Nadir Andrei James, Sato Kevin
Wyle Science, Technology and Engineering, FILMSS, NASA Biosciences and Space Biology, NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA 94035 USA.
NPJ Microgravity. 2017 Jan 12;3:6. doi: 10.1038/s41526-016-0003-7. eCollection 2017.
The International Space Station National Laboratory gives students a platform to conduct space-flight science experiments. To successfully take advantage of this opportunity, students and their mentors must have an understanding of how to develop and then conduct a science project on international space station within a school year. Many factors influence the speed in which a project progresses. The first step is to develop a science plan, including defining a hypothesis, developing science objectives, and defining a concept of operation for conducting the flight experiment. The next step is to translate the plan into well-defined requirements for payload development. The last step is a rapid development process. Included in this step is identifying problems early and negotiating appropriate trade-offs between science and implementation complexity. Organizing the team and keeping players motivated is an equally important task, as is employing the right mentors. The project team must understand the flight experiment infrastructure, which includes the international space station environment, payload resource requirements and available components, fail-safe operations, system logs, and payload data. Without this understanding, project development can be impacted, resulting in schedule delays, added costs, undiagnosed problems, and data misinterpretation. The information and processes for conducting low-cost, rapidly developed student-based international space station experiments are presented, including insight into the system operations, the development environment, effective team organization, and data analysis. The details are based on the Valley Christian Schools (VCS, San Jose, CA) fluidic density experiment and penicillin experiment, which were developed by 13- and 14-year-old students and flown on ISS.
国际空间站国家实验室为学生提供了一个进行太空飞行科学实验的平台。为了成功利用这一机会，学生及其导师必须了解如何在一学年内制定并开展一个国际空间站上的科学项目。许多因素会影响项目进展的速度。第一步是制定科学计划，包括定义假设、制定科学目标以及定义进行飞行实验的操作概念。下一步是将计划转化为明确的有效载荷开发要求。最后一步是快速开发过程。这一步包括尽早发现问题，并在科学与实施复杂性之间进行适当的权衡。组织团队并保持成员的积极性与聘请合适的导师同样重要。项目团队必须了解飞行实验基础设施，其中包括国际空间站环境、有效载荷资源需求和可用组件、故障安全操作、系统日志以及有效载荷数据。如果缺乏这种了解，可能会影响项目开发，导致进度延迟、成本增加、问题未被诊断以及数据误解。本文介绍了开展低成本、快速开发的基于学生的国际空间站实验的信息和流程，包括对系统操作、开发环境、有效的团队组织和数据分析的深入了解。细节基于由13岁和14岁学生开发并在国际空间站上进行的山谷基督学校（位于加利福尼亚州圣何塞）的流体密度实验和青霉素实验。
