ASGSB 1998 Annual Meeting Abstracts

[85]
COLLABORATIVE UKRAINIAN EXPERIMENTS (CUE) CONDUCTED ON STS-87 MISSION NOV 1997.    DK Chapman¹, G Goins¹, C Johnson² W Piastuch¹ and G Stutte¹. ¹Dynamac Corporation, Kennedy Space Center, FL, ²Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY

The Collaborative Ukrainian Experiment (CUE) was a payload of ten plant space-biology experiments conducted in the middeck of the shuttle Columbia during a 16 day mission which was launched on 19 November and landed on 5 Dec 1997. It was a collaborative effort consisting of 14 United States scientists and 20 Ukrainian scientists. Col. Leonid Kadenyuk, a Ukrainian Payload Specialist, conducted the CUE experiments during the 16-day mission. He was assisted by Commander Kevin Kregel and Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla.

The CUE experiments examined the effects of microgravity on (1) the reproductive process (2) development of the photosynthetic apparatus (3) biomass partitioning (3) susceptibility of plant to fungal pathogens (4) differentiation and phototropic responses and (5) gene expression.

The flight hardware used to conduct the CUE experiments were developed at the Kennedy Space Center. The hardware consisted of the Plant Growth Facility (PGF), Biological Research in Canisters (BRIC) and BRIC-LED. The PGF was used for culture of Brassica rapa seedlings. The BRIC canisters was used for three soybean experiments, while a modified BRIC canister provided red Light-Emitting Diode (LED) lighting to individual petri dishes was used for experiments on two species of moss. The Kennedy Fixation Tubes (KFT) were used fix plant material and a gaseous nitrogen (GN₂) freezer was used to freeze plant material for the soybean and Brassica rapa experiments

Back to Meeting Program