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Space sleeping bag to solve astronauts' squashed eyeball disorder
Scientists have developed a hi-tech sleeping bag that could prevent the vision problems that some astronauts experience while living in space.
In zero-gravity, fluids float into the head and squash the eyeball over time. It's regarded as one of the riskiest medical problems affecting astronauts, with some experts concerned it could compromise missions to Mars. The sleeping bag sucks fluid out of the head and towards the feet, countering the pressure build-up.
[...] The sleeping bag, developed with outdoor equipment manufacturer REI, fits around the person's waist, enclosing their lower body within a solid frame.
A suction device, that works on the same principle as a vacuum cleaner, creates a pressure difference that draws fluid down towards the feet. This prevents it from building up in the brain and applying damaging pressure to the eyeball.
Several questions need to be answered before the sleeping bag technology is used routinely, including the optimal amount of time astronauts should spend in the sleeping bag each day.
Journal Reference:
Christopher M. Hearon, Katrin A. Dias, Gautam Babu, et al. Nightly Lower Body Negative Pressure and Choroid Engorgement in Spaceflight-Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome, JAMA Ophthalmology (DOI: 10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2021.5200)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 11 2021, @05:25PM (1 child)
> would adding another requirement even matter?
We're in the realm of "unknown unknowns." How would it look if we put together a $100T space station and it turns out that the only way 99% of people can live on it for more than 72 hours without becoming debilitatingly nauseated is to surgically cut the nerves from their middle ear and give them a year of on-ground rehab/training so they can cope with that?
Will it happen? Probably not, but we don't really know until we try, and there's no way to simulate it - to get that kind of input into a homo-sapiens middle ear, you've got to build and launch the real deal, then try it.
Again, people would _probably_ adapt, most people who get zero G nausea get over it, or at least aren't completely debilitated, after a day, or two, or ten. The vomit comet is a small scale test for that, but a few seconds of zero-G followed by a few seconds of 2G is a very different thing than 72 hours of microgravity.
Sensitive people might sleep in frames that prevent their head from rotating (relative to the station) so they don't get "the spins" everytime they shift during their sleep, but then when they're up and around they'll have to deal with ear-canal slosh every time they rotate.
The effect will be less the larger the spinning frame is, and a minimal test vehicle might be a mini-hab on a cable vs a counterweight. We have the control systems to be able to spin up such a contraption, but it's not a cheap thing to build and operate no matter how "minimal" you make it. Exercise for the reader: what's the spin rate for a system with two mini habs on a cable, spun up to 0.1g at 100m diameter? If each hab weighs 1000kg, that's a cable capable of reliably holding 200kg load - in space, with multiple lives and billions of dollars of gear hanging on it. And, is 0.1g enough - or should we design for Mars gravity of 0.38g? Is 100m enough, or should we go for 500m?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 11 2021, @06:34PM
We have a lot of information on motion sickness. It's not unknown at all.
https://space.nss.org/media/Space-Settlement-Population-Rotation-Tolerance-Globus.pdf [nss.org]
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-020-00112-w [nature.com]
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2002ESASP.501..151H [harvard.edu]
A cable capable of supporting a ton! Whatever shall we do. The astronauts will have to stop by Harbor Freight on the way to the launch site. Not sure I'd trust it for a ten ton load, though. For that you'd better go to Grainger's.
Look into O'Neill cylinders. This is a well studied design for a rotating space habitat capable of 1G artificial gravity using only mid 20th century construction techniques. It's not what you have to build, but it's what can be built.