Three refrigerator-size scientific research racks are undergoing additional testing, upgrades and preventive maintenance while they await their ride to the International Space Station (ISS) on Space Shuttle mission, STS-121.

The racks, which will give the astronaut crew more research capability, will be installed in the Boeing-built Destiny laboratory. The three racks, currently housed at Kennedy Space Center, are the Window Observational Research Facility (WORF), Minus Eighty-degrees centigrade Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI) and the Human Research Facility Rack 2 (HRF-2).

The integration activity is part of the Boeing Payload Integration Contract, commonly called IPIC. The multi-contractor IPIC industry team led by Boeing, includes United Space Alliance. It performs the integration of all U.S. sponsored payloads headed to the ISS. The contract, valued at $133 million, employs mission integration, engineering, hardware, software, and operations experts in Houston, and Huntsville, Ala.

The WORF is designed to support small payload science experiments and will be installed over Destiny’s 20-inch optical-quality window facing Earth. It will allow cameras, scanners and other instruments to be positioned at the window location, helping ISS crews take better photographs by eliminating glare and allowing researchers to control their cameras and other equipment from the ground.

The ISS is an excellent platform for conducting Earth science. It flies over roughly 75 percent of the inhabited land surface of Earth and about 95 percent of the world’s population.

“We might use the WORF to take pictures of coastal waterways, or farmland, or sites of interest and improve upon our observation library that NASA has been building since the Mercury program,” said Joseph Pelfrey, Boeing payload integration manager at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The MELFI rack will freeze and store biological samples aboard the station and return the frozen samples to Earth. MELFI keeps temperatures below minus 68 degrees providing optimal preservation of scientific samples, even during limited periods when power is absent, said John Temple, a payload integration manager for United Space Alliance who is responsible for the MELFI integration.

The Boeing built HRF-2 will house experiments that study how the human body acts in space and provide additional capabilities to conduct biomedical research by providing the following:

• Refrigerated centrifuge that can separate biological substances of differing densities and keep them at a constant temperature of plus four degrees centigrade.

• Space Linear Acceleration Mass Measurement Device is a sophisticated scale that will measure the on-orbit mass of humans.

• Rack 2 workstation computer will provide data collection, archive, downlink, display and other functions for the rack.

• Gas Delivery System and Photo-acoustic Analyzer Module/Pulmonary Function Module, provided by the European Space Agency, and other components will provide a wide range of respiratory and cardiovascular measurements.

“HRF-2 has been checked out and the elements of HRF-1 (already on board ISS) and 2 will be swapped while on orbit. By reconfiguring the racks on orbit, NASA can do a broader range of experiments,” said Ron Prange, HRF program integration manager for United Space Alliance

Using the Payload Rack Checkout Unit that simulates the station, Kennedy Space Center employees will perform an exhaustive array of checkout and verification tests of each rack before it is installed in the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module that fits into the shuttle’s cargo bay for the ride to space.