How to safely watch and photograph the total solar eclipse

On April 8, the moon will pass directly between Earth and the sun, creating a total solar eclipse across much of the United States, Mexico, and Canada. 

Although total solar eclipses occur somewhere in the world every 18 months or so, this one is unusual because tens of millions of people in North America will likely witness it, from Mazatlán in Mexico to Newfoundland in Canada.

“It’s a huge communal experience,” says Meg Thacher, a senior lab instructor in the astronomy department at Smith College in Massachusetts. “A total solar eclipse is the Super Bowl of astronomy.” Here’s how to safely watch—and photograph—the natural phenomenon.

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail

It pays to have a plan of action for the day. 

Before you decide on a spot to watch the eclipse, whether it’s in your own backyard, in a national park, or at a viewing party, it’s worth checking the weather forecast to see how likely clouds are to spoil the show. Currently the majority of the eclipse’s path of totality—areas where onlookers will see a full eclipse, as opposed to a partial one—is forecast to have some degree of cloud cover.

However, even if visibility turns out to be poor, you still have options. NASA and the National Science Foundation are broadcasting livestreams, and many eclipse viewing parties will broadcast unobstructed views as part of their festivities. The American Astronomical Society has a state-by-state list to help you find your nearest event.

Safety first

You need proper eye protection to look at the eclipse, because the sun’s light can cause long-term damage to your vision. Be sure to purchase either specially made eclipse glasses or handheld solar viewers. Glasses might be the best option if you plan to take photos, as they’ll keep your hands free. Eclipse glasses are thousands of times darker than regular sunglasses and contain a polymer designed to filter out harmful light. 

You should also make sure any cameras, binoculars, or telescopes through which you plan to look at the sun have been fitted with a solar filter. You don’t need to double up and wear eclipse glasses if you already have a solar filter, though.

Once the moon fully obscures the sun, it’s safe to remove your eye protection for the duration of the totality, which is projected to last around four minutes during this eclipse.

A proper camera is your best bet …

Photographing an eclipse is pretty simple, says Randall Benton, a professional photographer who has been capturing them since 1979. Although cameras have changed vastly since then, the fundamentals remain the same. (If you plan to use your phone to take photos, skip to the next section.)

He recommends fixing a DSLR or mirrorless camera (equipped with a solar filter to protect both your eyes and the camera itself) to a tripod. A short exposure, which is designed to capture movement, is more likely to capture the details of the sun’s corona—the plasma surrounding it. A longer exposure, which keeps certain elements of pictures in focus while blurring others, is likely to stretch the corona further out. The exposure you choose will depend on the kind of shot you’d like to capture.

Before the eclipse begins, take the time to focus the camera exactly where you want the sun and moon to appear in your shot, and turn off any autofocus function. While some mounts come with an automated tracking feature that will follow the eclipse’s progression, others will require you to move your camera yourself, so make sure you’re familiar with the mount you’ve got to prevent the eclipse from drifting out of your frame.

Then, “when there’s just a sliver of sun left and it’s a few seconds away from disappearing, take the filter off the camera lens,” Benton says. “At the very last moment, there’s a phenomenon called the diamond ring effect, when the last speck of visible sunlight resembles a ring—that’s a great dramatic photo. Once the sunlight reappears, it’s time to put the filter back on.” 

… but smartphones work too

Despite the rapid advances in smartphone cameras over the past decade or so, they can’t really rival DSLR or mirrorless cameras when it comes to capturing an eclipse. 

Their short lenses means the sun will appear very small, which doesn’t tend to produce great photographs. That said, you can still capture the best photo possible by cutting out the plastic lens from a pair of spare eclipse glasses, taping it over your phone’s camera lens (or lenses), and securing the device in a tripod (or propping it up against a cup).

Don’t try to hold the phone, and use your phone’s shutter delay to decrease vibrations, says Gordon Telepun, an amateur enthusiast who has been photographing eclipses since 2001 and has advised NASA on how to capture them. “During totality, take the [eclipse glasses] filter off and take wide-angle shots of the corona in the sky and the landscape,” he says. “Automatic mode will work fine.”

Something smartphones are great at capturing is video of the moment the moon glides over the sun, says Benton: “That transition from daylight to nighttime is dramatic, and smartphones can handle that pretty well.”

Don’t be afraid to get creative

During the eclipse, there are plenty of other things to photograph besides the sun and moon. Foliage will create a natural version of a pinhole viewer, casting thousands of crescent images of the sun dancing around in the shade as the light streams through the trees. 

Another natural phenomena is shadow bands—flickering gray ripples that appear on light-colored surfaces like sheets or the sides of houses within a few minutes of totality. “It’s almost like a stroboscopic effect,” Benton says, referring to the visual effect that makes objects appear as though they are moving more slowly than they actually are. “Videos of that could be interesting.” 

“Take pictures of the faces of the people around you, too,” he adds. “Twenty years from now, your photo of the eclipse is going to be pretty much the same as anyone else’s. These other pictures are going to be a little more powerful in reminding you what your day was like.”

Take a moment to look around

Finally, when you’re looking up at the moon covering the sun during totality, let yourself enjoy the moment free from your technology. The next eclipse the US can expect to experience on this scale is in August 2044—so try hard to stay present.

“During totality, if you’re really concentrating on getting your photo, at some point let go of everything. Turn around—take a look with your eyes,” says Benton. “Whatever you’re seeing in the viewfinder or on the screen, it isn’t the same thing as seeing it with your own eyes. And it will change your life.”

The search for extraterrestrial life is targeting Jupiter’s icy moon Europa

We’ve known of Europa’s existence for more than four centuries, but for most of that time, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon was just a pinprick of light in our telescopes—a bright and curious companion to the solar system’s resident giant. Over the last few decades, however, as astronomers have scrutinized it through telescopes and six spacecraft have flown nearby, a new picture has come into focus. Europa is nothing like our moon. 

Observations suggest that its heart is a ball of metal and rock, surrounded by a vast saltwater ocean that contains more than twice as much water as is found on Earth. That massive sea is encased in a smooth but fractured blanket of cracked ice, one that seems to occasionally break open and spew watery plumes into the moon’s thin atmosphere. 

For these reasons, Europa has captivated planetary scientists interested in the geophysics of alien worlds. All that water and energy—and hints of elements essential for building organic molecules —point to another extraordinary possibility. In the depths of its ocean, or perhaps crowded in subsurface lakes or below icy surface vents, Jupiter’s big, bright moon could host life. 

“We think there’s an ocean there, everywhere,” says Bob Pappalardo, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Essentially everywhere on Earth that there’s water, there’s life. Could there be life on Europa?” 

Pappalardo has been at the forefront of efforts to send a craft to Europa for more than two decades. Now his hope is finally coming to fruition: later this year, NASA plans to launch Europa Clipper, the largest-­ever craft designed to visit another planet. The $5 billion mission, scheduled to reach Jupiter in 2030, will spend four years analyzing this moon to determine whether it could support life. It will be joined after two years by the European Space Agency’s Juice, which launched last year and is similarly designed to look for habitable conditions, not only on Europa but also on other mysterious Jovian moons. 

Neither mission will beam back a definitive answer to the question of extraterrestrial life. “Unless we get really lucky, we’re not going to be able to tell if there is life there, but we can find out if all the conditions are right for life,” says planetary geologist Louise Prockter at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, a co-­investigator on the Clipper camera team. 

“Essentially everywhere on Earth that there’s water, there’s life. Could there be life on Europa?”

Bob Pappalardo, planetary scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

What these spacecraft will do is get us closer than ever before to answers, by identifying the telltale chemical, physical, and geological signatures of habitability—whether a place is a suitable environment for life to emerge and thrive.

The payoff for confirming these signs on Europa would be huge. Not because humans could settle on its surface—it’s far too harsh and rugged and cold and irradiated for our delicate bodies—but because it could justify future exploration to land there and look for alien life-forms. Finding something, anything, living on Europa would offer strong evidence for an alternate path through which life could emerge. It would mean that life on Earth is not exceptional. We’d know that we have neighbors close by—even if they’re microbial, which would be the most likely life-form—and that would make it very likely that we have neighbors elsewhere in the cosmos.

NASA/JPL-CALTECH

“With the prospects of life—the prospects of vast oceans—within reach, you just have to go,” says Nicholas Makris, director of MIT’s Center for Ocean Engineering, who uses acoustics and other innovative methods to observe and explore big bodies of water. He once led a team of scientists who proposed a mission to land a spacecraft on Europa and use sound waves to explore what lies beneath the ice; he still hopes to see a lander go there one day. “You have to find out. Everyone wants to know,” he says. “There isn’t anyone who doesn’t want to know.” 

From a spot in the sky to a dynamic moon

Long before it became the cosmic destination of the year, Europa played an outsize role in transforming our understanding of the solar system. That began with its discovery, when one night in January 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei fixed his occiale—an ingenious homemade telescope—on Jupiter and noted three bright little dots near the side of the gas giant. 

Galileo assumed it was an illusion, that they were distant stars that only appeared to be close. But the next night, he observed those same three bright little stars now on the other side of the planet. Further observations revealed yet another bright light, also wandering nearby but refusing to leave Jupiter’s side. In a short treatise called Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), published in March 1610, Galileo reported that he’d found four worlds orbiting Jupiter, similar to how Mercury and Venus orbit the sun. (Astronomers still regard Jupiter and its satellites as a kind of mini solar system.) Galileo named the worlds I, II, III, etc., and referred to them as the “Medicean planets,” though they’re now called the “Galilean moons.” His discovery was the first time scientists had directly observed small worlds orbiting something other than Earth or the sun, giving strong evidence to the argument, still controversial at the time, that planets circled the sun and not the other way around. 

NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA (IO); NASA/JPL-CALTECH/KEVIN M. GILL (CALLISTO); NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SWRI/MSSS/KEVIN M. GILL (GANYMEDE¡)

Naming rights for these four Jovian moons ultimately went to the German astronomer Simon Marius, who claimed (but couldn’t prove) that he’d actually discovered them a few weeks before Galileo. In 1614, on a suggestion from Johannes Kepler, Marius proposed naming the moons Io, Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede—after four “irregular loves” pursued by Zeus (Jupiter) in ancient mythology. It took 200 years for those names to gain widespread adoption, but they were definitely an upgrade. Had Galileo’s naming scheme stuck, you’d now be reading about the “II Clipper,” which doesn’t have the same ring.

These moons were only the first to be discovered orbiting Jupiter. As of December 2023, astronomers had officially confirmed the existence of 91 others—and there are likely many more. Where the first four are round and follow stately, simple orbits, the more recent discoveries are more diverse. Some orbit in erratic swarms or go the opposite way around; some were asteroids captured in passing; others resulted from collisions. There are so many objects around Jupiter, in fact, that the International Astronomical Union no longer confers names on Jovian satellites unless they’re deemed to have significant scientific value.

It turned out that Ridgway, who describes himself as a tinkerer as well as a physicist, was well positioned to answer those questions. Using an old mathematical trick, he had devised an innovative instrument that could capture the spectrum of a distant light source, and he was using it during nighttime observations at a telescope at Kitt Peak Observatory, in Arizona. Every element and molecule absorbs and emits a unique collection of wavelengths of energy, and astronomers can read these spectra as fingerprints that reveal the composition of cosmic bodies. Pilcher suggested that he use the instrument to observe Europa.

They thought it would take a week to get a useful spectrum of one of Jupiter’s moons. “I went and got it in one night, maybe two,” Ridgway recalls. Ridgway showed the data to Pilcher, who showed it to his advisor, Tom McCord. Their analyses, published in Science in December 1972, suggested that water ice covered at least half, and possibly all, of the surface of Europa. (They also confirmed that the Jovian moons Ganymede and Callisto, both of which are larger than Europa, also had ice on their surfaces.) 

In a 1980 paper, scientists reported that Europa looked “cracked like a broken eggshell” and compared it to a white pool ball fouled by a felt-tip pen.

One year later, the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which had launched in March 1972, passed close enough to Europa to take a photo. The grainy image was provocative enough to justify sending Pioneer 11—which launched in 1973—to swing by on its way to Saturn and then out of the solar system. 

NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA/UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO (TITAN); NASA/JPL£CALTECH/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE (ENCELADUS)

But Europa really started to come into focus in 1979, after the Voyager 2 spacecraft sped past the moon on July 9. (Voyager 1 also passed near Europa, but Voyager 2 had better photos.) The photographs the spacecraft beamed back revealed a smooth, bright surface, crisscrossed by long linear marks and low ridges; they might have been cracks or cliffs. In a 1980 NASA paper describing the observation, scientists reported that Europa looked “cracked like a broken eggshell” and compared it to a white pool ball fouled by a felt-tip pen. A 1983 Nature paper fueled interest in Europa by proposing that those features were consistent with liquid water and regular resurfacing, like the work of a natural Zamboni machine.   

Among other things, Galileo’s magnetometer revealed a wildly varying magnetic field. Ice is a poor conductor, but liquid salt water isn’t, and Europa’s magnetic oscillations pointed to something moving beneath the surface. Its readings fit the idea of a global ocean being pushed, pulled, and heated by the tidal forces of Jupiter and its moon companions. They also lined up with earlier theoretical predictions of liquid water near the surface of icy moons. “We are pretty certain there’s an ocean there,” Prockter says, “but there is a chance that it might be something really exotic we don’t understand.” The only way to know for sure, she says, is to go back. 

Other images from Galileo confirmed what telescope observations had long suggested: that Europa sports a youthful appearance despite its advanced age. It likely formed at the same time as Jupiter and the rest of the solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago, yet its surface—as dated by the oldest craters—is less than 100 million years old. “That’s a long time for us mere mortals,” says Prockter, “but in geological terms, it was born yesterday. The surface is very, very young.” The cracks and crevices on Europa suggest that giant ice plates on its surface collide, break apart, shove under and over each other, and refreeze. 

The longer scientists stared at Europa, the more mysteries emerged—like the questions around those ubiquitous dark ridges, often in pairs, that splatter the surface like a Jackson Pollock painting. Theorists have been busy devising explanations. Perhaps they’re made by ice volcanoes or geysers, or cracks where liquid water from subsurface pools rose, froze, and crumbled as the opening closed again. Maybe they resulted from subduction, which occurs on Earth in plate tectonics, as one giant sheet of ice slid and crumpled under another. “I’ve lost count of the number of different models for forming those landforms, but we really don’t know how they form,” Prockter says. “Part of the reason is that geology is based on Earth geology, but it’s not like Earth.” 

One particularly striking image of Europa, captured in September 2022 by a camera on the Juno spacecraft, which is currently exploring Jupiter, reveals many of the features that are driving scientists to want to take a closer look. It shows the side of Europa that always faces Jupiter, bathed in sunlight. The moon’s surface is covered with cracks, streaks, and ridges where water may rise from the ocean beneath, or where irradiated surface material may sink lower. It also shows the “chaos terrains”—remarkably messy areas suggesting that giant pieces of ice have broken off, moved around, and refrozen, bolstering the case for geological activity similar to plate tectonics on Earth. 

However, Juno’s brief two-hour flyby failed to answer questions about how those features formed or to confirm the existence of a buried ocean. For planetary scientists and astrophysicists, Clipper’s data can help fill in the missing knowledge. It will also push our relationship with Europa into new, unexplored territory. 

What all those previous missions did do was help build enthusiasm for the plan to get to Europa, a plan that has evolved dramatically over the last 20 years. Originally, scientists wanted orbiters and landers, and NASA and ESA were working together on a joint mission with multiple spacecraft. Those plans fizzled, but in 2013—as a result of the 2011 Decadal Survey, a report that sets the priorities for space exploration for the next 10 years—NASA approved a plan to send an orbiter. By 2015, the agency had selected the instruments on board. Independently, the ESA moved forward with its own mission, with a broader goal of studying Jupiter’s icy moons. 

“The Voyager mission transformed Europa from a light in the sky to a geologic world, and then the Galileo mission did the transformation to an ocean world,” says Diana Blaney, a JPL geophysicist who leads the Clipper team charged with using a mapping image spectrometer to identify molecules on Europa’s surface. “Hopefully, Clipper will bring the transformation to a habitable world.” 

Getting in close

Researchers have long searched for signs of habitability in the solar system. Landers and rovers on Mars have found evidence of liquid water, mostly long gone, and organic molecules, which contain carbon, often in chains or rings. The building blocks of biological organisms—including nucleic acids and proteins—all contain carbon, which is why scientists get excited when they find organic molecules. Their presence could indicate that it’s possible for the precursors of life to form. 

But it’s not enough just to have promising pieces in place. Any alien species would also have to find a way to grow and survive. That far from the sun, photosynthesis is likely impossible. Organisms would necessarily be fueled by chemical energy, much as microbial extremophiles near the black smokers and hydrothermal vents on the seafloor live off the minerals and methane. 

The possibility for Europan life is at the mercy of the moon’s geophysics, says Lynnae Quick, a planetary geophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In fact, she argues that you can’t have one without the other. Europa seems to host the necessary ingredients for life. But ingredients alone, on Europa as in the kitchen, won’t spontaneously combine in the right way on their own. Other forces have to intervene: the moon needs to shift and squeeze, with heat, to mix the minerals from the seafloor with the salt water and any irradiated particles that seep down from the icy surface. “We need something to stir the pot, and I think the geophysical processes do that,” says Quick, whose graduate work on cryovolcanism in alien worlds led to her recruitment to join Clipper. She’s particularly excited about the possibility of finding pockets of warm salty water, trapped just beneath the surface, that could be abodes for life. 

 “Europa is my favorite body in the solar system,” Quick confesses. But she notes that other ocean worlds also offer promising places to look for signs of life. Those include Enceladus, a small moon of Saturn that, like Europa, has an icy crust with an ocean beneath. Images from the Cassini mission in 2005 revealed that geysers on the south pole of Enceladus spew water and organic molecules into space, feeding Saturn’s outermost ring. 

However, Europa is bigger than Enceladus and is more likely to have a surface covered in icy plates that move in a way similar to Earth’s plate tectonics. This sort of activity would help combine the ingredients for life. Ganymede, another Jovian moon and the solar system’s largest, also likely has a liquid ocean, but sandwiched between two ice layers; without an interface between water and minerals, life is less probable. Other possible places to look include Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, which also probably hides a liquid-water ocean beneath an ice crust. (Quick is an investigator on Dragonfly, a mission to explore Titan, scheduled to launch in 2028.) 

To look for the signs and signals of habitability, Clipper will use nine primary instruments. These will take pictures of the surface, look for water plumes, use ground-penetrating radar to measure the icy shell and search for the ocean below, and take precise measurements of the magnetic field. 

The spacecraft will pass close enough to the moon to sample its thin atmosphere, and it will use mass spectrometry to identify molecules in the gases it finds there. Another instrument will enable scientists to analyze dust from the surface that has been kicked into the atmosphere by meteorite collisions. With any luck, they’ll be able to tell if that dust originated from below—from the enclosed ocean or subsurface lakes trapped in the ice—or from above, as fragments that migrated from the violent volcanoes on the nearby moon Io. Either scenario would be interesting to planetary geologists, but if the molecules were organic and came from below, they would help build the case that life could exist there.

ESA’s Juice mission has a similar suite of instruments, and scientists from the two teams meet regularly to plan for ways to jointly exploit the data when it starts coming in—five or six years from now. “This is really very good for scientists in the planetary community,” says Lorenzo Bruzzone, a telecommunications engineer at the University of Trento who leads the Juice mission’s radar tool team. He’s long been involved in efforts to get to Europa and the rest of the Jovian system. 

Because Juice will visit the other ocean-bearing Galilean moons, Bruzzone says, data from that mission can be combined with Clipper’s to generate a more comprehensive picture of the geological processes and potential habitability of all the ocean worlds. “We can analyze the differences in subsurface geology to better understand the evolution of the Jupiter system,” he says. Those differences may help explain, for example, why three of the Galilean moons formed as icy worlds while the fourth, Io, became a volcanic hellscape. 

Jupiter’s radiation has the potential to interfere with every measurement, turning a meaningful signal into a mess of digital snow, like static on a television screen.

To make sure those instruments work when they get there, engineers and designers for both missions have had to contend with a raft of challenges. Many of them revolve around energy: Europa receives only a fifth as much sunlight as Earth. Clipper addresses the problem with gargantuan solar panels, which will span 30 meters when fully extended. (An earlier proposal for a mission to Europa included nuclear batteries, but that idea was expensive, and it was ultimately scrapped.) 

In addition, Jupiter’s magnetic field is more than 10,000 times more powerful than Earth’s, accelerating already-­energetic particles around the planet to create an intense radiation environment. The radiation has the potential to interfere with every measurement—turning a meaningful signal into a mess of digital snow, like static on a television screen—and can threaten the integrity of the instruments. 

To slow the accumulation of radiation damage, Clipper won’t orbit Europa when it reaches the moon in 2030; instead, it will make about 50 flybys over four years, swooping nearer and farther from the destructive radiation field. At its closest, it will pass just 16 miles above the surface. The name points back to fast 19th-century sailing vessels, but it also describes the journey. The craft will sail past the world, over and over. In between passes, its distance from Jupiter will give it openings to transmit data back to Earth. 

Those first transmissions will have been generations—if not centuries—in the making. Some of the people who laid the groundwork for the mission, decades ago, have already died. Makris, at MIT, says that when scientists were first discussing how to get to Europa, he was told by Ron Greeley, a planetary geologist and NASA advisor who proposed and fiercely advocated for missions to the moon, that space travel spans generations: “He likened it to building a cathedral.” Prockter notes that by the time Clipper’s data comes in, she’ll be in her late 60s. “I will have spent my entire career on Clipper,” Prockter says. Quick, at 39, is one of the youngest members of the science team. 

ESA/ATG MEDIALAB

Many of the scientists involved in Clipper—including Pappalardo, Prockter, and Quick—are already planning ways to use its insights for future missions to other worlds. But it’s Europa that holds the most promise, at least for the moment. 

Pappalardo thrills at the prospect of finding a Europan neighborhood that might be just right for life. “What if we find a place that’s kind of an oasis, where there are hot spots or warm spots that we detect with a thermal imager?” he says. 

Ultimately, Pappalardo says, his hope is that Clipper finds enough evidence to make a strong case for sending a lander someday. The mission’s observations could also tell scientists where to land it: “That would be a place where we’d say, well, we really need to go and scoop up some of that stuff from below the surface, look at it with a microscope, put it in a mass spectrometer, and do the next step, which is to search for life.” 

Stephen Ornes is a science writer based in Nashville, Tennessee.

This startup wants to find out if humans can have babies in space

Egbert Edelbroek was acting as a sperm donor when he first wondered whether it’s possible to have babies in space.

Curious about the various ways that donated sperm can be used, Edelbroek, a Dutch entrepreneur, began to speculate on whether in vitro fertilization technology was possible beyond Earth—or could even be improved by the conditions found there. Could the weightlessness of space be better than a flat laboratory petri dish?

Now Edelbroek is CEO of SpaceBorn United, a biotech startup seeking to pioneer the study of human reproduction away from Earth. Next year, he plans to send a mini lab on a rocket into low Earth orbit, where in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will take place. If it succeeds, Edelbroek hopes his work could pave the way for future space settlements. 

“Humanity needs a backup plan,” he says. “If you want to be a sustainable species, you want to be a multiplanetary species.”

Beyond future space colonies, there is also a more pressing need to understand the effects of space on the human reproductive system. No one has ever become pregnant in space—yet. But with the rise of space tourism, it’s likely that it will eventually happen one day. Edelbroek thinks we should be prepared.

Despite the burgeoning interest in deep space exploration and settlement, prompted in part by billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, we still know very little about what happens to our reproductive biology when we’re in orbit. A report released in September by the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine points out that almost no research has been done on human reproduction in space, adding that our understanding of how space affects reproduction is “vital to long-term space exploration, but largely unexplored to date.”

Some studies on animals have suggested that the various stages of reproduction—from mating and fertilization to embryo development, implantation, pregnancy, and birth—can function normally in space. For example, in the very first such experiment, eight Japanese medaka fish developed from egg to hatchling aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1994. All eight survived the return to Earth and seemed to behave normally. 

Taking it step by step

Yet other studies have found evidence that points to potential problems. Pregnant rats that spent much of their third trimester—a total of five days—on a Soviet satellite in 1983 experienced complications during labor and delivery. Like all astronauts returning to Earth, the rats were exhausted and weak. Their deliveries lasted longer than usual, likely because of atrophied uterine muscles. All the pups in one of the litters died during delivery, the result of an obstruction thought to be due in part to the mother’s weakened state.

To Edelbroek, these inconclusive results point to a need to systematically isolate each step in the reproductive process in order to better understand how it is affected by conditions like lower gravity and higher radiation exposure. The mini lab his company developed is designed to do exactly that. It is about the size of a shoebox and uses microfluidics to connect a chamber containing sperm to a chamber containing an egg. It can also rotate at different speeds to replicate the gravitational environment of Earth, the moon, or Mars. It is small enough to fit inside a capsule that can be housed on top of a rocket and launched into space. 

MARTA FERRAZ

After the egg has been fertilized in the device, it splits into two cells, each of which divides again to form four cells and so on. After five to six days, the embryo reaches a stage known as a blastocyst, which looks like a hollow ball. At this point, the embryos in the mini lab will be cryogenically frozen for their return to Earth. 

But first, SpaceBorn needs to demonstrate that the device works in space. Edelbroek’s plans to test it were revealed at the SXSW festival in March this year. 

“We have our first prototype finished, and it’s going to go on board a rocket this year—within six months,” he told the audience. 

That turned out to be overly optimistic. During a Zoom meeting of the SpaceBorn United advisory board in August, Edelbroek explained that a company that had been contracted to perform the launch in Iceland had not yet secured the necessary launch permits. Edelbroek decided to scrub the suborbital test and is now targeting a loftier goal—a three-hour orbital test of the device with the German startup Atmos Space Cargo, tentatively scheduled for November 2024. 

“You want to find this stuff out in a petri dish before you’ve got tourists getting pregnant in space.”

If it is able to pull off this test, SpaceBorn United plans to move forward with additional test flights following the plan for its mission, known as ARTIS (Assisted Reproductive Technology in Space). As described on its website, the first few ARTIS missions will involve rodent embryos fertilized in space using simulated gravity equivalent to that on Earth. Next, the embryos that were formed in space and cryogenically frozen for their return to Earth will be implanted into a rodent mother. If this results in the birth of healthy pups, later ARTIS missions will include human embryos fertilized under Earth-like gravity and, eventually, partial gravity similar to that of the moon or Mars.

If these experiments show that human embryos can be formed under those low-gravity conditions, Edelbroek believes, it would be a major advance toward demonstrating the feasibility of multigenerational space settlements. 

“I feel like we definitely need this kind of research to be done,” says Kelly Weinersmith, a biologist and coauthor of a forthcoming book about space settlement titled A City on Mars. “I do feel like it’s worth making humans multiplanetary as, like, a plan B,” she says. “But I think we need to do it slowly.” 

Edelbroek also sees a more immediate need for the research. As access to space expands, and especially as the space tourism industry grows, it becomes increasingly likely that a baby could be conceived in space, intentionally or otherwise. Currently, there is very little understanding of how a space pregnancy could affect either the mother or the unborn child. Edelbroek sees the company’s IVF studies as urgently needed to help inform such risks.

SCOTT SOLOMON

Weinersmith agrees. “You want to find this stuff out in a petri dish before you’ve got tourists getting pregnant in space,” she says.

Currently, SpaceBorn United is among only a handful of research groups working on reproduction in space. That is largely because there has been very little public funding available for the research. NASA, the European Space Agency, and other governmental organizations have historically been reluctant to fund and support research on sex and human reproduction. 

Erik Antonsen, an associate professor of space medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and a consultant for NASA’s Human Research Program, sees yet another obstacle: the relatively small amount of funding that has historically gone to space medical research. “The Human Research Program at NASA … they have an entire budget of like $130 million. Which is crap,” he says. “And that’s the premier research group and funding that are out there.”

More money needed

The National Academies report could change that. Among the recommendations is a tenfold increase in funding for biological and physical sciences, including studies on reproduction. According to Robert Ferl, cochair of the group that produced the report, that research should include studies on reproduction in a variety of different organisms, from plants to people, because many of the underlying biological principles are the same.

“We’ve got to know what happens over generations, because there are fundamental processes involved when an egg is produced, when sperm is produced, and when the new zygote—no matter what organism it is—begins to grow and develop,” he says. 

But there is no guarantee that the funding recommended in the report will materialize. In the meantime, SpaceBorn United is pressing forward with its plans for testing an IVF lab in low Earth orbit. It would be “a wonderful experiment if you can get the funding for it,” says Antonsen.

Edelbroek says he has raised $400,000 so far from venture capitalists and assembled an advisory board that includes fertility experts and engineers. But any money raised will be spent by the end of the year, and he now has to raise enough for the first planned orbital test next year. Assuming the extra funds come through, which is by no means certain, Jeffrey Alberts, a professor at Indiana University who has studied the effects of spaceflight on rodents, is optimistic. “I’ve come to the general conclusion that fertilization [in space] will probably work,” he says.

Yet even if fertilization is successful, the embryos still have to get back to Earth. That part worries Dorit Donoviel, director of the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at Baylor College of Medicine.

“Those blastocysts are going to experience massive g-loads coming back,” she says. 

Marta Ferraz, who leads research and mission design for SpaceBorn United, acknowledges the challenge. 

“Reentry is a really difficult process technologically,” she says. SpaceBorn United recently began testing its prototype to measure the forces to which the samples will be subjected. The results of a recent high-altitude drop test are still pending, but the team is confident the device can be stabilized enough to minimize the impact on the embryos. 

This information will be essential in order to get approval to use live embryos. The approval process also requires permission from the nation in which the launch company is based—and the way to obtain it varies according to whether the entity conducting the research is public or private.

Donoviel sees this as a loophole that needs to be fixed. She was one of 25 coauthors on a recent opinion piece published in Science that argued for more stringent and consistent guidelines for research in the commercial space industry. They stated that “companies should issue policies and develop best practices to ensure that sponsored research is performed in a socially responsible and ethical manner.” 

Of particular concern to Donoviel are SpaceBorn United’s long-term plans to conduct IVF experiments in space using human embryos. Donoviel considers this unethical and worries that it could turn public opinion against all types of space research. 

“It extends a negative aura over our entire industry and field, so I’m very much against this work,” she says.

Edelbroek argues that his company is taking ethical concerns very seriously. He told me that it recently added two advisors who specialize in biomedical ethics. He added that despite being a privately funded company, SpaceBorn United intends to follow all the internationally recognized legal and ethical standards when it comes to applying for permission to use human embryos.

But experiments on reproduction do not necessarily need to involve human samples. Jeffrey Alberts wants to see several generations of animals like rats be born in space, live their entire lives there, and reproduce. Such experiments have never been performed and would be the definitive test of whether there are any multigenerational effects of life in space—an outstanding question highlighted by the National Academies report. 

The results of such studies would reveal a lot about whether space settlements could ever become a reality. But to Edelbroek, the fact that multigenerational studies on animals have never been approved is the raison d’être for his company. And while its research might make some people uncomfortable, he sees pushing the boundaries as important.

“Humanity has benefited all the time from expanding her comfort zone,” he says. “And if you ask me, it’s good to continue to do that into space.”

Scott Solomon is a biologist and science communicator. He teaches ecology and evolutionary biology at Rice University in Houston. He is the host of the podcast Wild World With Scott Solomon and the author of Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution as well as a forthcoming book for MIT Press about how living in space will affect the human body and mind.

This startup wants to find out if humans can have babies in space

Egbert Edelbroek was acting as a sperm donor when he first wondered whether it’s possible to have babies in space.

Curious about the various ways that donated sperm can be used, Edelbroek, a Dutch entrepreneur, began to speculate on whether in vitro fertilization technology was possible beyond Earth—or could even be improved by the conditions found there. Could the weightlessness of space be better than a flat laboratory petri dish?

Now Edelbroek is CEO of SpaceBorn United, a biotech startup seeking to pioneer the study of human reproduction away from Earth. Next year, he plans to send a mini lab on a rocket into low Earth orbit, where in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will take place. If it succeeds, Edelbroek hopes his work could pave the way for future space settlements. 

“Humanity needs a backup plan,” he says. “If you want to be a sustainable species, you want to be a multiplanetary species.”

Beyond future space colonies, there is also a more pressing need to understand the effects of space on the human reproductive system. No one has ever become pregnant in space—yet. But with the rise of space tourism, it’s likely that it will eventually happen one day. Edelbroek thinks we should be prepared.

Despite the burgeoning interest in deep space exploration and settlement, prompted in part by billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, we still know very little about what happens to our reproductive biology when we’re in orbit. A report released in September by the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine points out that almost no research has been done on human reproduction in space, adding that our understanding of how space affects reproduction is “vital to long-term space exploration, but largely unexplored to date.”

Some studies on animals have suggested that the various stages of reproduction—from mating and fertilization to embryo development, implantation, pregnancy, and birth—can function normally in space. For example, in the very first such experiment, eight Japanese medaka fish developed from egg to hatchling aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1994. All eight survived the return to Earth and seemed to behave normally. 

Taking it step by step

Yet other studies have found evidence that points to potential problems. Pregnant rats that spent much of their third trimester—a total of five days—on a Soviet satellite in 1983 experienced complications during labor and delivery. Like all astronauts returning to Earth, the rats were exhausted and weak. Their deliveries lasted longer than usual, likely because of atrophied uterine muscles. All the pups in one of the litters died during delivery, the result of an obstruction thought to be due in part to the mother’s weakened state.

To Edelbroek, these inconclusive results point to a need to systematically isolate each step in the reproductive process in order to better understand how it is affected by conditions like lower gravity and higher radiation exposure. The mini lab his company developed is designed to do exactly that. It is about the size of a shoebox and uses microfluidics to connect a chamber containing sperm to a chamber containing an egg. It can also rotate at different speeds to replicate the gravitational environment of Earth, the moon, or Mars. It is small enough to fit inside a capsule that can be housed on top of a rocket and launched into space. 

MARTA FERRAZ

After the egg has been fertilized in the device, it splits into two cells, each of which divides again to form four cells and so on. After five to six days, the embryo reaches a stage known as a blastocyst, which looks like a hollow ball. At this point, the embryos in the mini lab will be cryogenically frozen for their return to Earth. 

But first, SpaceBorn needs to demonstrate that the device works in space. Edelbroek’s plans to test it were revealed at the SXSW festival in March this year. 

“We have our first prototype finished, and it’s going to go on board a rocket this year—within six months,” he told the audience. 

That turned out to be overly optimistic. During a Zoom meeting of the SpaceBorn United advisory board in August, Edelbroek explained that a company that had been contracted to perform the launch in Iceland had not yet secured the necessary launch permits. Edelbroek decided to scrub the suborbital test and is now targeting a loftier goal—a three-hour orbital test of the device with the German startup Atmos Space Cargo, tentatively scheduled for November 2024. 

“You want to find this stuff out in a petri dish before you’ve got tourists getting pregnant in space.”

If it is able to pull off this test, SpaceBorn United plans to move forward with additional test flights following the plan for its mission, known as ARTIS (Assisted Reproductive Technology in Space). As described on its website, the first few ARTIS missions will involve rodent embryos fertilized in space using simulated gravity equivalent to that on Earth. Next, the embryos that were formed in space and cryogenically frozen for their return to Earth will be implanted into a rodent mother. If this results in the birth of healthy pups, later ARTIS missions will include human embryos fertilized under Earth-like gravity and, eventually, partial gravity similar to that of the moon or Mars.

If these experiments show that human embryos can be formed under those low-gravity conditions, Edelbroek believes, it would be a major advance toward demonstrating the feasibility of multigenerational space settlements. 

“I feel like we definitely need this kind of research to be done,” says Kelly Weinersmith, a biologist and coauthor of a forthcoming book about space settlement titled A City on Mars. “I do feel like it’s worth making humans multiplanetary as, like, a plan B,” she says. “But I think we need to do it slowly.” 

Edelbroek also sees a more immediate need for the research. As access to space expands, and especially as the space tourism industry grows, it becomes increasingly likely that a baby could be conceived in space, intentionally or otherwise. Currently, there is very little understanding of how a space pregnancy could affect either the mother or the unborn child. Edelbroek sees the company’s IVF studies as urgently needed to help inform such risks.

SCOTT SOLOMON

Weinersmith agrees. “You want to find this stuff out in a petri dish before you’ve got tourists getting pregnant in space,” she says.

Currently, SpaceBorn United is among only a handful of research groups working on reproduction in space. That is largely because there has been very little public funding available for the research. NASA, the European Space Agency, and other governmental organizations have historically been reluctant to fund and support research on sex and human reproduction. 

Erik Antonsen, an associate professor of space medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and a consultant for NASA’s Human Research Program, sees yet another obstacle: the relatively small amount of funding that has historically gone to space medical research. “The Human Research Program at NASA … they have an entire budget of like $130 million. Which is crap,” he says. “And that’s the premier research group and funding that are out there.”

More money needed

The National Academies report could change that. Among the recommendations is a tenfold increase in funding for biological and physical sciences, including studies on reproduction. According to Robert Ferl, cochair of the group that produced the report, that research should include studies on reproduction in a variety of different organisms, from plants to people, because many of the underlying biological principles are the same.

“We’ve got to know what happens over generations, because there are fundamental processes involved when an egg is produced, when sperm is produced, and when the new zygote—no matter what organism it is—begins to grow and develop,” he says. 

But there is no guarantee that the funding recommended in the report will materialize. In the meantime, SpaceBorn United is pressing forward with its plans for testing an IVF lab in low Earth orbit. It would be “a wonderful experiment if you can get the funding for it,” says Antonsen.

Edelbroek says he has raised $400,000 so far from venture capitalists and assembled an advisory board that includes fertility experts and engineers. But any money raised will be spent by the end of the year, and he now has to raise enough for the first planned orbital test next year. Assuming the extra funds come through, which is by no means certain, Jeffrey Alberts, a professor at Indiana University who has studied the effects of spaceflight on rodents, is optimistic. “I’ve come to the general conclusion that fertilization [in space] will probably work,” he says.

Yet even if fertilization is successful, the embryos still have to get back to Earth. That part worries Dorit Donoviel, director of the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at Baylor College of Medicine.

“Those blastocysts are going to experience massive g-loads coming back,” she says. 

Marta Ferraz, who leads research and mission design for SpaceBorn United, acknowledges the challenge. 

“Reentry is a really difficult process technologically,” she says. SpaceBorn United recently began testing its prototype to measure the forces to which the samples will be subjected. The results of a recent high-altitude drop test are still pending, but the team is confident the device can be stabilized enough to minimize the impact on the embryos. 

This information will be essential in order to get approval to use live embryos. The approval process also requires permission from the nation in which the launch company is based—and the way to obtain it varies according to whether the entity conducting the research is public or private.

Donoviel sees this as a loophole that needs to be fixed. She was one of 25 coauthors on a recent opinion piece published in Science that argued for more stringent and consistent guidelines for research in the commercial space industry. They stated that “companies should issue policies and develop best practices to ensure that sponsored research is performed in a socially responsible and ethical manner.” 

Of particular concern to Donoviel are SpaceBorn United’s long-term plans to conduct IVF experiments in space using human embryos. Donoviel considers this unethical and worries that it could turn public opinion against all types of space research. 

“It extends a negative aura over our entire industry and field, so I’m very much against this work,” she says.

Edelbroek argues that his company is taking ethical concerns very seriously. He told me that it recently added two advisors who specialize in biomedical ethics. He added that despite being a privately funded company, SpaceBorn United intends to follow all the internationally recognized legal and ethical standards when it comes to applying for permission to use human embryos.

But experiments on reproduction do not necessarily need to involve human samples. Jeffrey Alberts wants to see several generations of animals like rats be born in space, live their entire lives there, and reproduce. Such experiments have never been performed and would be the definitive test of whether there are any multigenerational effects of life in space—an outstanding question highlighted by the National Academies report. 

The results of such studies would reveal a lot about whether space settlements could ever become a reality. But to Edelbroek, the fact that multigenerational studies on animals have never been approved is the raison d’être for his company. And while its research might make some people uncomfortable, he sees pushing the boundaries as important.

“Humanity has benefited all the time from expanding her comfort zone,” he says. “And if you ask me, it’s good to continue to do that into space.”

Scott Solomon is a biologist and science communicator. He teaches ecology and evolutionary biology at Rice University in Houston. He is the host of the podcast Wild World With Scott Solomon and the author of Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution as well as a forthcoming book for MIT Press about how living in space will affect the human body and mind.

These scientists live like astronauts without leaving Earth

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

In January 2023, Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier, a 74,000-square-mile mass of frozen water in West Antarctica. She arrived with an international research team to study the glacier’s geology and ice fabric, and how its ice melt might contribute to sea level rise. But while near Earth’s southernmost point, Sweeney kept thinking about the moon.

“It felt every bit of what I think it will feel like being a space explorer,” says Sweeney, a former Air Force officer who’s now working on a doctorate in lunar geology at the University of Texas at El Paso. “You have all of these resources, and you get to be the one to go out and do the exploring and do the science. And that was really spectacular.”

That similarity is why space scientists study the physiology and psychology of people living in Antarctic and other remote outposts: For around 25 years, people have played out what existence might be like on, or en route to, another world. Polar explorers are, in a way, analogous to astronauts who land on alien planets. And while Sweeney wasn’t technically on an “analog astronaut” mission—her primary objective being the geological exploration of Earth—her days played out much the same as a space explorer’s might.

For 16 days, Sweeney and her colleagues lived in tents on the ice, spending half their time trapped inside as storms blew snow against their tents. When the weather permitted, Sweeney snowmobiled to and from seismometer sites, once getting caught in a whiteout that, she says, felt like zooming inside a ping-pong ball.

On the glacier, Sweeney was always cold, sometimes bored, often frustrated. But she was also alive, elated. And she felt a form of focus that eluded her on her home continent. “I had three objectives: to be a good crewmate, to do good science, and to stay alive,” she says. “That’s all I had to do.”

None of that was easy, of course. But it may have been easier than landing back on the earth of El Paso. “My mission ended, and it’s over,” she says. “And how do I process through all these things that I’m feeling?”

Then, in May, she attended the 2023 Analog Astronaut Conference, a gathering of people who simulate long-term space travel from the relative safety and comfort of Earth. Sweeney had learned about the event when she visited an analog facility in the country of Jordan. There, she’d met one of the conference’s founders, Jas Purewal, who invited her to the gathering.

The meeting was held, appropriately, at Biosphere 2, a glass-paneled, self-contained habitat in the Arizona desert that resembles a 1980s sci-fi vision of a space settlement—one of the first facilities built, in part, to understand whether humans could create a habitable environment on a hostile planet.

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

A speaker at the conference had spent eight months locked inside a simulated space habitat in Moscow, Russia, and she talked about how the post-mission period had been hard for her. The psychological toll of reintegration became a chattering theme throughout the whole meeting. Sweeney, it turned out, wasn’t alone.

Across the world, around 20 analog space facilities host people who volunteer to be study subjects, isolating themselves for weeks or months in polar stations, desert outposts, or even sealed habitats inside NASA centers. These places are intended to mimic how people might fare on Mars or the moon, or on long-term orbital stations. Such research, scientists say, can help test out medical and software tools, enhance indoor agriculture, and address the difficulties analog astronauts face, including, like Sweeney’s, those that come when their “missions” are over.

Lately, a community of researchers has started to make the field more formalized: laying out standards so that results are comparable; gathering research papers into a single database so investigators can build on previous work; and bringing scientists, participants, and facility directors together to share results and insights.

With that cohesion, a formerly quiet area of research is enhancing its reputation and looking to gain more credibility with space agencies. “I think the analogs are underestimated,” says Jenni Hesterman, a retired Air Force officer who is helping spearhead this formalization. “A lot of people think it’s just space camp.”

Analog astronaut facilities emerged as a way to test-drive space missions without the price tag of actually going to space. Scientists, for example, want to make sure tools work properly, and so analog astronauts will test out equipment ranging from spacesuits to extreme-environment medical equipment.

Researchers are also interested in how astronauts fare in isolation, and so they will sometimes track characteristics like microbiome changes, stress levels, and immune responses by taking samples of spit, skin, blood, urine, and fecal matter. Analog missions “can give us insights about how a person would react or what kind of team—what kind of mix of people—can react to some challenges,” says Francesco Pagnini, a psychology professor at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Italy, who has researched human behavior and performance in collaboration with the European and Italian space agencies.

Some facilities are run by space agencies, like NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog, or HERA, which is located inside NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The center also houses a 3D-printed habitat called Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, where crews will simulate a year-long mission to Mars. The structure looks like what would happen if an artificial intelligence created a cosmic living space using IKEA as its source material.

Most analog spots, though, are run by private organizations and take research proposals from space agencies, university researchers, and sometimes laypeople with projects that the facilities select through an application process.

Such work has been going on for decades: NASA’s first official analog mission took place in 1997, in Death Valley, when four people spent a week pretending to be Martian geologists. In 2000, the nonprofit Mars Society, a space-exploration advocacy and research organization, built the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station in Nunavut, Canada, and soon after constructed the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. (Both facilities have been used by NASA researchers, too.) But the practice was in place long before those projects, even if the terminology and permanent facilities were not: in the Apollo era, astronauts used to try out their rovers and space walks, along with scientific techniques, in Arizona and Hawaii.

Every day on “Mars,” Purewal and Hesterman’s team completed a set of missions, including simulated spacewalks.

Many facilities, according to Ronita Cromwell, formerly the lead scientist of NASA’s Flight Analogs Project, are located in two types of places: extreme environments or controlled ones. The former include Antarctic or Arctic research stations, which tend to be used to study topics like sleep patterns and team dynamics. The latter—sealed, simulated habitats—are primarily useful for human behavior research, like learning how cognitive ability changes over the course of a mission, or testing out equipment, like software that helps astronauts make decisions without communicating to mission control. That independence becomes necessary as crews travel farther from Earth, because the communication delays increase with distance.

During her work on NASA’s mission simulations, Cromwell saw their value. “What excited me is that we were able to create sort of spaceflight situations on the ground, to study spaceflight changes in the human body,” Cromwell says, “whether they be, you know, psychological, cognitive changes, or physiological changes.”

Psychiatry researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, recently found that members of a crew at HERA performed better on cognition tasks—like clicking on squares that randomly appear on a screen and memorizing three-dimensional objects—as their mission went on. Another recent HERA study, led by scientists at Northwestern and DePaul, found that over time, teams got better at executing physical tasks together, but worsened when they tried to work together creatively and intellectually on tasks like brainstorming as many uses as possible for a given object. Those brain and behavioral changes could teach scientists about tight teams deployed in other remote, tedious, stressful situations. “I think space psychology can also speak a lot about everyday life,” says Pagnini.

On the physical side, an international team that included a NASA scientist recently used the Mars Desert Research Station to test whether analog astronauts could be quickly taught how to fix broken bones using a device that could work on Mars—or an earthly site far from medical facilities. Investigations into self-contained, sustainable living reveal how low-resource existence could work on Earth, too. For example, another crew, led by Griffith University medical researchers, performed an experiment extracting water from minerals in case of emergency.

While scientific research that actually takes place in space usually gets the spotlight, the ground-testing of all systems, including human ones, is necessary, if not always glamorous or publicly lauded. “I felt like I was in charge of a deep, dark secret,” says Cromwell, jokingly, of her work on the NASA analog program.

In fact, even people who work in adjacent fields sometimes haven’t heard of the field. Purewal, an astrophysicist, only learned about analog space research in 2020. With covid-19 restrictions in place, though, most facilities had halted new missions. “If I can’t go to an analog, maybe I can bring the analog to me,” Purewal thought.

Amid the drapey willow branches and manicured hedges of her parents’ backyard in Warwick, England, she constructed a geodesic dome out of broomstick handles and tent-like materials. Purewal sequestered inside for a week, leaving only to use the bathroom—and then only while wearing a simulated spacesuit. She communicated with those outside her dome on a synthesized 20-minute delay and ate freeze-dried foods, which she came to hate, and insect protein from mealworms and locusts, which she came to like more than she anticipated.

While Purewal admits her personal analog was “low-fidelity,” it offered a test drive for more rigorous research. By 2021, Purewal had, with SpaceX civilian astronaut Sian Proctor, cofounded the Analog Astronaut Conference that Sweeney attended, along with an associated online community of more than 1,000 people. She also participated in an analog mission in someone else’s backyard—one surrounded by Utah State Trust Lands—in November 2022. Their endeavor was sponsored by the Mars Society and involved research on mental health, geologic research tools, and sustainable food supplies, all of which would be necessary if they were going to Mars.

But they weren’t headed to Mars; they were headed to Utah. About five minutes from the small town of Hanksville—home to “Hollow Mountain,” a gas station convenience store dug out of a rock formation—sits the turnoff to the Mars Desert Research Station. Operated by the Mars Society, the facility is 3.4 miles down a dirt track called N Cow Dung Road. The landscape looks otherworldly: mushroom-shaped rock formations; sandy, granular ground; and eroded hills of red rock.

BILL STAFFORD/NASA

The station sits in a flat spot surrounded by those hills, with a cylindrical living space two stories tall but just 26 feet in diameter. The habitat links out via above-ground “tunnels” to a greenhouse and a geodesic dome that resembles Purewal’s initial backyard creation, and houses a control center and lab.

In November 2022, Purewal brought a team there for two weeks, with Hesterman as commander. In the habitat, an astrobiology student tried to grow edible mushrooms in the crew’s food waste. Another team member wanted to see if they could make yogurt from powdered milk and bacteria. Purewal, meanwhile, was experimenting with an AI companion robot called PARO. Shaped like a baby harp seal, PARO is typically used to relieve stress in medical situations. The crew members interacted with PARO and wore bio-monitoring straps that measured things like heart rate as they did so.

After their mission ended, they spoke with others, and heard about issues such as expired fire extinguishers, or the lack of safety training for participants who would be using specialized technologies and life support systems. They consulted Emily Apollonio, a former aircraft accident investigator. In 2022, she traveled to Hawaii to live at HI-SEAS, a 1,200-square-foot analog station located 8,200 feet above sea level on the Mauna Loa volcano. Apollonio thought HI-SEAS had avoidable problems. For one, the bathroom had only a composting toilet, which the mission crew weren’t allowed to pee in, and a urinal, which the women had to use too.

With a draft version released this June, they hope to improve conditions for participants—ensuring, for instance, that facilities adhere to building codes and provide adequate medical support. They also want to encourage analog participants to follow research best practices to ensure rigorous outputs. The standards suggest, for instance, that each mission have its research plan pre-validated by the principal investigator and habitat director, a timeline for research completion, and an Institutional Review Board approval in place for human experiments. While projects with federal or institutional grant funding go through these steps anyway, the formality isn’t uniform across the board.

NASA

While some analogs already have rigorous protocols in place to protect participants, the safety issues and inclusivity gaps she heard about from colleagues helped inspire Apollonio to start a training and consulting company called Interstellar Performance Labs to help prepare would-be analog astronauts before their missions. She also started to work with Purewal, Hesterman, and others on a document called “International Guidelines and Standards for Space Analogs.”

The standards also detail the creation of a research database, putting all the write-ups (peer-reviewed and otherwise) of analog projects in one place. That way, people aren’t duplicating efforts—as the mushroom grower, it turns out, was—unless they mean to test the replicability of results. They can also better link their studies to space agencies’ established needs to be more directly helpful and relevant to the real world.

As part of this centralization effort, Purewal, Apollonio, Hesterman, and colleagues are also putting together what they call the World’s Biggest Analog: a simultaneous, month-long mission involving at least 10 isolated bases across the world, which together will simulate a large, cooperative future presence in space.

So far, though, attempts to give the community cohesion and coherency have yet to fully address the aspect of analog life that gives many participants trouble: the end of their mission. “Being in an analog mission was less difficult than coming out an analog mission,” says Apollonio, of her own experience.

Shortly after emerging from HI-SEAS, she walked around the streets of Waikiki with her husband. The lights, the noise—everything was too much. “I didn’t know where to look, I didn’t know where to go,” she says. “I couldn’t hear my thoughts.” After they chose a restaurant for dinner, and the server handed her a menu, she froze. “I have to choose my own food,” she realized. It was overwhelming, and that feeling didn’t abate.

Meanwhile, few other people understood the experience, says Hesterman. “You come home and you’re all excited, like, you want to tell everybody about it,” she continues. “You tell everybody about it once, and then they’re just done. On back to paying the bills and cutting the grass and stuff. You still want to talk about it.”

Purewal missed the team and the sense of shared purpose, and started to seek it outside the simulation. “I need to find this same feeling in my day-to-day life,” she says. “We all kind of need our crew.”

Research on the post-mission experience is scant, says Pagnini. In March 2023, he coauthored a review paper, commissioned by the European Space Agency, which aimed to lay out the state of research on human behavior and performance in space, including gaps in the science. Studying how astronauts react and cope “post-mission,” his research found, has been particularly neglected. The same is true of returning from analog space.

Pagnini says the research isn’t just relevant to analog or actual astronauts. Life in space has similarities to life on Earth—including in its difficulties. Italy’s heavily restrictive and prolonged covid-19 lockdown, for instance, resembled going away on a mission. “When we got out of the lockdown phase, getting in touch with other people was kind of strange,” he says. Much of living a regular life on Earth was strange.

NASA

The strangeness also characterizes other experiences, like military deployments and the subsequent return to domestic life. “The expectation is kind of that families will live happily ever after” once they’re reunited, says Leanne Knobloch, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois, who performed a large reintegration study on military couples. “So that’s why reintegration has sometimes been overlooked, but more and more researchers are starting to recognize that it is a challenging period, and it’s not the storybook ending that people make it out to be.”

THE MARS SOCIETY

Knobloch’s work includes suggestions for easing the transition, such as preparing people for the issues they’re likely to experience. “If you’re ready and expect that you might experience some of these problems, it won’t be so stressful,” she says. “Because you’ll recognize that they’re normal.”

Apollonio’s Interstellar Performance Labs, for one, is already planning to include education on “aftercare,” educating people about what she calls the “deorbiting effect” of returning to regular life.

When the day finally came for Sweeney to depart Thwaites Glacier, the aircraft seemed to materialize right out of the sky, as though the remote outpost had transformed into a busy airport. As she was leaving, she looked down at the camp where half her team remained. “You could just see how small our little footprint was,” she says. A speck in the middle of endless white space.

Since she landed in North America, Sweeney has savored time with her family. But the adjustment hasn’t been easy. “Each day that ticks by of being back, I started feeling pulled in different directions,” she says. With numerous projects ongoing—mentoring, speaking, doing her doctoral research—she felt her sense of self splintering. In Antarctica, she had been a smooth, singular whole.

But at the Analog Astronaut Conference in May, hearing about others’ similar readjustment difficulties, Sweeney felt some sense of normalcy. Having a community of support could help with post-mission struggles. Further research—aided by the new database and standardization measures—could help uncover best coping strategies, along with the keys to successful crew dynamics, stress creators and mitigators, and tools and designs that make the practicalities of a mission easier. Maybe someone will look at the database, see this scientific gap, and try to fill it.

Such research might resonate with Sweeney and others having trouble readjusting to their daily lives. “We have to get back to work, we have to go see our families, we want to pick up the projects we were doing before,” she says. “But also, we need to make space for the magnitude of the experience that we just had. And to be able to decompress from that.”