| The UCSD NASA Lab has a long history beginning it's investigations of
pulmonary function in weightlessness with SpaceLab Life Sciences 1 in 1991. The tradition
of it's high-flying research aims was continued two years later with SpaceLab Life Sciences 2
in 1993. Together, these experiments served as a launching pad for a bright future
in human life sciences research in space and on the ground.
In 1996 the Life and Microgravity Sciences mission once again saw
the UCSD designed and built Astronaut Lung Function Experiment (ALFE) rocket into orbit on the way to making the
first measurements of the bodies response to carbon dioxide in space.
The Astronaut Lung Function Experiment (ALFE) hardware made it's
last journey into space in 1998 aboard STS-90 during the final SpaceLab mission, Neurolab.
It was during this mission that the UCSD NASA Lab began it's colaboration with a team from Brigham and Women's
Hospital at the Harvard Medical School. Together, the two groups investigated the effects of microgravity on
sleep and respiration.
The sleep studies begun during Neurolab would continue during STS-95,
a double SpaceHab mission which is most notably remembered as the mission during which Senator John Glenn
returned to space but which also saw the deployment and retrieval of the Spartan free-flyer payload, and
operations with the HST Orbiting Systems Test (HOST) and the International Extreme Ultraviolet Hitchhiker (IEH)
payloads carried in the payload bay. |
