While the primary goal of the Artemis II mission is the ensure the Orion spacecraft is safe for humans, NASA did find time to fit some science on board during the 10-day lunar fly-by.
“The most complex machine we’re flying is the human, and we have to understand the human as a system in order to be successful,” said Steven Platts, NASA’s chief scientist for its human research program. “That’s our job. That’s what we’re doing.”
The four main human science experiments all involve the four crew on board, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
For Artemis II, the studies delve deeper into immunology, physical measurements like blood pressure, and a sleep and human interaction study using a watch-like tool dubbed ARCHeR, which stands for Artemis Research for Crew Health & Readiness.
Platts says his group has to remind the people building the spacecraft to keep their passengers in mind.
“A lot of times, they will have a list of standards that they need. And everyone’s very good at listing out, ‘My hardware has to do this. My software has to do that,’ but they’re not very good at saying, ‘My human has to do that,’” Platts said.
Platts’ favorite experiment is called Avatar. It would fly tissue cells of an astronaut to space before they do, so that scientists could see how their body will react and potentially send up things like medicine to counter what the “avatar” forecast would happen to the human body.
“It’s very cool, very futuristic. So what we’re doing is taking blood samples from the astronauts, isolating certain cells and putting them on a chip, and it will mimic bone marrow cells,” Platts said. “Then we fly that chip, and we fly the astronaut, and when they come back, we compare the responses.”
If the cell on the chip acts like the human does, then NASA knows it could go to an astronaut assigned to a mission years ahead, for instance, and fly a chip of cell samples with an earlier mission.
“‘Okay, we know that from your chips, you’re going to have this, you’re going to have this, you’re going to have this,’” Platts said astronauts could one day be told. “It allows us to personalize the medicine … and that’s very much what we want to do in the future, is focus in so that we can treat them as individuals and get a better response.”
Platts got his start in zoology but switched to human research because “humans can give informed consent,” he said.
“All research is 100% voluntary, so we can’t require any astronaut to do anything,” he said.
Investigators typically approach crews a year at least in advance and present them with their human research investigations, doing a 15-minute pitch.
“We get about 80% participation in any given experiment,” he said. “Sometimes the crew is interested in everything, but they can’t do everything because there’s only so much time in the day. So they would have to pick and choose.”
Not everyone is cooperative when they get back, he said.
“People are people, right? Some people don’t like to have stuff touching them, and don’t like to be stuck and everything, but they still do it,” he said. “Other people are like, ‘Load me up. I am here.’”
He said crew members who are physicians or scientists are usually the first ones in line.
Some studies are borne out of interaction with NASA’s medical teams, such as past incidents with astronauts on board the International Space Station, including one that suffered a blood clot in 2019. Anther recent medical issue involved Mike Fincke, who lost his voice temporarily on the station, an incident that drove NASA’s decision to perform its first-ever medical evacuation.
“We work very closely with medical operations, because if they’re seeing issues repeatedly, we need to figure out what’s going on,” Platts said. “That’s our job on the research side.”
One of Platts’ biggest interests is the isolation astronauts will experience once NASA ventures past the moon. Already work is underway on Earth to deal with some of the expected stressors.
“We put subjects in a six-degree, head-down tilt in bed rest for months at a time,” he said. “Not allowed to get out of bed for anything. We have to teach them special ways to use a bed pan. They eat laying down — everything, and that mimics the fluid shift and the muscle disuse that happens with space flight.”
As for isolation and confinement, he notes International Space Station is too big.
“It’s a six-bedroom house up there. It’s nice compared to what we’re going to be doing for Artemis II, which is much, much, much smaller. It’s like a camper van size wise,” he said.
That feeds directly into the ARCHeR project, which monitors with a wearable device the astronauts’ well-being, activity and sleep patterns, all to measure human health and performance in deep space.
“All that stress of being so close to people for so long a period of time, exercising right next to them, sleeping right next to them. All those stressors add up, and so that’s part of what the ARCHeR study is designed to look at,” he said. “Are there astronauts who are getting frustrated or having issues? Is the team not working in a cohesive way? What are some things we can do to improve that?”
For his part, he finds working on human spaceflight the best job he’s ever had.
“Before I came to NASA, working in a laboratory I sat in a dark lab in front of a microscope for 12 hours a day, looking at cells, and you never knew if that was going to make an impact anywhere,” he said. “Here, every single day, I see the impact of the work we’re doing. It’s benefiting the crew, it’s coming back and benefiting people in the clinic. It’s very, very rewarding.”