If you’re fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how that all works, you’ve come to the right place.
“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.
On Episode 201, Sarah Smith, a NASA intern, interviews students who were recently selected to fly their experiments to the International Space Station as part of the program under NASA’s STEM on Station initiative called Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science, or SPOCS. The interviews for this episode were recorded in March of 2021.
Transcript
Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 201, “Citizen Science on Station.” I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, astronauts all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight. There are opportunities for college students to design an experiment that flies to the International Space Station and comes back to Earth. There are a few requirements to be selected, one of which is that these college students must involve K-12 students at some level as citizen science and get them involved as well. The program is called Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science, or more commonly known as SPOCS. Recently, NASA intern, Sarah Smith, who worked on SPOCS under NASA’s STEM on Station initiative, interviewed students that were selected in December 2020 expecting to fly their experiments to the station in the 2022 timeframe. The experiments are very interesting, and they have really unique applications. She put together a narrative audio product. And I thought it would be a cool story to share here on Houston We Have a Podcast. So, to help me introduce this story, I have Sarah Smith here with me in the studio. Welcome, Sarah.
Sarah Smith: Thanks, Gary. I’m happy to be here.
Host: So, let’s help to kick off and explain what this story is going to be about. Can you tell me about the students that we’re going to be bringing on today and that you’ve interviewed?
Sarah Smith: Yeah, so I had the opportunity to chat with student teams from five universities across the nation; Stanford, Columbia, University of Idaho, Arkansas State, and the University of New Hampshire at Manchester. And so, I got to talk to them about their experiences of working together building payloads to send to the International Space Station. And each, each team developed their own scientific experiment that’s related to sustainability or bacteria resistance. And there’s just some really unique and exciting ideas being explored by these students. And I guess a couple of my favorites are the University of Idaho team is studying bacteria resistant polymers, which has huge potential benefits for the space station and future space travel endeavors. And Arkansas State has an experiment where they’re looking at plastic degradation by wax worms.
Host: Hm.
Sarah Smith: So plastic pollution and microplastics are, you know, becoming a huge problem here on Earth. And so, the science around degrading plastic with wax-moth larvae is really exciting, so, yeah, and they talk about their local communities and working with K-12 students to engage them in citizen science, which is just a really great part of it, because I certainly don’t remember doing anything like that when I was in school. And I just think it’s so great that they’re engaging these kids with the science, with science that will go to the space station. I mean, that is just is so cool.
Host: Yeah, I mean, this sounds like pretty complicated stuff. So how did you approach the interview process?
Sarah Smith: Yeah, so all these interviews were done online because we’re in a pandemic still. So, everybody has been working remotely throughout this process. So, these students are all, they’re all pros at online collaboration by now, and they made my job easy for sure, but they also were able to share some of their unique perspectives about developing these experiments; working remotely, and the challenges, and you know, there was surprisingly some benefits of working together without being together in the lab.
Host: So, I really enjoyed the product that you put together. It’s sort of a narrative piece that — because you did all these interviews, but then you sort of put it together into an audio storytelling format. Can you tell me about your process?
Sarah Smith: Yeah. So, this — these interviews were originally for a written piece I did that was published on the NASA blog. So, the content was just so good. And I had recorded these interviews to kind of reference back and, you know, be able to check my notes and everything when I was writing the article. And I just thought, you know, this would be a really great opportunity to go into depth a little more about the students work and, you know, create a better understanding and connection to what the teams are doing. And I love podcasting and storytelling, so I just, yeah, I just went for it.
Host: I’m really excited to get into it, but it sounds like you’ve been having a pretty good experience at NASA so far, getting to interview some cool people and putting together all these products and written products, sharing good stories. How has your NASA experience been so far?
Sarah Smith: Well, I mean, it’s been absolutely incredible. And it’s, I mean, it’s just a dream come true to be able to, you know, apply my passion for science communication and creating media products, videos, podcasts, all different kinds of things. And I get to contribute to work that matters. So, I’m really proud to be a NASA intern, especially since I am a non-traditional intern. I’m a mid-career changer and a mom. And it’s just really cool to work for an organization that really supports and believes in interns from all different walks of life. And the experience I’ve gained has just been invaluable. And you know, anybody that’s thinking about applying, definitely check it out. It’s not just engineering or being a scientist. There’s all kinds of roles; communications roles, business administration. So yeah, definitely check it out.
Host: Very cool. Well, Sarah, I’m very excited to share some of your hard work on this podcast today. So, you ready? We’re going to get right into it.
Sarah Smith: Alright, sounds good.
Host: Alright. Alright. To our listeners, here’s the wonderful product that Sarah put together. I hope you enjoy.
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Sarah Smith: For the past year, students from five universities across the United States have been working to ready payloads for the launch at the end of this year and early next year. Initially, students engaged in the competitive process to participate in SPOCS by submitting proposals detailing their scientific questions, experimental design, payload build, and citizen science outreach plans. The selected student teams and experiments include, Columbia University and their CARMEn experiment, Characterizing Antibiotic Resistance in Microgravity Environments; Stanford University’s Biopolymer Research for In-Situ Capabilities, also known as BRIC; the University of Idaho’s study of Bacteria Resistant Polymers in Microgravity; Arkansas State University and their experiment on Microgravity Environment Impact on Plastic Biodegradation; and the University of New Hampshire at Manchester’s Novel Methods of Antibiotic Discovery in Space or NoMADS. Designing an experiment to fly to the International Space Station was a challenging opportunity for the students participating together in SPOCS.
Will Alvero Koski: So, we’re going to be making bricks on the ISS, making bricks on Earth and seeing the microstructure differences between the two of them, and seeing if there’s design considerations that need to be made when you’re designing the habitats on Mars.
Sarah Smith: That’s Will Alvero Koski, one of the team BRIC co-leads from Stanford. Team BRIC is now working with material to make concrete on the Moon and Mars in a mixture that consists of basic ingredients; dirt, water, and binding protein.
Will Alvero Koski: We are using material called protein-bound soil composites or biopolymer-bound soil composite. I’m sorry. And basically, what it is, is you take dirt from anywhere, usually just local materials, mix it with water, and mix it with this protein. And once it’s dried, it turns into material with around half the strength of Portland cement. So, it’s a very — so if you need to build stuff on Mars where you need a lot of mass that provide radiation shielding, this allows you to avoid using, carrying all the mass from Earth. You can just bring the protein powder and then use the local dirt, and you’ve got radiation shielding habitats fairly cheaply.
Sarah Smith: While working on a design idea for a machine to make bricks on Mars, team BRIC students from Stanford found themselves looking for ways to test their process in microgravity. Phoebe Wall is team BRIC’s other co-lead.
Phoebe Wall: We have been, as a team, designing a brick machine. That’s how kind of, actually, we got started before this SPOCS competition, is a machine that will make these bricks autonomously on Mars. And so, we were, you know, talking amongst ourselves and wondering how this process looks different in the one-third gravity on Mars. So, we actually started looking into, OK, how could we test this in partial gravity? What are our resources available to us? And so, that’s when we discovered SPOCS and applied for that. And so, we’re hoping that we can use data from SPOCS coupled with data from, from centrifuges on Earth that will get us, you know, forces above 1 g. And then hopefully, we’ll be able to fit a curve to that and interpolate what this process would look like in the one-third gravity environment of Mars.
Sarah Smith: Columbia SPOCS team will make their data available online, worldwide, for individuals to contribute to the citizen science component of their project. Through online analysis and tracking, Columbia has been able to further expand their teams emphasis on accessibility. Hugo Favila, Columbia’s citizen science and outreach lead, explains.
Hugo Favila: And really, anybody who has an internet connection can download all the data once we have it up there and do the experiment at home or run the experiment at home.
Sarah Smith: Here’s Swati Ravi, one of Columbia’s team co-leads, talking about the science behind their experiment.
Swati Ravi: It utilizes a form of antibiotics testing called Kirby-Bauer testing. So basically, it’s going to be images that they can see of these dishes where there’ll sort of be little rings around little discs of antibiotics where the size of the ring of sort of killed off bacteria, shows how effective the antibiotic is. And so, they’ll actually be able to use like real image processing software that like, laboratories use to do this analysis and sort of measure the distances of these circles to see which antibiotics become more or less effective when exposed, when the bacteria is exposed to microgravity.
Hugo Favila: Yeah, and then our second mini project is aimed towards high schoolers. And it’s a bioinformatics type of project. And the person that spearheaded that, Theo [Nelson], who is actually a freshman on our team, he’s been putting together these really great tutorials. And they’re — just to show you how great they are, he’s actually using them to teach people in his lab some cool stuff about bioinformatics. So, the kids are going to be getting some good content out of that.
Sarah Smith: A requirement for participation in SPOCS is for each of the five teams to conduct educational outreach and involve K-12 students as part of their experiment. The University of Idaho’s website provides an example of successful citizen outreach. As Citizen Science Lead Adriana Bryant tells us, the team recently completed this portion of the SPOCS experiment with the help of local elementary students in Moscow, Idaho, to swab petri dishes and look at the effectiveness of the bacteria resistant polymers they plan to test on the space station.
Adriana Bryant: And so basically, our project will be testing non-fouling polymers in microgravity. And so, these polymers have been scientifically proven on Earth to resist bacteria adhesion. So currently, on the ISS, they have these different solutions that will clean high-contact surface areas, door handles, counters, things like that. And so, we’re thinking that if you can put these non-fouling polymers on these high-contact surface areas, then we can prevent bacteria growth in the first place. We have three of our non-fouling polymers that we made. And so, each student, so there’s about 200 kids that we distributed, was given two of our polymers and a control. And so basically, once a week, they would swab these petri dishes and put a little bit of the nutrient broth on top of it and then allow bacteria to grow.
Sarah Smith: As citizen scientists working with SPOCS researchers, younger participants are exposed to what it’s like to work with real-world science and contribute through data analysis.
Adriana Bryant: That’s what’s really cool. And I really like our citizen science because one of the big things we stress is that there is no, like, right answer. There is no known right now for the students, and like a lot of times, even in college, like, you know, you, you kind of know where you’re going and what the answer is, especially in elementary school too. And it’s cool that there is no right answer, so they’re kind of doing like real science. So, I really like that about our project.
Sarah Smith: Associate Professor of Molecular Biology, Maureen Dolan, mentors the team at Arkansas State University, all sophomores. She’s continually impressed by the energy and excitement her students bring to their SPOCS project.
Maureen Dolan: This project came from them. So, it’s — a lot of projects I know come from existing project — faculty projects. This was actually inspired by these students. And they had a real passion for the environment.
Sarah Smith: Arkansas State University is working with wax worms to study degradation of polyethylene in space, which could also potentially offer insights into how this might benefit humanity and the global ecosystem here on Earth.
Landon Perdue: So, we’re sending these wax worms into space. And we’re seeing if they’re able to degrade this polyethylene in our controlled environment.
Sarah Smith: That’s Landon Perdue, one of the sophomores from Arkansas State University SPOCS team.
Landon Perdue: So, the biologists are working on creating and or creating a colony and controlling exactly the kind of food they give it to control it. So, we know exactly what kind of bacteria are growing in their stomachs when we send them into space. The engineering team is working on optimizing and trading our pods, in which the worms are going to be sent up in. So, we’re working on dealing with the constraints and different layers of protection.
Maureen Dolan: So, these wax worms have been shown to degrade polyethylene and could potentially be used also of broader impacts here on Earth. But the idea that to be able to take those onto the space station and use those under microgravity conditions is — pretty cool.
Sarah Smith: Team Cooke from the University of New Hampshire at Manchester, who’s partnering with Northeastern University on an experiment related to antibiotics and mutation rates utilizing bacteria from soil. Flexibility and dialog are crucial to ensuring their project is a success. Here’s team co-leads Sydney Rollins and Raymond Miller to explain.
Raymond Miller: It revolves around antibiotics discovery and also mutation rates of bacteria. So, we are sending up a device invented by Slava Epstein at Northeastern University, actually, and we’re partnering with them. And it allows us to culture bacteria in a more in situ-like environment by actually sending up soil. That’s where we’re getting our bacteria from. And then we can look at how microgravity and, you know, some EM (electromagnetic)[radiation] affects bacteria and how they are pressured into creating more antibiotics. That really gives us an idea of how bacteria will try to mutate as space exploration kind of continues and evolves. You know, of course, we’re taking bacteria from Earth and putting it in an environment that it really doesn’t want to be in, so it’s important that we get a model to build off of that.
Sydney Rollins: As far as citizen science, we’re going to have a group of middle schoolers, probably in seventh grade, that will be super involved in our project in particular. They will go out and get the soil. We’ll have meetings with them. So, they’ll have a control experiment happening in their school at the same time as ours is, is in space. And then when our comes back from space, they’ll come to our lab and they’ll get to process some of their samples using like real microbiology techniques like, you know, hemolysis plates, they can see some cool hemolysis um, they’ll have some catalase and oxidase tests, some simple biochemical stuff that they get to play with, so they can see their samples that have been in their school the whole time. And then they’ll have real experience in a microbiology lab.
Sarah Smith: SPOCS participants agree that one of the most enjoyable aspects of working on their project was the chance to collaborate as an interdisciplinary cohort with a variety of STEM-related roles. With majors varying from environmental science to engineering to business and biology, freshman through graduate students are working towards a common goal alongside their teammates. Stanford Citizen Science Lead, Benjamen Gao, sums up a team experience pretty well.
Benjamen Gao: There’s a very environmental science theory, there is some material science component. And there also are engineering components as well. We have a part we were putting actual machine. And that requires lot of CAD (computer-aided design) work, a lot of engineering work. Everyone has something unique to contribute since everyone, there is so many different — our team members come from so many different majors; from aero-astro to business to mathematical and computational science. Everyone has something unique to offer, and that’s what we really value on a team.
Kal Ganeshan: I have a much stronger background in biochemistry. And a lot of this project requires more like mechanical and technical skills, which I don’t really have a background in.
Sarah Smith: That’s Kal Ganeshan, a team co-lead from Columbia.
Kal Ganeshan: But despite that, I’ve never felt like I wouldn’t be able to contribute to this project because this whole time, we’ve been receiving a mentorship and help, and guidance from older students. For example, we received kind of tutorials on how to use Fusion 360 and do CAD and how to work some of the more electrical facets of the project. And so, I’ve never done any of that. But because of the tutorials we’ve been receiving, I feel like I can get involved. And so all around, it’s just been a great experience.
Landon Perdue: We’re all sophomores on this team. So, all of us are really new to this type of stuff too. So, it was a great experience to be able to learn with everybody else as you’re trying to figure out how to make this experiment work.
Sarah Smith: Over the past year, the students have overcome obstacles, learned to adapt, and gained valuable professional experience working virtually as a scientific research team. Reorienting to a remote learning model, provided students with unexpected insight on what they might expect in their research experience when their payloads are 200 miles above Earth on the International Space Station. Here’s Kylie Holland from team BRIC’s outreach committee.
Kylie Holland: I believe for us, the greatest challenge we’ve had to overcome was the transition to remote work. We are a hardware and hands-on material science-focused team. We do — prior to the pandemic, all of our work was in the lab or in our workspace. And so, when our school closed down, we were moved off campus very quickly. We couldn’t take any of our supplies our BSA (bovine serum albumin), the stuff we used to make the bricks is still locked somewhere in our workspace. And I’ve always been really impressed by how effectively Phoebe and Will, our project leads, sat down and figured out, “OK, how are we going to keep this team alive and thriving throughout a potentially, a very long period of remote work?” And they did that by pulling in, by pulling up this proposal and reorienting the team away from in-person material science research to focusing on remotely completing this proposal.
Kal Ganeshan: We’ve only been able to start meeting, like parts of the team at least, meeting in person, starting the beginning of this year. So, a majority of our work actually happens virtually. So, it’s been really interesting to like, kind of form that community and see how the team grows virtually.
Adriana Bryant: And then, just in terms of teamwork and communication, I think that since everything is so interconnected, we definitely have learned that we can’t kind of go in our own corners and design these things and then like meet back up a week later because everything that one person does will somehow subsequently affect another part of the project. And so, I know that, like, just with like our type of bacteria, we were working with a BSL (Biosafety Level)-2 bacteria. And just to make it like overall more safe for the experiment, we chose the BSL-1. But with that science component, it changes our containment levels, and just like that; it’s kind of a domino effect. So, kind of working through those obstacles has been a learning curve for us. And I think, especially for, a lot of us are engineers. So, I think that just, you know, learning how to — just learning how to learn, honestly. How to take a scenario that you’d never been in and work through that with other people and draw from their particular expertise has definitely been the way that we’ve been successful so far. And that applies to, you know, most of us go off and work in industry. So, I think that’s a great, like transition between, you know, working on this project that no one really knows how to do and figuring that out and then using those skills later on, in whatever we do.
Hugo Favila: You have to be adaptable. You have to be willing to make a lot of changes and tradeoffs. And also, you have to really know how to work well on a team. And I think we’ve had a first-hand knowledge of working on a team since we’re not actually in person. Well, some of us are in person, but the majority of the team is not in person. They’re in other parts of the world. And just learning like how to communicate properly with each other as Swati and Kal do. They’re great leads. I think has made it pretty successful.
Swati Ravi: I think it was setting our goals as high as they were in the beginning and sort of daring to be as ambitious as we were even in our like proposal stage that allowed us to still accomplish quite a lot, including pushing the boundaries of what we even thought would be possible for us when we first started out this project.
Sarah Smith: What are the hopes for the SPOCS teams as they work towards the next phase of their experiments and prepare to launch?
Phoebe Wall: I’m also hoping that, you know, us as a team and then also the students that we’re interacting with, whether they be high school students with citizen science or, you know, K-12 students with outreach; that we can gain skills that we wouldn’t have gained just through school or classwork, that we can gain, you know, hands-on skills when it comes to material science. And then also, you know, working on CAD, you know, there’s a lot of operational work and then also testing that goes into sending something, something to the International Space Station that you might not have that rigor in, in a school project. And so, I think that, that’ll be really beneficial for all of our learning.
Landon Perdue: In terms of things we’re looking forward to seeing the most, I think the thing I’m looking forward to seeing most is just seeing the polyethylene actually be degraded and even in microgravity. Just seeing the results and the pictures come back. And then us being able to try and quantify that and writing a paper about it to try and expand our knowledge of that subject. That’s just really exciting to me to be able to try and understand that better and to actually be part of the growing knowledge of science.
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Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed our episode today. It’s a little bit unusual because we brought in a product that an intern created. And I really liked it, and I hope you did too. If you want more of it, please provide some comments and reviews and let us know. This product was about the NASA SPOCS program, Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science. It’s part of NASA’s STEM on Station. So, if you’d like to learn more, just search NASA STEM on Station or NASA SPOCS, S-P-O-C-S to find out more. If you just go to our episode webpage, though, we’ll have the links for you, and you can go right to those webpages from there. We are one of many NASA podcasts all across the agency. Go to NASA.gov/podcasts to check them all out, and then you can listen to our episodes in no particular order. If you’d like to chat with us, we’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just use the hashtag #AskNASA on any one of those platforms, submit an idea, and maybe a question. Just make sure to mention it’s for us at Houston We Have a Podcast. The interviews for this episode were recorded in March of 2021. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido, Jennifer Hernandez, Katie Atkinson, Thalia Patrinos, Scott Black, Kristal Winters, and the STEM on Station team for bringing all of this together on this podcast. Thanks to the students who participated in the interviews. And a huge thanks to Sarah Smith for coming on the podcast today to introduce this portion and for creating the narrative portion of today’s episode. Next week, Episode 202, Sarah Smith introduced in the beginning that she is a non-traditional student. We’re going to go into depth with three non-traditional students. So if you’re interested in becoming a — coming to NASA and maybe you didn’t take a path that maybe you’re used to, four years of college, and then you do a couple internships while you’re in college; maybe you want to learn more about other opportunities that exist, that episode is for you. That’s coming next week, Episode 202. If you like what you heard or if you don’t like what you heard, give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on. And tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.