By Jenet Krol

Krol@hometownnewsol.com

CAPE CANAVERAL - If you've recently visited a Web site and taken a 360-degree virtual tour of a hotel room, a piece of real estate, or a new automobile, you've used technology developed thanks to experiments aboard the International Space Station.

Originally developed to help astronauts with remote docking of spacecraft and to guide space robots, the 360-degree digital representations now help consumers on a daily basis.

And, while hundreds of people routinely watch the shuttles blasting off to carry the equipment necessary for experiments aboard the International Space Station, few know just what has been going on up there for the past decade.

Since 2000, astronauts aboard the ISS have conducted experiments on the effects of micro gravity on human physiology and have tested new materials for future space exploration.

"One challenge we have is that it takes time for the results of our experiments to turn into benefits for everyone," said Julie Robinson, program scientist-International Space Station, based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "People are familiar with the spinoffs of the Apollo mission, but don't know what the Space Station is doing now. The clinical trial and research and development trial processes take a little while."

For example, a microencapsulated system for medicine was recently patented and is entering the testing phase on Earth.

Astronauts aboard the ISS tested a way of encapsulating a drug in a microcapsule to target a specific area of the body when injected. Their research focused on prostate cancer in mice.

"After the Columbia accident happened, we couldn't make anymore in space. Instead we sharpened our pencils, because we knew this was a desirable system to have, and developed a machine to make the microcapsules on Earth," said Ms. Robinson.

Tests to discover the effects of micro gravity on human beings, in preparation for extended space flight, has yielded some medical discoveries, such as the discovery that some types of microorganisms grow faster in space than on Earth.

"Usually something that starts as exploration research benefits us here on Earth," said Ms. Robison.

The National Lab Pathfinder Vaccine is using the space environment to find vaccines for bacteria such as Salmonella and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, an infection that is resistant to many antibiotics, said Ms. Robinson.

"When a microorganism is in space, it doesn't have any shearing forces working on it and the cell walls become a perfect sphere. All of those physical changes affect their gene expression and their ability to cause a disease."

Introducing these organisms into a novel, challenging environment gives researchers ideas of genes to use as targets in fighting these organisms that they otherwise wouldn't know were involved, she said.

The Materials ISS Experiment brings new materials to the ISS with each mission. The MISSE articles are mounted outside the station and exposed to the space environment to see what will be durable in space for future missions, said Ms. Johnson.

These experiments have taught researches how atomic oxygen, or a single oxygen molecule, which is very reactive and unstable, breaks down the bonds of compounds it reacts with.

"Researchers were able to fine-tune an atomic oxygen gun to remove one single layer of atomic oxygen off of an object," said Ms. Robinson. As a result, artwork that has been damaged by vandalism or fire has been restored.

Due to the current budget set by Congress, the time horizon for shutting down the International Space Station is set for 2015, said Ms. Robinson.