Astronauts living on the International Space Station spend hours working out every day just to avoid losing serious muscle mass and bone density in microgravity. But will such precautions be needed to live on worlds that are simply lower in gravity than Earth, like the moon and Mars? And what effect would such gravity have on growing children? These questions are almost entirely unanswered by science, but they’re vital for humanity’s aims to build permanent settlements off-world.
Now Japan has taken a first step toward answering some of these questions thanks to a new instrument in their KIBO module on the International Space Station. Called MARS – Multiple Artificial-gravity Research System – it can spin to produce gravity at a variety of levels. Scientists have used it to raise mice in microgravity, artificial Earth gravity and artificial lunar gravity. Then, they compared the mice to those raised in a similar ...
