CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Brimming with thousands of crickets, snails and other creatures, space shuttle Columbia soared into orbit Friday on a two-week mission to explore the mysteries of inner space -- the brain.
Dartmouth Medical School Professor Jay Buckey is among the seven astronauts on board.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects the mission to provide the best look yet at how the brain and nervous system adapt and develop in weightlessness.
''It's a little bit like a Cecil B. DeMille production: years in the making, cast of thousands, and it went off like it was supposed to,'' NASA's chief veterinarian Joseph Bielitzki said.
The shuttle vaulted into a clear afternoon sky to the delight of the tens of thousands who jammed the Kennedy Space Center in a post-holiday crush. The ship glittered for nearly five minutes as it sped toward the east.
One day late in taking off, Columbia was outfitted with a new data processor to replace one that failed in the final hours of Thursday's countdown. It also was loaded with a fresh batch of crickets and mice.
As if there were not enough animals on board -- 2,052 crickets, snails, fish, rats and mice, to be exact -- a bat tried to hitch a ride.
The small, black bat attached itself to the back of the huge external fuel tank late in the countdown. Launch director Dave King said he was not sure whether the bat was still clinging to the tank when the shuttle blasted off. If so, the bat became toast.
The astronauts quickly began preparing Columbia's bus-size laboratory for 16 to 17 days of neurological tests. Exams -- some of them unpleasant -- will be conducted on the crew and the animals.
Three of the astronauts are from New Hampshire -- Buckey, Richard Linnehan, a graduate of the University of New Hampshire, and Commander Richard Searfoss, who graduated from Portsmouth High School.
The shuttle is carrying 1,514 crickets, nearly half in the soon-to-hatch egg stage. None is old enough to chirp. Also aboard are 18 pregnant mice, 152 rats, 60 snails and 75 snail eggs, and 233 fish.
''One of the big goals of this mission is exploring inner space, or the innermost workings of the human nervous system,'' one of Columbia's four medical men, Dave Williams, said before the flight.
By knowing how the nervous system adjusts to weightlessness, NASA will be in a better position to send astronauts to Mars and establish moon colonies.
The space agency also hopes to solve some of the nagging health problems that afflict astronauts in orbit as well as older people on Earth: insomnia, vertigo, imbalance, reduced blood pressure and weakened immunity.
"When we have gone to space, our brains have had to do a lot of quick thinking about how to adapt to these environments," Buckey previously told The Dartmouth. "How that adaptability works will provide answers to keeping us in space for a long time."
Twenty-six experiments valued at more than $100 million will be conducted during the mission. Among other things, Buckey and the astronauts will be spun on a chair, jabbed with needles, covered with electrodes, squeezed into a decompression chamber and monitored during sleep.
The four oyster toadfish have electrodes in their heads to measure nerve impulses, and 24 rats have temperature and heart rate sensors attached to their skulls.
All of the mice and some of the rats will be killed and dissected in orbit. Most of the other animals will be killed for dissection once they return to Earth. Buckey will dissect some of the rats in the study.
On Saturday, April 24 at 5:34 p.m., Buckey will talk live from space with Daniel Alfonso '99, Erica Brandling-Bennett '98 and Abigail Marsh '99 in the basement of Fairbanks Hall. The College will be wired to the Houston NASA headquarters, which will in turn be hooked up to Columbia in space.
Dartmouth graduate students Joshua Bassett, Yang Hong, Fang Liu and Matthew Tullman will also be participating.
The public will be able to view the interviews in the Collis Center, Kellogg Auditorium and DHMC Auditorium E.
Brandling-Bennett, a psychology major with a neuroscience minor, said Dartmouth psychology professors invited her to participate in the interview.
"We only each get to ask one question since the whole interview will be 10 minutes total and there is seven of us interviewing," she said. "We'll be asking more specific questions about the experiments they're doing with rodents, the weightlessness you experience in space -- more clarifying questions."
NASA chose Buckey as a payload specialist for the mission last April.
He moved from Hanover to Houston last June to begin extensive training for the upcoming mission.
