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.