This experiment will hopefully provide valuable data for NASA’s planned Mars mission in the 2030s, a round trip that will require at least a year away from Earth.
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Discussing the findings on Capital Wired, the researchers recruited the help of three NASA Astronauts who were subjected to advanced imaging technology which appears to show a two-stage degradation process once they leave Earth. Of the multitude of obstacles to beat, the well being of the astronauts throughout such an extended interval in area is of chief concern.
The builders of the laser know-how say the spatial decision is a thousand occasions greater than that of…
As space agencies prep for the long-awaited, highly-anticipated mission to Mars, much research still needs to be done.
“Because we want to know if there’s any ageing process going on or what kind of modifications happened to astronauts as they work for six months out in space.’ Because many astronauts complain about skin problems”. Led by Professor Karsten Koenig of Saarland University, the study is an offshoot of the European Space Agency’s Skin B project detailing the effects of skin aging in space. High-resolution images were used.
New high-resolution skin imaging techniques have measured the dermal health of Europeans astronauts before and after space flight and found that the experience causes the epidermis to literally shrink.
The scientists used femtosecond laser pulses in order to obtain signals from the skin: second harmonic generation and levels of fluorescence.
According to Reuters, Koenig’s team for their study documented three astronauts, scanned their skin cells before and after their time on the ISS using multiphoton tomography (MPT).
What this effectively means is that there is an “anti-ageing” effect taking place in the dermis – lower sections of the skin. Koenig informed Reuters that the results were “interesting” and that it seems as if “there is a strong production of collagen; so suddenly these astronauts have more collagen” which means that “there is some sort of anti-aging effect” on the skin, but at the same time, the epidermis is shrinking, so the skin is getting thinner.
“We’ve seen the epidermis get thinner by almost 20 percent”.
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“So far we have no explanation yet, and we are waiting for the other astronauts to figure out what’s going on and maybe to try to figure out how we can protect, how we can help so that this epidermis is not shrinking”, he added. And so far we have no explanation. And bones lose density – about one to two percent per month.
