INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION Expedition Two Science Operations Status Report for the week ending May 31, 2001 The Expedition Two crew finished setting up a device to protect experiments from vibrations and began efforts along with ground controllers to activate an experiment designed to study the physics of materials used in many manufacturing processes. "We've had some good successes and major accomplishments in the past week," said John Uri, Expedition Two Lead Increment Scientist from Johnson Space Center. Ground controllers Wednesday, May 30, activated EXPRESS Rack Two in preparation for activation of the Experiment on the Physics of Colloids in Space. Initial activation of the colloids expeirment was not successful, and troubleshooting continued today. A colloid is a system of particles suspended in a liquid. Common examples are milk, ink and paint. This experiment is part of an effort to understand the basic behavior of colloids. It could lead to colloid engineering and development of new manufacturing materials and processes on Earth with applications in semiconductors, electro-optics, ceramics, composites, coatings, and food. Flight Engineer Jim Voss on Tuesday, May 29, completed the last half of setup work for the Active Rack Isolation System, located in EXPRESS Rack Two, in preparation for activation later. Using sensors and pushrods, ARIS acts like a powered shock absorber to react to disturbances such as crew exercises and vibrating equipment to provide a better low gravity environment for delicate experiments. An additional growth chamber in Protein Crystal Growth Single Thermal Enclosure (PCG-STES) Unit 10 was activated Monday, May 28. Three of the six chambers in Unit 10 are now active. An identical experiment device PCG-STES Unit 9 was activated earlier in the mission, along with all six of its growth chambers. Protein molecules are involved in numerous biological processes. Scientists hope the space experiment will reveal more about their structure and yield advances in medicine, agriculture, the environment and other biosciences. On Saturday, May 26, Flight Engineer Susan Helms continued operations with the Middeck Active Control Experiment (MACE II). This expeirment, first begun during the Expedition One mission and continued by Helms, is testing control mechanisms that can be used in large articulated spacecraft as well as other industrial applications. The crew continued to conduct normal maintenance of active science experiments - re-charging radiation sensors, downloading sensor data to computers, checking experiment status panels and photographing hardware setups. Seeds in the Advanced Astroculture experiment have sprouted, and the science team based at the University of Wisconsin reports the seedlings appear on video to be slightly larger than expected. Scientists hope to use the long duration Station mission to grow plants from seeds to the seed production stage and learn whether there are any genetic changes. A commercial company is using the experiment as the basis for Internet-based education programs for classrooms. A list of targets for Crew Earth Observations photography was uplinked to the crew Tuesday, May 29. Targets of this ongoing investigation included: major industrial complex of Cape Town, South Africa, smoke and ash from Volcano San Cristobal, Nicaragua, Parana River Basin development in South America, glaciers in the Chilean Andes, ice and snow covers in the South Sandwich Islands, Antarctic ice, Peruvian and Bolivian Andes peaks. Water levels in the lakes of the Andean Altiplano. Human development and global warming investigations are continuing themes for these photographic studies. The science and payload teams have decided to discontinue trouble-shooting with the Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus and return the experiment on an upcoming Space Shuttle mission. An investigation team has been assigned to look into the cause of the failure. "That's a hardware problem we don't fully understand," Uri said. "An identical unit on the ground has been operating nominally. There have been several attempts via software patches to bypass what we think the problem is. Without the ability to water and feed the bacterial samples, the samples no longer remain viable. We've flown CGBA 15 times on the Shuttle and twice on Mir. The hardware is fairly well proven, but this is a problem we've never seen before. We need to get the unit back and look at it." The science team sent up a message to the crew thanking them for their effort to recover the payload. "While we are certainly disappointed, we are in no way giving up on the bigger picture of what this commercial space research project represents," said Dr. Dave Klaus, principal investigator for the experiment, with Bioserve Space Technologies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "Our colleagues at Bristol-Myers Squibb understand the challenges of conducting research in space, and we expect our long-standing collaboration to continue as we work towards future flight opportunities."