This Thursday at 2:19 p.m., the space shuttle Columbia will blast off from Kennedy Space Center carrying Dartmouth Medical School Professor Jay Buckey and six other crew members into space for 16 days on the NASA Neurolab Mission.
Kevin Hand '97, who worked as an intern at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration last summer, described the mission and its objectives in a presentation to a crowded Rockefeller 1 last night.
Hand said the eight experimental teams on the mission will use crew members and animals as subjects of 26 experiments devoted to studying the nervous system.
He explained that NASA wants to learn more about the brain's reaction to life in space, since the brain is a "chemical factory" that has evolved for four billion years under the influence of gravity on Earth.
The teams hope to discover how human beings might survive on long-duration space flights, such as a trip to Mars, Hand said. A mission to Mars would take about six months in each direction.
The vestibular team on the Neurolab mission will explore the mechanisms for maintaining balance and orientation in space, Hand said.
"Sixty percent of astronauts, when they come back to earth, can't stand [upright] for 10 minutes," he explained. "Scientists are hoping to examine the connection between the eye and the inner ear to see what causes that."
Hand said the mission's mammalian development team will attempt to learn how young rats' gravity receptors form and develop in space. Sixteen days of a rat's life are analogous to two years of an infant human being's life, so the rats' reactions to life in space would be applicable to human development.
He said the team will study "how much of our experience is coded in our genes, and how much is affected by our environment."
Once they return to the planet, the scientists will also learn if the rats are able to adapt to life on Earth.
Hand said one problem astronauts encounter during space is an inability to sleep efficiently. Human test subjects on the mission will have electrodes attached to their heads recording signals in order to find the causes of their insomnia.
One team will study neuronal plasticity -- the ability to form new connections in the brain -- in rats. Buckey will dissect some of the rats in the study, Hand said.
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. Preparation includes parabolic flights aboard a KC-135 plane, which is used by NASA to simulate weightlessness. A KC-135, dubbed the "vomit comet" for its propensity to induce nausea, was used in the filming of "Apollo 13" to simulate outer space conditions.
Buckey is in quarantine this week in order to ensure no contaminants are brought on to the shuttle.
