Rob Ferl, A UF Scientist, Completes A Historic Space Flight
Rob Ferl, a scientist at the University of Florida, made history on Thursday when he became the first academic researcher to be funded by NASA to carry out independent experiments in space. The mission was a perfect sub-orbital flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.
At 8:07 a.m. Central Daylight Time, New Shepard launched from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas and reached a height of 345,958 feet, which is significantly higher than the Karman Line, the internationally acknowledged border of space. After being weightless for a few minutes, Ferl and the other five crew members returned to Earth in their capsule and gently landed in a dust cloud covered in three orange and blue parachutes.
When Ferl emerged from the capsule, he celebrated by raising his arms, put on a bright orange UF cap, and went to see his family who was waiting for him.
Not too long after, Ferl declared, “It was the best experience ever.” Scientists of all shapes, sizes, and ages are welcome to participate in this. Such a voyage offers a lot of opportunities.
After his mission, Rob Ferl returns to the payload lab.
Rob Ferl makes a successful spaceflight and returns to the payload processing facility.
When Ferl emerged from the capsule, he celebrated by raising his arms, put on a bright orange UF cap, and went to see his family who was waiting for him.
Not too long after, Ferl declared, “It was the best experience ever.” Scientists of all shapes, sizes, and ages are welcome to participate in this. Such a voyage offers a lot of opportunities.
The experimental tubes that Ferl, a distinguished professor in the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, had activated during the flight were then ready to be returned to an on-site lab and eventually be analyzed in Gainesville with the help of his longtime partner, fellow UF professor Anna-Lisa Paul.
Interim UF President Kent Fuchs remarked, “What a glorious day for the University of Florida, Rob, Anna-Lisa, and their team.” “Researchers doing their own studies in space is a new era of space exploration that UF is very happy to have pioneered. For university scientists around the globe, our collaboration with NASA and Blue Origin represents a significant first. There are yet discoveries to come.
Over the past 20 years, Ferl—who also serves as the head of UF’s Astraeus Space Institute—and Paul have launched scores of experiments into space to try to better understand how living things react molecularly to launch, microgravity, and return to Earth. Usually, NASA astronauts have been in charge of complicated, mostly self-sufficient payload packages containing plants as part of these investigations. The majority of these studies have been conducted “in space,” not “on the way to space,” according to Paul, head of the UF Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research.
“Over the years, academic researchers and NASA astronauts have enjoyed a wonderful collaborative relationship,” Ferl stated. “Now that the commercial space industry is expanding, we scientists have more opportunities to carry out our own highly targeted, real-time experiments.”
The Biological and Physical Sciences division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, as well as the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, both provided grants for this project. With NASA’s assistance, UF may take advantage of Blue Origin’s space capabilities, ushering in a new era of space research in which researchers like Ferl can carry out independent space studies.
Ferl carried experimental plants for Thursday’s mission in specially made tubes that he attached to his flight suit and activated four times: before launch, when the vehicle reached microgravity, when the weightless phase ended and the vehicle started to descend, and when the vehicle landed.
Jordan Callaham, the lab manager at the Payload Processing Facility on the ground, simultaneously activated a set of control tubes and monitored his progress. Paul claimed that the team’s training hours leading up to the mission were priceless.
“We were able to precisely coordinate ground control because of the astronaut’s outstanding performance,” the woman stated. “Every plant had an amazing appearance. Our experiment is well paired.
In order to quickly and safely mix test materials (in this case, a model plant called Arabidopsis thaliana) and preservative solutions to “fix” a moment of gene expression so researchers can later study what was happening at that time, Ferl and Paul contributed to the design of the tubes, known as Kennedy Space Center Fixation Tubes, or KFTs. In order to manage solutions in a microgravity environment safely and effectively, KFTs have also been utilized on board the space station. Here are other details regarding the experiment.
Paul stated, “A wide range of biological experiments in suborbital space are made possible by the successful use of KFTs, as any biology that can fit inside the KFTs can be sampled at any phases of flight chosen, in real time, by the scientist astronaut.”
