At the end of their historic journey around the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis 1 mission, the radiation measurement dummies simulating astronauts, Helga and Zohar, arrived in Cologne, Germany in recent days. Last Thursday, both were presented to the media for the first time by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The data from the experiment MARE of the German and Israeli space agencies will soon provide a three-dimensional anatomical image of the exposure to radiation during a flight to the moon and back.
As I recall, the two dolls, the Israeli Zohar and the German Helga, returned with the unmanned spacecraft on 11.12.22, at the end of a pioneering and record-breaking 26-day journey in deep space. As part of the MARE experiment, Zohar wore the Astro-Rad protective vest from the Israeli Stamrad company. If it is proven that Zohar did absorb less dangerous radiation than Helga on their way to the moon, the blue-and-white Astro-Rad protective vests are expected to become NASA’s new safety standard – and will also be used by the astronauts who will land on the moon in 2025 and in subsequent missions of the Artemis program.
“Manned space flights are developing rapidly and the exploration of the moon and beyond will continue and gain momentum,” explained Anka Kiser-Fizzela, chairman of the board of directors of DLR. “Radiation exposure is one of the main unsolved medical challenges of human spaceflight. We need to understand this more precisely in order to develop effective means of protecting humans in space. This is where the MARE project did pioneering work as part of the Artemis mission to the moon.”
More than 12,000 radiation detectors
Zohar and Helga each consist of 38 discs, 95 centimeters thick and weighing 36 kilograms, and both contain organs and bones made of plastic of varying density. In order to simulate the female landscape as much as possible, the two dolls even include a plastic simulation of reproductive organs, in order to measure the intensity of the radiation in particularly sensitive organs.
The delivery of the two measurement dummies at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in January included an initial test of the measurement instruments. “The active radiation detectors provided consistent and high-quality data,” reports Thomas Berger, head of the MARE experiment. “We will now begin evaluating more than 12,000 Passive radiation detectors made of small crystals located in all two measuring bodies.”
The analysis of the data will take several months and the results will be published in early 2024, but Berger added that “already now we can see a strengthening of some of our assumptions regarding exposure to radiation during the journey to the moon.”