Update for 5 a.m. ET, Nov. 7: Northrop Grumman is now counting down to the launch of the Antares rocket and Cygnus NG-18 cargo ship from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility today at 5 :32 am EST (10:32 GMT).
Ovarian cells from cows are headed for the space station, along with a host of other intriguing science experiments.
The latest International Space Station (ISS) shipment, courtesy of Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus robotic cargo spacecraft, will lift off on the company’s Antares rocket no earlier than 5:50 a.m. EST (1050 GMT ) on Sunday (Nov. 6) from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia. You can watch it live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA Television. Coverage begins 20 minutes before kick-off.
After arriving at the ISS on Tuesday (Nov. 8) and settling in, the bovine cell bonanza (OVOSPACE (opens a new tab)) will study how microgravity affects cell growth . This could have applications for human fertility treatments, the experiment’s co-principal investigator Andrew Fuso told Space.com.
“This is really our first approach, and for now it’s an observational study,” Fuso, who is also an associate professor at Sapienza University of Rome, said during a live press conference on Oct. 25. , researchers will investigate potential pharmacological interventions or edible additives (nutraceuticals) to improve fertility outcomes in future studies, he added.
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Also headed to the orbiting lab is a 3D printer known as the BioFabrication Facility (opens in a new tab), which also arrived in space in 2019 to print human knee cartilage (specifically, the meniscus) and a set of human heart cells.
“We brought [the printer] We’re going back to our lab in Indiana … to add some new capabilities, like the ability to finally control the temperature of each print head, and now we’re excited to see it released,” said Rich Boling, vice president of corporate advances for space manufacturing and operations at the Rewire Space company, at the same conference.
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After another space mission, Redwire will print a new meniscus and study it in the lab to prepare for possible patient transplants in the future, Boling said. Blood vessels and heart tissues will also be manufactured. Rewire also plans to test the effectiveness of drugs in space on “organoids,” or miniature versions of organs.
Boling hinted that this research would continue at Orbital Reef, a Redwire-backed commercial space station under development for flight in the 2030s. The project is led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space, and includes partners such as Boeing and Amazon.
Some of the other experiments debuting in space include, in the words of NASA (opens in a new tab):
- Assessing how plants adapt to space: Plants exposed to spaceflight undergo changes that involve adding extra information to their DNA, which regulates how genes are turned on or off, but does not change the DNA sequence itself. This process is known as epigenetic change. Plant Habitat-03 (opens a new tab) assesses whether these adaptations in one generation of space-grown plants can be transferred to the next generation.
- Mud mixes: Climate change and global warming are contributing to an increase in the occurrence of wildfires. When a wildfire burns plants, the burned chemicals create a thin layer of soil that repels rainwater. Rain then erodes the soil and can turn into catastrophic mudslides that carry heavy rocks and debris downstream, causing significant damage to infrastructure, watersheds and human life. Post-fire mudflow microstructure (opens new tab) assesses the composition of these mudflows, which include sand, water, and entrapped air.
- Uganda and Zimbabwe’s first satellites: BIRDS-5 (opens in a new tab) is a constellation of CubeSats: PEARLAFRICASAT-1, the first satellite developed by Uganda; ZIMSAT-1, Zimbabwe’s first satellite; and TAKA from Japan. BIRDS-5 performs multispectral observations of the Earth using a commercial commercial camera and demonstrates a high-energy electronic measurement instrument. The data collected could help distinguish bare land from forests and farmland and possibly indicate the quality of agricultural growth.
- Space Station Power: Hardware that will be installed outside the station in preparation for the installation of Roll-Out Solar Arrays (opens in a new tab).
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of Why Am I Taller (over in a new tab)? (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book on space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook (opens in a new tab).