A motley crew of mannequins and biological experiments will take a journey into deep space farther than any human has ever been before.
The simulated astronauts and various experiments will travel aboard Artemis 1, an uncrewed test flight of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and Orion spacecraft, after a launch no earlier than August 29 . The system will explore the radiation environment near Earth and the moon, including flying deeper into space than the Apollo missions, for more than a month.
Moving outside the near-Earth Van Allen radiation belts that protect International Space Station astronauts from cosmic rays will increase the risk for future crew members venturing on lunar missions, scientists said in a live NASA briefing Wednesday (Aug. 17).
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“Understanding that [risk] is very important to successful and sustainable space exploration efforts in deep space,” Ramona Gaza of NASA’s Johnson Space Center said at the briefing.
Gaza leads the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment (MARE) science team, which also includes researchers from DLR (the German space agency). MARE will fly two dummy torsos (or ghosts) called Helga and Zohar into space equipped with 5,600 sensors to measure radiation; of the two, only Zohar will be wearing an AstroRad radiation shielding vest.
Helga, one of two DLR (German space agency) dummies to assess radiation during Artemis 1, is tested by the stresses of the launch. (Image credit: DLR)
The two “crew members” will be joined by a “moonikin” named after Apollo 13 engineer Arturo Campos. In addition to collecting information about acceleration and vibration, Campos has two radiation sensors to see the cumulative exposure that a mission to the Moon will bring.
In addition to humanoids, yeast cells will fly aboard Artemis 1 to see how living things react to radiation. The BioSentinel cubesat will conduct a biology experiment beyond the Earth-Moon system for the first time, assessing how yeast cells are affected by space radiation.
“We hope that we can extrapolate our resource to human biology and inform possible countermeasures for future missions,” Principal Scientist Sergio Santa Maria of NASA’s Ames Research Center told BioSentinel.
Astronaut protection also boils down to an assessment of the radiation environment. Scientists will continue to study the sun’s emissions using another cubesat called the CubeSat to Study Solar Particles (CuSP). The mission will examine the particles and magnetic fields coming from the sun, also known as the solar wind.
The solar wind is not only relevant to human health in space, but also on Earth; This is because large space weather events such as coronal mass ejections can affect power lines, satellites and other infrastructure vital to human functioning on our planet.
CuSP will be an experiment ahead of possible plans to put fleets of cubesats into deep space to look at solar radiation from multiple angles, said Mihir Desai, CuSP principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute.
“It will be, in a way, a precursor or a seeker for a potential constellation of low-cost cubesats that can make measurements in a very cost-effective way,” he said.
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