The Artemis II crew is pushing the limits of human spaceflight and giving scientists a closer look at how the human body handles deep space.
Headed back to Earth on Tuesday, the four astronauts are on the return path after a historic journey around the Moon.
But this mission is about more than just distance. NASA is using it to study how space impacts the human body.
“The moon mission itself is a whole new territory for space medicine. The Mars trip will be leaps and bounds beyond that,” said Dr. Haig Aintablian, the director of the UCLA Space Medicine Program.
The astronauts traveling deeper into space than any crew in decades are exposed to high levels of radiation from the sun and cosmic particles.
“Radiation is something that we’re very interested in learning everything we can about. It’s going to be the thing that we’re going to have to protect our crew health, our crew systems, and all of our equipment from,” said Jesse Berdis, NASA Deputy Project Manager.
Experts say this is a major concern for future missions to the Moon and, eventually, to Mars. So, scientists are testing how the human body handles that exposure and how to protect it.
“We have a payload called the avatar, which is basically a sample of human tissue that we’re going to expose during the mission to that radiation, and we’ll get a lot of really good data back,” said Berdis.
That sample, exposed to space radiation, is expected to deliver critical data that could help keep future astronauts safe on longer missions.
And as NASA looks ahead to long-term stays on the Moon, a new challenge emerges: how to treat medical emergencies in space.
“As we start going toward these missions where you can’t just abort back to the Earth and go to a hospital, we’re going to have to send up physicians on these missions to do everything from minor emergencies to even potentially up to major surgeries,” said Aintablian.
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