SSEP Blog – Ballston Spa, NY

The shuttle launch was great yesterday morning.  The MDA mini-Laboratory containing the SSEP experiments should now be activiated.  The first slide of the MDA blocks was scheduled to take place at 3:45 am EDT this morning.  The second slide of the blocks, which activated all Type 2-Prime experiment slots, was scheduled to take place at 4:35 am EDT.

The MDA was supposed to be handed off at 5:00 am this morning.  Our experiment should be sitting on the shuttle now waiting for liftoff.  Launch party will be held starting at 8:30 am.  Tried find Tang to serve at the party but couldn’t find any.  We will be having gold fish in honor of the Tilipia eggs.  Everything still on track for lanuch tomorrow morning.

The samples arrived this morning at 9:35.  ITA called.  Some of the eggs in the sample vial had hatched in transport and they could see tails moving.  They asked if they wanted us to load those or if we wanted them to open up the other vials and find 5 eggs that hadn’t hatched yet.  We confirmed that they could use the eggs in some of the reload vials.  They told us that our experiement would be loaded the next morning.  We asked that they keep the eggs at as close to  68 degrees F as possible.

A new set of samples were shipped today.  We are hoping that the shuttle will launch on Monday.

ITA called today.  There was a possibility that they would need to put less water in Well A and wanted to know our views on the impact of this on our experiment.  We decided to put our eggs in Well B instead of Well A.  Therefore the change in water amount would have less of an impact.

Damon from Americulture emailed me to see if he should set up a breeder tank or if we should use the more mature production tank eggs.  We decided to go with the more mature production tank eggs.  We had a better hatch in our fish tanks from the more mature production tank eggs than the ones that came from the breeder tank and were much less mature.

We recieved word from ITA that the launch date has been changed.  The samples will now be due by 10:30 am on May 13th.

We still haven’t heard an update on whether the launch has been moved or not.  We have decided to play it safe and ship a set of samples.

Samples are due by 10:30 am on May 7th if the launch is a go on May 10th.  We have to decided whether to ship samples or not by later this afternoon.  There is a rumor that the launch may be delayed again.

NASA has now indicated that the launch will be no earlier than May 10th.