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.
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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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.