’The Lab is Open Orbiting the Earth at almost 5 miles per second, a structure exists that is nearly the size of a football feld and weighs almost a million pounds. The International Space Station (ISS) is a testament to international cooperation and signifcant achievements in engineering. Beyond all of this, the ISS is a truly unique research platform. The possibilities of what can be discovered by using the results of research already conducted, as well as by conducting research on the ISS, are endless and have the potential to contribute to the greater good of life on Earth and inspire generations of researchers to come. As we increase utilization of the ISS as a National Laboratory, now is the time for investigators to propose ways to use both existing and new research and to make discoveries unveiling new knowledge about nature that could not be defned using traditional approaches on Earth. NASA s Physical Sciences Research Program conducts fundamental and applied physical sciences research, with the objective of enabling exploration and pioneering scientifc discovery. NASA s experiments in the various disciplines of physical science reveal how physical systems respond to the near absence of gravity. They also reveal how other phenomena that have a small infuence on physical systems in Earth’s gravity can dominate system behavior in space. Not only are we using the ISS to perform investigations, we are also taking the results from these investigations and making them available to researchers via open data. The PSI system (https://psi.nasa.gov) allows researchers to access the data from physical sciences investigations, most of which have been performed on the ISS.
