Artemis Moon Crew Has 'Avatars' on Board

Four astronauts heading home after their historic trip around the moon are also participants in a unique science experiment that could help future space missions. On board with them are what NASA calls their "avatars"—chips about the size of a half-dollar that contain the bone marrow of astronauts Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen, Christina Koch, and Reid Wiseman, reports Florida Today. The aim: See how deep space radiation and microgravity stress human tissue without experimenting directly on the crew. If the experiment is successful, NASA could theoretically send such chips into space ahead of missions to see how astronauts might fare, per the Washington Post.

"Imagine if we could send these ahead of time to Mars to really understand what's going to happen to humans," says Lisa Carnell, director of NASA's Biological and Physical Sciences Division. The chips use channels lined with blood vessel cells to keep the astronauts' bone marrow cells alive in space, while identical chips stay on Earth as controls. After splashdown, scientists will hunt for DNA damage, inflammation markers, telomere changes, and more, comparing chips, ground samples, and the astronauts' own health data. The first step, however, is seeing whether the chips in the Avatar program—short for A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response—survive the record-long moon flight.