Before sending humans to Mars or the moon, scientists need to understand what long-term space living does to the human body. Now results are coming in from the Kelly brothers in the TWINS Study.
Daily life aboard the International Space Station moves fast. Really fast. Traveling at approximately 17,000 miles per hour, 300 miles above the Earth, astronauts watch 16 sunrises and sunsets every “day” while floating around in a box with a handful of people they depend on for survival.
In November of 2012, NASA selected astronaut Scott Kelly for its first one-year mission. At a press conference not long thereafter, it was Scott who hinted that that this mission might provide the chance to compare the impact of space living on his body with his Earth-dwelling identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, who had also been an astronaut and former Navy test pilot.
Teasing apart health effects of space livingNASA put out a call and selected 10 peer-reviewed investigations from around the country for the TWINS Study. Studies included molecular, physiological and behavioral measures, and for the first time ever in astronauts, “omics”-based studies. Some teams evaluated the impact of space on the genome—the entire complement of DNA in a cell . Other teams examined which genes were turned on and producing a molecule called mRNA .
The Kelly twins are without a doubt one of the most profiled pairs—on or off our planet. They are also one of the most interviewed. One question often asked is whether Scott will return from space younger than Mark—a situation reminiscent of Interstellar or Einstein’s so-called “Twin Paradox.” However, because the ISS is not traveling anywhere near the speed of light relative to us, time dilation—or the slowing of time due to motion—is very minimal.
Telomeres and agingOur study proposed that the unique stresses and out-of-this-world exposures the astronauts experience during spaceflight—things like isolation, microgravity, high carbon dioxide levels and galactic cosmic rays—would accelerate telomere shortening and aging. To test this, we evaluated telomere length in blood samples received from both twins before, during and after the one year mission.
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