Asclepios VI

The primary approach for managing menstruation in space has traditionally been menstrual suppression using hormonal contraceptive pills. While this method reduces operational complexity and waste, it presents limitations for long-duration missions including storage constraints, potential refrigeration requirements, and long-term health risks such as effects on bone density, cardiovascular strain, and an increased risk of venous thromboembolism.

Long-duration habitation in environments devoid of natural sunlight poses a significant challenge to human health and performance. A critical aspect is the absence of near- infrared radiation (NIR), a major component of natural sunlight that plays a key role in photobiomodulation (PBM) and that is almost entirely excluded from modern energy-efficient LED lighting systems.

Astronauts are known to experience insulin resistance and impaired glucose regulation during and after space missions, alongside declines in cognitive performance and sleep quality. These physiological stressors are exacerbated by confinement, circadian disruption, and the absence of natural solar spectrum. Recent human studies have shown that PBM through brief exposures to red and near-infrared light can significantly reduce postprandial blood glucose levels and improve metabolic efficiency in healthy adults.

Spaceflight induces structural and functional changes in neural systems essential for sensory processing and multisensory integration, including vestibular, visual, auditory and proprioceptive networks. These alterations can reduce the reliability of sensory signals, creating conditions in which perception becomes less grounded in external reality.

SENSE aims to identify the mechanisms by which extreme environments induce perceptual distortions, hallucinations and altered conscious experiences through computer-controlled tasks delivered via head-mounted display; the experiment will characterize perceptual distortions under sensory monotony, measure the impact of sensory monotony on the feeling of presence and investigate temporal and individual factors generating empirical evidence directly relevant to astronaut performance and safety.

Water and energy efficiency are critical in long-duration missions, where resupply is limited and every resource must be optimized. Photobioreactors (PBRs) are a promising technology for long-duration human spaceflight missions, as they enable the cultivation of microalgae for oxygen and food production for the crew based on their photosynthetic activity. Previous experiments with PBRs in microgravity and analog habitats have demonstrated feasibility, but challenges such as evaporation-driven medium and water loss, and operational complexity remain.

HIVETENNA is a human-in-the-loop simulation, cognitive and robotics experiment designed to study how astronauts can develop robust geometric intuition and spatial reasoning skills through repeated manual estimation tasks when manually operating complex parallel robotic systems in an analog lunar mission environment (6-DoF Stewart platform parallel robot).

The experiment runs as a web-based simulation platform. During each experimental session, astronauts are presented with a target configuration (e.g., orienting an antenna toward a specific satellite) and asked to manually estimate the six actuator lengths required to achieve that pose, relying entirely on mental visualization and geometric reasoning without real-time visual feedback. Astronauts receive detailed feedback only after submission, allowing us to study their reasoning strategies, error patterns, and confidence evolution across the mission timeline.

PEBBLE (Planetary Exploration Bot for Backtracked Lunar Exploration) is an AI powered platform that integrates satellite imagery, field sensor data and machine learning to identify high- probability mining targets. As communication delays, lack of GPS, and hazardous terrain make real-time human control impractical, this expertise in AI-driven geospatial analysis uniquely positions PEBBLE to tackle one of the most pressing challenges in the exploration of the Moon: autonomous surface prospecting for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU).

For future lunar missions autonomous prospecting is key. By minimizing the need for manual scouting or heavy drilling, PEBBLE also aims to demonstrate a more efficient, risk-reducing approach to finding usable resources on the Moon.

In partnership with Neurospace’s HiveR platform, PEBBLE is designed to be teleoperated for detailed investigation and to analyze surface and subsurface composition using onboard sensors (including hyperspectral imagers and ground-penetrating radar) to identify mineralogical “hotspots.

Future lunar infrastructure will rely heavily on In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) to reduce prohibitive launch costs. While material science has advanced significantly regarding the chemical composition of Space Bricks, there is a critical Technology Readiness Level (TRL) gap regarding the operational reality of manufacturing these elements inside a confined, human-tended habitat.

The BUILD (Building Utility for In-situ Lunar Development) project aims to bridge this gap by validating the operational workflow of a low-energy Pressure-Assisted Die Casting (PADC) method. PADC utilizes a biopolymer binder (Guar Gum) and moderate hydraulic pressure to consolidate regolith at low temperatures (60°C). The experiment simulates a workbench manufacturing scenario where astronauts manually operate a hydraulic press to produce interlocking regolith bricks while introducing realistic constraints (crew fatigue, confined space or suit restrictions, dust mitigation).

Long-duration space missions pose significant psychological challenges to crew members, including isolation, confinement, monotony, and disrupted circadian rhythms and research from analog missions has demonstrated that psychosocial stress accumulates over time. Horticultural therapy and interaction with plants have been shown to reduce cortisol levels, improve mood, and provide a sense of purpose in confined environments on Earth, suggesting that tending plants provides astronauts with a meaningful psychological benefit.

Simultaneously, establishing viable agriculture in lunar regolith remains a critical challenge for sustained human presence on the Moon. While plants have been grown in actual Apollo regolith samples, they exhibited severe stress responses High-fidelity regolith simulants are essential for developing scalable agricultural strategies.

This proposal is developed in collaboration with Starbase Brewing, a Texas-based craft brewery aiming to become the first brewery on Mars. Starbase Brewing has already achieved (1) the MicroBrew-1 experiment aboard NASA's Crew-11 mission, successfully completing the first-ever fermentation of beer in space on the International Space Station and (2) the OASIS experiment, marked the first time barley was grown in Martian regolith simulant in space.

Isolation, confinement, monotony, and separation from family produce cumulative stress that can impair crew performance, mood, and interpersonal dynamics. On Earth, moderate consumption of beverages such as beer, tea, and coffee is deeply embedded in social rituals that promote relaxation, social bonding, and a sense of normalcy.

Future crewed missions to the Moon and Mars will require astronauts to pilot vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicles during descent, landing, and surface-to-surface transport. Isolation, confinement and sleep restriction are known to impair psychomotor vigilance and cognitive throughput and degrade piloting performance, memory, and steering precision.

Separately, cybersickness — the constellation of nausea, oculomotor disturbance, and disorientation induced by visual-vestibular conflict in VR environments— poses a practical barrier to routine VR use during long-duration missions.

Asclepios’s EVA suits are heavy and can cause overheating and other sources of discomfort; EVAs are already physically and psychologically demanding activities, given the stressful situation and limitations caused by the equipment it is necessary to improve its comfort to ensure mission success.

MEEVA is an improvement over a previous project of the SpaceTech department of PoliSpace, the largest space association at Politecnico di Milano. The MEEVA system is a comprehensive thermal control and health monitoring system designed for Analogue Astronauts. It consists of an undervest with integrated sensors to measure the astronaut’s vital parameters and a temperature control system (TCS) to improve comfort throughout the activity. Strategically located sensors provide real-time measurements of the astronaut’s physiological status such as heart rate, skin temperature, and core temperature. These readings are processed by on-board microcontrollers, producing an estimate of the current stress level of the analogue astronaut (AA).

Analog missions perfectly recreate situations of Isolation, confinement and monotony, driving stressors that can affect crew wellbeing and technical task performance. Spending time in nature has been linked to cognitive benefits and improvements in mood, mental health and emotional well-being, on many occasions regardless of how much time is spent outdoors.

Sense of NATURE employs an early-stage multisensory VR prototype designed to support relaxation and provide a sense of escape from confinement to the participants. The prototype includes an olfactory device to assist in simulation immersion of the participants. With its focus on experience, usability, and sensory integration, the experiment aims to gain feedback through a collaborative approach with the crew, which will be used to refine and improve the prototype.

The Spatial Perception Assessments (SpaceCog) experiment’s hypothesis is that spatial cognition can be disproportionately impaired under confinement and stress inducing mission conditions.

The study uses a within-subject longitudinal design with analogue astronauts tested across multiple environments: pre-mission baseline, mission phase (isolation and absence of natural light), immediate post-mission, and delayed post-mission. Additionally, controlled stressors (noise or dual-tasking) will also be applied. The full test battery will be implemented through a virtual tool and will integrate tasks to measure visuo-spatial working memory, perspective taking and spatial orientation, object location memory and maze solving tasks.

An internal project organized and scheduled by Asclepios VI teams, COSMOS aims to investigate the effects of two crews with an offset sleep schedule on self-perceived astronaut stress, well-being, performance, and fatigue.

The experiment consists of daily digital questionnaires that have to be completed by the astronauts at different times of the day, which will assess their fatigue level and socialization status through the mission

Effective team coordination is a critical component of mission success in space operations. In such environments, communication plays a central role in maintaining situational awareness, supporting shared decision-making, and ensuring that collaborative actions are executed efficiently and safely. However, space missions may also involve situations in which verbal communication is degraded, delayed, or temporarily unavailable, whether due to technical failure, environmental constraints, or operational demands.

Some non-verbal communication strategies may include gestures, pointing, visual confirmations, or other forms of implicit coordination that emerge naturally during task execution. As participants repeat collaborative activities under constrained conditions, they may progressively adapt by creating stable compensatory strategies, resulting in partial performance recovery over time. In addition to these behavioral and operational outcomes, the project also seeks to examine subjective dimensions such as cognitive workload and frustration, which may increase when communication channels are restricted.