NASA is stepping up its space radiation studies with a round of experiments that for the first time in decades will use monkeys as subjects.

The point of the experiments is to understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior and what countermeasures can be developed to make long-duration spaceflight safe for travelers beyond Earth’s protective magnetic shield.

For the new study, 18 to 28 squirrel monkeys will be exposed to a low dose of the type of radiation that astronauts traveling to Mars can expect to encounter.

Scientists are particularly interested in studying how the radiation impacts the monkeys’ central nervous systems and behaviors over time.

“We realized there was a need for this kind of work,” Jack Bergman, a behavioral pharmacologist at Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital in Boston, told Discovery News.

“There’s a long-standing commitment on the part of NASA to deep space travel and with that commitment comes a need for knowing what kinds of adverse effects deep space travel might have, what are the risks to astronauts,” Bergman said. “That’s not been well assessed.”

NASA has zapped rats and mice to probe radiation’s impacts, but that provides only a small picture, Frank Cucinotta, head of the Space Radiation Health Project at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, told Discovery News.

“Obviously, the closer we get to man, the better,” added Eleanor Blakely, a biophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies radiation-induced cataracts.

For Bergman’s study, squirrel monkeys trained on a variety of behavioral tasks will be tested to see how exposure to radiation impacts performance. The radiation exposures will take place at NASA’s Space Radiation Laboratory at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

“The beauty of this is that we can assess at different time points after exposure, so not only do we get a sense of rather immediate effects, but then we can look again at longer time points,” Bergman said. “That kind of information just hasn’t been available.”

The animals, which will not be killed, will remain at McLean Hospital, where they will be overseen by veterinarians and staff.

“McLean Hospital is responsible for the lifetime care of the primates,” NASA wrote in an email. “No further research is planned for them at this time.”

Before NASA first sent humans into space, it flew two chimpanzees, Ham and Enos, to test the Mercury capsules.

In all, 29 non-human primates have flown in space, including 12 on Soviet or Russian rockets and 17 on U.S. spacecraft, according to NASA’s chief veterinarian Joseph Bielitzki. Most of the missions were suborbital flights to test basic physiology and assess risks of launch and microgravity.

NASA is stepping up its space radiation studies with a round of experiments that for the first time in decades will use monkeys as subjects.

The point of the experiments is to understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior and what countermeasures can be developed to make long-duration spaceflight safe for travelers beyond Earth’s protective magnetic shield.

For the new study, 18 to 28 squirrel monkeys will be exposed to a low dose of the type of radiation that astronauts traveling to Mars can expect to encounter.

Scientists are particularly interested in studying how the radiation impacts the monkeys’ central nervous systems and behaviors over time.

“We realized there was a need for this kind of work,” Jack Bergman, a behavioral pharmacologist at Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital in Boston, told Discovery News.

“There’s a long-standing commitment on the part of NASA to deep space travel and with that commitment comes a need for knowing what kinds of adverse effects deep space travel might have, what are the risks to astronauts,” Bergman said. “That’s not been well assessed.”

NASA has zapped rats and mice to probe radiation’s impacts, but that provides only a small picture, Frank Cucinotta, head of the Space Radiation Health Project at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, told Discovery News.

“Obviously, the closer we get to man, the better,” added Eleanor Blakely, a biophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies radiation-induced cataracts.

For Bergman’s study, squirrel monkeys trained on a variety of behavioral tasks will be tested to see how exposure to radiation impacts performance. The radiation exposures will take place at NASA’s Space Radiation Laboratory at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

“The beauty of this is that we can assess at different time points after exposure, so not only do we get a sense of rather immediate effects, but then we can look again at longer time points,” Bergman said. “That kind of information just hasn’t been available.”

The animals, which will not be killed, will remain at McLean Hospital, where they will be overseen by veterinarians and staff.

“McLean Hospital is responsible for the lifetime care of the primates,” NASA wrote in an email. “No further research is planned for them at this time.”

Before NASA first sent humans into space, it flew two chimpanzees, Ham and Enos, to test the Mercury capsules.

In all, 29 non-human primates have flown in space, including 12 on Soviet or Russian rockets and 17 on U.S. spacecraft, according to NASA’s chief veterinarian Joseph Bielitzki. Most of the missions were suborbital flights to test basic physiology and assess risks of launch and microgravity.

Say bye bye to duplicate content.
Now, with WordPress Uniquefier v3.4 all your articles are 100% unique
What is Uniquefier and how is it going to help you?
Uniquefier is a WordPress Plugin which once activated will turn your blog content from duplicate to unique. All it takes is 1 single click to activate the plugin and everything will be 100% unique content.
You may be wondering how is this possible? Well, it is indeed, and no it’s not one of those article rewriters or any spinners you may have heard of. More, the articles will be the same for your site visitors, the changes which are being made to the articles are in the backpage, in the page source, changes which are not visible to the visitors, but only to the search engines bots and browsers. We are not adding hiding text or any kind of such activities which are strictly forbidden, the Uniquefier uses a simple, yet highly effective mechanism of turning your articles unique. It is a well known fact that search engines (for google has been proofed) can run and index non advanced JavaScript from your pages. This is why, by using a special technique we place the original articles under a JavaScript run. This way:

• you get original content as the way you show the articles is different than just a pure copy+paste
• search engines understand what an untrained human eye can’t

Click here to view more details

Tags: behavioral tasks, berkeley national laboratory, biophysicist, brookhaven national laboratory, central nervous systems, discovery news, harvard medical school, health project, human bodies, johnson space center, lawrence berkeley national laboratory, magnetic shield, mclean hospital, nasa, pharmacologist, radiation exposures, radiation health, radiation studies, radioactive environment, space radiation laboratory, squirrel monkey, squirrel monkeys

Related posts:

1. NASA Monkey Radiation Study Draws Group’s Ire
2. NASA’s Spitzer Images Out-of-this-World Galaxy
3. NASA’s Mars Rover Has Uncertain Future as Sixth Anniversary Nears
4. NASA’s Spitzer Sees the Cosmos Through ‘Warm’ Infrared Eyes
5. World Not Ending in 2012, Says NASA