Artemis II is the second stage of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to establish a permanent base on the Moon, which will serve as a springboard for a future manned mission to Mars. Artemis II will consist of a test flight to the Moon with four astronauts on board, including Canadian Jeremy Hansen. During this mission of around ten days, the crew of the capsule Orion will tour the Moon and experiment with various technologies that will be used during future Artemis missions. The capsule Orion of Artemis II is expected to take off in September 2025.
But what will daily life be like for the astronauts on the Artemis II mission? How will they feed themselves? How will they stay in shape? And how will they be cared for if they get sick? In the presence of Jeremy Hansen and Jenni Gibbons, relief crew member, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) described to the press on Monday how these essential activities of any mission in space will take place.
The astronauts’ diet during the mission will closely resemble that which they are accustomed to adopting on Earth. It is a balanced diet to which we will however add a vitamin D supplement, because the astronauts will not be exposed to the Sun, which allows our body on Earth to synthesize this vitamin.
The caloric intake of each menu will take into account the sex of the astronaut, their size and the type of activity they will carry out during the day. Astronauts will have access to three meals and a snack per day, “but they will not be obliged to eat it all and in the usual order”, because some may suffer from space sickness, which causes symptoms similar to those of motion sickness, which some people experience on Earth when they travel by boat or car. “Space sickness occurs when astronauts adapt to microgravity, because their bodies no longer know where up and down are and their brain receives signals contradictory to what it is used to. to receive,” explains Natalie Hirsch, project manager in operational space medicine at the ASC.
For breakfast, they will be spoiled for choice among granola, cereals, eggs and sausages packaged separately per portion in small metallized bags. The other two meals of the day will consist of five pockets containing respectively a soup, a vegetable dish, shrimp rice flavored with curry, for example, a meat dish and a dessert.
Most of these foods are dehydrated and will need to be rehydrated with water drawn from reserves brought from Earth. Some foods, like a delicious wood-smoked wild chum salmon (which journalists were able to taste), undergo a heat treatment similar to that used for canned goods.
Since Artemis II is a short 10-day mission, the astronauts were asked to taste different foods and rank them in order of preference, allowing the team to put together menus they thought they would like. And since a Canadian will be part of the crew, we have included some typically Canadian foods, including maple syrup and the iconic maple cookies.
In the capsule Orion, the astronauts will have access to a water reserve. The latter will, however, be at room temperature and cannot be cooled or heated. “We don’t even know what that ambient temperature will be, because the Artemis I mission was unmanned and no one was there to tell us when we returned. We will find out during our mission,” said Mr. Hansen.
Physical training
“We learned from astronauts who spent six months on the International Space Station that microgravity induces bone loss, especially in the hips and pelvis. When we’re on Earth, we’re constantly battling gravity; our hips and pelvis do a lot of work to support us when we walk. Whereas when we are in space, they no longer have to do this work. On the other hand, the wrist bones, in particular, are much less affected, because astronauts use their upper body to move around the station. They float and have to pull with their arms to move,” explains Mme Hirsch.
To prevent this bone loss, the training program that has been planned for the astronauts aims to “stimulate the lower body as much as possible, because it is the part that is most affected,” she specifies. This program mainly includes leg bends performed while maintaining the torso straight (squats), as well as deadlifts (deadlifts), which consist of lifting and then placing a weight on the ground. These two movements particularly stress the lower body, particularly the hips and pelvis. The Artemis II mission astronauts will do this training for around thirty minutes a day.
The capsule being cramped, it was necessary to design a training platform that was small, lightweight and did not require electrical energy, which we called Flywheel. However, during a short period of their training, the astronauts will wear a monitor which will record their heart rate and their physical performance in terms of speed and force deployed in using the device.
Medical care
Of course, “we make sure that the astronauts who go into space are in good health. And we are focusing above all on prevention,” underlined Annie Martin, portfolio manager for the ASC’s New Horizons in Health initiative.
The space agency will use new telemedicine technologies to diagnose and treat health problems that astronauts may experience while in space. “Our doctors will be on the ground and will periodically communicate with the astronauts in space to make sure they are OK,” she said.
The ASC worked with five organizations to develop prototypes of connected medical care systems. “On the Moon, and later on Mars, we will need an integrated system, that is to say the patient will be connected to various measuring devices (e.g. an ultrasound device, a portable laboratory allowing the carrying out analyses), that the data collected will appear on a screen and that it can be sent to medical experts who are on Earth,” indicated Mme Martin.
Crew members receive minimal medical training, but a decision support system that uses artificial intelligence to analyze data will guide them initially, she explains. “If an astronaut suddenly complains of chest pain, we inform our decision support system of this symptom. Knowing good medical practices, this system will ask questions about the patient, questions that the doctor would ask if he were at his side. The system will then arrive at a diagnosis that will allow other crew members, who are not necessarily medical experts, to manage the health problem on site so that the mission can continue. The system will give instructions on what could be done while waiting for access to more expertise. »
If an astronaut’s condition is critical and requires special care that cannot be provided in space, he or she can be returned to Earth within a day, Gibbons said.
The use of these telemedicine technologies could also be used by remote communities, such as those in the north of the country, but also by populations cut off from the world due to natural disasters, noted Mme Martin.