Citizen Science on Station

01Houston, we have a podcast.

02Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 201, Citizen Science on Station.

03I'm Gary Jordan, and I'll be your host today.

04On 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.

05There are opportunities for college students to design an experiment that flies to the International Space Station and comes back to Earth.

06There 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.

07The program is called Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science, or more commonly known as SPOCs.

08Recently, 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.

09The experiments are very interesting, and they have really unique applications.

10She put together a narrative audio product, and I thought it would be a cool story to share here on Houston We Have a Podcast.

11So to help me introduce this story, I have Sarah Smith here with me in the studio.

12Welcome, Sarah.

13Thanks, Gary.

14I'm happy to be here.

15So let's help to kick off and explain what this story is going to be about.

16Can you tell me about the students that we're going to be bringing on today and that you interviewed?

17Yeah.

18So 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.

19And so I got to talk to them about their experiences of working together building payloads to send to the International Space Station.

20And each team develops their own scientific experiment that's related to sustainability or bacteria resistance.

21And there's just some really unique and exciting ideas being explored by these students.

22And 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.

23And Arkansas State has an experiment where they're looking at plastic degradation by wax worms.

24So plastic pollution and microplastics are becoming a huge problem here on Earth.

25And so the science around degrading plastic with wax moss larvae is really exciting.

26So, yeah.

27And 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.

28Because I certainly don't remember doing anything like that when I was in school.

29And I just think it's so great that they're engaging these kids with the science that will go to the space station.

30I mean, that's just so cool.

31Yeah.

32I mean, this sounds like pretty complicated stuff.

33So how did you approach the interview process?

34Yeah.

35So all these interviews were done online because we're in a pandemic still.

36So everybody has been working remotely throughout this process.

37So these students are all pros at online collaboration by now.

38And they made my job easy for sure.

39But they also were able to share some of their unique perspectives about developing these experiments, working remotely, and the challenges.

40And, you know, there was surprisingly some benefits of working together without being together in the lab.

41So I really enjoyed the product that you put together.

42It'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.

43Can you tell me about your process?

44Yeah.

45So these interviews were originally for a written piece I did that was published on the NASA blog.

46So the content was just so good.

47And 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.

48And 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.

49And I love podcasting and storytelling.

50So I just – yeah, I just went for it.

51I'm really excited to get into it.

52But 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, some written products, sharing good stories.

53How's your NASA experience been so far?

54Well, I mean, it's been absolutely incredible.

55And 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.

56And I get to contribute to work that matters.

57So I'm really proud to be a NASA intern, especially since I'm a nontraditional intern.

58I'm a mid-career changer and a mom.

59And it's just really cool to work for an organization that really supports and believes in interns from all different walks of life.

60And the experience I've gained has just been invaluable.

61And, you know, anybody that's thinking about applying, definitely check it out.

62It's not just engineering or being a scientist.

63There's all kinds of roles, communications roles, business administration.

64So, yeah, definitely check it out.

65Very cool.

66Well, Sarah, I'm very excited to share some of your hard work on this podcast today.

67So you're ready?

68We're going to get right into it.

69All right.

70Sounds good.

71All right.

72All right.

73To our listeners, here's the wonderful product that Sarah put together.

74I hope you enjoy.

75T-minus five seconds in county.

76Mark.

77Long-speed deadlines are correct.

78There she goes.

79We have a podcast.

80For 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.

81Initially, 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.

82The selected student teams and experiments include Columbia University and their Carmen experiment, characterizing antibiotic resistance in microgravity environments.

83Stanford University's biopolymer research for in-situ capabilities, also known as BRIC.

84The University of Idaho study of bacteria-resistant polymers in microgravity.

85Arkansas State University and their experiment on microgravity environment impact on plastic biodegradation.

86And the University of New Hampshire at Manchester's novel methods of antibiotic discovery in space, or NOMADS.

87Designing an experiment to fly to the International Space Station was a challenging opportunity for the students participating together in SPOCs.

88So we're making bricks on the ISS, making bricks on Earth, and seeing the microstructure differences between the two of them.

89And seeing if there's design considerations that need to be made when you're designing the habitats on Mars.

90That's Will Alvaro-Koski, one of the TeamBRIC co-leads from Stanford.

91TeamBRIC 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.

92We are using a material called protein-bound soil composites, or biopolymer-bound soil composite, I'm sorry.

93And basically what it is, is you take dirt from anywhere, usually just local materials, mix it with water and mix it with this protein.

94And once it's dried, it turns into material with around half the strength of Portland cement.

95So it's a very, so if you need to build stuff on Mars where you need a lot of mass to provide radiation shielding, this allows you to avoid carrying all the mass from Earth.

96You can just bring the protein powder and then use the local dirt, and you've got radiation shielding habitats fairly cheaply.

97While working on a design idea for a machine to make bricks on Mars, TeamBRIC students from Stanford found themselves looking for ways to test their process in microgravity.

98Phoebe Wall is TeamBRIC's other co-lead.

99We have been, as a team, designing a brick machine.

100That's how actually we got started before this box competition.

101It's a machine that will make these bricks autonomously on Mars.

102And so we were, you know, talking amongst ourselves and wondering how will this process look different in the one-third gravity on Mars?

103And we actually started looking into, okay, how could we test this in partial gravity?

104What are our resources available to us?

105And so that's when we discovered Spox and applied for that.

106And so we're hoping that we can use data from Spox coupled with data from centrifuges on Earth that will get us, you know, forces above 1G.

107And 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.

108Columbia's Spox team will make their data available online worldwide for individuals to contribute to the citizen science component of their project.

109Through online analysis and tracking, Columbia has been able to further expand their team's emphasis on accessibility.

110And 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.

111Here's Swati Ravi, one of Columbia's team co-leads, talking about the science behind their experiment.

112It utilizes a form of antibiotic testing called Kirby-Bauer testing.

113So basically it's going to be images that they can see of these dishes where they'll sort of be little rings around little disks of antibiotics where the size of the ring of sort of killed off bacteria shows how effective the antibiotic is.

114And 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 are exposed to microgravity.

115Yeah, and then our second mini project is aimed towards high schoolers.

116And it's a bioinformatics type of project.

117And the person that spearheaded that, Tao, who's actually a freshman on our team, he's been putting together these really great tutorials.

118And 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.

119So the kids are going to be getting some good content out of that.

120A requirement for participation in SPOC's is for each of the five teams to conduct educational outreach and involve K-12 students as part of their experiment.

121The University of Idaho's website provides an example of successful citizen outreach.

122As citizen science lead Adriana Bryant tells us, The team recently completed this portion of the SPOC's experiment with the help of local elementary students in Moscow, Idaho, to swap petri dishes and look at the effectiveness of the bacteria-resistant polymers they plan to test on the space station.

123And so basically our project will be testing non-fouling polymers in microgravity.

124And so these polymers have been scientifically proven on Earth to resist bacteria adhesion.

125So currently on the ISS, they have these different solutions that will clean high contact surface areas, door handles, counters, things like that.

126And 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.

127We have three of our non-fouling polymers that we made.

128And so each student, so there's about 200 kits that we distributed, was given two of our polymers and a control.

129And 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.

130As citizen scientists working with SPOC's researchers, younger participants are exposed to what it's like to work with real-world science and contribute through data analysis.

131That's what's really cool.

132And I really like our citizen science because one of the big things we stress is that there is no like right answer.

133There is no known right now for the students.

134And like a lot of times, even in college, like, you know, you kind of know where you're going and what the answer is, especially in elementary school too.

135And it's cool that there is no right answer.

136So they're kind of doing like real science.

137So I really like that about our project.

138Associate Professor of Molecular Biology, Maureen Dolan, mentors the team at Arkansas State University, all sophomores.

139She's continually impressed by the energy and excitement her students bring to their SPOC's project.

140This project came from them.

141So a lot of projects I know come from existing projects, faculty projects.

142This was actually inspired by these students.

143And they had a real passion for the environment.

144Arkansas 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.

145So we're seeing these wax worms in space and we're seeing if they're able to degrade this polyethylene in our controlled environment.

146That's Landon Perdue, one of the sophomores from Arkansas State University's SPOC's team.

147So the biologists are working on creating and or creating a colony and controlling exactly the kind of food they give it to control it.

148So we know exactly what kind of bacteria are growing in their stomachs when we send them in space.

149The engineering team is working on optimizing and creating our pods in which the worms are going to be sent up in.

150So we're working on dealing with the constraints and different layers of protection.

151So these wax worms have been shown to degrade polyethylene and could potentially be used also of broader impacts here on Earth.

152But the idea that to be able to take those onto the space station and use those under microgravity conditions is pretty cool.

153Team Cook from the University of New Hampshire at Manchester is partnering with Northeastern University on an experiment related to antibiotics and mutation rates utilizing bacteria from soil.

154Flexibility and dialogue are crucial to ensuring their project is a success.

155Here's team co-leads Sidney Rollins and Raymond Miller to explain.

156It revolves around antibiotic discovery and also kind of mutation rates of bacteria.

157So we are setting up a device invented by Slava Epstein at Northeastern University actually.

158We're partnering with them and it allows us to culture bacteria in a more in situ like environment by actually sending up soil.

159That's where we're getting our bacteria from.

160And then we can look at how microgravity and some EM affects bacteria and how they are pressured into creating more antibiotics.

161That really gives us an idea of how bacteria will try to mutate as space exploration kind of continues and evolves.

162You know, of course, we're taking bacteria from Earth and putting it in an environment that it really doesn't want to be in.

163So it's important that we get a model to build off of that.

164As 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.

165They will go out and get the soil.

166We'll have meetings with them.

167So they'll have a control experiment happening in their school at the same time as ours is in space.

168And then when ours 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.

169They can see some cool hemolysis.

170They'll have some catalysmox phase tests, just 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.

171And then they'll have real experience in a microbiology lab.

172SPOC's participants agree that one of the most enjoyable aspects of working on their project is the chance to collaborate as an interdisciplinary cohort with a variety of STEM-related roles.

173With majors varying from environmental science to engineering to business and biology, freshmen through graduate students are working towards a common goal alongside their teammates.

174Stanford citizen science lead Benjamin Gao sums up a team experience pretty well.

175There's a very environmental side.

176There's a material science component.

177And there also are engineering components as well.

178We have a part where we're building the actual machine and that requires a lot of cattle work, a lot of engineering work.

179Everyone has something unique to contribute since everyone, there are so many different, our team members come from so many different majors from aero-astro to business to mathematical and computational science.

180Everyone has something unique to offer and that's what we really value on our team.

181I have a much stronger background in biochemistry and a lot of this project requires more mechanical and technical skills, which I don't really have a background in.

182That's Cal Ganashan, a team co-lead from Columbia.

183But 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 mentorship and help and guidance from older students.

184For 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.

185And so I've never done any of that, but because of the tutorials we've been receiving, I feel like I can get involved.

186And so all around, it's just been a great experience.

187We're all sophomores on this team.

188So all of us are really new to this kind of stuff, too.

189So it was a great experience to be able to learn with everybody else as we're trying to figure out how to make this experience work.

190Over the past year, the students have overcome obstacles, learned to adapt, and gained valuable professional experience working virtually as a scientific research team.

191Reorienting 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.

192Here's Kylie Holland from Team Brick's Outreach Committee.

193I believe for us, the greatest challenge we've had to overcome was the transition to remote work.

194We are a hardware and hands-on material science-focused team.

195Prior to the pandemic, all of our work was in the lab or in our workspace.

196And so when our school closed down, we were moved off campus very quickly.

197We couldn't take any of our supplies.

198Our BSA, the stuff we used to make the bricks, is still locked somewhere in our workspace.

199And I've always been really impressed by how effectively Phoebe and Will, our project leads, sat down and figured out, okay, how are we going to keep this team alive and thriving throughout a potentially very long period of remote work?

200And they did that by pulling up this proposal and reorienting the team away from in-person material science research to focusing on remotely completing this proposal.

201We've only been able to start meeting, like parts of a team at least, meeting in person starting and beginning of this year.

202So a majority of our work actually happens virtually.

203So it's been really interesting to kind of form that community and see how the team grows virtually.

204And 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.

205Because everything that one person does will somehow subsequently affect another part of the project.

206And so I know that like just with like our type of bacteria, we were working with a BSL-2 bacteria.

207And just to make it like overall more safe for the experiment, we chose BSL-1.

208But with that science component, it changes our containment levels.

209And just like that, it's kind of a domino effect.

210So kind of working through those obstacles has been a learning curve for us.

211And I think especially for a lot of us are engineers.

212So I think that just, you know, learning how to just learning how to learn, honestly, how to take a scenario that you've 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.

213And that applies to, you know, most of us go off and work in industry.

214So 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, whatever we do.

215You have to be adaptable.

216You have to be willing to make a lot of changes and trade-offs.

217And also you have to really know how to work well on a team.

218And I think we've had a firsthand knowledge of working on a team since we're not actually in person.

219Well, some of us are in person, but the majority of the team is not in person.

220They're in other parts of the world.

221And just learning how to communicate properly with each other as Swati and Cal do.

222They're great leads.

223I think it's made it pretty successful.

224I 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 in sort of pushing the boundaries of what we even thought would be possible for us.

225When we first started out this project.

226What are the hopes for the SPOX teams as they work towards the next phase of their experiments and prepare to launch?

227I'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 through 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.

228And then also, you know, working on CAD, you know, there's a lot of operational work and then also testing that goes into something, something that's the International Space Station that you might not have that rigor in in a school project.

229And so I think that that'll be really beneficial for all of our learning.

230In terms of things we're looking forward to seeing the most, I think the thing I'm looking forward to seeing the most is just seeing the polyethylene actually be degraded and eaten in microgravity.

231Just seeing the results and the pictures come back.

232And then us being able to try and quantify that and writing a paper about it to try and expand our knowledge in that subject.

233That'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.

234Hey, thanks for sticking around.

235I hope you enjoyed our episode today.

236It's a little bit unusual because we brought in a product that an intern created.

237And I really liked it.

238And I hope you did, too.

239If you want more of it, please provide some comments and reviews and let us know.

240This product was about the NASA SPOCs program, Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science.

241It's part of NASA STEM on Station.

242So 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.

243If 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.

244We are one of many NASA podcasts all across the agency.

245Go to nasa.gov slash podcast to check them all out, and then you can listen to our episodes in no particular order.

246If you'd like to chat with us, we're on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

247Just use the hashtag AskNASA on any one of those platforms.

248Some of an idea, maybe a question, just make sure to mention it's for us.

249At Houston, we have a podcast.

250The interviews for this episode were recorded in March of 2021.

251Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norm Moran, Belinda Pulido, Jennifer Hernandez, Katie Atkinson, Tholly Petrina, Scott Black, Crystal Winters, and the STEM on Station team for bringing all of this together on this podcast.

252Thanks 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.

253Next week, episode 202, Sarah Smith introduced in the beginning that she is a non-traditional student.

254We're going to go into depth with three non-traditional students.

255So if you're interested in coming to NASA, and maybe you didn't take a path that maybe you're used to four years at 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's for you.

256That's coming next week, episode 202.

257If 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.

258We'll be back next week.