Nasa: Could you lie in bed for two months for £14,000?
- Published
- comments
Nasa is offering volunteers £14,177 each to spend two months in bed to help scientists reduce the effects of space travel on astronauts.
Volunteers will have a TV, reading material and other leisure activities to keep them from getting bored.
It may seem like a dream come true but there is a catch...
The 24 volunteers will be put in a single room where they'll be made to do EVERYTHING lying down - from going to the toilet through to eating.
And they must make sure one of their shoulders is touching the bed at ALL times.
Plus, as this experiment is happening at the German Aerospace Centre in Cologne you need to be able to speak German and be over 18.
It's a joint research project by Nasa and the European Space Agency.
The research will look at the muscle wasting that happens when astronauts spend a long time in space.
Anyone who goes on the International Space Station must exercise regularly with resistance machines to protect themselves from muscle waste.
Scientists will use the volunteers to test whether daily sessions inside an artificial gravity chamber could be used to stop deterioration on long-distance missions to places like Mars.
Half of the volunteers will be put a machine that spins them around for half an hour, mimicking what an artificial gravity chamber would do.
The scientists will then see whether the machine has helped reduce muscle waste.
- Published22 February 2019
- Published27 March 2019
- Published28 September 2018