Space to Ground: Packing Up: April 14, 2023

NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station.

What is said in the film

Welcome to space to ground, I’m dan huot. It was a sprint to the finish this week as the expedition 69 crew prepares to unleash a dragon. Before that can happen, the crew will pack just shy of 4,200 pounds of cargo and science inside the capsule to return to earth. Dragon continues to be the main pipeline for us to return large amounts of stuff from station to earth, from completed science experiments ready for analysis to hardware like big nitrogen and oxygen tanks that we’ll refill and fly again. And it isn’t like just throwing your luggage into your car.

Each of the crew will spend hours this week carefully laying out and accounting for every item returning. They also take photos of the packed configuration for analysis done by teams on the ground, calcuating the weight distribution and center of gravity of dragon, a critical piece of making sure everything gets home safe. And critical for return though is the science, with experiments running the full gamut making the trip home. Studies looking at everything from crystal and plant growth to fire safety and muscle and heart health will be taking the plunge through earth’s atmosphere packed away inside dragon. We’ll have dwarf tomatoes grown in our very own space garden helping us learn how to grow nutritious food for deep space explorers of the future.

Crystals testing a new way to develop more efficient solar cells and semiconductors. Stuff the astronauts literally lit on fire, in a very safe and controlled facility, to better understand how different materials react in the spaceflight environment. And blood samples used in one study to analyze muscle changes in astronauts which can help us better protect future crews and help those struggling with muscle loss on earth; and another study looking at how we can treat arteries in your heart when they stiffen, something that can happen to astronauts living in space for months at a time or to everyone here on earth just as they grow older. And because it’s still the best part of my job, let’s knock out a few rapid fire #asknasa questions! Charles asked: when astronauts swallow food in space, how does it get into the stomach.

Does it not stop in the throat or somewhere? Answer: your body doesn’t use gravity to move food and water, it uses muscles. So everything works in microgravity. Try drinking water standing on your head, it still works. Fredriksen asked: how do they get the cargo out of the trunk of dragon answer: big robotic arm (aka the canadarm2) edmund asked: if the iss is 260 miles up, why does the trip take 24 hours?

Straight line, that's 22mph on a rocket! Answer: because you aren’t driving to something sitting stationary 260 miles above you, you’re going to something flying past you at 17k mph that also happens to be 260 miles up. Imagine you had a nine minute drive to get home but in that nine minutes, your home moved 2,500 miles farther away. That's orbital mechanics and lastly darth beetus asked: is coffee consumed in space? If so, does it taste different in space, and what kind?

And the answer is yes and there’s actually a pretty wide selection. Most of the time it still comes in a pouch though like other drinks on station, you just add hot water and drink. Just last week though, an astronaut told me about how drinking out of a pouch made them worry that they didn’t like coffee anymore, because you lose the aroma when it’s sealed behind a straw. But thanks to some ingenious engineering from nasa astronaut don pettit, there is a special space cup that brings the sensory experience of coffee to microgravity without the mess of floating orbs of java. "houston, station on space to ground.

" "welcome to space to ground, your weekly look at what's happening onboard the iss. I'm dan huot. " and that will do it for us this week on space to ground. This is going to be my last one ever, so I just want to close by saying thank you to everybody who's watched over the years. Thank you to all my fellow host.

Thanks for giving me an excuse to grow my sweater collection, and thank you to everybody that's made this show possible, from josh and seth and beth, to everybody behind the camera. Charles, but most of all thank you to dex for making this and so many other moments of my nasa career, the best version of themselves. We'll see you next week. "that's a spaceship behind me! This thing was in space...

like, 20 minutes ago! I"m gonna touch it!

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