COLORADO, USA — The crew from SpaceX's Polaris Dawn has made it safely back to Earth after the first commercial spacewalk. The mission reached a higher altitude than any human has traveled in more than 50 years. Doctors and aerospace engineers in Colorado are now using data collected on that mission to study eye conditions .
They're hopeful their findings will help astronauts as they begin to plan deep-space missions and help people with similar eye issues here on Earth. "Once astronauts started going to space and staying there for a long period of time on the ISS [International Space Station], we started to learn that they were getting changes in the back of their eye, with swelling of their optic nerves, and even little hemorrhages in their retina," said Dr. Prem Subramanian , professor of ophthalmology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine .
"We had no idea why this was happening. There are some diseases that people get here on Earth that are similar, and we thought it might be related because of fluid shifts that happen when you go into microgravity." Credit: Polaris Program / John Kraus Liftoff of the Polaris Dawn on September 10th, 2024.
This research is being done in collaboration with the University of Colorado School of Medicine and CU Boulder aerospace engineers . They're working together to see how human bodies react in spaceflight. Researchers here in Colorado sent up specialized optical equipment to gather data from astronauts' eyes during the Polari.