Biological Experiments in BIOLAB Facility on board Columbus

Kurzfassung

BIOLAB is a multi-user payload facility for biological experiments, that was launched on board Space Shuttle Atlantis with the Columbus laboratory on 7 February 2008. Since then the facility is accessible to the scientific community, with a number of experiments by different project teams have been performed and research is still ongoing. BIOLAB is operated under ESA contract by the Microgravity User Support Center (MUSC) at DLR in Cologne, Germany. BIOLAB offers two centrifuges inside an incubator (18°C up to 40°C) to allow experiments to be undertaken in micro gravity but also under simulated gravity at 1g, to compare results. Most scientists also perform a ground reference experiment at their laboratories. For the experiments two types of experiment containers are available a standard experiment container or an advanced experiment container. On-orbit, experiment containers are inserted into Biolab for processing. A typical experiment can run from one day to three months. The Facility Responsible Centre for Biolab, has the overall responsibility to operate it according to the needs of the scientists. The individual experiment container providers can monitor the processing of experiments from own User Home Bases. After an experiment run two temperature-controlled units are available for post cold stowage from -20°C to +10°C until there is a download possibility. Several experiments were executed in BIOLAB, e.g.: • CYTOSKELETON: Measurements of morphology, cytoskeleton, gene expression and signaling of mammalian fibroblast and osteoblasts. • Arthrospira-B: Measurements of growth, oxygen production and photosynthesis of the cyanobacteria Arthrospira. • TripleLux A&B: Bioluminescence measurement of reactive oxygen species production in mammalian and invertebrate immune cells during immune response. • Cold stowage of the experiments Extremophiles, CrISStal and Seedling Growth-3. Future experiments such as Suture in Space, Lux in Space, WAPS or Arthrospira-C are still planned in the near term future. The paper will give a survey on BIOLAB operations over the last decade and provide an outlook for future BIOLAB planning.