Why astronauts are super hot, experiment

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

What started as a simple question – what happens to the body temperature of an astronaut when he or she is in space? – has resulted in the development of a new technological breakthrough that is being used by doctors here on Earth, the ESA announced on Wednesday.

As the agency explained, people on Earth lose much of their body heat through a process known as convection. In convection, the air around a person is heated by his or her skin, then rises and is replaced by cooler air. Because of the weightlessness, however, convection does not exist on the International Space Station, and space travelers have long complained about feeling hot.

Hanns-Christian Gunga at the Center for Space Medicine and Extreme Environments in Berlin, wondered what impact this phenomenon would have on the body temperature of an astronaut. His curiosity resulted in the birth of the ESA’s Thermolab experiment, which was designed to measure core temperature changes in humans before, during, and after performing exercise on the ISS.

Benefits on the ground

According to the website devoted to the experiment, the objective of Thermolab is to gauge the physiological strain index (PSI) during the course of long-term exposure to a microgravity environment. Gunga developed a new thermo-sensor to measure heat radiated in the forehead, which is then converted to core body temperature using a simple calculation.

The sensors have already been used by 11 astronauts over two sessions following three months in space and just prior to coming back to Earth, the ESA said. The sensors have proven to be so effective that they are also being used by firefighters working in extreme environments and in the Mars 500 study, the agency noted.

Furthermore, since the thermometer works at a distance and constantly records highly accurate data, it is being used by doctors who are performing open-heart surgery on children, and it also offers an improved, less-expensive way to generally monitor the temperatures of patients.

The Thermolab experiment has also revealed that an astronaut’s temperature rises by 1ºC during the first two months he or she spends in space, and remains there until the individual comes back to the ground. This phenomenon has been linked to the fever-causing hormone Interleukin-1, and the one-degree body temperature increase requires an additional 20 percent energy obtained from food, meaning that supplies should be adjusted accordingly for long-term missions.

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