Biotechnology System Facility: Risk Mitigation on Mir

NASA is working with its international partners to develop space vehicles and facilities that will give researchers the opportunity to conduct scientific investigations in space. As part of this activity, NASA's Biotechnology Cell Science Program (BCSP) at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) is developing a world-class biotechnology laboratory facility for the International Space Station (ISS). This report describes the BCSP, including the role of the BTS. We identify the purpose and objectives of the BTS and a detailed description of BTS facility design and operational concept, BTS facility and experiment-specific hardware, and scientific investigations conducted in the facility. We identify the objectives, methods, and results of risk mitigation investigations of the effects of microgravity and cosmic radiation on the BTS data acquisition and control system. These results may apply to many other space experiments that use commercial, terrestrial-based data acquisition technology. Another focal point is a description of the end-to-end process of integrating and operating biotechnology experiments on a variety of space vehicles. The identification of lessons learned that can be applied to future biotechnology experiments is an overall theme of the report. We include a brief summary of the science results, but this is not the focus of the report. The report provides some discussion on the successful 130-day tissue engineering experiment performed in BTS on Mir and describes a seminal gene array investigation that identified a set of unique genes that are activated in space.