Space to Ground: All Heart: Feb. 14, 2025

NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station.

What is said in the film

Welcome to Space to Ground, I'm Ana Cristina Olvera coming to you today from the Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas. It's from this very building that flight controllers oversee the status of the International Space Station and its systems, including monitoring the health and safety of the astronauts on board. In fact the health and safety of crew members is one of the primary areas of research aboard the space station. Every aspect of how our body react to microgravity is studied, but arguably none more so than the heart. "Roger, liftoff and the clock is started".

From the early days of human space flight, researchers studied how the heart reacted to microgravity. They monitored heart rate and blood pressure changes before during and after space flight in order to see if the human body could survive living in space, and the extreme G-Forces during launch and landing. So we happen to be here on Valentine's Day, so what better time to talk to you about affairs of the heart. But instead of chocolate and flowers, we will take a look at heart health and the research taking place aboard the International Space Station. Dr.

KRISTIN FABRE: First of all think about fluid shifts. We go from Earth's gravity to no gravity and what does all that do to the fluid in our body. We think about changes in our vision. We think about muscle atrophy or bone atrophy and so we have to think about all the ways that we counter that. But maybe for Valentine's Day we could just talk about the cardiovascular system.

So we know a lot about those changes in microgravity, those fluid shifts. We have to think about some of these risks that are associated with that. So for example, there could be a chance of vein clots or blood clots and how we monitor that is through ultrasound. Another example is that when we land there are that pretty significant change in microgravity to back to Earth's gravity, and there's something called Orthostatic Intolerance, and if you think about it like if you're tying your shoe and you stand up really quick or you move your body really quick and you kind of go: "Whoa I'm a little light-headed", that's an example of orthostatic intolerance, and how we counter that is through compression garments so that we can at least try to control some of the fluid shifts and some of that impact for the crew when they come back on surface. ANA: There are culturing leaving heart cells in microgravity and 3D printing cells.

How is these going to keep astronauts safer? Dr. FABRE: I mean it's it's kind of interesting when you say bioprinting heart cells in space, it almost sounds sci-fi but that's where we are today. We actually work a lot with the ISS Program, our partners over there from the science department also the biological and physiological group over at the agency, and even the ISS National Lab on learning how what are they understanding from these types of technologies, because we think that if you can actually start to understand some of these complex 3D models, if they start to mimic kind of the the invivo or the body-like types of responses that we would see in in our body, can we actually take a lot of that knowledge and say, maybe even think about precision health or personalized health for the crew as they start thinking about those long lunar missions or as we go to Mars, how we can learn a lot about those responses even just using some of those models. ANA: Exactly!

What is NASA doing to keep the astronauts heart safer during these long-term missions in space? Dr. FARBE: Yeah and we actually, that's that's one of the things that we think a lot about. That's a big knowledge gap for us. Right now on average our crew are up in space for about six months with a handful being about a year.

In terms of even going beyond low earth orbits something that that really has only really been done with the Apollo missions with just a handful of crew exposed to this unique Galactic Cosmic radiation environment. That's a big knowledge gap for us and so we need to think about duration, we need to think about these long-term health effects especially exposed to to Galactic Cosmic radiation for long-term health effects. So we're looking at CIPHER which is this 14 studies that's integrated to see how that all impacts the the human body and in a period of time over a period of time and cardiovascular features or functions is an important part of that so we got to think about radiation counter measures, got to keep our exercise and keep proper nutrition for these long duration missions. ANA: Excellent! Dr.

Fabre, thank you very much. Dr. FARBE: Thank you, it's been a pleasure. ANA: Over the years we have expanded our research from answering the questions of if the heart could survive space flight to developing techniques for better cardiovascular health of astronauts on futures space missions, and using that knowledge to contribute to better health care for all of us here on Earth. As always, we invite you to visit nasa.

gov for more stories, blogs, updates, and media broadcasts. And that Space to Ground this week. Thank you so much for watching.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from [NASA](https://images.nasa.gov/details/jcs2025m000057_Space to Ground_557_250714). NASA material is generally not copyrighted and is in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.