Ax-2 Mission

Principal Investigator: Mathias Basner, M.D., Ph.D., M.S.
University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine

When you go to space, you’ll experience a multitude of different stressors that could change your body and brain in ways that affect your cognitive function and behavior. Dr. Mathias Basner and his team at the University of Pennsylvania will collect cognitive and physiological data on crew behavior and performance before launch and after landing on Earth. Dr. Basner’s team will analyze and submit the data to TRISH EXPAND commercial spaceflight participant database, for future research use by the scientific community.

Why is this important? This project tracks the spaceflight participants’ performance in the cognitive domains relevant for spaceflight (including memory, abstraction, spatial orientation, emotion recognition, risk decision making, and sustained attention) before and after the mission. This data will be combined with mood, environmental and physiological data to better understand the impact of spaceflight on the mind and ultimately performance of the crew.

Principal Investigator: Mark Shelhamer, Sc.D.
Johns Hopkins University

Motion sickness is commonly experienced in spaceflight, both upon entering space and after returning to Earth. However, there is a lot of individual variability both to the degree of motion sickness and how long it lasts. Motion sickness, nausea, and other disorienting effects are not only an inconvenience for the individual but may have significant performance impacts and could result in injuries to the crew particularly at landing. Dr. Shelhamer, of Johns Hopkins, will study how commercial spaceflight astronauts’ inner ears and eyes sense and respond to motion before and immediately after spaceflight. He will also determine if this data can be used to predict who will get motion sickness in spaceflight. The tests are non-invasive and easy to administer via a tablet computer pre- and post-spaceflight.

Why is this important? This technique may potentially predict who will get motion sickness from spaceflight so that measures to prevent or minimize the effects of motion sickness and disorientation can be used, improving the spaceflight experience and safety. This knowledge could also lead to future developments to prevent or treat motion sickness for people on Earth.

Principal Investigator: Richard Gibbs, Ph.D.
Baylor College of Medicine

As spaceflight becomes available to a broader range of humanity, there is an opportunity to characterize how spaceflight affects the human body at the genomic level. To achieve that, biological specimens are collected from commercial astronauts before and after the mission. The samples are held in a secure Biobank and will be made available to researchers. This characterization effort focuses on gold-standard genetic analyses, allowing us to document the human adaptation to spaceflight at the most biologically fundamental level. This study will enhance clinically actionable assays both in the pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine fields, pushing the boundaries of what we know about the effects of space on the human body.

Why is this important? Pre- and post-flight biological comparisons can yield critical insights into the impact of space travel on human health. These comparisons can also be valuable for advancing health care on Earth by revealing how the body strategically uses alterations in gene expression to cope with extreme environmental stressors. This platform could help increase diagnostic capabilities in low resource and isolated communities, since the sample collection and processing need to be nimble and easy to implement. Insights from this characterization studies in addition to the psychological, physiological, and environmental data could help us identify molecular pathways associated with resilience. The BioBank repository and omics analysis database can be used for future longitudinal studies as humans continue to explore space.

TRISH

This project collects Spaceflight Associated Neuro-Ocular Syndrome (SANS)-related ocular images and vision function data during ground phases of the mission, closely following NASA’s protocols. As SANS is one of NASA’s top long-duration human spaceflight risks, the data collected in this project will create a companion dataset from a diverse population, comparable to NASA’s existing SANS-related datasets collected on government astronauts.

Why is this important? It’s important for all commercial astronauts to have the opportunity to contribute to important data collection efforts to increase the knowledge of how a diverse population of humans respond to spaceflight exposure. As the number of people journeying to space is still relatively few, TRISH researchers are aligning how and what they study, so that data from these civilian astronauts will be comparable to what NASA collects.

TRISH

TRISH has implemented a set of standardized research questionnaires for the crew to collect data on their sleep, personality, health history, team dynamics, and immune-related symptoms. These questionnaires are part of TRISH Essential Measures and provide contextual information for other Ax-2 projects.

Why is this important? These additional contextual and qualitative data points paint a robust picture of the human experience during spaceflight. They will become part of TRISH’s EXPAND research database, available to current and future scientists exploring space health.

• Sleep - It's common for astronauts to experience poor sleep quality in space, resulting from stress, such as operational tempo and noise, and disrupted circadian rhythms due to unusual day/night cycles. This survey will capture the crew's individual sleep experience and quality to provide contextual data that will aid researchers in studying and improving astronaut sleep.
• Personality - Space exploration is both physically and psychologically challenging. Yet the success of a space mission requires close cooperation and crew cohesion. This questionnaire investigates the personality traits that make an individual, the crew, and their mission successful.
• Health - Working with civilian astronauts allows researchers to study the health history and habits of new and diverse spaceflight participants. This questionnaire collects additional data for investigators looking for new experiences and clues about necessary health and safety protections for all astronauts.
• Immune - Existing evidence suggests that the spaceflight environment alters immune system function in space travelers. In a series of research questions, scientists will collect historical data on the crew's immune-related symptoms increasing the wealth of medical data for researchers investigating the body's responses to spaceflight. The data collected may help researchers identify ways to prepare the immune system for future space exploration.