Houston, we have a podcast.

Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 287 Science

in a Space Suit.

I'm Gary Jordan, and I'll be your host today.

On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all

to let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight and more.

If you're an active listener of this podcast, hopefully you're familiar with spacewalking.

But if not, in short, this is where astronauts put on those puffy white spacesuits so they

can work on the outside of a spacecraft.

Most recently, we see these a lot aboard the International Space Station for maintenance

and upgrade tasks, like swapping out batteries and installing new solar arrays.

But not very often, do astronauts go outside in a space suit to conduct science?

And that activity is coming up soon.

Scientists have been preparing for an extra vehicular science activity called the International

Space Station external micro-organism study.

During a spacewalk with other maintenance and upgrade tasks, spacewalkers will dedicate

some time to conducting a scientific activity to understand more about the microbial environment

on the outside of the International Space Station that can help us to better understand

likely contaminants for when we're exploring the moon and other planets.

This study has been a long time in the making, and is about to launch to the International

Space Station on Northrop Grumman's CRS-19 cargo mission.

We're lucky enough to bring in the project lead, Dr. Aaron Regberg, who's also a Geo-microbiologist

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