BioSentinel, a first-of-its-kind experiment from NASA, is carrying living organisms over 1.6 million kilometres into deep space to test the long-term effects of cosmic radiation on living things — in this case, yeast. NASA has unveiled a new real-time visualisation tool so the public can follow along with BioSentinel’s progress.
BioSentinel launched in November as part of a NASA effort to understand more clearly how deep space travel can affect living organisms. BioSentinel is a shoebox-sized cubesat that hitched a ride as a payload on Artemis 1.
On December 5, NASA officially began the first long-duration biology study in deep space when BioSentinel was 1,055,295 kilometres from Earth. Since then, BioSentinel has continued to hurtle through space, and yesterday NASA invited the public to follow the mission’s progress with a visualisation tool that is tracking the movement of BioSentinel in real-time.
Currently, BioSentinel is far outside Earth’s magnetosphere and will remain in its own orbit around the Sun for an expected mission duration of 18 months. The visualisation allows you to rewind and speed up time, to relive BioSentinel’s launch aboard Artemis 1 as well as see its future trajectory.
Yeast was chosen because, according to NASA, the cells that make up yeast are somewhat similar to the cells that make up humans, including DNA that can be damaged by cosmic radiation. The results of this experiment will help shed light on how humans and other organisms might respond to long-term spaceflight, such as during a crewed mission to Mars.