Astronaut Nespoli busy with experiments in VITA mission

Rome - Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, also known by his Twitter username "@Astro_Paolo", on Friday will work on the IN SITU bioanalysis experiment aboard the International Space Station (ISS), where he arrived on July 28 and is completing various experiments as part of the Italian Space Agency's (ASI) VITA mission.
    In the experiment, a saliva sample will be analysed for the first time ever aboard the ISS, using a special device developed by the University of Bologna's chemistry department.
    On Thursday Nespoli transferred work from other biology experiments in the mission - CORM, MyoGravity, NANOROS, and SERISM - to containers specifically designed to maintain cells at their ideal survival temperatures in the incubator Kubik, provided by the European Space Agency (ESA).
    In the coming days Nespoli will remove the containers one by one and insert them into a freezer before sending them back to the Earth to allow Italian researchers to complete the experiments.
    In the two weeks leading up to the launch of the experiments, a group of about 20 Italian researchers prepared the material in laboratories at a base that NASA made available to ASI.