Munich

Forget purpose-built laboratories, all you need to do experiments in space is an airlock. At least, that is where the first experiments on board the International Space Station (ISS) will take place.

Thanks to a deal with the Russian Space Agency, German and Russian physicists will make an early start to research on the space station, long before its main laboratories reach orbit. Using a makeshift lab, the researchers will begin a multimillion dollar investigation into the properties of a complex plasma later this year.

Lab space: the airlock (above) will connect the next module to the space station (right). Credit: NASA/MPE

The location will be the bubble-shaped connection chamber between the Russian service module, due to be launched in June, and the Zarya control module, already in orbit. Once the ISS is fully operational, the chamber will be a busy thoroughfare, and will have to be kept clear. But until then, the Russian Space Agency is happy to turn the airlock over to the plasma physicists, led by Greg Morfill of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching.

Accustomed to a make-do-and-mend approach from their experiences with the ageing Mir station, Russian space officials have even allowed the scientists to drill a hole through a door hatch in order to thread electricity cables into the airlock. “The agency was very fast and unbureaucratic,” says Morfill, who acknowledges that its western counterparts would not have been quite so accommodating. “The same sort of agreement with NASA would have required a square metre of paperwork; with European space agencies, perhaps a square kilometre,” he says.

The experiments will examine the unusual plasma states that can be created by introducing microspheres of melanine formaldehyde into normal plasmas. The microspheres, which are around one hundred billion times more massive than the electrons and ions that constitute a plasma, introduce order into what is normally the most disordered form of matter. The plasma liquefies, and then crystallizes. However, gravity disturbs the spheres making it difficult to interpret data from studies of the plasma on Earth.

Morfill and his colleagues had originally hoped to run the experiments on Mir, but when its future started to look shaky, they shifted their allegiance to the ISS. The team will attempt to observe the propagation of waves through the crystals, and will also watch the behaviour of individual microspheres as the crystals melt — analagous to studying individual molecules in a conventional crystal. “Because the microspheres are so relatively massive,” says Morfill, “we will be able to record their individual movements with [charge-coupled device] cameras.”

Russia is paying for the launch costs, the crew and their training, and other logistics, to a value estimated at around DM20 million (US$9.45 million). Germany is contributing DM8 million.

The first crew to visit the space station in October will tend the apparatus for a week, and bring back 40 hours of videos for Morfill's team to analyse. Based on these results, the experiments will be redesigned and repeated by the third ISS crew a couple of months later. The fifth crew may also continue the experiments.