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.
