SSEP Blog – Ballston Spa, NY

Damon from Americulture emailed and called today. 

Americulture has set up six breeding tanks with a male and female fish in each tank so that we will have eggs to ship on Monday. 

Damon also suggested that in addition to sending the samples FedEx and UPS he would drive 3 hours round trip to El Paso, Texas to deliver samples to shipped by commercial cargo freight by Southwest Airlines.  He considered this the “doomesday” plan in case the other shipments didn’t arrive.  Thank you Damon.  You are awesome!

YNN (Your News Now) came to the school today to learn about the project. The clip from the interview can be found at http://capitalregion.ynn.com/content/your_news/saratoga/540036/students-prepare-science-project-for-space-launch/

The plan for the samples is to ship the water samples FedEx on Monday April 26th from Ballston Spa to a hotel in Florida. The eggs will be shipped from New Mexico on April 26th via UPS and FedEx. The samples will be combined and hand delivered to Kennedy Space Center. Hoping that all the logistics work out.

We received a new batch of eggs and are using different vials to store the eggs. We are still trying out different temperatures to store the vials and have put some in closed shipping contaners. We are still trying to figure out a plan to get our samples down there on time. We may try to have the samples shipped to a hotel in Florida, combine the eggs and water and then hand deliver the samples.

We found out today that the pH was off and adversely affected the eggs. We are working on how to improve the water quality. Additional water tanks have been set up. We are going to ask for another shipment of eggs at the end of the week. We found out today that the launch date has been moved to April 29th. We are now working on changing our plans and figuring out how to get our samples submitted on time.

The eggs arrived today. The 5th grade classes filled vials with eggs and placed them at different temperatures. We are trying to figure out what temperature to ship the vials at.

The eggs that were shipped last week ended up going from New Mexico to Kentucky back to New Mexico then back to Kentucy and then to El Paso, Texas. They never arrived. We have requested Americulture to send us another shipment at the end of the week.

We were supposed to recieve a shipment of eggs today to conduct some test trials.  At 12:00 pm they has still not arrived.  We soon found out that they had traveled from New Mexico to Kentucy and due to a routing error were sent back to New Mexico.

We were informed that the NASA Johnson Space Center Toxicology Office review has been completed and that our experiment has been accepted for flight on STS-134, the historic final flight of U.S. Space Shuttle Endeavour.  The launch is currently scheduled for April 19^th.

Based on the material list that we submitted to NCESSE/ITA we can put a maximum of 15 eggs into the bottom well of the Type 2-Prime Well.    We have until January 20^thto tweak our experiment and adjust the number of eggs we put in the well for the actual experiment.  We are thinking that we might want to decrease the number of eggs in the well in order to increase the possibility of survival.  The top well will have 125 microliters of water.   The bottom well will be filled with Tilapia eggs and water.  Tilapia eggs are approximately 1 – 2 mm in diameter.  Any space not taken up by the eggs in the bottom well will be filled with water.  The top and bottom wells will be slid together approximately 10 hours into the flight.  The only oxygen available to the Tilapia eggs after they hatch approximately 3 to 4 days after liftoff will come from the water.  The total duration of the flight is expected to be 14 days.  We want there to be a large enough sample size to have good results but a small enough number of eggs to maximize survival opportunity.  Help us do the math.  How many eggs should we use in our experiment?  Click the link http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Q5PQH3N to provide suggestions or leave a comment below.

               

 

 

 

 

Type 2-Prime Wells

• overall volume in each Well: 125 micro liters (μl) = 0.125 cc = 0.125 cm3; a way to think about it—this corresponds to a cubical volume 0.5 cm on a side
• but the Wells are actually cylindrical in shape, with a diameter of  0.125 inches (0.318 cm), and length of 0.63 inches (1.6 cm)