When presented with just one chance to send an experiment to space, the hardest decision to make is always what experiment to send. Every year, the SpaceLab team has planned and successfully run novel experiments that take advantage of the unique environment in space. This year’s team seeks to continue that trend.

With everyone pitching into the ideation process, great plans for experiments were plentiful. As the year progressed, however, the team had to narrow down the list and strike off ideas that were simply too unfeasible.

One of our first ideas was to test the feasibility of a sodium-ion battery in space. Known for developing crystalline structures that inhibit their efficiency, the team wanted to examine the extent to which such crystals would pose problems in space. Furthermore, the team wanted to look into the batteries’ retention of charge over an extended period of time in space. Comparing either of these two factors to their performance on Earth would yield valuable information on how to make sodium-ion batteries more efficient. However, the restrictions on shipping along with NASA’s hesitance to run an experiment with potentially explosive materials made it impossible for us to obtain permission to run this experiment.

Unable to run the sodium-ion battery experiment, we resorted to our second idea—sending an ant colony to space. The interactions between ants in a colony are incredibly complex, and the team was interested in examining how such behaviors would be altered when ants were placed in a radically different environment. In addition, the experiment could serve as a test run for future astronauts and scientists hoping to use ants as a food source in space. However, we once again faced crucial challenges. For one, the container was too small to support an entire colony. Moreover, the ants would need to survive not only their 30-day spaceflight but also the many months they spend in their container before launch. 

Not wanting to create an entirely new experiment, we decided to make only one change—instead of ants, we use brine shrimp. Brine shrimp don’t require much room, solving our first problem. Moreover, they exist as cysts before coming in contact with water, causing them to awaken from this dormant state. This served as an ingenious solution to our second problem. By storing the brine shrimp as cysts and pumping in water at the start of the experiment, we could control when they would awaken. This completely eliminated our concern that the brine shrimp may die before the experiment began.

To make the experiment a reality, the team got to work designing a capsule that would both support brine shrimp and allow us to observe them. The current design (shown below) consists of a fluidic bag that stores the solution the shrimp will live in. The shrimp are stored as cysts in the viewing chamber, where the pumps will siphon the solution at the start of the experiment. The lights are activated every time the camera takes a photo of the shrimp, which occurs on the hour.

The team is hard at work refining both the design and the plans for the launch, which is currently planned to occur on June 3, 2021. Continue to look out for updates from the team as they get closer to creating their final product!