Artificial gravity could reduce astronauts’ health risks, Nasa finds

Astronauts may experience harsh circumstances when travelling to outer space, and planets such as the Moon and Mars, which are rife with health risks.

Nasa has now launched an investigation into how “model organisms” – or other forms of life that are biologically comparable to humans – are affected by gravity, radiation and other effects of being in space, in preparation for future long-duration space trips, reports the Tech Times.

Artificial gravity appears to offer some protection from these alterations, according to recent results from a study using fruit flies at the International Space Station.

The results of the study suggest that space travel impacts the central nervous system, but that artificial gravity provides partial protection against those changes, with the findings published in Cell Reports.

“Microgravity poses risks to the central nervous system, suggesting that countermeasures may be needed for long-duration space travel,” said Dr Janani Iyer, a Universities Space Research Association project scientist at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and a co-author of the paper published in Cell Reports.

“As we venture back to the Moon and on to Mars, reducing the harmful effects of microgravity will be key to keeping future explorers safe. This study is a step in the right direction to explore the protective effects of artificial gravity in space and to understand the adaptation to Earth conditions after returning from space.”

Fruit flies are the ideal organism for this kind of research because there is a significant amount of overlap between the cellular and molecular processes of flies and humans.

Almost 75 per cent of the genes that cause disease in humans are shared by fruit flies, meaning that the more that’s learned about fruit flies, the more information scientists have to investigate how the space environment impacts human health.

Flies also have a much shorter life span of about two months, and they reproduce after only two weeks, meaning that the three weeks the flies spend in space is equivalent to about three decades of a human’s life, giving scientists more biological information in a shorter time span.

In the study, scientists sent flies to the space station on a mission, in a newly developed piece of hardware, called the Multi-Use Variable-Gravity Platform, which is capable of housing flies at different gravity levels, reports the Universities Space Research Association.

After they returned to Earth, the flies were brought back to Ames for further analysis and scientists worked around the clock for two days to sort them and perform behavioural and biochemical tests.

The study was one of the first of its kind to take an “integrated approach to how the space environment impacts the nervous system”, and scientists looked at the fly behaviour by observing the movements of flies as they moved about in their habitat, changes that occurred at the cellular level in their brains and how gene expression modifications impacted the nervous system.

The study’s results suggest spaceflight causes stress in the fly’s cells that leads to negative behavioural and neurological impacts, as well as changes in the gene expression in the fly’s brain.

However, the use of artificial gravity can provide relief, even if there are still long-term health implications.

The two groups of space-travelling flies both exhibited “symptoms of altered metabolism, oxidative stress in their cells, and detrimental effects on their nervous systems”, reports Tech Times.

However flies that had been kept in artificial gravity were found to be protected from “oxidative damage, cell death, loss of neurons, and alterations in the number of glial cells”, it said.

“With the upcoming long-duration deep space missions, where astronauts will be exposed to varying levels of gravity, it is imperative that we understand the impacts of altered gravity on the neurological function,” said Dr Siddhita Mhatre, a co-author of the paper.

“If we can use artificial gravity to delay space-related deficits, maybe we can extend the future mission timelines. And flies in space, alongside the astronauts, will help to further our efforts in keeping astronauts healthy.”