Changes in operational procedures to improve spaceflight experiments in plant biology in the European Modular Cultivation System

The microgravity environment aboard orbiting spacecraft has provided a unique laboratory to explore topics in basic plant biology as well as applied research on the use of plants in bioregenerative life support systems. Our group has utilized the European Modular Cultivation System (EMCS) aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to study plant growth, development, tropisms, and gene expression in a series of spaceflight experiments. The most current project performed on the ISS was termed Seedling Growth-1 (SG-1) which builds on the previous TROPI (for tropisms) experiments performed in 2006 and 2010. Major technical and operational changes in SG-1 (launched in March 2013) compared to the TROPI experiments include: (1) improvements in lighting conditions within the EMCS to optimize the environment for phototropism studies, (2) the use of infrared illumination to provide high-quality images of the seedlings, (3) modifications in procedures used in flight to improve the focus and overall quality of the images, and (4) changes in the atmospheric conditions in the EMCS incubator. In SG-1, a novel red-light-based phototropism in roots and hypocotyls of seedlings that was noted in TROPI was confirmed and now can be more precisely characterized based on the improvements in procedures. The lessons learned from sequential experiments in the TROPI hardware provide insights to other researchers developing space experiments in plant biology.     

Numerical solution of nonlinear heat problem with moving boundary

Two phase gas–liquid flow in pipes is widely spread in space applications: bubble flows appear in cryogenic components transport through fuel/oxidant supply lines. Another important application is based on the fact that in liquid flows with small bubbles a close contact between the two phases occurs resulting in high rates of transfer between them. The compactness of a system makes it ideally suited to serve as a space-based two-phase bio-reactor which forms an important unit in environmental control and life support system deployed onboard. A numerical method was developed for solving a nonlinear problem of thermal interaction between a spherical gas bubble and surrounding liquid. The system of equations for describing this interaction was formulated. It includes ordinary and nonlinear partial differential equations. The problem was solved using finite-difference technique by dividing the system into spherical layers inside the bubble and employing the new variable which “freezes” the moving boundary of the bubble. A numerical solution is obtained for the problem of radial bubble motion induced by a sudden pressure change in the liquid—a situation which corresponds to the behavior of bubbles beyond a shock wave front when the latter enters a bubble curtain.