We were doing something called telemedicine, where we were using the ultrasound. One interesting application of this ultrasound is the possibility that you could possibly use it to measure critical bone areas during a long space mission and track if you're losing bone in these areas. On Earth, when they check you for bone loss, you get in this big machine. It's the size of a room and it's got a platform with an x-ray that scans your whole body and in critical areas and it takes a while and it just wouldn't be practical to have a machine like that in space.
Another real problem was over putting our helmets on for re-entry, because we all had severe head colds. They couldn't come up there and make us. Houston, you have a problem!
The 20-G Centrifuge is our largest facility certified for use by humans. Its capabilities make it a unique NASA resource and a very versatile research tool that is ideal for developing health-maintenance activities for astronauts.
People do really well on space missions, but it's the physiological, the medical stuff, the stuff like radiation, loss of bone mass and muscle mass and density. It's those things that we need to figure out.
The life expectancy of people going to Mars may be decreased by the higher level of radiation that they receive.
Every month, we weigh ourselves to make sure we aren't losing weight. I really have been eating more than I do on Earth to make sure I don't lose too much weight.
I'd like to be proven wrong on the difficulty of handling the medical side-effects of long term exposure to deep space (both microgravity induced illnesses and radiation damage).
Sometimes astronauts feel a little ill or get minor scrapes. I trained as a crew medical officer to do basic treatment.
The biggest technical challenge to sending astronauts on farther and longer missions is biomedical: How do we keep them healthy?
