Astronauts have thin skin.
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While any possible manned voyages are decades away, scientists are already working to find a solution to a puzzling question: Why does the skin of astronauts get thinner in space?
But alas, the mystery of the shrinking skin continues to mystify the team with Prof Koenig saying: “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”.
The three astronauts analyzed included Germany’s Alexander Gerst and Italy’s Samantha Cristoforetti and Luca Parmitano.
The researchers scanned the skin of the astronauts before leaving and after their return suing high-resolution images. So NASA and the European Space Agency asked Professor Karsten Koenig and his team from the Department of Biophotonics and Laser Technology at Saarland University to investigate the effect of space travel on the skin.
The scientists used femtosecond laser pulses in order to obtain signals from the skin: second harmonic generation and levels of fluorescence. So with these two signals we can build up images and get a precise look into the skin with a high resolution. Koenig’s company JenLab, the developer of the system, claims that its femtosecond laser pulses provide a “spatial resolution a thousand times higher than that of ultrasonic devices”.
The same result was observed in the case of all astronauts. Of the set of tough situations to beat, the condition of the astronauts during this kind of long-lasting in areas is of fundamental interest. Keonig found the end results to be “interesting” and went on to say that “there is a strong production of collagen; so suddenly these astronauts have more collagen”. What this means is that there is an anti-aging process that takes place at least in “the lower part of the skin”, in the dermis.
According to Daily Mail, lasers have revealed that the skin of a human being, while in space, will become about 20% thinner, after almost a 6 month period. What they don’t know yet is why.
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NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency now have two astronauts who are spending an entire year in space aboard the worldwide Space Station to help gauge how longer stays in zero-G affect the human body. This study could be helpful for NASA’s mission to Mars which is planned for the 2030s.
