When there are many ants in a small space, each ant moves round and round in roughly the same place, but when density is low, each ant walks a straighter path to cover more ground. Data on the ant colony's adaptations can be used to build various algorithms, or sets of steps followed in order to solve a mathematical problem. For example, ant-based algorithms could help scientists develop cheaper, more efficient strategies for robot-based searching and exploration.

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12 Cool Experiments Done on the International Space Station

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Sleeping in Space

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Sleeping in Space video topic is part of Day in the Life Aboard the International Space Station.

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Free Time in Space

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Free Time in Space video topic is part of A Day in the Life Aboard the International Space Station.

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Modern Space Suits

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While early space suits were made entirely of soft fabrics, today's Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) has a combination of soft and hard components to provide support, mobility and comfort. The suit itself has 13 layers of material, including an inner cooling garment (two layers), pressure garment (two layers), thermal micrometeoroid garment (eight layers) and outer cover (one layer). The materials used include:

All of the layers are sewn and cemented together to form the suit. In contrast to early space suits, which were individually tailored for each astronaut, the EMU has component pieces of varying sizes that can be put together to fit any given astronaut.

The EMU consists of the following parts:

Maximum Absorption Garment (MAG) - collects urine produced by the astronaut

Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG) - removes excess body heat produced by the astronaut during spacewalks

EMU Electrical Harness (EEH) - provides connections for communications and bio-instruments

Communications Carrier Assembly (CCA) - contains microphones and earphones for communications

Lower Torso Assembly (LTA) - lower half of the EMU including pants, knee and ankle joints, boots and lower waist

Hard Upper Torso (HUT) - hard fiberglass shell that supports several structures including the arms, torso, helmet, life-support backpack and control module

Gloves - outer and inner gloves

Extravehicular Visor Assembly (EVA) - protects the astronaut from bright sunlight

In-suit Drink Bag (IDB) - provides drinking water for the astronaut during the spacewalk

Primary Life Support Subsystem (PLSS) - provides oxygen, power, carbon dioxide removal, cooling water, radio equipment and warning system

Secondary Oxygen Pack (SOP) - provides emergency oxygen supply

Display and Control Module (DCM) - displays and controls to run the PLSS

Diagram of space shuttle EMU showing its components

Maximum Absorption Garment (MAG)

Spacewalking astronauts can spend up to seven hours spacewalking. During that time, their bodies produce urine. Because it takes too much time to pressurize and depressurize both the space suits and the airlocks/spacecraft, astronauts cannot simply go inside the spacecraft and use the toilet to relieve themselves. Therefore, each spacewalking astronaut wears a large, absorbant diaper to collect urine and feces while in the space suit. The astronaut disposes the MAG when the spacewalk is over.

Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG)

LCVG is a set of Nylon tricot and spandex "long underwear" that is laced with thin plastic tubes. Cool water flows through these tubes to remove the heat produced by the astronaut. The cooling water comes from the space suit's backpack unit or from the spacecraft through an umbilical cord (used in the airlock while preparing for the spacewalk).

EMU Electrical Harness (EEH)

This is a set of communications wires and bioinstruments that is worn by the astronaut inside the suit. It provides connections to the radio and bioinstruments in the suit's backpack. It allows for communication and for monitoring of the astronaut's vital signs (respiration rate, heart rate, temperature, etc.).

Communications Carrier Assembly (CCA)

The CCA is a fabric cap worn by the astronaut. It contains microphones and speakers for use with the radio. It allows hands-free radio communications within the suit.

Lower Torso Assembly (LTA)

The LTA is a one-piece unit that contains the lower half of the EMU, including pants, knee and ankle joints, boots and lower waist. It is fitted to the upper half of the EMU by a metal connect ring. The LTA has loops to tether tools so that they do not float away in space.

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While early space suits were made entirely of soft fabrics, today's Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) has a combination of soft and hard components to provide support, mobility and comfort. The suit itself has 13 layers of material, including an inner cooling garment (two layers), pressure garment (two layers), thermal micrometeoroid garment (eight layers) and outer cover (one layer).