PART 1: New WebChat sessions announced
PART 2: Students discuss design of space hardware
PART 3: Another plea to register
PART 4: What's up in space: nothing new
PART 5: Science is fun; having a good evening
PART 6: We don't cover up our mistakes

A new series of WebChats has been scheduled with NASA experts
from various backgrounds. Your students can virtually meet these
people and learn about their jobs, career paths, and personal
interests.

To participate, please RSVP for each event to Andrea by sending a
brief Email note to andream@quest.arc.nasa.gov with the date(s) you
plan to participate. This RSVP is very important, since it will allow
us to ensure that the chatroom does not become too crowded.

Wednesday, November 20 from 10-11 AM Pacific (1-2 PM Eastern)
Tana Hoban-Higgins is a Principal Investigator at the University of
California, Davis. She is involved in designing experiments to study
the internal body clocks of beetles in space.

Wednesday, December 4 from 10-11 AM Pacific (1-2 PM Eastern)
Karen Borski is a Mission Science Support Engineer at NASA Johnson
Space Center. She is responsible for archiving data for life science
experiments on computers.

Wednesday, December 11 from 10-11 AM Pacific (1-2 PM Eastern)
Cecilia Wigley is a System Safety, Reliability & Quality Assurance
Lead at NASA Ames Research Center. She is responsible for insuring
that equipment flown in space is safe and functions properly.

For more information about all of this, please visit the web page at:
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/smore/events/interact.html

STUDENTS DISCUSS DESIGN OF SPACE HARDWARE

As part of The Great Plant Debate
(http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/smore/events/datashare.html), 
students
have just begun to discuss the relative merits of various
hardware designs for growing plants in space. Please consider having
your students join the discussion on a mail list called debate-sm.

There are various ways to participate in this action. You may
receive the messages direct to your email box, either in a standard
or digested form. The standard mechanism will deliver each
contribution as a new mail message. If you already get too much
email coming in, then you may opt for the digest option. This
collates all of the contributions in the past 24-hours, which is
then forwarded as one email per day to you.

To join these lists, send an email message to
      listmanager@quest.arc.nasa.gov
Write one of the following lines in the message body:
      subscribe debate-sm
      subscribe debate-digest-sm

In addition, you can also access this dialogue via the web. For this
option, see this web homepage:

A few weeks back, we began registering S/MORE users voluntarily.
We had about 85 people register. Thanks so much. But there are
around 600 people signed up for the S/MORE mail list. So that
means a lot of folks did not bother to help us.

We ask those folks to reconsider and to now register. It won't
take very much of your time and it will provide us with critical
information we need to continue doing these projects. We are
interested in hearing from everybody, whether or not you are
actually using this project to teach students in a classroom.
Please take a few moments and visit

Thanks again

We were unable to obtain information from the past week. So this
regular feature will return next week.




[Editor's note: Kenneth Souza is a high-level manager of life sciences

activities at NASA Ames, where he helps oversee many unique
facilities (like centrifuges). Also his organization does in-house
research and works with those outside of NASA to help them use
space for advancing our knowledge of biomedical problems and
basic biology.]

THE FUN OF DOING SPACE EXPERIMENTS
Kenneth A. Souza - http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/smore/team/ksouza.html
August 8, 1996
Within my first few months as a research scientist at
Ames, I was asked to join a spaceflight team, which took
me out of the laboratory environment and down to the
Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. I was
involved with an embryology experiment that was the
predecessor of the one that I subsequently flew on the
shuttle in the early 1990s. We flew a variety of
organisms--plants, insects and frog eggs that were
fertilized on the ground and taken into space--on some
biosatellites in the mid-1960s. It became incredibly
exciting to be a part of that process, in which things are
developed, put on a rocket, sent into space, and received
back several days later.

Following the early biosatellites, there were not many
opportunities for space biologists to gain access to space.
In 1978 NASA requested proposals for flights onboard the
new space shuttle. I submitted a proposal which was a
logical extension of the early frog embryology
experiments. It passed peer review and went into the queue
awaiting a flight opportunity. It was very interesting and
exciting to be a part of taking an experiment from an idea
stage, through the hardware development and training of
the astronauts, to the actual interaction with them during
flight and conduct of the experiment. Fortunately, this
experiment was very successful. We received excellent
results. This was a developmental biology experiment
studying how organisms could develop in the absence of
gravity. The model was just simple frog eggs for study,
but it was fairly complex to do in space because of the
difficulties of conducting any kind of research in the
absence of gravity.

We are now on a threshold of putting a permanently
occupied space station into orbit and beginning human
exploration beyond the Moon and Mars. If we get the
station up, it will give us the opportunity to do things we
couldn't do on the shuttle. There will be more time and
people in space and more power to do things with. If we
do continue exploration to the Moon and Mars, we will
have unlimited opportunities to expand our horizons.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

HAVING A "GOOD" EVENING
Kenneth A. Souza - http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/smore/team/ksouza.html
August 8, 1996
I was a member of a joint working group with the Russians, in
which every year we would get together: about 10 U.S.
members and about 10 Russians. One year we would meet in
Russia, and the next year we would meet in the U.S. I was a
part of that group that met in Leningrad in 1978. The Russians,
out of the blue, came to me and said, "We'd like to move our
program from plants, cells, tissues and rats to non-human
primates." They had never flown a monkey in space. "These
biomedical problems that exist with humans in long-term
spaceflight are very serious: bone wasting, muscle loss, etc.
The only way we're really going to get more insight is to utilize
a primate species like the Rhesus monkey, and we'd like you to
be involved." When the offer came to me, it was my job to
analyze the offer and if I thought it as good for the US, I was to
put a set of arguments together that I could take to the head of
the U.S. delegation, and convince him that this was the right
thing to do for NASA and our overall Space Biology and
Medicine Program. I had to do all of it overnight, and it was
about 8 p.m. when the offer came to us. Of course, the
banquets that existed every night didn't give me a lot of time to
do other things. At that time, we didn't have computers to allow
us to bang out a few things in our hotel room.

So I remember going back to my room between 10 and 11
p.m., after the dinner broke up, and trying to put some things
together by hand. I do remember writing it all out. It was about
4 a.m. when I finally finished. At 8 a.m., the head of the
delegation met with me and I showed him the pros and cons,
risks, and rough cost estimates, all of which I had come up
with the previous night. After he thought about the issues for
awhile, and asked other people in the delegation for their
opinions, we were given the go-ahead to proceed down this
new path. That meant that at the end of the meeting, we entered
into a protocol basically stating that we accepted the offer and
would go forward and work with the Russians in the new
program. This would be in addition to a budget commitment
from the head of the delegation, who was the director of NASA
Life Sciences.

That put us on a path that we are still on, called the BION
series. The first BION mission with monkeys was to have
flown in 1981, but did not fly until 1983. But since that time,
we have flown the missions every two years. It has been
extremely productive and has enhanced our understanding of
biomedical problems, as well as expanded what we have been
able to glean from the use of rodents.

That was very exciting to realize that I was at that crossroads.
Had I had a bad evening and not presented the case well
enough, today we may not have the benefit of the joint venture
with the Russians.




[Editor's note: Cecilia is a System Safety, Reliability, and Quality
Assurance Lead. She makes sure that the equipment sent into space
will not cause any injury or illness to any of the crew members, or
possibly damage the shuttle or hardware experiments. Also, she
insures that designs and hardware meet the stringent requirements
(both Russian and American) on anything that flies.]

WE DON'T COVER UP OUR MISTAKES
Cecilia Wigley - http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/smore/team/cwigley.html
August 1, 1996
A typical day includes going to a lot of meetings. I spend half
of my time going to meetings. The rest of the time is spent
writing reports, answering engineering questions, overseeing
hardware building and reviewing documents.

What often happens is that in the middle of a test, the hardware
doesn't function correctly. This has happened with jet engines
and test conductors. When something doesn't work correctly
we do a lot of brainstorming and try to determine what we can
do to fix the problem. We try to do what we need to in order to
stay on schedule, but not blow the budget.

Sometimes we have to admit that something didn't work and
we have to go back and do it again. Part of our reputation is that
we do not try to hide our mistakes and we own up to problems
that occur. We provide solutions to problems and the worst
thing is to try to cover up mistakes.

I have been involved in 10 successful missions and the patches
and stickers on my wall represent missions that I have played
some role in. The successes far outweigh the problems. But in
the final outcome, we can say that we did what we needed to
do, the scientists got what they needed, and we were part of the
different aspects of a mission.

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