NASA Twins Study: How stressful will a trip to Mars be on the human body?
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
If there is anything that you feel that we should be focusing on or any aspects of space radiation that haven't been properly explored, we're always looking for new ideas!
Given the ISS is a closed environment, I think gut bacteria samples from other astronauts on board at the same time would be valuable to compare. Also cultures from skin and mouth.
There has been work showing we have unique personal microbiomes that follow us around. When we live with other people for long enough, there's a lot of merging between them.
Okay the rabbit hole wasn't that deep. At the very least it appears that this [1] is ongoing.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...
How different would 12 months in orbit be from 4-10 months interplanetary? Even if this winds up being accurate for LEO (even with n=1), how relevant is it for going to Mars?
I'm thinking that best practice for a potential Martian would be to create a sperm/egg cold-storage repository before leaving Earth (in case they want kids after potentially and safely returning). Kind of a weird, radiation-related tangent.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jillianscudder/2016/08/23/astroq...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Magnet_...
[1] http://radio2.marssociety.org/2017/01/18/rpr-11-mars-radiati...
Isn't the amount of research, meticulate care and millions upon millions spent making space travel as safe as possible becoming ridiculous?
About 150,000 people die each day. That's about 50 million a year. Test pilots used to die in crashes all the time.
I'd wager there are plenty of aspiring Astronauts that would be okay with an earlier death (due to radiation exposure, bone degredation, whatever) for having had the chance to go to Mars.
We won't really know anything beyond speculation until we actually send someone anyway.
Look how many people die to due terrorism vs. traffic accidents. Yet people take traffic accidents to be a fact of life, white terrorism gets a lot of funding and government attention.
If an astronaut has anything other than a space journey, that will quell interest in traveling to Mars for a generation or longer. NASA would lose funding for those missions. "Travel to Mars! Die horribly when you get there, far, far away from everything you know and love!"
For the worst case, supply them with euthanasia drugs. Sounds inhuman, but in my opinion far more human than letting them suffer a brutal death.
I mean, just imagine someone dies on a Mars base. Either of age, of a medical issue (heart attack), or an accident (e.g. electrical shock, or mishandling heavy stuff)... are they going to be buried on Mars? Cremated and flown home?
Will the families on Earth have a place to remember their lost ones? Should there be something like a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier? Where should this be, especially given that a Mars mission will be international? In the US? One per country?
Under which circumstances is euthanasia on space missions acceptable? Not at all? For grave untreatable injuries/illnesses only? Or for "okay its treatable on Earth easily but it's too expensive to fly home", too?
What do we do if someone (by negligence or with intent) kills or gravely injures someone else on a space mission? On a space travel, someone jailed is basically dead weight eating away your resources (ST:VOY dealt with this in the Lon Suder arc in the early seasons), so would it be acceptable to ditch the person? Same for a space colony. You're not going to bring lawyers, judges and trained police personnel on an early space mission.
To make it worse: society has to think about these issues FAST. I believe it's likely SpaceX will be manned permanently on Moon or Mars in no less than 10 years.
But for now, it's exploration, and the radiation exposure is almost a guarantee of cancer. I think NASA will have to figure something out before people are willing to accept half of Mars-bound astronauts dying horribly during the mission.
The other side of these things is that the research being done is not single-purpose. The lunar missions were an amazing human achievement, but their lasting legacy can be seen much more clearly on earth. Our radiation work has homeworld implications for understanding radiotherapy. Heavy ion therapy is a rapidly emerging technology that has the potential to make some previously-mortal cancers tractable, and understanding its full biological effects is critical. By exploring new worlds, we hope to be able to improve the lives on our own as well.
My claim was really totally unsubstantiated, because I have no idea how much is spent on human safety. I just assumed because I read about that regularily.
It might very well be that the actual investment is miniscule when compared to the technology spending.
Your other points are definitely valid as well.
(1) It's fairly cheap, compared to real R&D and
(2) There's nothing else to do in the meantime. Without big budget shifts, or big tech breakthroughs, there's no realistic path to a (NASA) manned Mars mission anytime soon.
So there's fiddling around the edges of the problem in the interim.
The pool of talented astronauts is already surprisingly slim. And every one of them has a brilliant career ahead of them, on a safe planet, if they want it. I bet the percentage of qualified astronauts who are fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants daredevils willing to face certain death for fleeting glory, is actually kind of small. You know what they say about old pilots and bold pilots.
So I'll take your wager.
That noted, I'd be curious to find if there are any particularly measurable "sensory" or "perception" type effects that could be part of a large inquiry. As in, does prolonged exposure change visual or auditory type input/processing/etc? It's curious to me because of seemingly how adaptive our senses can be in various environments (light versus dim), certain noises can be tuned out, and that sort of stuff. Maybe a large bombardment of space radiation or lack of gravity dulls our inner ear?
This way if the twins have measurable baselines and can take identical tests concurrently (one on Earth, one in orbit), then maybe the results could be worth reviewing...or not! Because science!
I imagine this must be very hard to accomplish but I wonder how meaningfull is the study otherwise.
> telomerase activity (the enzyme that repairs the telomeres and lengthens them) increased in both twins in November, which may be related to a significant, stressful family event happening around that time