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| T-cell in space! Astronaut Rick Mastracchio loads our cassettes into the KUBIK centrifuge (photo: NASA) |
We've made it to the ISS! Or at least our samples have. The Dragon capsule berthing was complete this morning, and T-cell was one of the first payloads unloaded. The cold bag containing our experimental cassettes was handed off to astronaut Rick Mastracchio, who performed the on-board operations. While it would be very neat to have been up there with the samples, we settled (happily) for watching a live stream from the ISS.
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| All dressed up to do our ground controls. |
Speaking of our samples, we had a pretty busy day in lab doing our ground controls. In addition to the 10 experimental containers sent to the ISS, we filled four additional cassettes on our long isolation day to stay with us on the ground. This morning, we moved them to a special room that mimics the conditions on-board the ISS. In full clean-room outfitting - hairnet, gloves, lab coats and booties - we then incubated, activated and fixed our ground samples just like our samples on board (with a two hour delay so we could get the exact time between each step right).
On one of our many plane trips between SF and Florida the last few weeks (they all blend together now) we watched the Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which featured a version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity." It's been stuck in our head this past week, and seemed very fitting for this post.
It's crazy to be done with this phase of the experiment -- we've been working towards this for more than a year! Now all we have to do is wait to get our samples back for analysis and the real science (and fun) will begin.
