Research

Spacecraft Occupant Safety

Researchers: Srihari Menon, Quenton Hua, Rami Ayari

Spacecraft occupants are subject to risk from dynamic loads during spaceflight. On average, 1 out of 3 astronauts have been injured when landing back on Earth, and 9% have needed medical attention. As human spaceflight continues to expand and diversify, it is important to understand how spacecraft occupants sustain injuries in order to mitigate them.

In our ongoing investigations of spacecraft occupant safety, we:

• Use finite element human body models to computationally simulate dynamic responses of the human body to spaceflight loads.
• Study how spinal alignment and posture variation could affect injury outcomes.
• Evaluate how injury outcomes differ based on sex and anthropometry.
• Compare and validate finite element model responses to real-world data.
• Develop computational and software tools used for occupant injury risk prediction.

Development of a Ground-Based Analog for In-Flight Vestibular Disruption

Researchers: John Hayes

Upon entry into a microgravity environment, astronauts experience altered inputs to the vestibular system, leading to motion sickness and sensorimotor challenges. Current ground-based analogs such as parabolic flight are limited by high costs and short exposure periods (inadequate for studying adaptation to microgravity). The goal of this project is to develop a new ground-based analog for modeling these in-flight vestibular disturbances for both research and training applications. This ongoing project involves:

• Integration of a virtual reality Orion docking simulation, 3-axis 360° motion base, and galvanic vestibular stimulation.
• Analysis of performance and physiological measures to validate analog against in-flight astronaut data.
• Development and testing of a pre-flight training protocol to reduce adaptation time.

This study is funded by a NASA NSTGRO fellowship in collaboration with the ASTRO center.

Altered Gravity Ambulation

Researchers: John Hayes

Future manned missions to the moon and Mars will require significant surface EVAs. Altered gravity and vestibular deconditioning are likely to have major impacts on gait and ambulation, but very little data is available as the only human extraterrestrial surface EVAs occurred during the Apollo lunar EVAs over 50 years ago. It is imperative to accurately characterize the impacts of these combined stressors on performance, gait, workload, cardiovascular load, and metabolic load in order to safely plan and conduct EVAs on extraplanetary surfaces. Our lab is working to reduce these knowledge gaps by:

• Simulating altered gravity ambulation through the integration of an altered gravity treadmill and galvanic vestibular stimulation.
• Identifying changes in gait, balance, and muscle recruitment associated with altered gravity ambulation that could impact astronaut endurance and injury risk.
• Exploring changes in metabolic expenditure associated with altered gravity ambulation and their implications on EVA planning.

General Aviation Accident Causal Analysis

Researchers: Wyatt McGinnis, Sreesh K Reddy, Srihari Menon

Every year, over one thousand fixed-wing general aviation accidents occur in the United States. At least 10% of these are fatal. At our lab, we attempt to study the causes of these accidents by:

• Employing natural language processing to read through thousands of National Transport Safety Board investigations.
• Generating causal knowledge graphs to visualize causality, helping us zero in on the true root causes of accident trends.
• Developing software that can be used to query the NTSB database programmatically.