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| SSPF as we entered tonight |
The Space Station Processing Facility (SSPF) is the location of our lab. It is midnight on 4/13/2014 and Tara, Miya,
Emily and I have been here since 9:30 PM EST along with our NASA support teams.
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| KI hands over hardware to T Cell Team |
Handover of the flight hardware from Kayser Italia to the T Cell Team in the laboratory before the start of isolation of the T cells.
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| LRS sitting in a 50 ml tube |
It will be a long night since we are isolating T-cells from
the LRS and buffy coat blood bank samples.
We have 10 independent human samples prepared; we use the best 8 for the
experiment (n=8). The photo on the left shows a LRS at the start of
isolation. Isolation is finished around
3 AM; we then start loading the samples into flight hardware.
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Experimental Unit holds four independent donor samples
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Each experiment unit takes approximately 45 minutes to fill
and we will finish approximately at 10AM EST.
That is when Kayser Italia (our ESA hardware maker) begin the leak testing the experiment units. The experimental unit is shown to the right, each cell is filled with T cells from individual donors (n=4) we have two EUs for each condition so the total number of donors is 8 for each gravity condition.
More Pictures of the team:
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| Starting to process our blood samples |
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| Layering blood over Ficoll to separate out the peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) |
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| Adding media to isolated cells |
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| Counting our cells |
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| Filling the Experimental Units (EUs) |
