Bioserve Space Technologies

Research in space, helping people on Earth: BioServe marks 100th orbital launch

Jeff Zehnder — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 20:28:51 +0000

Research in space, helping people on Earth: BioServe marks 100th orbital launch Jeff Zehnder Mon, 04/21/2025 - 14:28

Louis Stodieck remembers the first time he saw a space shuttle blast off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In April 1991, Stodieck, an aerospace engineer, was the associate director of BioServe Space Technologies, a research center at the ��ɫ��Ƶ.

He had helped to design a set of test tubes that would, among other things, not spill the moment they reached space. Stodieck handed the test tubes off to a NASA crew, then watched as his work lifted away from a launchpad aboard the space shuttle Atlantis.

“I never get tired of launches,” said Stodieck, who served as BioServe’s director from 1999 to 2019 and is now its chief scientist. “The sound reaches you seconds after the launch because you’re a few miles away. When it hits you, it’s this low vibration, and you just feel it.”

BioServe founder Marvin Luttges in 1989. (Credit: BioServe)

The BioServe team poses for a photo in 1996. (Credit: BioServe)

A test tube designed for space by BioServe. (Credit: BioServe)

BioServe, which was founded in 1987, works with scientists at companies and research institutions around the world to conduct life science experiments in space.

Today, Stodieck and his colleagues are celebrating a new milestone: BioServe’s 100th launch into orbit.

On Monday, April 21, a SpaceX Dragon capsule lifted off from a similar pad in Florida en route to the International Space Station (ISS). It carried equipment belonging to three research projects, or “payloads,” developed by BioServe. They include several colonies containing billions of bacteria and algae.

“This launch is an amazing milestone,” said Stefanie Countryman, the current director of BioServe. “It exemplifies the hard work of everybody at BioServe, not just our engineers and researchers, but also our students.”

The center has come a long way since that first launch, NASA’s STS-37 mission, in 1991.

Researchers at the center have since sent a wide range of living things into orbit. They include single-celled organisms but also ants, silkworms, mice and an intrepid “spidernaut” named Nefertiti. (An 18-year-old student from Egypt proposed studying whether Nefertiti, a jumping spider, could adjust her hunting techniques in space, which she did). But BioServe has also kept one foot planted on the ground. The center’s research has generated new insights into human medical conditions like bone loss and cancer—and could even lead to facilities in the not-so-distant future that orbit Earth while making human stem cells.

“Space gives us an opportunity to look at organisms in new ways, including how they may express genes differently than they do on Earth,” Countryman said.

Single-celled astronauts

David Klaus, professor at the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, was a graduate student at ��ɫ��Ƶ when BioServe’s first launch took off. From 1985 to 1990, he worked as a shuttle launch controller at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and in Mission Control in Houston. Klaus is set to retire this spring and sees the 100th BioServe launch as a “bookend” on his career.

In those early days, BioServe’s work largely revolved around one challenge of conducting science from hundreds of miles above Earth—open liquids and space don’t mix.

“It’s not like taking two test tubes in a lab on Earth and mixing them together,” Klaus said. “With our early payloads, we were really just trying to figure out how we could manipulate biological fluids in a space environment and get some initial experimental results.”

BioServe began as a 5-year grant from NASA under founder Marvin Luttges, a professor of aerospace engineering sciences at ��ɫ��Ƶ. Klaus explained that the center’s space test tubes include up to four sealed chambers. If you push down on a plunger, you can mix the fluids in those chambers one by one, all without exposing them to the air. BioServe has since sent thousands of its test tubes into space, and the basic design remains largely the same.

The team’s early research also revealed something surprising: BioServe scientists discovered that bacteria tend to grow better in space than they do on Earth—perhaps because they’re not being squished down by gravity. A handful of experiments showed that such bacteria could even be transformed into living factories for making anti-cancer drugs.

Astronaut Jessica Meir uses a microscope supplied by BioServe aboard the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

A lab 250 miles up

In the decades that followed, BioServe’s scientific equipment wound up on NASA’s four space shuttles, the Russian space station Mir and, eventually, the ISS, which entered into orbit in 1998.

Today, astronauts on the ISS can peer through a microscope flight certified and launched by BioServe and grow cell cultures in four incubators called Space Automated Bioproduct Lab (SABL) 1, 2, 3 and 4. BioServe even supplied the refrigerator where humans on the ISS store their food. On the ground, the center runs a mission operation and control center on the ��ɫ��Ƶ campus. There, BioServe staff talk to astronauts in real time on a giant screen.

“We’re replicating the sorts of biological labs that you can find at ��ɫ��Ƶ in space,” said Tobias Niederwieser, a research associate at BioServe.

Astronaut Alexander Gerst loads biological cultures into a SABL incubator on the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

Adeline Loesch assembles space "petri dishes" containing biological organisms in a lab on the ��ɫ��Ƶ campus. (Credit: Adeline Loesch)

The center has also collaborated with dozens of space agencies, universities and private companies over its history. On the current launch, for example, a company called Sophie’s Bionutrients based in the Netherlands contracted with the center to examine how algae produce proteins in space—which the company hopes will lead to new kinds of algae-based meat substitutes.

The center’s most lasting contribution to science, however, may be its students. Over the years, hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students at ��ɫ��Ƶ have worked for BioServe. Many have gone on to jobs at NASA and private space companies.

They include Adeline Loesch, a senior studying atmospheric and oceanic sciences at ��ɫ��Ƶ. She started working at BioServe between her freshman and sophomore years. These days, she does a little bit of everything for the center: She helps to build the hardware for experiments, assembles them for flight and sits in the operations center as astronauts carry out the research.

In the fall, Loesch will start work in spacecraft and satellite flight operations for Lockheed Martin in Colorado.

“My favorite is watching the projects come full circle during the operations,” Loesch said. “Watching the research being done in real time by astronauts in space is the coolest thing ever.”

Making humans healthier from space

In the end, BioServe’s research in space doesn’t stay in space.

Roughly 24 years ago, for example, Stodieck and his colleagues designed a specialized habitat for mice to live on the ISS. His team’s research has revealed new clues to why mammals lose bone mass when they leave Earth. Those insights, in turn, helped to inspire new kinds of medications for osteoporosis in people.

Niederwieser, meanwhile, is tackling what may be an even more ambitious goal—he and his colleagues are growing human hematopoietic stem cells in space. Doctors often transplant these cells into people to treat cancers like leukemia and lymphoma.

But they’re also tricky and expensive to make on Earth. In a few early experiments, Niederwieser and his colleagues discovered that stem cells, like bacteria, may grow more freely in space. Later this year, his team plans to transport a facility for producing stem cells en masse to the ISS.

That could lead to a new vision for space—one in which stations in orbit around Earth produce various treatments for human illnesses, then send them back to patients on the ground.

“Humans have been on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years and have evolved with only one gravity,” Stodieck said. “It’s really been a privilege to understand how organisms work in another environment.”

Stodieck didn’t travel to Florida for Monday’s launch, but Klaus was there to see SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket roar off the launchpad. Before he left, he was feeling wistful about seeing his old stomping grounds again.

“I'm looking forward to going down there and reminiscing a little bit,” Klaus said. “I’ll drive around and look at the base—a little 40-year flashback to where my career started.”

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CNN discusses ��ɫ��Ƶ research on Fram2 space mission

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 16:00:31 +0000

CNN discusses ��ɫ��Ƶ research on Fram2 space mission Jeff Zehnder Tue, 04/01/2025 - 10:00

Torin Clark was interviewed for a feature piece on the Fram2 space mission launching Monday night.

The article discusses the all-civilian astronauts and research slated for the mission, including work on motion sickness being by led Clark.

Clark is an associate professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and an expert on astronaut biomedical and cognitive issues.

He spearheaded similar work on the Polaris Dawn mission last fall.

Read the full piece at CNN...

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Aerospace engineers to study motion sickness in space

Jeff Zehnder — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 14:35:07 +0000

Aerospace engineers to study motion sickness in space Jeff Zehnder Mon, 03/24/2025 - 08:35

Don’t tell Neil Armstrong, but giant leaps for mankind may leave astronauts feeling a little queasy.

In a new experiment, aerospace engineers at the ��ɫ��Ƶ will work with astronauts to study how people experience motion sickness when they travel to space—with an eye toward reducing these sometimes debilitating symptoms.

The research is part of the first-of-its-kind Fram2 mission, a human spaceflight mission that will orbit Earth from above its poles to explore these regions in new ways. The mission’s four-person crew will spend 3-5 days on-orbit aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. It’s targeted to launch March 31 on a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida.

Torin Clark, associate professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at ��ɫ��Ƶ, explained that motion sickness in space is a common problem—although not necessarily one that many early astronauts talked about. An estimated 60-80% of space explorers have experienced at least some nausea during their first few days away from Earth. Astronaut Frank Borman, for example, vomited less than 24 hours into the Apollo 8 mission to the moon, creating a mess for him and his crewmates to clean up.

As the space tourism industry ramps up, those bouts of queasiness could become a more urgent issue.

Torin Clark

“In the past, most astronauts have been carefully selected by NASA, including many military pilots,” said Clark, who’s leading the motion sickness experiment for ��ɫ��Ƶ. “We don’t know much about how the general public will respond to these gravity transitions.”

Clark and his colleagues simulate those dynamics in experiments on the ��ɫ��Ƶ campus. The researchers, for example, spin volunteers in circles on a centrifuge machine the size of a room. They also put test subjects in a device called a “sled” that slides back and forth to mimic how a space capsule might bob in the ocean upon its return to Earth.

The Fram2 mission represents an opportunity to explore motion sickness in a real space environment. The mission gets its name from the Fram ship, which was built in the late 1800s and helped to carry early Norwegian explorers like Roald Amundsen and Otto Sverdrup to the planet’s polar regions. The Fram2 crew consists of Mission Commander Chun Wang, Vehicle Commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, Mission Pilot Rabea Rogge, and Mission Specialist and Medical Officer Eric Philips.

Throughout the mission, the crew members will perform a series of exercises at regular intervals. They will tilt their heads side to side and forward and back four times, motions that can stimulate symptoms of motion sickness. The crew will then fill out surveys, which Clark and his colleagues will analyze back on Earth to gauge how motion sickness evolves as humans spend time in space.

“We want to quantify the dynamics of space motion sickness: When does it start? How soon does it go back down?” Clark said. “We also want to understand how astronauts experience motion sickness when they come back to Earth because some research suggests that it might be worse than in space.”

Clark led a similar experiment during the Polaris Dawn mission, which launched last year with a four-person crew, including ��ɫ��Ƶ alumna Sarah Gillis. Eventually, Clark and his colleagues hope to inform strategies for preventing motion sickness in space. That might include improved procedures for administering anti-nausea medications or training exercises that astronauts can do on the ground to prepare for the rigors of space.

“This issue may not be as big of a deal for going to Mars because symptoms will dissipate over long-duration missions,” Clark said. “But for shorter, commercial missions, it can make people feel pretty crummy.”

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CUriosity: Can humans handle the stress of traveling to Mars?

Jeff Zehnder — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 21:42:12 +0000

CUriosity: Can humans handle the stress of traveling to Mars? Jeff Zehnder Wed, 11/13/2024 - 14:42

In CUriosity, experts across the ��ɫ��Ƶ campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

This week, Katya Arquilla, assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, looks into the question: “Can humans handle the stress of traveling to Mars?”

NASA astronaut Suni Williams aboard the International Space Station in October 2024. (Credit: NASA)

In June, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams boarded the International Space Station (ISS), expecting a week-long stay in orbit. Now, they won’t return to Earth until February after a series of technical issues plagued the Boeing Starliner space capsule they rode into space on.

If spending eight months on the ISS, which measures just 5,000 square feet, sounds like a recipe for frayed nerves, it may very well be. That’s according to Arquilla, an engineer who has studied how long space journeys can affect the mental health of humans.

“On long-duration space missions, there are many stressors that create the potential for negative mental health effects,” she said. “From data taken in research facilities in extreme environments on Earth, like Antarctica, we have seen symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress.”

A future mission to Mars, however, could be a lot more than eight months, potentially as much as three years. Which raises the question: Can humans handle that much time in space?

Arquilla thinks so, but there are caveats.

“It will be a big challenge,” she said. “There’s a lot we don’t know because we haven’t sent people to Mars before. They won’t be able to look down and see the Earth the way they can on the International Space Station.”

In previous research, Arquilla and her colleagues explored the mental health consequences of that kind of isolation through an unlikely event here on Earth—the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, millions of Americans were suddenly cooped up in their homes with the threat of a major disease hanging over their heads. The researchers conducted a survey and observed that people with military training or other experience in stressful environments tended to be more productive during the pandemic than others. But those experienced individuals didn’t appear to maintain their mental health better than less experienced people.

Arquilla noted that simply being aware of your own body, and knowing when stress sets in, can help. She has partnered with Laura Devendorf, a researcher at ��ɫ��Ƶ’s ATLAS Institute, to assist people in doing that kind of monitoring. The team integrated sensors into comfortable textiles that track electrocardiogram (ECG) signals coming from wearers’ hearts.

“Maybe I'm an astronaut on a mission and I'm tracking my own signals, and I see that my heartrate starts to go up,” Arquilla said. “I could decide based on that that I should take a break for a couple of hours.”

This research won’t just help astronauts. Arquilla is also exploring how similar technologies could give people on the ground tools to detect and manage symptoms of mental health changes in high-stress environments. That might include wilderness expeditions, remote research facilities and military deployments.

She’s glad to see people talking more about mental health, both on Earth and in space.

“We all, after the pandemic, understand the importance of mental health a lot more than we did maybe 10 years ago,” she said. “Being able to recognize that it's okay to not feel at 100% all the time, and being able to give people the tools they need to articulate what is wrong, is really important.”

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Improving astronaut team performance during Lunar operations

Jeff Zehnder — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 15:01:44 +0000

Improving astronaut team performance during Lunar operations Jeff Zehnder Wed, 09/25/2024 - 09:01

Jeff Zehnder

Katya Arquilla

Katya Arquilla is leading a major new NASA grant to mitigate the negative effects of communication delays on the performance of distributed teams for upcoming missions on the surface of the Moon.

Arquilla has earned a five-year, $1.5 million grant through NASA’s 2024 Human Exploration Research Opportunities program. With it, she is leading a multidisciplinary team to investigate countermeasures for radio transmission lags between the Earth and Moon as well as the length of time it takes astronauts to mentally process new instructions and act on them.

“There are communication delays inherent in lunar operations, not just due to the time it takes for a message to travel from Earth to the Moon, but also because of the time it takes people to work through their comprehension of task requirements and their environment. The delays are 5-14 seconds as a baseline, and it only goes up from there,” Arquilla said.

An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the ��ɫ��Ƶ, Arquilla works in bioastronautics, particularly how humans interact with and adapt to complex systems.

NASA is planning an array of lengthy Moon missions over the next decade, potentially including a permanent base near the lunar south pole. Construction of such a facility and subsequent science missions will require long and complicated extravehicular activities, or moon walks, by astronauts. Such efforts can be trying under the best of conditions, and could be even more complex when astronauts are trying to follow elaborate instructions from team members in another location on the Moon or back on Earth.

“Communications become a real stressor if there is any lag time that causes overlapping communications or excessive wait time that wastes resources,” Arquilla said. “We are developing countermeasures to fill that lag time with productive actions, using approaches like autonomous chat bots and automated prompts that guide the human through aspects of the reasoning process.”

To test these countermeasures, the research team will develop a laboratory-based mission analog that will include distributed teams performing realistic tasks in a mockup habitat, rover, and mission control center with integrated communication delays. During testing, participants’ cognitive load and team performance will be measured with physiological sensors.

Following testing of potential countermeasures in the Bioastronautics Laboratory, the team will select the most promising solutions for full field tests at NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog facility in Houston, Texas, where scientists conduct simulated space missions.

The project features researchers from multiple laboratories at ��ɫ��Ƶ as well as the Colorado School of Mines. In addition to Arquilla, the team includes Torin Clark and Allie Hayman, also from Smead Aerospace, Leanne Hirshfield from ��ɫ��Ƶ’s Institute of Cognitive Science, and Tom Williams from the Colorado School of Mines.

“This may be one of the first projects to do this kind of comprehensive distributed team simulation in the laboratory, and it’s a really cool collaborative opportunity that is going to be a great challenge. Good ideas don’t happen in a vacuum—we have a strong Bioastronautics team and collaborators with expertise in computer science and human cognition that led to our selection for this award,” Arquilla said.

Developing communications systems to help astronauts work better on the Moon could have an array of future benefits.

“It’s about improving communications during maintenance tasks, but also in problem situations that could threaten the rest of the crew when seconds count,” Arquilla said. “But anytime astronauts are outside the capsule, wearing a bulky space suit is a high stress, demanding situation. This is something that can make for a better experience.”

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy cap on a mannequin. Sensors can be attached to the cap to monitor cognitive load in real time.

Spacesuit simulator and airlock in the Bioastronautics high bay in the Aerospace Building. Developed by graduate project teams, a facility like this will be used for the simulated mission operations.

Katya Arquilla is leading a $1.5 million NASA grant to mitigate the negative effects of communication delays on the performance of distributed teams for upcoming missions on the surface of the Moon. Arquilla has...

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With Polaris Dawn’s launch, Colorado scientists will study vision changes in space

Jeff Zehnder — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 15:04:06 +0000

With Polaris Dawn’s launch, Colorado scientists will study vision changes in space Jeff Zehnder Mon, 09/16/2024 - 09:04

During SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn's multi-day high-altitude mission, which rocketed to space on Sept. 10, the crew will conduct health impact research to better understand spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome (SANS). Researchers from ��ɫ��Ƶ and the CU Anschutz Medical Campus are right there with them. Or at least their equipment and expertise will be.

The team is sending up specialized optical equipment to gather data from astronauts’ eyes and will analyze the results during and after the five-day mission.

The research is a collaboration between Allie Hayman, associate professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at ��ɫ��Ƶ, and Prem Subramanian, chief of neuro-ophthalmology at the CU School of Medicine.

Torin Clark, associate professor of aerospace engineering sciences at ��ɫ��Ƶ, is leading separate research from the ground for the Polaris Dawn mission about how astronauts experience motion sickness and other illusory sensations during space travel.

For some time, astronauts have noticed vision changes during long-duration space missions. Since 1998, NASA has sent astronauts to the International Space Station with “space anticipation glasses,” which have adjustable refraction settings to meet changing vision needs, similar to binoculars. In 2011, NASA began conducting MRI scans on astronauts following missions, which revealed potentially increased pressure in their brains as well as optic disc swelling, or papilledema, in more than half of the astronauts.

On Polaris Dawn, the researchers are sending up SENSIMED Triggerfish lenses, which are “smart” contact lenses to track eye pressure fluctuation and changes in cornea dimensions in glaucoma patients. CU Department of Ophthalmology Adjoint Professor Kaweh Mansouri, MD, contributed to the development of these lenses, which will monitor astronauts’ eyes during launch and as they transition to microgravity, a condition of apparent weightlessness. The lenses contain sensors that transmit data to an antenna and local storage device, enabling the researchers to collect and analyze data upon their return.

The team is also sending a device called the QuickSee, which will measure astronauts’ refractive error, when the shape of the eye changes and keeps light from focusing correctly on the retina.

Polaris Dawn crew members include Mission Commander Jared “Rook” Isaacman; Mission Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet; Mission Specialist and Medical Officer Anna “Walker” Menon; and Mission Specialist Sarah “Cooper” Gillis, who graduated from ��ɫ��Ƶ in 2017 with a degree in aerospace engineering sciences.

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With space travel comes motion sickness. These engineers want to help

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 21:50:01 +0000

With space travel comes motion sickness. These engineers want to help Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/01/2024 - 14:50

In a corner room of the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building at ��ɫ��Ƶ, Torin Clark is about to go for a ride.

The associate professor straps himself into what looks like an intimidating dentist’s chair perched on metal scaffolding, which, in turn, rests on a circular base. The whole set up resembles a carnival attraction.

Which, in a way, it is.

Motion sickness and space
By the numbers

60%–80%

Percentage of space travelers who experience space motion sickness.

2–3 days

Typical length of a bout of space motion sickness.

86%

Percent of astronauts who reported vomitting as a symptom of their space motion sickness in a survey from the 1980s. Other common symptoms included anorexia (78%), headache (64%), stomach awareness (61%) and malaise (58%).

27%

Percent of Russian cosmonauts who experienced "readaption syndrome," similar to symptoms of motion sickness, upon their return to Earth.

Source: Heer & Paloski, 2006, "Autonomic Neuroscience"

“Torin, are you ready to start?” calls out graduate student Taylor Lonner from in front of a monitor displaying several views of Clark. “I’m going to go to 5 r.p.m. over two minutes.”

Clark gives a thumbs up and begins to spin—first slowly, then faster and faster. The chair whips in circles around the room, creating a centrifugal force that forces his body back into the headrest.

Once the machine slows down and Clark is back on solid ground, he seems a little wobbly but in otherwise good spirits.

“It basically feels like a gravitron,” he says, referring to the spinning, nausea-inducing rides that became a staple of county fairs in the 1980s.

The team from the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences is using this machine as one step in an experiment that seeks to recreate an experience that few people ever have: The shock of going from one gravity environment, like space, to another, like the surface of Earth. In particular, the group is tackling what happens when astronauts return home, landing in their spacecrafts in the middle of a choppy ocean.

Disorientation and motion sickness have long been an underappreciated reality of space exploration, Lonner said. Surveys suggest that a majority of astronauts and cosmonauts have gotten sick during water landings—a relatively minor condition that could become dangerous if nauseous crew members suddenly have to respond to a disaster.

Addressing such motion sickness will become increasingly important as more people travel into space, and stay there for long, Lonner said. In recent lab experiments, the team discovered that virtual reality goggles might help keep astronauts grounded when they splash down in the ocean. This technology can provide people with calming images of a landscape to gaze at, similar to watching the horizon from the deck of a boat.

The team presented its results this month at NASA’s annual Human Research Program Investigators’ Workshop in Galveston, Texas.

“We’re increasing this whole bubble of space exploration,” Lonner said. “But people aren’t going to want to do that if they’re just going to be miserable when they get to microgravity and when they return to Earth.”

Adrift at sea

For the aerospace engineer, the question is a personal one—she can’t so much as crack a book open during car rides without getting queasy. According to one hypothesis, motion sickness like hers arises from a sort of mismatch between the body and brain.

“When you’re in a moving environment, your body senses your surroundings, but your brain also holds an expectation for what you should be sensing based on your past experiences,” Lonner said. “When those two things disagree for an extended period of time, you get motion sick.”

Graduate student Taylor Lonner dons a virtual reality headset inside the Tilt-Translation Sled, a machine that, in experiments, can mimic the motion of ocean waves. (Credit: Taylor Lonner)

Engineers try out the cockpit of the Orion spacecraft, with a few porthole windows above their heads. (Credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz)

In experiments, virtual reality scenes of a forest seemed to help reduce the motion sickness from a simulated water landing. (Credit: Clark lab)

Unfortunately for astronauts, space is full of those kinds of contradictions.

When humans first break free of Earth’s atmosphere, for example, their brains expect their bodies to experience a downward tug from gravity—conditions that don’t exist in space. As a result, roughly 60% to 80% of space travelers have experienced what scientists call “space motion sickness,” which can last for a few days or even longer. (Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov holds the dubious honor of being the first human to vomit in space when he lost his lunch inside the Vostok 2 spacecraft).

In separate research, Clark and his colleagues are exploring whether space explorers can reduce space motion sickness through simple exercises, such as careful tilts of the head.

But icky feelings may also emerge when astronauts come back to Earth. NASA is planning to send humans to the moon this decade aboard the Orion or Dragon spacecrafts. When Orion, in particular, returns to Earth, it will likely plop into the ocean somewhere off the coast of California. There, astronauts may bob up and down in the waves for as long as an hour while they wait for rescue.

It's not a pretty picture, Lonner said: “If you look at Orion and Dragon, there are only a few porthole windows that really aren’t sufficient for giving astronauts a fixed view of Earth.”

Walk in the forest

Back at ��ɫ��Ƶ, in a lab down the hall from the human centrifuge, Clark steps into a different machine.

The metal cube painted blue is about the size of a small bedroom. It previously resided at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and is so big that the team had to bring it into the building in pieces, then put it back together on site.

Once Clark secures himself to a chair inside and shuts the door, the massive device rumbles to life and begins to move, sliding along a track on the floor. It swishes in a straight line from one end of the room to the other for several minutes.

“You feel like you’re getting rocked back and forth,” Clark says.

In fact, it feels like being rocked back and forth by waves—the researchers programmed the sled’s motion by drawing on data from real buoys in the Pacific Ocean.

In one recent experiment, the team took a two-stage approach to simulating the motion sickness that comes from water landings: First, the group spun 30 human subjects for an hour in the centrifuge. That spinning mimics the disorientation astronauts experience when they suddenly transition from microgravity to the harshness of Earth’s gravity.

Next, the researchers rocked the subjects in the sled for as much as an hour. If that sounds like a recipe for nausea, Lonner said, it was.

But, she added, the team also gave each of the subjects a pair of virtual reality goggles to wear. Half of the subjects saw an image of a fixed white dot against a black background. But the other subjects received a much richer picture—a digital forest complete with a few cartoon humans for scale. Those forests also moved in tandem with the sled. When it slid or tilted, so did the trees and people.

“It’s like a virtual window,” Lonner said.

It also did the trick. Lonner explained that if subjects experienced moderate symptoms of motion sickness for longer than two minutes, they exited the experiment. Only a third of the people wearing goggles showing just the white dot lasted for the entire hour in the sled. In contrast, nearly 80% of subjects watching the forest survived the ordeal.

A window opens

The researchers are working to build on their results, exploring, for example, whether adding more information to the forest scene can help reduce nausea even more. But they are optimistic that virtual reality could give astronauts returning to Earth a little relief.

Lonner sees the project as a way of opening space exploration up to more people—including people like her who get nauseous on airplanes. She’s even used some of the lessons from her research in her own life.

“I realized that it’s worse when the window is closed, and I can’t see the clouds passing by,” Lonner said. “Now, I’ll always open the window to watch the clouds.”

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��ɫ��Ƶ aerospace students, post-docs honored at NASA Workshop

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 17:07:59 +0000

��ɫ��Ƶ aerospace students, post-docs honored at NASA Workshop Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/19/2024 - 10:07

Jeff Zehnder

Three ��ɫ��Ƶ aerospace graduate students and post-doctoral fellows were honored at the 2024 NASA Human Research Program Investigators Workshop.

The annual conference is a deep dive into space research on human health and physiology.

Winner, NASA Augmentation Grant - Caroline Austin (Advisor: Torin Clark) - "Modeling Perceptual Changes Following the Sickness Induced by Centrifugation Analog"
3rd Place, Graduate Student Poster Competition - Patrick Pischulti (Advisor: David Klaus) - "Simulation of an Autonomous Anomaly Response Architecture for Human Deep-Space Exploration Missions"
1st Place, Post Doctoral Fellows Poster Competition - Sage Sherman - "A Trade Study of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation Techniques for Use on Long Duration Spaceflight Missions." Sherman is a triple graduate of the ��ɫ��Ƶ, earning his PhD (2023), master's (2019), and bachelor of science (2018) here, all in aerospace engineering sciences.

The 3.5 day conference was held Feb. 13-16 in Galveston, TX.

��ɫ��Ƶ faculty, students, and researchers at the conference.

Three ��ɫ��Ƶ aerospace graduate students and post-doctoral fellows were honored at the 2024 NASA Human Research Program Investigators Workshop...

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Researchers at ��ɫ��Ƶ advancing more trustworthy autonomous systems with U.S Air Force

Anonymous — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:25:08 +0000

Researchers at ��ɫ��Ƶ advancing more trustworthy autonomous systems with U.S Air Force Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/03/2023 - 09:25

Jeff Zehnder

Allie Anderson and Torin Clark at ��ɫ��Ƶ are conducting research into how humans and artificial intelligence systems work together.

The pair are part of a multi-university research team commissioned by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to study trust in autonomous systems. It is an important and complex problem.

“Trust is a dynamic human state with multiple dimensions - it’s different for each individual and the specific system you’re using. Trusting a self-driving car if you want to go to sleep in the backseat is different than trusting Alexa to tell you the weather,” said Anderson, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the ��ɫ��Ƶ.

The work has broad applications across the technological spectrum, but the Air Force is particularly interested due to increasing integration of autonomy in military systems and the uncertainties faced by soldiers using them, said Anderson.

“There are many applications where autonomous systems may be used and – particularly with space-based applications – the human isn’t onsite with a satellite to have additional context, and you can’t always get all the data in real-time. We need to understand how users trust and view that type interaction with autonomy across a variety of situations,” Anderson said.

The initiative aims to build metrics and models for real time predictions of trust, with the goal of helping developers create better AI systems in the future, said Clark, an associate professor in Smead Aerospace.

“Space and military autonomy represent critically challenging environments and being able to estimate and predict human-operator trust will enable systems to intelligently alter their behaviors to complement their human teammates,” Clark said.

During the research, test subjects will be fitted with wearable sensors while they conduct tasks with AI systems. The sensors will collect physiological data on the body’s responses – things like heart rate and respiration – as well as how users physically interact with the systems. That includes where they are looking on a computer screen, the buttons they click, and how long they take to do an activity requested by the AI powered system.

“It’s exciting to work in this emerging field where there are important questions that need to be answered to move out of the laboratory and into operations,” Anderson said.

The three-year, $900,000 grant is being led overall by the University of California, Davis. ��ɫ��Ƶ’s work represents nearly $500,000 of the total award.

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Heart experiments to help astronauts live better in space

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 16:29:15 +0000

Heart experiments to help astronauts live better in space Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/05/2023 - 10:29

Jeff Zehnder

An astronaut working with one of the experiments aboard the International Space Station.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are hard at work on research guided by students and researchers from the ��ɫ��Ƶ.

Two cardiovascular tissue experiments were launched to the ISS aboard SpaceX CRS-27 on March 15, 2023 and ��ɫ��Ƶ’s BioServe Space Technologies developed the hardware for both. The research stems from National Institutes of Health grants led by Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University.

“When astronauts go to space it can have negative impact on their cardiovascular systems,” said Stefanie Countryman, director of BioServe. “Our organs evolved to work here on Earth so they function differently in space. The goal with both of these projects is to better understand how these treatments impact cardiovascular issues in Earth bound people and to advance treatments that could be provided to astronauts before launch or while in space.”

BioServe has been designing, building, and flying microgravity life science research experiments and hardware since 1987. Government space agencies, universities, and private companies like SpaceX frequently contract with BioServe to take advantage of the center’s longstanding experience in space research.

The two experiments launched on March 15 include specialized hardware developed by BioServe specifically for these projects and will also utilize BioServe’s Space Automated Bioproduct Lab, an orbiting incubator that has been in use on ISS since 2015.

One of the experiments and its enclosure before launch here on Earth.

Past heart studies have shown that just four weeks of microgravity exposure causes significant changes in cell function and gene expression that could lead to long-term damage or cardiac muscle atrophy.

The Stanford experiment utilizes simplified heart tissues to test pharmaceuticals that could reduce microgravity-induced changes in heart cell function. Meanwhile the Johns Hopkins project aims to study human cardiomyocyte functional performance and the potential of specific therapeutics to prevent negative impacts.

While both projects are intended to help astronauts in space, the research could eventually also improve life for people here on Earth suffering from heart conditions due to aging or abnormalities that lead to a weakening of the heart muscle.

“Being able to design the hardware to support research like this for cell cultures and tissue engineering is very specialized,” Countryman said.

In addition to the hardware development, BioServe also conducts live uplinks with astronauts to walk them through the experiments. As both a research facility and educational center, BioServe employs full time staff and students to advance their work.

“Undergrad and grad students are responsible for assembly of hardware and kit design and helping during uplinks with the crew. Students are an integral part of operations,” Countryman said.

The one downside to working with astronauts is frequent late nights. ISS astronauts live and work on Coordinated Universal Time, so the crew day begins at 1:30 a.m. Colorado time. That means uplinks frequently occur long after most Americans have gone to sleep.

“It’s a small price to pay to work with people in space,” Countryman said.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are hard at work on research guided by students and researchers from the ��ɫ��Ƶ.

Two cardiovascular tissue experiments were...

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