We have arrived in Amsterdam! After a
13 hour flight and a connection in Frankfurt, we have reached the Netherlands.
It is extremely cold here for us San Franciscans, although we did spot several
Dutch without jackets. We tried to beat the time change by walking through the city, but the cold and exhaustion was too much. All of us crashed after we returned to the hotel.
We will be traveling next to Noordwijk,
where the European Space Research and
Technology Centre (ESTEC) is located. Once there, we plan to carry out a dry
run of our experiment - from start to finish. We call it the "Experiment Sequence Test." This includes obtaining donated
blood, isolating the T-cells, and placing the cells in special flight hardware
units. The hardware will then go into ESTEC's microgravity simulator. Members of the European Space Agency (ESA) will be there to assist and coordinate the experiment, which may take over 12 hours to complete.
We already sent supplies for our entire experiment over to ESTEC about 1 month ago - this amounted to over 17 boxes of lab supplies. We need to rest up and mentally prepare for the first step of the EST.
