NASA experimenting with suspended animation in transporting people to Mars

Going to Mars may be a dream for most of us now, but if NASA has its way, dreams will be very important for astronauts heading to the Red Planet.

The American space agency is conducting a medical study exploring the idea of placing human crew members on a six-month long flight to Mars into a deep sleep or hibernation of sorts. Known as torpor, it is where the body’s metabolic rate and temperature are drastically brought down to stasis levels.

While it may sound like something out of a Hollywood movie, under this suspended animation scenario, intravenous feeding would provide nutrition and small electrical impulses would zap unconscious astronauts regularly to prevent their muscles from wasting away during the interplanetary voyage.

Of course, suspended animation is nothing new. Emergency room doctors are quite familiar with inducing hypothermic torpor conditions in trauma patients for decades now, using the process to gain critical time needed for life-saving treatments.

Now science is looking to extend it from the week or so maximum now possible to about 180 days – which is about the length of time for a one-way trip to Mars. Beyond the medical challenges, there are technical challenges as well, including being able to remotely monitor the astronaut’s status and adjust the torpor levels in near real-time.

This may prove to be a difficult nut to crack since there is a natural time delay in communicating over such great distances of space. While radio signals, which travel at the speed of light, have a 1.5 second one-way travel time from Earth to the Moon, travel times for signals to Mars are between 5 to 15 minutes, depending on where Mars is in relation to Earth.

The study suggests that future Mars crew members will lie inside individual pods where a cooling agent would be injected through the nose that would slowly lower the body’s temperature. Either the entire crew or a rotating number of individuals would shift between torpor and work cycles during the long voyage. While one-week successes are still a long way off from being useful for exploring the final frontier, if NASA can make it work, it would bring deep space human-led missions closer to reality.

Unless a new propulsion technology comes into play that would cut down the one-way trip time from months to weeks, there have to be ways of reducing costs and risks. By placing space travellers in stasis, a planetary mission would be safer and cheaper. Looking at just the supplies for a mission to Mars, this could cut the requirement of food, water and other gear from 400 tons to 220 tons.

And it really does appear that sleep is essential for working and living in space. Another recent NASA study suggests that current astronauts are just not getting enough sleep while on the job which, not surprisingly, can impact their job performance. That’s not a good thing when you are doing delicate maintenance work while on a spacewalk, hanging off the end of the robotic Canadarm outside of the International Space Station, circling 400 km above the Earth.

While the space agency guidelines order 8.5 hours of sleep a night for astronauts, researchers have discovered – following more than 4,000 nights of astronaut sleep in space – that they are getting closer to only six hours of shuteye per night. Also of concern is the use of sleep medication, which about 75 per cent of the station crew members take to help them sleep while in space.

The combination of sleep deprivation and sedatives could make for a dangerous cocktail that may impair and jeopardize space missions – especially long-term space flights. This gives new meaning to those warning labels that come with medication that recommend avoiding operating heavy machinery.

So whether it’s hibernation or natural sleep, if humans are ever going to voyage beyond low Earth orbit, dreaming may prove to be the difference between life and death.