ASGSB 1998 Annual Meeting Abstracts

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SPACEFLIGHT HARDWARE ALLOWING UNILATERAL IRRADIATION AND CHEMICAL FIXATION IN SITU IN PETRI DISHES.  F.D. Sack¹, V.D. Kern¹, N.J. White¹, K. Anderson², W. Wells², C. Martin³. ¹Department of Plant Biology, Ohio State University, 1735 Neil Ave., Columbus, OH, ²Bionetics Corporation, Mail Code BIO-3, Kennedy Space Center, FL, and ³NASA, KSC, Mail Code CG, FL.

To accommodate a spaceflight experiment with moss (SPM), purpose-built flight hardware was developed by engineers at Kennedy Space Center. The hardware allows sterile culture for an extended period of time in commercial petri dishes, lateral illumination of each culture with light of a specific wavelength (660 nm) and a range of intensities (0.05 to 5 µMol m^-2s^-1), incubation in complete darkness, and chemical fixation to terminate the experiment under conditions of microgravity. The use of a fixative required triple containment to protect the astronaut crew. An external panel on the experiment container allowed the timing of illumination and fixation to be controlled by the crew. Light quality is provided by LEDs that are located in the lid of the outer container, the BRIC/LED canister. Each canister accommodates 6 Petri Dish Fixation Units (PDFUs), each of them housing one standard 6 cm petri dish. All components of the PDFU are autoclavable. LED illumination is piped through a transparent glass rod. Each PDFU contains fixative in a reservoir that is released by the depression of an actuator. This hardware performed perfectly during its first flight, the 16-day STS-87 mission in Nov./Dec., 1997 as part of the Collaborative US and Ukrainian Experiment (CUE). It supported strong and sterile moss growth, cells were maintained in position and were well-fixed, and there was a vigorous and consistent response to light. Although here used for moss, in future flight experiments this unique new hardware can be used for many types of organisms normally grown in petri dishes, with or without a requirement for illumination. (Supported by NASA: NAG10-0179).

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