He and his science team, stationed at Spacelab Mission Operations Control, are pushing the envelope of knowledge about the precise conditions under which one material can coexist in two states of matter. That will be the point where the Zeno apparatus will collect the all-important data for his investigation. Having accomplished this, they decided to wait for the next period of reduced crew activity, scheduled for this evening, in order to take maximum advantage of the relatively undisturbed microgravity environment. The IDGE science team has completed data collection for their first 20-cycle phase of primary science and have begun their second phase. During each cycle, the facility studies crystal structures for clues about how to solidify liquid materials into forms with just the right characteristics for their intended purpose.
Applications range from aluminum to steel products.
Alloys are combinations of metals that reinforce or add properties not found in each constituent alone. The goal is to develop processes to distribute constituents in a precise manner to improve the final product. They noticed that the thrusters had a great impact on the sample's crystallization when fired at a perpendicular orientation, at a 90-degree angle, to the direction in which the sample grows, but no effect when fired parallel to that direction. This was the first time this effect has been demonstrated in space, and it could prove important to materials processing in similar furnaces aboard the International Space Station. The CSD experiment team, led by Dr. David L. Urban of NASA's Lewis Research Center, received good data from the burns, which will contribute to the understanding and prevention of possible fires on spacecraft.