NASA MEDIA TELECON ON SCIENCE ON SpX-17 CARGO MISSION, Apr 22, 2019, virtual, 11:00 am ET

NASA will hold a media telecon at 11:00 am ET on April 22, 2019 to discuss science experiments that will delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) on the SpaceX CRS-17 (SpX-17) cargo mission.  SpX-17 is scheduled to launch on April 26.

The briefing will be audiocast on NASA Live.

Participants in the briefing are:

• Annmarie Eldering, project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who will discusshow the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3), to be installed on the Japanese Experiment Module-Exposed Facility of the orbiting laboratory, observes the complex dynamics of the Earth’s atmospheric carbon cycle.
• Gisela Detrell, head of the Life Support System research group at the Institute of Space Systems – University of Stuttgart, Germany, who will talk about Photobioreactor, an investigation aimed at demonstrating the use of biological processes to create a hybrid life support system. On future long-duration missions, this approach could reduce the amount of food, water, and other essentials that crews have to bring from Earth.
• Lucie Low of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the National Institutes of Health, who will discuss tissue chips, or organs-on-chips. Tissue chips model the detailed physical structure of human tissue using cells grown on an artificial scaffold, enabling higher-accuracy disease modeling and drug testing.
• Alan Grodzinsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who will discuss his team’s tissue chip investigation that will study the effects of spaceflight on musculoskeletal disease biology.The goal of this research is to treat the root cause of post-traumatic osteoarthritis disease and prevent permanent joint damage, rather than mask the symptoms with painkillers later in life.