space travel
Data from moon travel dolls are evaluated
Dolls Helga (front) and Zohar under inspection at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. photo
© Glenn Benson/NASA/dpa
How much radiation exposure can the female body tolerate? There are still open questions. Helga and Zohar may have answers after their journey into space.
After the return of the two dolls Helga and Zohar from a trip to the moon, researchers began evaluating the data collected. The two “astronaut phantoms” were handed over to the research team in Florida by the US space agency Nasa, said the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, which is significantly behind the experiment. A spokesman said on Friday that the first data had already been evaluated in the United States. Helga and Zohar are then expected in Cologne in February.
The two dolls flew around the moon with NASA’s “Artemis 1” mission. In December they landed in an “Orion” capsule in the Pacific as planned.
On their journey, Helga and Zohar had the task of measuring the radiation exposure on the female body during such a flight. They were therefore modeled after female bodies. Among other things, the experiment is about the radiation dose that can be observed in the most radiation-sensitive organs of the body – the lungs, stomach, uterus and bone marrow. It was also tested whether a protective vest developed in Israel can effectively protect a female body in particular from dangerous space radiation.