Six astronauts lie motionless in a row of compartments with medical monitoring cables connected to their bodies, as their space ship cuts through the silent blackness that separates Earth from Mars.Can I just say, wow, cool?
They're sound asleep and will be for the extent of their six-month trip, having been placed in an artificially induced state of hibernation called torpor.
This is the way a NASA-funded study sees space explorers traveling to Mars -- unconscious, with their metabolism switched into slow motion.
Sending astronauts that far into space would be too challenging, costly and grueling without it, says space engineer John Bradford, whose Atlanta-based company SpaceWorks wrote the study for NASA.
"Ultimately, it's what we'll have to do," he says.
Born, like other comic book characters, out of an otherwise trivial but life-changing animal bite, the Rabid Librarian seeks out strange, useless facts, raves about real and perceived injustices, and seeks to meet her greatest challenge of all--her own life.
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Tuesday, October 07, 2014
Science fiction becoming reality
Sleeper spaceship could carry first humans to Mars in hibernation state
Labels:
Hibernation,
Mars,
NASA,
Torpor
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