NASA's Cold Atom Laboratory, a facility for fundamental physics experiments on the International Space Station recently underwent a major hardware upgrade with the help of astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch.
What is the Cold Atom Laboratory?
It's a massive piece of equipment that was installed on the International Space Station in May 2018. Its purpose is basically to supercool atoms so that their natural vibrations slow down, making them easier to study.
Effectively, the machine can cool atoms within one ten-billionth of a degree above 0 Kelvin (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius).
It's important for this machine to stay on the space station since it uses the ISS's unique microgravity environment to observe quantum phenomena that would otherwise be undetectable from Earth.
The mission team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California had to guide astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir through the installation of the new hardware via live video conference.
To complete the upgrade, Koch and Meir would have to gently maneuver the sizeable Science Instrument out of its operating location on the space station, remove the old Science Module and replace it with the new one.
While Koch and Meir did prepare to do this before they left Earth, it was a task that could not afford any mess-ups.
Here's what Kamal Oudrhiri, project manager for Cold Atom Lab at JPL, had to say about the upgrade:
"With this upgrade, we were effectively replacing the heart of Cold Atom Lab, and everything had to go perfectly. Astronauts are extremely smart, capable people, but we felt like heart surgeons trying to show a general practitioner how to do surgery for the first time. We did everything we could to ensure success, but truthfully I was very nervous."
The laboratory will be available for use by multiple scientific investigators and is designed to be maintained on orbit.
And how did the installation turn out? So far, the JPL team says it looks like a complete success.
"This was an extremely difficult endeavor that required a dedicated team on the ground and two committed astronauts, Christina and Jessica," said Oudrhiri. "If this installation hadn't gone well, there would have been no second chance. We'd have to bring the entire flight instrument back to Earth, and that could have set us back at least two years."
Once testing and analysis of the new hardware are complete in the coming weeks, the team expects the science groups that use the Cold Atom Lab to begin taking data again.
