As NASA prepares to send astronauts back to the Moon, human explorers will have to handle microgravity conditions and other elements that take a toll on the body. And for an Artemis mission that aims to send astronauts on multi-year trips to Mars, the crew will need to stay healthy — you can't get back to Earth quickly after all.

Nujoud Fahoum Merancy

In a live presentation last week titled Artemis: Back to the Moon, a Tech Briefs reader had the following question for Nujoud Fahoum Merancy, Chief of the Exploration Mission Planning Office, at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX.

"How will crew health be maintained for Artemis?"

Read Merancy's edited response below.

Nujoud Fahoum Merancy: There are a lot of challenges to the human body being in space in microgravity. We're extremely well adapted to the 1G environment we live in. When you take humans out of that environment, there are a lot of challenges.

First, the microgravity. We all know about [microgravity's effect on] muscle deterioration and bones. NASA has a lot of experience in working in microgravity — in particular, in keeping the crew healthy doing exercise and the protocols they have for the crew. Astronauts are up there in excess of a year and are actually coming back there stronger than when they left. There are lots of good mitigations for the muscle and the skeletal system.

There are a lot of things that are a challenge that are not so easy to handle, though. Like radiation.

When crews are on the Space Station, they're actually still protected in large part by the magnetosphere of Earth. Six months on the ISS is equivalent to the radiation dosage of a two-week lunar mission. Once we start talking about going to the Moon for months at a time, and once we start talking about 3-year Mars missions, radiation becomes a huge issue. How do you keep the crew safe from that? Without gravity, the water in the body essentially pools up in the chest and the face. (If you look at the astronauts on orbit, you can see their face almost looks a little puffy, because gravity is not pulling the water from their head.) That causes a lot of secondary effects.

NASA is already working on this on the space station: How to tackle those challenges in microgravity. There are a lot of questions. How do these people transition from microgravity to partial gravity and then back to microgravity? What is the body going to go through with those kinds of cycles? There's a lot of research in front of us.

When we get to a two-and-a-half-plus-year Mars mission, we can't bring astronauts home quickly. We can't bring new things up for them. The "human" in "human space exploration" is one of the hardest challenges. There are a lot of teams working on this already. If you're interested, I always suggest googling "NASA contractors." A lot of universities do research in this area. NASA has a lot of scientists on staff and companies that help with this. There are many different ways to contribute on these types of things already, for sure.

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 >> Commander Scott Kelly: Hi. I'm Caption Scott Kelly, Commander of the Expedition 26 crew for the International Space Station. Microgravity provides a lot of difficulties for us in space. It also makes some things easier. But one of the major impacts it has is the effect on our bodies, specifically with regards to the loss of bone mass and muscle mass. One of the ways we mitigate that is with exercise, and one of the things -- one of the devices we use is right behind me, and it's called the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device.

    00:00:40 Basically, it's a weightlifting machine that uses cylinders of air to provide resistance, and it actually feels like real weight. It's a really, really well-designed piece of equipment, and we really like it, and we use it six days a week here on the International Space Station. It's located in the Node 3 module, and it's also located on the ceiling, so when you're lifting weights, you're lifting upside down. So let's get started. The first exercise I'd like to show you today is squats, and today is my six-squat or six-rep day, and I'm doing the squats of 240 pounds. The next exercise I want to show you are heel raises.

    00:01:40 We use a little block here to raise our feet up. This bar actually has two positions: An upward position for exercise like squats and heel raises, and then a lower position for other exercises like dead lifts or bench press. In this case next I'm going to do the dead lift. I don't know if you notice, I keep looking up, because that's where the cupola is, and this is the view, looking up. So when we're doing our exercises here, if we're going to be laying down and using this device to bench press, we can actually look out at the beautiful planet Earth. It's quite a spectacular view. We do a lot of leg exercises, as you can see here.

    00:03:00 The reason for that is most of the critical areas where we lose bone mass are in our hips and our thighs, even your heels. So a lot of the exercises, we do exercise those specific areas. We're going to start now are some shoulder presses, which uses a small bench. You see a cable upright row. The last exercise that we'll show you is the bicep curls Well, hope you enjoyed seeing how we worked out here on the International Space Station, and you learned a little bit about the effects of microgravity on our bodies, and how we mitigate those effects. Hope you enjoyed it.

    00:04:36 Thank you.