During the first week of September, the BRIC-20 space experiment moved one big step closer to the December 2014 launch date as members from both the Wyatt Lab (Ohio University) and the Luesse Lab (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) arrived at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral, Florida to begin Payload Verification Testing (PVT).
Dr. Wyatt and Dr. Leusse, co-principal investigators, were accompanied by graduate students Proma Basu (OHIO) and Sarah Hutchinson (SIUE). The PVT phase marks the successful close of the critical SVT phase, and serves as the final dress rehearsal before the launch in December. During their stay, the team completed the integration of the science with the NASA BRIC-20 hardware. They will return to KSC October 18th to deintegrate the science and ship the samples back to the lab for proteomic and RNA analysis.
Gravitron 