Artemis II crew to return with ‘avatar’ organ chips after Moon flyby
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NASA’s Artemis II astronauts are set to return to Earth on Friday after a 10-day mission around the Moon, bringing back four tiny organ chips designed to help scientists understand how deep-space travel affects the human body.
The crew includes mission commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen.
Travelling with them are four transparent, USB-sized chips containing bone marrow cells from the astronauts. The chips are part of NASA’s AVATAR programme, short for “A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response”, which aims to study how radiation and other conditions in deep space affect human health.
Developed by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, the chips act as living tissue models and are intended to predict possible health risks before astronauts embark on long-duration missions.
Lisa Carnell said the long-term goal is to send “avatars” of astronauts into deep space before the astronauts themselves travel.
“In the Apollo days, it was just a few days on the surface. If we're literally going to have people on the surface for a long period of time, even 30 days or longer, we don't have data on that at all,” Carnell told CNN.
Scientists do not yet know whether the chips survived the trip or how closely they will reflect the astronauts’ actual biological responses. The answers will come after the chips are recovered from the Orion spacecraft following splashdown.
The Orion capsule is expected to splash down off the coast of California at about 8:07 p.m. EDT on Friday, or 5:37 a.m. IST on April 11. During re-entry, the spacecraft will face temperatures of up to 2,760 degrees Celsius and speeds of up to 38,600 kph before parachutes slow its descent into the Pacific Ocean. The crew will then be recovered by the USS John Murtha.