Neuroscience in Space

Astronaut Anne McClain performing the European Space Agency's Neuroscience experiment, "Time Perception in Microgravity" (Source: NASA). In this experiment, the crewmembers wear a virtual-reality headset and perform a series of activities that indicate their "feeling" of how much time passes in different scenarios. You can see that Anne is freefloating - this is because we want these perceptions to be removed from any physical inputs.

This book arrived in the mail last night - I ordered it weeks ago but this isn't considered an "essential item" (I beg to differ!!) so it was only shipped out recently.

The book is Neuroscience in Space by Gilles Clément and Millard F Reschke.  Published in 2008 (the same year that the Columbus Module was flown on on the Atlantis Shuttle with mission STS-122 and attached to the ISS), these scientists reviewed all the neuroscience research from the Shuttle program and from the Russian MIR station. The book is a technical description of the state of the art - what was known in 2008. I've been curious about the brains of astronauts for a long time so this will be my new bedtime reading. I'm sure that space-medicine folks have all read this text, but I'm a physicist so I'm a bit late to the game. 

The authors of this text, Gilles Clément  and Millard Reschke are both active in the field of Space Neuroscience. Gilles Clément has worked as the director of the French Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and is a researcher at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center in France. We are familiar with Gilles Clément at ESA because he has research payloads on the ISS right now. In fact, here is a list of the ISS Neurology Payloads he's been a part of: 

• 3D Space - Mental Representation of Spatial Cues During Space Flight This experiment started in 2008 and finished in 2011. The purpose of the Mental Representation of Spatial Cues During Space Flight (3D-Space) experiment was to investigate how astronauts perceived two-dimensional depictions of three-dimensional images (for example, a line-drawing of a box) - and how this changed in microgravity and after spaceflight. 

• BRAIN-DTI - Spaceflight induced neuroplasticity studied with advanced magnetic resonance imaging methods This experiment started in 2014 (Increment 39) and is ongoing. The overall objective of this research is to determine whether biomarkers of neuroplasticity in vestibular signal processing can be found using the model of microgravity. In other words: how does the brain communicate with itself and how does this change in microgravity? 

• PATTERNS - Patterns of Acceleration and Navigation on board the ISS . This research looks at the normal patterns of head and body accelerations experienced by astronauts during adaptation to microgravity. Also, it looks at the strategies adopted by astronauts in order to navigate around the ISS. 

• PERSPECTIVES This was a technology demonstration - the commissioning and testing of a Virtual Reality headset -  developed by the French Space Agency (CNES) for the 2016/2017 Proxima mission of ESA Astronaut Thomas Pesquet. This VR headset was then used in the experiments GRASP and Time Perception in Microgravity (both commissioned by Thomas Pesquet). 

• REVERSIBLE FIGURES - Perspective Reversible Figures in Microgravity This experiment ran from 2012 (Inc 31) to 2014 (Inc 40). The objective of this experiment was to identify, for a series of ten ambiguous figures, how long it took for the crewmembers to mentally reverse the image - and how many reversals the crewmembers experienced in a given period of time. Researchers found that, after adaptation to microgravity, ISS crewmembers developed larger depth perception instability, manifested by an equal probability for seeing each 3D interpretation after three months in space. 

• SPIN - Validation of Centrifugation as a Countermeasure for Otolith Deconditioning During Spaceflight This experiment started on the ISS in 2007 (Increment 16) and finished in 2012 (Increment 32). This research looked at how gravity sensing reflexes between the inner ear vestibular system and the visual system is affected in microgravity. Particularly, this investigation focused on these otolith-ocular reflexes and the correlation with the development of symptoms during upright standing such as changes in heart rate, blood pressure, and cerebral blood flow that can be relieved by sitting down.

• Straight-Ahead in Microgravity  How we perceive the direction of "straight-ahead" along the horizontal and vertical meridian is largely determined by both otolith (the structure in the inner-ear which is part of the vestibular system) and somatosensory inputs (a collection of sensory inputs in the central nervous system). These are both altered in microgravity. During spaceflight, adaptive processes are take place within the central nervous system to take into account the new environment, and compute new spatial egocentric and world-centered representations or frames of reference. The Straight Ahead in Microgravity investigation measured and monitored how these frames changed over time by investigating eye movements and crewmember's reporting of their own perception.

• TIME Perception in Microgravity This experiment started in 2017 and continues through today. ESA Crewmembers Alexander Gerst and Luca Parmitano have participated in this research. This experiment looks at how someone's sense of time is changed in microgravity. For example, if I were to ask you to estimate how long a minute is, what would you say? (incidentally,  my own perception of time is always wildly off. I can NEVER estimate how much time has passed and I'm perpetually late to things!)

I've only had a chance to scan the chapters of this book so I see that there's a lot about perception of the body in space, body posture, and adaptation. I gotta be honest, when I started reading about space motion sickness, I started feeling a little ill myself. The authors write, "After long-duration spaceflight, full recovery of balance, as measured by a posture platform, takes up to four weeks. However, some crewmembers felt like they did not return to baseline until between ten weeks and five months later."

Wow. Five months. That's a long time to feel unbalanced! I was immediately reminded of the first time I lived/worked on a U.S. Navy ship. Because the ship is constantly rocking, it's hard to maintain your balance while you stand and talk to a shipmate, while you walk down the passageways, or while you stand in front of the sink to brush your teeth. I got into the habit of bracing myself while I brushed, leaning forward and resting my hips on the sink. For days after returning to solid-ground, I would often feel like the ground was rocking, and I continued to brace myself when I brushed my teeth!

Hello.

ESA's Space Station Activities

ESA Astronaut Tim Peake conducting science for the Airway Monitoring Experiment (Source: ESA)

ESA and our partners have a lot of different activities we do on board the ISS during a given increment (or increment pair).  There are five main categories for these:

ESA Research: These projects are selected through an Announcement of Opportunity, or AO. This is basically a call-out from ESA to any scientist who has an idea/project that needs the special conditions of space in order to do their experiment. Besides the ISS, we have other platforms to do microgravity research. These include the Parabolic Flight, Drop Tower, Sounding Rockets, and Retrievable Capsules. It's neat that we have the ability to discover how something might work in microgravity without needing to put it up on a rocket and load it onto the station. Scientific proposals go through a peer-review process to evaluate their scientific merit.

A graphical depiction of how science and technology payloads are actually selected for the ISS (Source: ESA Twitter)

These proposals are then evaluated for technical feasibility. The ESA science team works with the principal investigators (PIs) to develop an Experimental Science Requirements document (called an ESR). This basically outlines the scientific objectives, what hardware will be needed, and the different steps that will need to happen in order to collect this data (I'll write more about ESRs later). This process is managed by Dr. Jennifer Ngo-Anh, the team lead in charge of the Science Program for ESA Human Space Flight. Any necessary hardware is then developed and testing is done, and (after a bunch of other really intense steps)  the payload finally flies. A huge chunk of the ESA activities we put onto the station are ESA research. As a scientist, I have a big soft spot in my heart for them. So many of them are wildly interesting. These get at really key questions in science: they examine how fundamental physics and chemical and biological processes work differently in space, to how the human body is affected by the radiation and microgravity of space. Also, some payloads use the altitude of the space station to look at the earth. There's a neat payload called ASIM which looks at the weird things that happen in the upper atmosphere when there's a storm on Earth.

This is the Zarm Drop Tower in Bremen Germany. Zarm delivers 4.74 seconds of near-weightlessness up to three times a day. The microgravity time can be doubled using a catapult system. From the bottom, the catapult propels experiments upwards to fall back. (Source: ESA)

Technology Demonstrations: These may come directly from ESA or may be part of a National Space Agency. These include semi-autonomous robots which are controlled by astronauts to do things here on Earth  - such as collect rocks or clean off solar panels. The German Space Agency DLR has a little spherical robot called CIMON which is meant to float around and be a companion for crewmembers - helping them with their tasks, playing music for them, and cheering them up when they feel sad. There is also an air purification system called Life Support Rack which recycles carbon dioxide on the Space Station into oxygen. In general, these technology demonstrations are proofs-of-concept - exploring technology that could be helpful in future space missions.

Okay, so I had to add this comic on the Technology Demonstration robot, Supvis-Justin. Once again, this is the work of the ESA public affairs team, me, and the brilliant Ed Grace. (Source: ESA Twitter)

Commercial: ESA has a number of commercial partnerships. There's ICE Cubes, a facility that rents out little cube spaces to commercial and academic researchers on Earth who want to test something in microgravity. This is basically plug-and-play. If your experiment/idea can fit into a little box, it can be flown to the station and plugged into the ICE Cubes facility. Also, there's  Bartolomeo . This was uploaded on SpX-20 a few months ago. On 24-25 Mar (GMT084-085) Bartolomeo was extracted from SpaceX-20 using Canadarm robotic operations and put onto the exterior of the Columbus module. This is an external balcony to Columbus - so science experiments and technology demonstrations can be exposed to the hostile conditions of space.

Education:  The future of space science rests on the next generation - so it's important to snag these future scientists and engineers early and bend their minds to our space-investigation ways mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha (evil cackle). We have teams developing different education activities for the astronauts to perform and film for students everywhere. There's also a really neat payload called Astro-Pi - which uploads and runs student codes to an onboard Raspberry-Pi computer on the ISS.

Facilities Maintenance: Of course we need to make sure our facilities are running properly, so we always allocate time and activities to maintenance.

So, that's basically it. These are the activities we do.

Here's a summary of the ESA objectives which we accomplished in Increment 61/62 (this increment pair rain between 03 October 2019 and 17 April 2020). Eventually, if my bosses agree to let me release it, I'll share the plan we're looking at for the upcoming Increment 65 activities.

Ten months out from Increment 65

I'm focused on planning for Increment 65 which, according to NASA's 15-June Flight plan, is scheduled to start on 01-April 2021 when the crew of the 64 Soyuz comes up. At this point, the flight plan is super uncertain, so it's difficult to plan. This is particularly true when planning for human physiology. For example, the flight plan currently lists no names for the 64 Soyuz. This doesn't mean that crewmembers aren't targeted for this, it's just that there's enough flux that we don't know for sure who these might be.
At the moment, the flight plan tells me that between April and October 2021 there will be as many as six crewed vehicles. These are:

• 63 Soyuz (3-person crew) - returning just after Increment 65 starts (within the first two weeks of April 2021)
• 64 Soyuz (3-person crew) - The up- and download of this vehicle currently defines the boundary of Increment 65 - coming up in April and down again in October 2021. 
• SpaceX-Crew-2 (4-person crew). At the moment this is projected to come down some time in the summer months 2021.  
•  Boeing Crewed Flight Vehicle (3 person crew)- currently projected sometime in this increment
• US Commercial Vehicle -Crew-3 (4-person crew). It isn't known whether this will be Space-X or Boeing. This will come up a little while after Crew-2 comes back down. 
• 65 Soyuz (3-person crew). This will come up at the end of the increment, right before the 64 Soyuz heads back to Earth.

As you can see, we're looking to have between 7 and 13 people on-board the ISS at any given time. Also (fingers crossed) we may have two ESA crewmembers in this increment (one on Crew 2 and one on Crew 3). This is really awesome for us space scientists because it means more people able to do science for us. But it's also complicated because the space on the ISS is limited. This means a challenging work/living environment for a lot of people. It may also impact the science. Sometimes a payload will take up the entire space in a laboratory like the ESA Columbus module. For example, ESA has a payload called "GRASP" which requires that the crewmember be suspended in the center of the laboratory wearing a virtual-reality headset, and complete tasks while his/her movements are tracked by cameras (this is actually pretty cool).  You can imagine that nobody else can be in the lab while this equipment is set up. 

This is ESA Astronaut Alexander Gerst performing a science session of "Grasp" in Increment 56. We were having trouble with the tracking cameras - because they were picking up too much ambient light - so Alex spread out the German flag to absorb the reflected light. The crazy thing is: this worked. We got good science out of this session. (Source: NASA). 

Another interesting problem is that there are payloads which are extremely sensitive to movements and vibrations. ESA has a payload called Electromagnetic Levitator (EML) which suspends metal alloys in a magnetic field and subjects them to rapid melt/cool cycles in a furnace. It's a really neat experiment but it's also super-sensitive. So we can only run this during the night hours when the crewmembers stop moving around the station. Will payloads like this be affected by the extra crew on board?

Okay, so I couldn't find a picture of EML science - but I did find this comic I worked on with the brilliant Ed Grace and ESA public affairs folks during Increment 55/56 (Source: ESA Twitter) which gives EML a personality. Hey - this may be a science blog, but I don't mind anthropomorphizing space equipment. 

I know there are a ton of other complications with having so many people on board (such as where to sleep, toilet use, etc...) but I'm not going to worry about those in my planning. NASA has those covered, and our ladies and gents upstairs are incredibly professional, so I'm sure they'll figure out how to manage gracefully. I mean, they agreed to have a rocket strapped to their back and to not shower for months at a time while we boss them around to do our science for us, so they're pretty rugged. 

The Increment 65 Manager wants me to put together some slides for a Friday meeting to summarize our planning situation and strategy, our milestone dates, and to identify watch-items as the uncertain future comes more into focus. So...back to work!

ESA Planning and the Increment Requirements Document

A few weeks ago, the Increment Requirements Document (IRD) for Increment 65 was released by my boss, Kirsten MacDonell, the Utilization Planning Team Leader. This is the official way for the European Space Agency to declare what we intend to do during a particular increment.

"What's an increment?"  you say.
Glad you asked.
Okay, maybe I should back up.

An increment is how the international space agencies define a particular period of time aboard the space station. Back in the day it was defined by flights. For example, the period between a Soyuz flight bringing crewmembers and taking them back down. For a long time, an increment was about three months - so you would have an increment management team managing an "increment pair".  For example, last April I finished up working (in my role as Requirements Planning Team Lead) for the real-time work for Increment 61/62. This ran from 03-OCT 2019 through 17-April 2020 and was in line with the launch and download of the crew with the 61 Soyuz.

This is a snapshot of the flight plan for Increment 61/62 (source: NASA) so you can see how we divide the increment pair. Incidentally, the flight plan never ends up executing how we think it will initially. This is from a flight plan early last October - and a lot of things switched up when we actually executed.  For example, you can see that the SPX-crewed vehicle was initially thought to fly in January 2020 - but it didn't get launched until May 30. This is just the nature of working with complicated things like rockets and space stations. You need to have a lot of flexibility and a lot of patience.  

It makes a lot of sense to divide things into increments. That way, you can plan for certain chunks of time - not everything at once. Having increments defined like this also means that you can switch out management teams. Managing space station activities can be pretty intense. So you can have a group of people working on "real-time" operations and all the urgency and craziness this implies - but then they get to hand off after a while. One advantage of this is that it prevents everyone from getting burned out and hating our jobs. It also makes sense in terms of allocating resources (like crewtime) and balancing the budget. I don't think it's any surprise that the increments also tend to line up nicely with the end of the U.S. Government Fiscal year (end of September).

Anyhoo...we try to get things on the plan pretty far left of boom. So the IRD comes out a year before the increment starts.  In April 2021 we will be starting Increment 65.  Hence the recent release of the IRD.

Before the IRD is released, Kirsten and her team do a lot of work - looking at the crew composition, the flights, the state of all the payloads in the development pipeline, the national stakeholders, the commercial goals, etc. And then this is kluged together into a no-kidding look at "here's what we think we can do for increment 65".  This is the IRD. This is pushed up the chain-of-command to the Research and Utilization Group Leader who gives it his blessing and says, "go forth and do." And we do.

Industry and Operations professionals who are working on ISS payloads use the IRD as their bible. If the IRD says we're going to do something, we're going to do it, and everything needs to be put together on time. Because this is an official ESA document, there's a formal process for changing things. If the flight plan has changed and this pushes an activity out of the increment, or if we've decided not to do a particular activity, I'll put together a "Change Notice". This is presented by the Increment Manager to the Research and Utilization Group Leader and discussed by the stakeholders. If the changes are agreed to, then the IRD is amended.

Of course, that's just the first phase...more on this stuff later.

How ISS Science works (roughly)

So, before I got into the details of a particular science payload, I think I should talk about how ISS science works. This is a big topic, so I'll have to give a little peek here, and then write more later.

At any given time there are between 3 and 6 crewmembers on board. Historically, there have been more crewmembers - because the Shuttle could bring 7 people at a time. However, since the shuttle program was retired, human spaceflight has relied on the Russian Soyuz vehicle to get men and women into space. With recent the introduction of commercial vehicles capable of supporting human flight, we're going to have even more crew on board the ISS at a given time. The flight plan is worked months and years in advance, so we have a pretty good idea of who's going to be on board. This is important for science for a number of reasons. Here are four:

1. The number of crewmembers defines how much "crewtime" is available for science. All science activities take time. A typical ESA science payload can take as little as ten minutes to execute, or it can take a 30 hours. A ten-minute payload would be basic: for example the crew required to get something out of a box, take a picture, and plug it in someplace.  A 30 hour payload would require a complicated set-up of equipment, and multiple science sessions - where the crewmember performs a series of activities that takes hours. Of course ESA isn't the only organization with science we want to perform. NASA, JAXA, CSA, and ROSCOSMOS all have science they need to do. So we look at the total number of hours in a day, subtract the time needed for sleep and personal activities, subtract the time needed to maintain and fix the systems on the station. And then everything left over goes to "utilization" crewtime. This gets divided among the partners based on pre-existing agreements. And that's what you get. So you can imagine crewtime ends up being a pretty valuable resource. Crewtime costs around $175,000 per hour . Also, you can't really negotiate for more, because the crew can't be expected to work more hours than they already do. When you're out, you're out. So there are a lot of people from each agency who work to make sure that we can optimize the value of this crewtime (I'll make a post about how this is done sometime later). When we're looking to plan our activities waaaay in advance, trying to make sure that we've lined up a research complement that fits inside our allocation. 
2. The crewmembers need training. In order for all the research on the station to be conducted correctly, crewmembers need to be able to easily recognize and execute the activities they'll do. They need a lot of training for this. For each payload there are huge teams of people who develop the procedures and training and, in the months leading up to launch, crewmembers get trained on these procedures and equipment. 
3. We need human subjects. Astronauts aren't required to do anything they aren't comfortable with and they have to agree to any science we do on their bodies (this is an ethical issue and also a legal one). Well in advance of a flight, researchers brief the crewmembers on their experiments and the crew then selects the human research they are interested in doing. They sign an "informed consent briefing". So we need to know beforehand who's going to be on board and what human research science we should propose that they conduct. 
4. We need baseline data collection. A lot of science on-board the ISS has to do with change - trying to find out how systems and people function differently in space than they do on earth, and whether these changes persist after the sample/subject is returned to Earth. In order to measure this change, you need data before and after the mission. Each science payload has its own set of requirements for baseline data collection (BDC) pre- and post-flight. Some baseline data needs to be collected 6 months before launch - and other BDC needs to happen years after the crewmember returns. For the pre-flight BDCs, we definitely need to know who's going to be on board so we can start the BDC sessions on time. 

This is the Soyuz 61 Rocket being prepped on the launchpad in the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This is a spaceport located in an area of southern Kazakhstan leased to Russia. (Source: nasa.gov) This is the site of all Soyuz rocket launches. We have relied exclusively on the Soyuz vehicles to get men and women into space - but this is changing. (Source: nasa.gov)

On 30 May 2020 SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft launched at 3:22 p.m. EDT from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., taking U.S. astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS. This was a historical launch and represents a spectacular and interesting change in the way we plan and execute science on board the ISS. We're going to be able to get more crewmembers, and missions of different lengths. This will give us more crewtime and interesting subjects for comparing data.

The historical launch of the crewed SpaceX vehicle to the ISS represents an exciting evolution in the human spaceflight program (source: nasa.gov)

Also, within the next year or so we expect to have space-tourism: men and women who can afford the hefty price tag for a flight. We don't really know whether these crew will be willing to do science for us. Of course we'd like them to. In particular it would really be great if they're willing to sign up to be human research subjects. Because so few people have actually gone into space, this makes it difficult to get statistically valid numbers for human research - information that will be critical if we want to continue pushing the boundaries of exploration beyond our planet. If you're a private astronaut looking forward to a flight and you happen to be reading this: consider this a personal appeal from a space scientist. Please consider signing up for as much research as you think you can handle. We need you.

When we've selected the research and technology demonstration payloads that are supposed to be executed, we start working on these. You can imagine that we've been working on a lot of science since the ISS began. You can find NASA's archive of ISS experiments payloads at this link. This should be open to the public. They don't keep the scientific papers here, but they do have references to them. The European Space Agency also keeps an archive of its experiments and you can find that here.

Welcome

Welcome. This is my blog about space science. At least that's my idea right now. We'll see how it evolves. I'm writing this because I deal with space science for my work and I thought, "Hey. This is some interesting stuff. Maybe other people would want to know about it too."

What I plan to do here is update you on the science we're doing on board the International Space Station, what I'm learning, and how things are going. This is my personal blog. It's not affiliated with ESA or NASA or anything, and the opinions are my own. Hopefully you find it interesting.

Growing up I was always fascinated by science fiction set in space - books and TV and films where people launched off the planet and explored the galaxy. Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Gattaca, Ender’s Game. For a while I even wanted to be an astronaut and I had this in the back of my mind as I studied physics and got a PhD. Now I’m a space scientist. I work with the Human Spaceflight Program at the European Space Agency.  Basically, I'm part of a big international team the plans the science experiments that happens on board the International Space Station, and supports the operators and crew. I coordinate with the other space agencies – the U.S. agency (NASA), the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) (I also work with the Russian Space Agency (ROSCOSMOS) but not as often and not directly).  When Astronauts perform our experiments, I’m there – sitting in a console room, watching them do science.

Mostly this is uneventful. Hollywood tells us there are aliens ready to telepathically invade our minds, hunt us down and chase us into ventilation spaces, suck onto our faces and burst out of our chests. There are also intergalactic battles from species trying to take over the galaxy, and there are crazed crewmembers, driven insane by the isolation of space, or pushed through another dimension, ready to terrorize their shipmates. Compared to these adventures, the day-to-day lives of the real-life astronauts are pretty dull. Men and women in khaki pants, golf shirts and socks float peaceably past the cameras, hooking their toes underneath bars in the walls so they can keep themselves in place to adjust this equipment or set up that experiment. They unpack gear which immediately starts to float away if they don’t catch it, and they pick up a hand-held radio to talk about what they’re doing while they bob up and down: “I’m starting on step 3.7 now.”

This is a view of the Console Room at the Erasmus Center at ESTEC. It usually isn't this full. A bunch of people were here when the Canada Robotic Arm was used to install ASIM, a detector designed to measure effects in the upper atmosphere during storms. (Source)

It’s kind of like watching my own reality TV show, but without the designer clothes and interpersonal drama. And nobody wins any prizes. Oh, and nobody gets a shower (there aren’t any showers on the ISS. Ack!!). This kind of voyeurism would be creepy, except it’s my job. When I met the astronaut Alexander Gerst for the first time, it was weird for me because although I’d spent six months watching him doing science on the space station, he had never met me and had no idea who I was. I actually asked him if he thought it was creepy that so many people were watching him (including me!). He was nice enough to say that it wasn’t – because we are all part of the same team. So that’s okay then.

If you're interested you can read an article I wrote about Alexander Gerst's Horizons Mission here.

This is literally the only picture I have with me and crewmember Alexander Gerst at the same time. Because I didn't think to ask for a selfie. (Source)