Jennifer Ngo-Anh, European Space Agency
We are entering a new era of human space exploration. We would like to go back to the Moon – not just to visit like in the Apollo programme, but this time staying and continue further towards Mars with a human crew for extended periods of time. Linked to such ambitious goals are a lot of challenges that we need to address – and that is what we do with our daily work in the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Human Research Programme.
It will probably not come as a surprise to you when I tell you that the space environment does not offer conditions for which humans were made for. Space is actually quite a hostile environment for humans.
Space exposes the astronauts to massive amounts of radiation, and the crews have to live autonomously in isolation and in what’s effectively like a giant tin can. While astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) are still quite protected from space radiation, on the Moon or Mars, or even further in Deep Space, conditions are very different. We are doing research right no to better understand what space radiation does to cells, organisms etc. and to identify good shielding and protective mechanisms.
In order to address the issue of isolation and confinement, ESA supports research on the Antarctic continent, specifically on the French-Italian Concordia station. Why are we convinced that research on Concordia station is valuable for us and our programme? To put it simply, you can essentially look at Concordia station as an ISS that was dropped in the middle of the Antarctic continent. Concordia station thus serves as a high-fidelity analogue on Earth for long duration exploration missions and allows us to use results from mainly human research experiments to extrapolate for missions into deep space with human crews.
Space also exposes astronauts to zero gravity conditions which has an impact on their bodies, and all these factors have a direct impact on the feasibility and success of such long-duration exploration missions with a human crew.
Studying the effects of microgravity is another area we have figured out how to do right here on Earth. We use bed-rest studies, making use of those models with the aim to test promising countermeasures that we can then recommend for use during real spaceflight missions. ESA has recently put in place a new bed-rest study plan focussing on artificial gravity as the main countermeasure that will guide our activities in the years to come. The idea is that we would like to prescribe gravity like a drug, giving it in short, but large doses through so-called “short arm human centrifuges,” in isolation but also in combination with specific exercise devices that will be mounted onto those centrifuges.
If we want to send a human crew to the Moon, to Mars or into Deep Space, we need to ensure that they remain fit, functional and healthy throughout the entire mission. We are getting there, but there is certainly still a ways to go.