Jenna M. Lang edited Methods.md  about 9 years ago

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### ISS Crew  Swabbing was conducted during Expedition 39. The crew included NASA astronauts Steve Swanson and Rick Mastracchio and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Alexander Skvortsov, and Mikhail Tyurin. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata was the commander for this expedition, and is the astronaut who performed the swabbing.  ### Do we have any information on how / why they chose particular sites? (MARK AND I CHOSE THESE SITES - JL) Sampling site choice  These surfaces were chosen in an attempt to sample surfaces analogous to those sampled in the Wildlife of Our Homes project \cite{23717552}. Wildlife of Our Homes was a Citizen Science project for which over 1000 volunteers swabbed nine surfaces in their homes: kitchen cutting board, kitchen counter, a shelf inside a refrigerator, toilet seat, pillowcase, exterior handle of the main door into the house, television screen, the upper door trim on the outside surface of an exterior door, and the upper door trim on an interior door. We were not granted access to all corresponding surfaces aboard the ISS. The kitchen surfaces aboard the ISS are in the Russian module, which we did not have permission to access, swabbing the toilet seat was deemed inappropriate due to ???, and the exterior surfaces are accessible only via an "Extra-vehicular Activity" (Space Walk), which was not requested for this experiment. We also sought to collect samples that would be analogous to the cell phone and shoe samples that were being obtained from thousands of Citizen Scientists across the country in a different component of Project MERCCURI. See Table 1 for a list of the ISS sampling sites and to which Earth samples they were intended to be analogous.  Upon successful completion of the swabbing on May 9, 2014, http://blogs.nasa.gov/stationreport/2014/05/09/iss-daily-summary-report-050914/ (include link to video of actual swabbing?) ll swabs were stored at -80 deg C in the MELFI freezer onboard the ISS, until transfer to the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. In the Dragon, the swabs were stored at -80 deg C in a portable freezer, called the GLACIER, that runs off of Dragon's batteries until it is plugged in (either to the ISS or on the ground.) The Dragon re-entered the Earth's atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:05pm PT on May 18, 2014. Samples were transferred to a cooler with dry ice, and shipped to the EMP lab.