Helga and Zohar from Hampton Roads are getting prepped for their historic NASA spaceflight to loop the moon and back again — voyaging farther than humans ever have.
Except Helga and Zohar aren’t human — they’re twin female simulants called “phantoms,” painstakingly crafted of unique epoxy resins that mimic human tissue and outfitted with thousands of sensors.
They will be VIP passengers in an Orion crew capsule scheduled to launch as early as next summer from Cape Canaveral on its maiden exploration mission. No actual astronauts will be aboard.
Their goal: to determine if a special protective vest, called AstroRad, can adequately protect the female body from six weeks of space radiation.
It will be a sacrificial mission of sorts for Helga, who will fly unprotected. Zohar will be wearing an AstroRad.
And when the pair returns to Earth, researchers will compare their radiation exposure and any damage to their simulated skin, organs and bones.
It’s a proud, exciting, slightly bittersweet moment for the Norfolk engineers and technicians who created them.
“I never had children, so I consider them my daughters,” said Hunter Gall, the Australian-born lead project engineer at CIRS Inc., which specializes in tissue simulation and phantom technology. “I’m sending my two daughters into space, is kind of what I’ve been joking.”
“I’ve always told Hunter his products were out of this world,” said CIRS president Mark Devlin. “But now I’ll be able to say so literally.”
Female phantom astronauts
Medical phantoms have been in use for more than a century as stand-ins for the human body in radiation research. Today, they’re more commonly used to test radiation therapies for cancers.
Helga and Zohar aren’t the first phantoms recruited for space work — from 2004 to 2011, a male phantom was exposed to radiation both inside and outside the International Space Station.
But these will be the first female phantoms in space.
They’re part of an experiment called MARE — Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment — devised by DLR, the German Aerospace Center.
“We chose female phantoms … because the number of women astronauts is increasing,” said Thomas Berger, scientific lead for MARE at the DLR Institute of Aerospace Medicine.
Such research is critical if humans ever will be able to venture safely to Mars or other deep-space destinations.
Astronauts on long voyages will face not only galactic cosmic radiation that can cause long-term damage, but the short-term radiation impacts of solar storms.
On Earth, the planet’s magnetic field shields against most of that radiation. But farther out in low-Earth orbit, radiation levels are about 250 times greater than surface levels. In interplanetary space, they could be up to 700 times greater.
The idea to include a radiation experiment in the Orion mission was the brainchild of Berger and Razvan Gaza, project manager at Lockheed Martin Space, NASA’s prime contractor for the spaceship.
Art and science
Crafting a phantom is a labor-intensive process that starts with a sophisticated epoxy that can accurately simulate organic tissue — the same physical density, the same elemental composition, and capable of attenuating photons and electrons in the same way.
Using sophisticated machines and open-mold casting, a team of technicians builds a human form literally from the inside out, from each rib and spinal disk to individual organs to skin.
“There’s an art and science to what we do,” said Devlin.
Helga and Zohar’s “bodies” were then carved into 38 inch-wide slices, and each slice machined or drilled to receive different types of detectors.
Each is being outfitted with more than 5,600 passive dosimeters to measure radiation continuously from launch to return, with another 16 active detectors placed in organs that are most at-risk from radiation: lungs, stomach, uterus and bone marrow.
“This will be the first time that the level of radiation to which astronauts are exposed during a crewed flight to the moon is measured with such precision,” said Berger.
The female phantoms aren’t full-body analogs — they have no arms or legs — and measure just over three feet from head to upper thigh.
At the moment, they’re in Germany, where a team is preparing a prototype to secure them to the Orion’s passenger seats.
A true international effort, MARE’s other partners include StemRad, the company that developed the AstroRad for the Israel Space Agency, and universities and research institutions in Austria, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Greece, Switzerland and Japan.
When the Orion finally launches, CIRS is considering renting a bus and driving its team down to Florida to watch their girls fly.
“It’s kind of unique,” Hall said. “I mean, it’s not every day that NASA knocks on your door.”