As NASA prepares for its latest launch to the moon — the first in 50 years — University of Colorado Boulder researchers have placed several stowaways on board which will help scientists learn the answer to a critical question: How long can humans exist in deep space?
In the latest journey to the moon, the unmanned mission — Artemis I — won’t land on the lunar surface, but the vehicle designed for humans will one day allow astronauts to travel farther into space than ever before. Although the launch date has been delayed from Aug. 29 to later this month or October due to fuel system leak, CU Boulder’s stowaways are already prepared for takeoff.
The stowaways, 12 bags filled with bakers yeast, are one of four biological experiments hitching a ride on the Orion spacecraft, said Tobias Niederwieser, an engineer who worked on the experiment and a research associate at CU Boulder’s BioServe Space Technologies. He said CU Boulder wrote a request for proposal about four years ago and was chosen to be one of the experiments involved with NASA’s latest lunar mission.
“We are flying yeast cells,” Niederwieser said. “We activate them once we are in space, outside the radiation belts around earth, grow them for about four days and then when they come back, we will look at which gene modifications behaved better due to radiation and which did not.”
After two recent attempts to launch Artemis I earlier this month were scrubbed due to a leak in a hydrogen fuel line, NASA is expected to try again, Sept. 23 or Sept. 27.
When Orion launches for space, it will fly hundreds of thousands of miles farther than the International Space Station, which orbits about 250 miles above Earth, and for the first time, researchers will take a look at how long humans can withstand the high amounts of radiation in deep space, Niederwieser said.
“We know that humans can survive two weeks in space because that’s what they did in the Apollo program — longer than that, we don’t know that,” he said.
To prepare for the experiment called, the Deep Space Radiation Genomics, CU Boulder worked with researchers from institutions such as the University of British Columbia in Canada, to modify the genes of thousands of yeast cells, Niederwieser said. These yeast cells are in a battery-powered box the size of a shoe box that has been programmed to know when the spacecraft is in microgravity — a condition of very low gravity — and will then activate the experiment to start growing the yeast.
When the yeast returns from its 42-day trip, scientists will be able examine the yeast, which share about 70% of their genes with humans, to see which gene sequences are important for humans to have in order to withstand radiation equivalent to thousands of chest X-rays, Niederwieser said.
Pamela Flores, a CU Boulder graduate student studying molecular, cellular and developmental biology, was part of the team of scientists working on the yeast experiment. She said her role on the team was to ensure that once the yeast is in space, the experiment will start at exactly the right time and without any contamination.
She said she enjoyed the Deep Space Radiation Genomics experiment because it allowed her to test her hand at engineering and see the project evolve from just an idea to a real, tangible experiment.
“One of the sets of genes I’m most interested to know what happens (involves) gene repair,” Flores said. “Most of the problems with DNA is when it gets hit by radiation, it gets broken. There’s a lot of genes that are involved with DNA repair machinery that will go and try to fix those nicks or breaks, and there are a lot of those proteins that occur in some diseases and ultimately aging.
“It will be cool to see if those proteins are related to the ones in microgravity and if people will age more or less (in microgravity).”
Although it is possible the experiment will not work, Niederwieser said if it does, it will help guide future space travel and the possibility of habits on other plants.
“It’s also applicable to fundamental research on Earth because we have cancer that is caused by radiation and aging,” he said. “There’s a lot of potential outcomes that this research can do and will do.”
