Space travel to the Moon, Mars, and beyond can expose astronauts to extreme conditions, causing potential health issues. To prepare for future long-duration missions, a team of scientists from NASA and Universities Space Research Association studied how the effects of space – like changes in gravity, radiation, and more – impact “model organisms,” or other kinds of life that are biologically similar to humans. New findings from a study using fruit flies on the International Space Station suggest that space travel has an impact on the central nervous system, but that artificial gravity provides partial protection against those changes. The findings were published in Cell Reports.
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“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 (USRA) project scientist at NASA‘s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and a co-author on 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 due to their similarities to humans. There’s a significant amount of overlap between the cellular and molecular processes of flies and humans. Almost 75% of the genes that cause disease in humans are shared by fruit flies, meaning the more we learn about fruit flies, the more information scientists have to investigate how the space environment may impact human health. Flies also have much shorter lifespans – about two months and reproduce in two weeks.
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 this 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 (MVP), capable of housing flies at different gravity levels.
After the flies returned to Earth, onboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule that splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, the flies were brought back to Ames for further analysis. Upon arrival, scientists at Ames worked around the clock for two days to sort the flies and perform behavioral and biochemical tests.