Seeing astronauts floating around weightlessly inside the International Space Station may be fun but the absence of gravity has its effects on long-duration space travellers, who experience dizziness, nausea and an unstable gait when they return to earth.
NASA astronauts Sunita Willams and Butch Wilmore, and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov returned to Earth on Wednesday onboard SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft. For Williams and Wilmore, test pilots for Boeing's new Starliner capsule, an eight-day mission stretched to more than nine months as a series of helium leaks and thruster failures deemed their spacecraft unsafe.
The spacecraft returned without them in September. Astronauts who have travelled on space missions earlier have reported facing difficulty in walking, having bad eyesight, dizziness and a condition called baby feet, where space travellers lose the thick part of the skin on the soles that become soft like that of a baby.
"Once the astronaut returns to Earth, they are immediately forced to readjust again, back to Earth's gravity, and can experience issues standing, stabilising their gaze, walking and turning. For their safety, returning astronauts are often placed in a chair immediately upon return to Earth," the Houston-based Baylor College of Medicine said in a note on body changes in space.
It takes astronauts several weeks to recalibrate themselves to life on Earth. The vestibular organ deep inside the ear helps humans keep their bodies balanced while walking on Earth by sending information about gravity to the brain.
"In the low gravity of space, the information received from the vestibular organs changes. This is thought to confuse the brain, leading to space sickness. When you return to Earth, you experience the effects of Earth's gravity again, and thus gravity sickness sometimes occurs, with similar symptoms as space sickness," the Japanese space agency JAXA said. On Earth, gravity pulls blood and other body fluids into the lower part of the body but for astronauts experiencing weightlessness in space, these fluids accumulate in the upper parts of the body, making them look bloated. -- PTI
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