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With Polaris Dawn’s launch, Colorado scientists will study vision changes in space

Jeff Zehnder — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 15:04:06 +0000

With Polaris Dawn’s launch, Colorado scientists will study vision changes in space Jeff Zehnder Mon, 09/16/2024 - 09:04

During SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn's multi-day high-altitude mission, which rocketed to space on Sept. 10, the crew will conduct health impact research to better understand spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome (SANS). Researchers from CU �鶹�� and the CU Anschutz Medical Campus are right there with them. Or at least their equipment and expertise will be.

The team is sending up specialized optical equipment to gather data from astronauts’ eyes and will analyze the results during and after the five-day mission.

The research is a collaboration between Allie Hayman, associate professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at CU �鶹��, and Prem Subramanian, chief of neuro-ophthalmology at the CU School of Medicine.

Torin Clark, associate professor of aerospace engineering sciences at CU �鶹��, is leading separate research from the ground for the Polaris Dawn mission about how astronauts experience motion sickness and other illusory sensations during space travel.

For some time, astronauts have noticed vision changes during long-duration space missions. Since 1998, NASA has sent astronauts to the International Space Station with “space anticipation glasses,” which have adjustable refraction settings to meet changing vision needs, similar to binoculars. In 2011, NASA began conducting MRI scans on astronauts following missions, which revealed potentially increased pressure in their brains as well as optic disc swelling, or papilledema, in more than half of the astronauts.

On Polaris Dawn, the researchers are sending up SENSIMED Triggerfish lenses, which are “smart” contact lenses to track eye pressure fluctuation and changes in cornea dimensions in glaucoma patients. CU Department of Ophthalmology Adjoint Professor Kaweh Mansouri, MD, contributed to the development of these lenses, which will monitor astronauts’ eyes during launch and as they transition to microgravity, a condition of apparent weightlessness. The lenses contain sensors that transmit data to an antenna and local storage device, enabling the researchers to collect and analyze data upon their return.

The team is also sending a device called the QuickSee, which will measure astronauts’ refractive error, when the shape of the eye changes and keeps light from focusing correctly on the retina.

Polaris Dawn crew members include Mission Commander Jared “Rook” Isaacman; Mission Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet; Mission Specialist and Medical Officer Anna “Walker” Menon; and Mission Specialist Sarah “Cooper” Gillis, who graduated from CU �鶹�� in 2017 with a degree in aerospace engineering sciences.

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With space travel comes motion sickness. These engineers want to help

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 21:50:01 +0000

With space travel comes motion sickness. These engineers want to help Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/01/2024 - 14:50

In a corner room of the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building at CU �鶹��, Torin Clark is about to go for a ride.

The associate professor straps himself into what looks like an intimidating dentist’s chair perched on metal scaffolding, which, in turn, rests on a circular base. The whole set up resembles a carnival attraction.

Which, in a way, it is.

Motion sickness and space
By the numbers

60%–80%

Percentage of space travelers who experience space motion sickness.

2–3 days

Typical length of a bout of space motion sickness.

86%

Percent of astronauts who reported vomitting as a symptom of their space motion sickness in a survey from the 1980s. Other common symptoms included anorexia (78%), headache (64%), stomach awareness (61%) and malaise (58%).

27%

Percent of Russian cosmonauts who experienced "readaption syndrome," similar to symptoms of motion sickness, upon their return to Earth.

Source: Heer & Paloski, 2006, "Autonomic Neuroscience"

“Torin, are you ready to start?” calls out graduate student Taylor Lonner from in front of a monitor displaying several views of Clark. “I’m going to go to 5 r.p.m. over two minutes.”

Clark gives a thumbs up and begins to spin—first slowly, then faster and faster. The chair whips in circles around the room, creating a centrifugal force that forces his body back into the headrest.

Once the machine slows down and Clark is back on solid ground, he seems a little wobbly but in otherwise good spirits.

“It basically feels like a gravitron,” he says, referring to the spinning, nausea-inducing rides that became a staple of county fairs in the 1980s.

The team from the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences is using this machine as one step in an experiment that seeks to recreate an experience that few people ever have: The shock of going from one gravity environment, like space, to another, like the surface of Earth. In particular, the group is tackling what happens when astronauts return home, landing in their spacecrafts in the middle of a choppy ocean.

Disorientation and motion sickness have long been an underappreciated reality of space exploration, Lonner said. Surveys suggest that a majority of astronauts and cosmonauts have gotten sick during water landings—a relatively minor condition that could become dangerous if nauseous crew members suddenly have to respond to a disaster.

Addressing such motion sickness will become increasingly important as more people travel into space, and stay there for long, Lonner said. In recent lab experiments, the team discovered that virtual reality goggles might help keep astronauts grounded when they splash down in the ocean. This technology can provide people with calming images of a landscape to gaze at, similar to watching the horizon from the deck of a boat.

The team presented its results this month at NASA’s annual Human Research Program Investigators’ Workshop in Galveston, Texas.

“We’re increasing this whole bubble of space exploration,” Lonner said. “But people aren’t going to want to do that if they’re just going to be miserable when they get to microgravity and when they return to Earth.”

Adrift at sea

For the aerospace engineer, the question is a personal one—she can’t so much as crack a book open during car rides without getting queasy. According to one hypothesis, motion sickness like hers arises from a sort of mismatch between the body and brain.

“When you’re in a moving environment, your body senses your surroundings, but your brain also holds an expectation for what you should be sensing based on your past experiences,” Lonner said. “When those two things disagree for an extended period of time, you get motion sick.”

Graduate student Taylor Lonner dons a virtual reality headset inside the Tilt-Translation Sled, a machine that, in experiments, can mimic the motion of ocean waves. (Credit: Taylor Lonner)

Engineers try out the cockpit of the Orion spacecraft, with a few porthole windows above their heads. (Credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz)

In experiments, virtual reality scenes of a forest seemed to help reduce the motion sickness from a simulated water landing. (Credit: Clark lab)

Unfortunately for astronauts, space is full of those kinds of contradictions.

When humans first break free of Earth’s atmosphere, for example, their brains expect their bodies to experience a downward tug from gravity—conditions that don’t exist in space. As a result, roughly 60% to 80% of space travelers have experienced what scientists call “space motion sickness,” which can last for a few days or even longer. (Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov holds the dubious honor of being the first human to vomit in space when he lost his lunch inside the Vostok 2 spacecraft).

In separate research, Clark and his colleagues are exploring whether space explorers can reduce space motion sickness through simple exercises, such as careful tilts of the head.

But icky feelings may also emerge when astronauts come back to Earth. NASA is planning to send humans to the moon this decade aboard the Orion or Dragon spacecrafts. When Orion, in particular, returns to Earth, it will likely plop into the ocean somewhere off the coast of California. There, astronauts may bob up and down in the waves for as long as an hour while they wait for rescue.

It's not a pretty picture, Lonner said: “If you look at Orion and Dragon, there are only a few porthole windows that really aren’t sufficient for giving astronauts a fixed view of Earth.”

Walk in the forest

Back at CU �鶹��, in a lab down the hall from the human centrifuge, Clark steps into a different machine.

The metal cube painted blue is about the size of a small bedroom. It previously resided at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and is so big that the team had to bring it into the building in pieces, then put it back together on site.

Once Clark secures himself to a chair inside and shuts the door, the massive device rumbles to life and begins to move, sliding along a track on the floor. It swishes in a straight line from one end of the room to the other for several minutes.

“You feel like you’re getting rocked back and forth,” Clark says.

In fact, it feels like being rocked back and forth by waves—the researchers programmed the sled’s motion by drawing on data from real buoys in the Pacific Ocean.

In one recent experiment, the team took a two-stage approach to simulating the motion sickness that comes from water landings: First, the group spun 30 human subjects for an hour in the centrifuge. That spinning mimics the disorientation astronauts experience when they suddenly transition from microgravity to the harshness of Earth’s gravity.

Next, the researchers rocked the subjects in the sled for as much as an hour. If that sounds like a recipe for nausea, Lonner said, it was.

But, she added, the team also gave each of the subjects a pair of virtual reality goggles to wear. Half of the subjects saw an image of a fixed white dot against a black background. But the other subjects received a much richer picture—a digital forest complete with a few cartoon humans for scale. Those forests also moved in tandem with the sled. When it slid or tilted, so did the trees and people.

“It’s like a virtual window,” Lonner said.

It also did the trick. Lonner explained that if subjects experienced moderate symptoms of motion sickness for longer than two minutes, they exited the experiment. Only a third of the people wearing goggles showing just the white dot lasted for the entire hour in the sled. In contrast, nearly 80% of subjects watching the forest survived the ordeal.

A window opens

The researchers are working to build on their results, exploring, for example, whether adding more information to the forest scene can help reduce nausea even more. But they are optimistic that virtual reality could give astronauts returning to Earth a little relief.

Lonner sees the project as a way of opening space exploration up to more people—including people like her who get nauseous on airplanes. She’s even used some of the lessons from her research in her own life.

“I realized that it’s worse when the window is closed, and I can’t see the clouds passing by,” Lonner said. “Now, I’ll always open the window to watch the clouds.”

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CU �鶹�� aerospace students, post-docs honored at NASA Workshop

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 17:07:59 +0000

CU �鶹�� aerospace students, post-docs honored at NASA Workshop Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/19/2024 - 10:07

Jeff Zehnder

Three �鶹�� aerospace graduate students and post-doctoral fellows were honored at the 2024 NASA Human Research Program Investigators Workshop.

The annual conference is a deep dive into space research on human health and physiology.

Winner, NASA Augmentation Grant - Caroline Austin (Advisor: Torin Clark) - "Modeling Perceptual Changes Following the Sickness Induced by Centrifugation Analog"
3rd Place, Graduate Student Poster Competition - Patrick Pischulti (Advisor: David Klaus) - "Simulation of an Autonomous Anomaly Response Architecture for Human Deep-Space Exploration Missions"
1st Place, Post Doctoral Fellows Poster Competition - Sage Sherman - "A Trade Study of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation Techniques for Use on Long Duration Spaceflight Missions." Sherman is a triple graduate of the �鶹��, earning his PhD (2023), master's (2019), and bachelor of science (2018) here, all in aerospace engineering sciences.

The 3.5 day conference was held Feb. 13-16 in Galveston, TX.

CU �鶹�� faculty, students, and researchers at the conference.

Three �鶹�� aerospace graduate students and post-doctoral fellows were honored at the 2024 NASA Human Research Program Investigators Workshop...

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Researchers at CU �鶹�� advancing more trustworthy autonomous systems with U.S Air Force

Anonymous — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:25:08 +0000

Researchers at CU �鶹�� advancing more trustworthy autonomous systems with U.S Air Force Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/03/2023 - 09:25

Jeff Zehnder

Allie Anderson and Torin Clark at CU �鶹�� are conducting research into how humans and artificial intelligence systems work together.

The pair are part of a multi-university research team commissioned by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to study trust in autonomous systems. It is an important and complex problem.

“Trust is a dynamic human state with multiple dimensions - it’s different for each individual and the specific system you’re using. Trusting a self-driving car if you want to go to sleep in the backseat is different than trusting Alexa to tell you the weather,” said Anderson, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹��.

The work has broad applications across the technological spectrum, but the Air Force is particularly interested due to increasing integration of autonomy in military systems and the uncertainties faced by soldiers using them, said Anderson.

“There are many applications where autonomous systems may be used and – particularly with space-based applications – the human isn’t onsite with a satellite to have additional context, and you can’t always get all the data in real-time. We need to understand how users trust and view that type interaction with autonomy across a variety of situations,” Anderson said.

The initiative aims to build metrics and models for real time predictions of trust, with the goal of helping developers create better AI systems in the future, said Clark, an associate professor in Smead Aerospace.

“Space and military autonomy represent critically challenging environments and being able to estimate and predict human-operator trust will enable systems to intelligently alter their behaviors to complement their human teammates,” Clark said.

During the research, test subjects will be fitted with wearable sensors while they conduct tasks with AI systems. The sensors will collect physiological data on the body’s responses – things like heart rate and respiration – as well as how users physically interact with the systems. That includes where they are looking on a computer screen, the buttons they click, and how long they take to do an activity requested by the AI powered system.

“It’s exciting to work in this emerging field where there are important questions that need to be answered to move out of the laboratory and into operations,” Anderson said.

The three-year, $900,000 grant is being led overall by the University of California, Davis. CU �鶹��’s work represents nearly $500,000 of the total award.

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Heart experiments to help astronauts live better in space

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 16:29:15 +0000

Heart experiments to help astronauts live better in space Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/05/2023 - 10:29

Jeff Zehnder

An astronaut working with one of the experiments aboard the International Space Station.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are hard at work on research guided by students and researchers from the �鶹��.

Two cardiovascular tissue experiments were launched to the ISS aboard SpaceX CRS-27 on March 15, 2023 and CU �鶹��’s BioServe Space Technologies developed the hardware for both. The research stems from National Institutes of Health grants led by Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University.

“When astronauts go to space it can have negative impact on their cardiovascular systems,” said Stefanie Countryman, director of BioServe. “Our organs evolved to work here on Earth so they function differently in space. The goal with both of these projects is to better understand how these treatments impact cardiovascular issues in Earth bound people and to advance treatments that could be provided to astronauts before launch or while in space.”

BioServe has been designing, building, and flying microgravity life science research experiments and hardware since 1987. Government space agencies, universities, and private companies like SpaceX frequently contract with BioServe to take advantage of the center’s longstanding experience in space research.

The two experiments launched on March 15 include specialized hardware developed by BioServe specifically for these projects and will also utilize BioServe’s Space Automated Bioproduct Lab, an orbiting incubator that has been in use on ISS since 2015.

One of the experiments and its enclosure before launch here on Earth.

Past heart studies have shown that just four weeks of microgravity exposure causes significant changes in cell function and gene expression that could lead to long-term damage or cardiac muscle atrophy.

The Stanford experiment utilizes simplified heart tissues to test pharmaceuticals that could reduce microgravity-induced changes in heart cell function. Meanwhile the Johns Hopkins project aims to study human cardiomyocyte functional performance and the potential of specific therapeutics to prevent negative impacts.

While both projects are intended to help astronauts in space, the research could eventually also improve life for people here on Earth suffering from heart conditions due to aging or abnormalities that lead to a weakening of the heart muscle.

“Being able to design the hardware to support research like this for cell cultures and tissue engineering is very specialized,” Countryman said.

In addition to the hardware development, BioServe also conducts live uplinks with astronauts to walk them through the experiments. As both a research facility and educational center, BioServe employs full time staff and students to advance their work.

“Undergrad and grad students are responsible for assembly of hardware and kit design and helping during uplinks with the crew. Students are an integral part of operations,” Countryman said.

The one downside to working with astronauts is frequent late nights. ISS astronauts live and work on Coordinated Universal Time, so the crew day begins at 1:30 a.m. Colorado time. That means uplinks frequently occur long after most Americans have gone to sleep.

“It’s a small price to pay to work with people in space,” Countryman said.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are hard at work on research guided by students and researchers from the �鶹��.

Two cardiovascular tissue experiments were...

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Anderson lands prestigious NSF CAREER research award to study human-autonomy interactions

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 19:12:01 +0000

Anderson lands prestigious NSF CAREER research award to study human-autonomy interactions Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/16/2023 - 13:12

Jeff Zehnder

Allie Anderson

Allie Anderson is probing trust in human-robot interactions with a major grant provided to promising early career faculty.

Anderson, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹��, has earned a 2023 National Science Foundation CAREER Award. The prestigious program supports early career faculty with potential to become leaders in research and education.

The five-year grant will allow Anderson to investigate an area of increasing importance for society – how humans work over time with autonomous systems – with a specific focus on trust.

“Autonomous systems are increasingly integrated into our lives every day,” Anderson said. “When people over trust technology, they rely on it too much. If people under trust it, they don’t use a system at all or use it inappropriately. Trust also changes over time as you use a system.”

That evolution as someone interacts with an autonomous system on an ongoing basis is a particular emphasis. While there have been studies looking at how people use autonomous systems, they typically involve test subjects in a laboratory environment at a single point in time. Anderson is instead probing these interactions over a longer period and in something closer to a real-world environment.

The study will explore two different industries that already use autonomous systems: package distribution centers and general aviation.

To complete the research, Anderson has partnered with Amazon to conduct interviews and simulations with employees at the company’s distribution centers where package procurement is done with human-robot teams. The aviation component will focus on small plane pilots using upgraded avionics systems to provide guidance and navigation during flight.

“These autonomous systems are already in place, but like everything, they’re imperfect, so people have to decide how to trust them,” Anderson said.

Study participants will be fitted with a series of wearable sensors to collect a wide array of physiological data, including heart rate, respiration, skin conductance, even pupil diameter and blink count.

“The idea is people don’t have to report their response manually. The sensors get the signal from the body and estimate trust so we can know their trust level – how they’re feeling,” she said.

Wearable sensor technology, especially in aerospace applications, has long been a focus of Anderson’s work. She has conducted numerous investigations into human health and performance with an aim to developing technologies to measure and improve the body’s adaptations to extreme stressors, like those experienced in space.

This new research has could help manufacturers develop better autonomous systems in the future.

In addition to the research, the CAREER award also includes an education and outreach component. Anderson will be creating hands-on academic modules for rural Colorado high school math and biology classes.

“Students on the Front Range have a ton of resources, but there’s less on the Eastern Plains and in the mountain regions and I want to help with that,” she said. “These modules will be aligned with state curriculum standards and will focus on how we use math and probabilities, how we use physiological signals and trust.”

It is a particular passion for Anderson, who completed her master’s thesis on rural STEM education.

“I grew up on a farm in Southwest Missouri. We always looked at the stars as a family and it spurred my love of space. In third grade, my teacher did a lesson on astronauts and I was obsessed. I still am,” Anderson said.

The full title of Anderson’s CAREER award is Physiological Modeling of Longitudinal Human Trust in Autonomy for Operational Environments. The research will formally begin in August and run through summer 2028.

Allie Anderson is probing trust in human-robot interactions with a major grant provided to promising early career faculty. Anderson has earned a $675,000 National Science...

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CU �鶹�� space yeast experiment featured on NPR

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 21:21:14 +0000

CU �鶹�� space yeast experiment featured on NPR Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/06/2022 - 14:21

The Artemis 1 spacecraft is in orbit around the Moon this week, carrying 12,000 varieties of yeast as part of an experiment led by the �鶹��.

The yeast cells will help scientists answer a critical question in space exploration: How might human bodies fare in the extreme environment of deep space, where astronauts could be exposed to the equivalent of thousands of chest X-rays’ worth of radiation on every voyage.

NPR interviewed Luis Zea, a former Smead Aerospace research professor who is leading the project, and Tobias Niederwieser, a research associate in BioServe Space Technologies and engineer on the team.

Listen to the piece at NPR...

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Epic year for aerospace research funding at CU �鶹��

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 17:14:36 +0000

Epic year for aerospace research funding at CU �鶹�� Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/22/2022 - 11:14

Jeff Zehnder

Year	Research Income	# of Research Awards
2022	$47,834,766	229
2021	$53,101,624	224
2020	$33,482,927	220
2019	$20,925,397	189
2018	$21,693,350	173
2017	$15,776,823	174
2016	$15,298,323	163
2015	$15,233,210	156
2014	$12,880,920	142
2013	$16,737,155	139
2012	$21,820,850	147

The Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹�� had another big year for research funding, bringing in nearly $48 million in awards.

The fiscal year 2022 number totals $47,834,766. It is the second highest year ever for funding in the department, behind only FY 2021, which topped $53 million.

“We have excellent faculty in our department who are being recognized for their expertise and it shows,” said Hanspeter Schaub, aerospace professor and department chair. “Space is a topic of interest again and the Air Force and Space Force are beginning to invest heavily into related research. Bioastronautics is also growing, with more access for humans to visit and work in space. Finally, remote sensing of and from space has been a strongly funded research area and fits out department expertise well.”

Over the last five years, the department’s research revenue has more than tripled, with significant growth in traditional aeronautics and aerospace fields and a push into newer areas like hypersonics.

The largest single grant during the most recent fiscal year was $15 million for the establishment of a new NASA hypersonics research center. The department also saw grants of over $1 million each in radio frequency research, orbital medicine, space domain awareness, virtual reality for space mission training, and artificial intelligence for drones.

Schaub expects the strong research funding totals to continue into the future.

“This is not a bubble in funding. There are several developments in progress that should keep this momentum going and it appears that this roughly $50 million a year funding level is here to stay,” Schaub said.

Research funding from FY 2022 spans 229 unique grants from organizations and government agencies including NASA, the National Science Foundation, private businesses, and other universities.

U.S. News and World Report ranks Smead Aerospace as the #6 public undergraduate program and #5 public graduate program among all universities.

The Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹�� had another big year for research funding, bringing in nearly $48 million in awards. The fiscal year 2022 number totals $47,834,766. It is the...

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Smead Aerospace #6 in US News Rankings

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 16:07:55 +0000

Smead Aerospace #6 in US News Rankings Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/14/2022 - 10:07

The College of Engineering and Applied Science gained a spot U.S. News and World Report’s Best Undergraduate Engineering rankings this year, coming in at No. 17 among public institution peers.

Six degree programs in the college also earned top 20 spots in the engineering specialty rankings and Best Undergraduate Computer Science rankings:

Aerospace engineering sciences (No. 6)
Environmental engineering (No. 9)
Chemical engineering (No. 13)
Mechanical engineering (No. 15)
Civil engineering (No. 17)
Computer science (No. 19)

The rankings were released on the U.S. News and World Report website on Sept. 11. Undergraduate rankings are based on assessments of 1,500 U.S. bachelor's degree-granting institutions on 17 measures of academic quality, including graduation and retention rates, financial resources per students, and average alumni giving rate. Read more about their methodology.

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NASA launch will carry CU baker's yeast experiment to the moon and back

Anonymous — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 15:02:08 +0000

NASA launch will carry CU baker's yeast experiment to the moon and back Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/29/2022 - 09:02

A team of researchers led by CU �鶹�� is sending some unexpected hitchhikers to the moon: Twelve bags filled with baker’s yeast, the same kind of hard-working cells that make bread rise and ferment beer and wine.

As early as Friday, a rocket taller than the Statue of Liberty is scheduled to blast off from a launch pad in Florida, carrying NASA’s new Orion space capsule into Earth’s orbit for the first time. From there, the spacecraft, designed to transport four astronauts, will begin a 42-day journey to the moon and back to Earth.

There aren’t any humans aboard this mission, called Artemis 1. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be passengers. Three human mannequins, named Moonikin Campos, Helga and Zohar, will fly aboard Orion—as will four biological experiments, including one designed by a team at BioServe Space Technologies, a center in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences.

The experiment is tucked under one of the seats in a case about the size of a shoebox. Inside, millions of yeast cells will help scientists answer a critical question in space exploration: How might human bodies fare in the extreme environment of deep space, where astronauts could be exposed to the equivalent of thousands of chest X-rays’ worth of radiation on every voyage.

“Nothing like this has happened for 50 years,” said Tobias Niederwieser, a research associate at BioServe and an engineer on the team. “The last time humans sent anything biological on a return trip to the moon was during Apollo 17 in 1972.”

But it’s also just the beginning.

Artemis 1 is the first step in NASA’s new era of lunar exploration. The space agency plans to launch human astronauts, including the first woman, to the moon’s surface later this decade.

Researchers at BioServe are trying to keep those lunar explorers safe. Once the yeast cultures return to Earth, the team will retrieve the cells to study their DNA—and potentially find clues that could help scientists prevent or treat the effects of radiation sickness in astronauts.

Luis Zea, a former researcher at BioServe now at the Colorado-based company Sierra Space, leads the project. He said it has made him look at the moon in a new way.

“I don’t see it the same,” Zea said. “Because I know that Orion will be orbiting it soon with the hardware and science that we worked on for four years.”

Far from home

For Zea and his colleagues, this experiment, officially called Deep Space Radiation Genomics (DSRG), has been a long time in the making.

Over nearly 35 years, researchers at BioServe have helped to fly hundreds of biological experiments into space. Most of them have traveled to the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits about 250 miles above Earth.

Orion is a different kind of laboratory. For a start, the spacecraft is flying much farther—hundreds of thousands of miles farther. In the process, it will travel beyond Earth’s Van Allen Belts, a pair of doughnut-shaped bands of radiation that surround the planet and shield it from the sun’s most dangerous rays. And unlike experiments on the ISS, no astronauts will be around to help run DSRG.

“The entire experiment is battery-powered,” Niederwieser said. “We can’t get any data from it. We can’t send it a signal telling it when to start.”

Instead, Niederwieser and his team designed the shoebox-sized laboratory to automatically detect when it is far enough from Earth, then turn itself on. Once that happens, small pumps will fill the bags of yeast with a nutrient-rich fluid, and the cells will begin to grow and reproduce.

The yeast cells themselves are a marvel of engineering. Working with researchers at the University of British Columbia in Canada, the BioServe team developed roughly 12,000 mutant strains of yeast for the experiment. Some of these organisms are missing certain genes, while others carry extra copies of those same snippets of code.

Researchers at the German Aerospace Center and the Universidad de Valle de Guatemala also contributed to the effort. More than a dozen students have taken part in the experiment, including four from CU �鶹��.

Which of those mutants survive the trip to the moon, and which don’t, could give scientists new clues about how radiation might affect human astronauts. Zea explained that yeast cells might not look a lot like big primates, but they share about 70% of their genes with humans. These cultures, in other words, will provide a window into how certain genes, or mechanisms for repairing damaged genes, might be critical for helping organisms survive in the harshness of space.

“What we may be able to do is give future space explorers medication that enhance the efficacy of those DNA repair mechanisms,” Zea said. “It’s kind of like an anti-oxidant that will help mitigate the effects of radiation.”

Coming home

Before that happens, however, the team will need to wait—and wait.

The trip on Orion is just the first leg of the experiment. The researchers want to know how space radiation affects the microbes. To tease that out, BioServe will grow identical cultures of yeast on the International Space Station and on the ground in �鶹��.

The box on Orion itself has a long journey ahead of it. Niederwiser and Zea handed the experiment over to NASA at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in mid-August. Once Orion touches back down on Earth later this fall, the Colorado researchers will have to wait for a team to retrieve the capsule and its biological experiments.

“It's especially nerve racking because we will not know if the unit has operated as intended until we get the box back in two or three months,” Niederwieser said.

He and his colleagues are confident, however, that their tiny space explorers won’t let them down.

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Bioserve Space Technologies

With Polaris Dawn’s launch, Colorado scientists will study vision changes in space

Off

With space travel comes motion sickness. These engineers want to help

Adrift at sea

Walk in the forest

A window opens

CU �鶹���� aerospace students, post-docs honored at NASA Workshop

Researchers at CU �鶹���� advancing more trustworthy autonomous systems with U.S Air Force

Heart experiments to help astronauts live better in space

Anderson lands prestigious NSF CAREER research award to study human-autonomy interactions

CU �鶹���� space yeast experiment featured on NPR

Epic year for aerospace research funding at CU �鶹����

Smead Aerospace #6 in US News Rankings

NASA launch will carry CU baker's yeast experiment to the moon and back

Far from home

Coming home

CU �鶹�� aerospace students, post-docs honored at NASA Workshop

Researchers at CU �鶹�� advancing more trustworthy autonomous systems with U.S Air Force

CU �鶹�� space yeast experiment featured on NPR

Epic year for aerospace research funding at CU �鶹��