NASA astronaut Victor Glover will join other agency representatives Wednesday (Feb. 2) to talk about the International Space Station’s research activities.
You can watch the whole event live at the Destination Station NASA website at 1 p.m. EST (1800 GMT). You must register to join the webinar on Zoom; registration is free.
Along with Glover, the virtual panel will include:
- Jennifer Buchli, deputy chief scientist of NASA’s International Space Station Program
- Christine Kretz, vice president of programs and partnerships at the ISS U.S. National Laboratory
- Liz Warren, senior program director of the ISS U.S. National Laboratory
The Destination Station series is meant to “inform participants how space station research benefits lives on Earth”, along with encouraging new researchers to join the effort and to step up commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit, NASA said in a statement. This is the third virtual Destination Station event; NASA pivoted the decade-long event series to virtual formats following the eruption of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020.
For this edition, NASA will focus on the science experiments and work during Glover’s space mission, Crew-1. Crew-1 was the first operational mission of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and was in space for five months in 2020-2021.
“Throughout their mission, Crew-1 astronauts contributed to scientific investigations and technology demonstrations,” NASA added in the statement. “From studying protein crystal development to … new drug discoveries, to demonstrating robotic assistant technologies, their work advances exploration of the universe while bringing benefits back to Earth.”
“They also grew crops in both the Advanced Plant Habitat and Veggie plant growth facilities, and conducted tests of a new method for producing semiconductor crystals,” NASA added about the Crew-1 science agenda.
Glover’s first (of four) spacewalks in January 2021 was also performed in the name of science, as he helped to connect cables for the newly installed Bartolomeo science platform from the European Space Agency that exposes experiments to the space environment for a few weeks or months.
NASA estimates that more than 2,400 researchers have participated in space station research in the past 21 years, running more than 3,000 different experiments.
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