Laser Analysis Reveals That Astronauts’ Skin Gets Thinner In Space

So with these two signals we can build up images and get a precise look into the skin with a high resolution.

Professor Karsten Koenig of the Saarland University was commissioned by NASA and the ESA to scan the skin of the aforementioned astronauts as part of the ESA’s Skin B project.

There’s no wonder that astronauts’skin is thinner since they must undergo extensive rehabilitation after a prolonged stay in space. And bones lose density – about one to two percent per month. Besides this the blood pressure must be restored and astronauts might also experience vision problems because the fluid in the head is not pulled down and this puts pressure on the eyeballs.

Researchers employing femtosecond lasers in order to analyze the skin of astronauts have found that human skin thins in space. High-resolution images were used.

JenLab, the developer of the system, claims that its femtosecond laser pulses provide a spatial resolution a thousand times higher than that of ultrasonic devices. The advantage is that they can reveal valuable information without needing to take biopsies.

But alas, the mystery of the shrinking skin continues to mystify the team with Prof Koenig saying: “So far we have no explanation yet, and we are waiting for the other astronauts to figure out what’s going on and maybe to try to figure out how we can protect, how we can help so that this epidermis is not shrinking”. In addition to the thinning, there is within the skin ” a strong production of collagen; so suddenly these astronauts have more collagen” suggesting that “there is some sort of anti-aging effect”, as aging results in less, producing wrinkles on the skin.

What this effectively means is that there is an “anti-ageing” effect taking place in the dermis – lower sections of the skin.

All three astronauts displayed the same symptoms, Koenig’s team found.

A long-awaited human mission to the Red Planet is still a number of years away, with NASA planning their first manned voyage in the 2030s. But at greater than 55 million kilometers away, astronauts face at the least half a yr of area journey simply to get to Mars – to not point out the return journey.

It appears in space, you quite literally have to have a thick skin as new findings from research conducted on NASA astronauts in space shows their skin becomes 20pc thinner than on Earth, and we have no idea why.

Koenig and his team have to wait, though; astronauts don’t return from the worldwide Space Station every day.