Inside a laboratory in the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, April Spinale, a payload integration specialist with Bionetics, and Ray Polniak, a quality assurance specialist with Dynamac, fill vials with clear water during an acceptance leak test on the hardware for the Protein Crystal Growth 2 experiment. They are both consultants for the Center for Advancement of Science in Space, or CASIS. The experiment is one of many that will be delivered to the International Space Station on the SpaceX-4 commercial cargo resupply mission.
Kennedy's ISS Ground Processing and Research Project Office is providing the necessary laboratories, equipment, supplies and consumables for 61 principal investigators, including 17 from other countries, as they prepare their science experiments for flight. The SpaceX-4 flight is targeted to launch in September 2014. Photo credit: NASA/Dimitri Gerondidakis