‘Gastronauts’ are go! Understanding how gravity affects health

On November 11, MAPHEUS-15 became the 600th suborbital rocket launched from Sweden’s Esrange Space Center. While not wanting to downplay this impressive milestone, many are keener to see whether its payload paid off, scientifically speaking.

A partnership between the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the science rocket reached an altitude of 309 km (192 miles), providing seven minutes of microgravity – or weightlessness – for the 21 different experiments it was carrying. One such experiment involved tiny vials of gut cells, affectionately referred to by supervising La Trobe University researchers as ‘gastronauts.’

“Gravity is the only constant force present throughout evolution,” said Professor Patrick Humbert, the mission’s lead researcher and the Director of the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science (LIMS), whose vision is to strengthen research in the areas of cancer, infection and immunity, molecular design, and nanoscience. “Conducting experiments in space where gravity is absent provides a means to ask how it is involved in the processes of cell regeneration and cancer.”

The aim of the Gastronaut-01 mission is to study a human intestinal cell line during pre-flight, launch, and microgravity as a precursor to human studies of gut function and behavior under microgravity conditions. The cells were grown on NanoMslides, microscope slides specially designed by La Trobe scientists to enable the visualization of cells in color without prior staining.

“The Gastronaut-01 experiment is the first step towards an intensive scientific collaboration between Germany and Australia in the field of microgravity research on sounding rockets,” said Dr Jens Hauslage from DLR, who collaborated with the Aussie scientists.

To ensure that the gastronauts survived radiation, launch vibrations, and other mission environments, La Trobe scientists enlisted the services of Melbourne-based company Enable Aerospace to engineer the specialized mini-labs in which the intestinal cells were housed for the flight. The temperature-controlled vials are replete with microscopes and cameras, to record data and enable real-time observation.

“Enable Aerospace is proud of the module, which we developed in under three months in support of the mission,” said Don Love, the company’s director. “This is the first in a family of modules we are developing that will make it easier to capture high-quality life sciences results in microgravity onboard sounding rockets like DLR’s MAPHEUS.”

MAPHEUS stands for ‘Material Physics Experiments Under Microgravity.’ MAPHEUS-15’s record-breaking achievement of seven minutes in microgravity was an improvement on the last mission, which managed six minutes. One minute might not sound like much of an improvement, but when Earth-based microgravity experiments offer only a few seconds of weightlessness, that extra time can be significant.

But there nearly weren’t any gastronauts to study. Many of the intestinal cells didn’t survive the trip from Australia to Sweden and needed to be replaced. By pure coincidence, a La Trobe researcher obtained more cells from another researcher working with the same cell at a nearby university.

The payload has been recovered by helicopter. All that’s left now is to analyze the experimental data that has been collected.

Source: La Trobe University, Satnews