Mission's specificities
Asclepios III, our third analogue mission, was set in a Lunar South Pole environment. A crew of six international analogue astronauts will placed in isolation and carried out experiments and EVAs to explore the challenges of space medicine. The mission itself took place at Sasso San Gottardo, Switzerland.
Asclepios III Team
Find out more about our third astronaut crew!
logo design by Chanud Sithipreedanant
Experiments
Organization: Société Française de Radiologie & MEDES/Spaceship-CNES
France’s national radiology society (Société Française de Radiologie, SFR), French Space Agency (CNES), and French Space Medicine and Physiology Institute (MDES) are currently designing an emergency toolkit for interventional radiology procedures. Each astronaut will perform a medical intervention on a phantom using ultrasound guidance according to the techniques of interventional radiology. This technique is then applicable to a large number of other pathologies as an alternative to surgical techniques that are impossible to perform in space flight conditions.
DIVINAS: DIVersity IN Astronaut Selection
Organisation: Space Generation Advisory Council SGAC
DIVINAS aims to study the best way to communicate with deaf astronauts by investigating the effectiveness of different forms of instructions (sign language, written text, graphics) in completing a critical task. The study measures cognitive workload, situation awareness, and physiological data through performance-based measures, surveys, and an experiment with people who have hearing loss for comparison.
Organization: Human Adaptation Institute
The project aims to investigate the impact of living in isolated and confined environments on analog astronauts. It will be evaluated both individually and as a group through a combination of psychological, cognitive, physiological, and management measures. It is expected to map social interactions, identify key positions and their evolution over time. These results could be used to help the selection, training, and support of future astronauts, and to better understand the coordination mechanisms of teams operating in extreme conditions.
Impact of Depression Anxiety and Sleep on Motivation on Analogue Astronaut
Organization: Rennes University, France
This project aims at studying how motivation and performance evolves during the mission by evaluating three reward-processing subcomponents. The data to be collected will involve depression, anxiety and sleep quality in combination with tests such as Cambridge Gambling Task, Monetary Incentive Delay Task, Iowa Gambling Task for example.
Project: Lunar Astronaut Revival System
Organization: BEARS – Berlin Experimental Astronautics Research Student Team
Description: LARS illustrates the methodology of testing a newly developed CPR Robotic device during an EVA on a mannequin. This process will be recorded by the crew and compared with the old method of carrying the mannequin back to the base and perform CPR.
ALESIA (Analog Legal Experimental Simulation for In-space Administration)
This project seeks to investigate the ways in which it will be possible to outline an autonomous decision-making model in the context of human settlements in space, while measuring the impact of permanence in a challenging environment on the perception of the concept of justice and on the ability to make decisions consistent with a legal-social model.
Organisation: UZH Space Hub
Description: This project aims to test the effectiveness of self-hypnosis for the often-occurring sleep and stress problems in astronauts’ lives due to the effectiveness of self-hypnosis in general is scientifically proven. This could represent a great achievement for future astronauts to maximize their well-being with simple measures.
Difficulties: It seems that the PI lack support for the ethical approval and overall supervision of the project. We mis-evaluated this project as we missed their actual status on budget, supervision and ethical approval.
Organisation: NASA AMES Research Center, University of Nottingham
This project investigates two systems for producing therapeutic proteins: 1) cell-free (University of Nottingham), 2) cell-based (NASA AMES) using Bacillus subtilis. The main objectives are to quantify and compare protein production, demonstrate the technology of the cube system and investigate the challenges of automated vs manual drug production.
Project: Linking EEG markers of cognitive fatigue to operational performance of astronauts in a space analog mission
Organisation: Neuralworks Technologies
Description: The project aims to gather data on brain function and operational performance to provide insight into the effects of isolation and stress on crew. The astronauts will play a toy analog mission game where a fixed number of decisions needs to be made during a mission.
Mentors
Pr. Claude Nicollier
Claude Nicollier is a former ESA astronaut and is currently a professor at EPFL. He is a member of the Swiss Space Center and participated in the astronaut selection process at ESA. Claude is the mentor of the Asclepios astronaut team.
Marc Toussaint
Marc Toussaint is a former ESA engineer who fulfilled many functions and responsibilities on different ESA programmes, such as Columbus Utilisation, Strategy and the Ariane 5 programme. He has been responsible for the late Ariane 5GS version and worked on the Ariane 5 Post-ECA new launchers, the Adapted Ariane 5ME and Ariane 6 versions.
Alban Michon
A real fan of the polar regions and deep-sea diving, Alban Michon is a French adventurer and explorer who has gone on some exceptional expeditions. In 2012, he travelled 1,000km in a sea kayak along the Greenland coast, and went diving under the icebergs there. He is the mentor for the training of our future astronauts.
Thibaut Gaillard
Thibaut Gaillard is an emergency physician and occupational physician specializing in aerospace medicine. He worked several years for the German Aerospace Center and the European Astronaut Center in Cologne. Back in Switzerland, he divides his activity between a consultation specializing in aptitude medicine and an activity in prehospital emergency medicine. Thibaut Gaillard is the mentor of the biomedical team of Ascelpios missions.
Romain Charles
Romain Charles is a MEDES engineer working at the French Space center in Toulouse. With « Spaceship FR », he helps CNES prepare the future of Space Exploration. Between 2010 and 2011, he participated in Mars500, a mission aiming at simulating on earth a trip to Mars back and fourth, meaning 520 days (for now the longest analog mission ever accomplished). Until 2020, he has used his experience to profit the astronauts and their families in their daily life throughout their space missions from the astronaut training center in Cologne (EAC).
Ingo Blechschmidt
Dr. Ingo Blechschmidt is Head of the Nagra’s Grimsel Test Site (GTS), the underground laboratory where our lunar base for Asclepios I is built. He is a geologist and beside his responsibility for the GTS, he represents Nagra in international organizations such as the IAEA network for underground research facilities (URF) for the management of radioactive waste in deep geological repositories.
Ingo and his team are helping us enormously with the construction and layout of our lunar base, guiding us in the technical and safety aspects of our base, and will be there in case of any concerns during the mission.
Stéphanie Lizy-Destrez | ISAE Supaero
Stéphanie Lizy-Destrez | ISAE Supaero
M. Mark Melin | MD FACS RPVI FACCWS
M. Mark Melin MD, FACS, RPVI, FACCWS is a graduate of the University of Minnesota Medical School, completed his General Surgery residency and Vascular Fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota and is currently the West Campus Medical Director of the Wound Healing Institute at M Health Fairview (University of Minnesota). In Asclepios he advices the medical team.
Alexis Paillet | Spaceship FR
Alexis PAILLET is the project leader of Spaceship FR at the french space agency CNES based in Toulouse.
Alexis joined the French space agency in 2005 to work in the development, assembly and testing of space instruments for the exploration of Mars (ChemCam on the Curiosity rover and the main seismometer of the InSight Mars lander).
Since 2019, Alexis is the Head of the Spaceship FR project, which aims to prepare human and robotic space exploration by validating French technologies on Earth, deploying them on test bases in order to start the exploration of the Moon and export the model to the planet Mars.
This project is a laboratory of ideas and demonstration of technologies for a future lunar base, which is being prepared under the impetus of the American program Artemis.
Laure Boyer | Spaceship FR
Laure Boyer studied aerospace engineering in ISAE-ENSICA in Toulouse, France, from 2009 to 2012. She also got a master’s Degree as part of a double degree exchange programme with Université de Sherbrooke, CANADA.From 2013 to 2017, she completed a Doctorate in biomedical engineering at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada, where she studied the biomechanics of the spine.In 2018, she integrated MEDES, the Institute for Space Medicine and Physiology. She worked as a payload operation engineer for life science experiments in the International Space Station, at the CNES control center (CADMOS). She is now responsible for the “crew health and performance” innovative projects at SPACESHIP FR.
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Spacefood
Spacefood is a Berlin-based startup caused on nourishment for space exploration missions and beyond. The mission is to provide astronauts and space enthusiasts alike with delicious, healthy, and sustainable plant-based food options; by combining cutting-edge food technology with a passion for space, Spacefood pioneers the new frontier in nutrition. Spacefood produces dehydrated fruits, vegetables, and berries, covering the need for nutritional, tasty food essential for successful space missions. Spacefood team is dedicated to making the universe a tastier place, one bite at a time.
Mission outcome
This section will be filled after the completion of the mission and the analysis of the results. As of now, you can download the Asclepios II brochure.
