At some point or other, most of us wish to travel to space or stepping foot on Red Planet. Though it might sound exciting, a new study has found it can be fatal by destroying gut and causing cancer.
A new NASA-funded study recently discovered that regardless of the fact that travelling to space might sound adventurous, but instead travelling long distances in space such as going to Mars can destroy astronauts’ guts and cause cancer, might also prove to be fatal.
Previously there have been studies suggesting that such space travel can do major damage to brains, causing them to age prematurely. As a proof, this new research conducted experiments on mice that were subjected to same type of bombardment by cosmic radiation that would affect humans if they were on long space journeys, reported Independent.
Though the dose given to the mice was way too low, it still lasted a long time to simulate the effect of a deep space mission, with changes irreversible.
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The radiation could cause damage to the gastrointestinal tissue, leading to long-term functional alterations. The study also concluded that those astronauts would also be at great risks of developing tumors in their stomach and colon.
“With the current shielding technology, it is difficult to protect astronauts from the adverse effects of heavy ion radiation. Although there may be a way to use medicines to counter these effects, no such agent has been developed yet,” as per study’s senior investigator, Kamal Datta.
He continued, “While short trips, like the times astronauts traveled to the Moon, may not expose them to this level of damage, the real concern is lasting injury from a long trip such as a Mars or other deep space missions which would be much longer,” wrote CNET.
Scientists now believe that similar problems could apply to other organs as well. They also said that more work needs to be done in order to understand the complete damage that deep space travel might cause to human bodies.
“We have documented the effects of deep space radiation on some vital organs, but we believe that similar damage responses may occur in many organs,” said Datta. “It is important to understand these effects in advance so we can do everything we can to protect our future space travelers.”