Environmental Analytics: Public NASA Ames International Space Station Particle Database Website Released
December 2021
NAMS staff, Meytar Sorek-Hamer, Ph.D., Manager and Scientist (USRA) and Irina Hallinan, Software Engineer, (USRA) under the guidance of Marit Meyer, Ph.D. (NASA GRC), created the NASA Ames International Space Station Particle Databases website as a collaborative effort between different research fields including aerosols, air quality, health in space, and data science. The website hosts an interactive plotting tool for a unique data set of airborne pollutant particles sampled on the International Space Station (ISS). The International Space Station Particle Database is a public-facing web tool for developing an air quality index for space missions.
This website is appropriate for researchers studying air quality in spacecraft, university professors and high school teachers for creating STEM focused curriculum. This interactive tool also provides a visual means to explore and plot sampled particles by classes, such as elemental composition, morphology (shape attributes) and ISS location. Some sample questions that the users will potentially answer by interacting with the ISS particle database include: what ISS sampling location that had the most silver-containing particles? What are the average diameters of aluminum particle classes sampled? The ISS indoor environment has air that has been continually recycled and revitalized for 20 years. Since the ISS serves as both home and workplace for crew members, there are many particle-producing activities and materials that the airborne particles or aerosols reflect. The Aerosol Sampling Experiment collected airborne particles on samplers in 2016. These were returned to Earth for subsequent microscopic analysis, providing a rich data set of elemental composition and morphology of individual particles and components of particles.
This application is hosted by NASA Ames Code-I Managed Cloud Environment. This work was funded by NASA Academic Mission Services and NASA Life Support Systems Project in the Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) Division within the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD).
ISS Particle Database: https://iss-particle-db.arc.nasa.gov/
