When the space shuttle Discovery makes its final flight on Feb. 24, it will carry two biomedical payloads built by CU.
According to a CU news release, one of the experiments will help astronauts understand bacteria virulence in space while the other is a cell cultivation experiment in tropical plants.
The experiments will make their trip in GAPs, or specially designed fluid-processing cylinders. These will be held in BioServe’s Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus. This device was designed by CU and has been used on more than 20 NASA space shuttle missions.
Louis Stodieck, director of BioServe Space Technologies in CU’s aerospace engineering sciences department, said he credits the work of CU’s students in making this research possible.
“We would be unable to carry out all of our research without the help of CU-Boulder students,” Stodieck said in the news release. “Both undergraduate and graduate students play an important role in designing, building and testing spaceflight payloads, activities that can give them a significant advantage when they move on to careers in the aerospace industry.”
BioServe is a nonprofit, NASA-funded center that has been at CU since 1987. Since 1991, BioServe has flown payloads on 36 space shuttle microgravity missions.
Contact CU Independent Breaking News Editor Isa Jones at Alexandra.i.jones@colorado.edu.
