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On Tuesday, June 11, the package of manuscripts, data, protocols and codes known as Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA). It is the largest collection of data on aerospace medicine and space biology ever carried out. It was prepared by 100 institutions from more than 25 countries and focused on determining how a short-duration space mission physically affects astronauts.
The report began to take shape in 2021 with Inspiration4, SpaceX’s first space mission which had a crew made up entirely of civilians. For three days, between September 16 and 18 of that year, they traveled 575 kilometers through low Earth orbit, where they carried out various experiments.
“While in orbit, The Inspiration4 crew carried out an extensive battery of scientific experiments, which were now processed, sequenced and analyzedcontributing to the majority of the 44 articles in the SOMA package,” is indicated in the article published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. All data collected during and after the mission are now available in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) open science data repository.
Within the package of articles that make up SOMA, five major changes suffered by the astronauts of the Inspiration4 mission were highlighted:
Medical Atlas concludes that This is the “second space age”, a time where more and more commercial, private and multinational space flights are launched into low Earth orbit. Consequently, the investigation considers that take advantage of the modern tools and methods provided by molecular biology, which could better identify the need for crews. They also indicated that better countermeasures (drugs, for example) can be developed to alleviate the consequences of travel.
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