The International Space Station has all but one of its seven ports occupied by two crew ships and four cargo ships today. With plenty of food, fuel and supplies, the Expedition 59 crew is busy conducting new science experiments delivered to the orbital lab.
The crew researched an array of space biology today including pathogen virulence, immune system changes and upper body pressure that can affect mission success. Human research and life science is key in microgravity as NASA learns to support healthy astronauts for longer missions farther into space.
NASA Flight Engineer Christina Koch continued studying why pathogens increase in virulence due to the weightless environment of space. She performed inoculation procedures on cell cultures to help scientists understand critical cellular and molecular changes that occur on the absence of gravity.
Koch then joined fellow astronauts Anne McClain and David Saint-Jacques in the afternoon exploring how the immune system responds during a long-term space mission. The crew is observing dozens of mice on the orbital lab to characterize the response changes since the mouse immune system closely parallels that of humans.
McClain also participated on more Fluid Shifts research with Flight Engineers Alexey Ovchinin and Flight Engineer Nick Hague. The trio worked with a variety of biomedical hardware today observing the impacts of increased head and eye pressure caused by microgravity. The long-running human research experiment seeks to reverse the upward flow of fluids and alleviate the symptoms reported by astronauts.