Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. As the four Artemis II astronauts looped around the moon this week before their return trip to Earth, so did four transparent chips, each about the size of a USB thumb drive and seeded with their bone marrow cells.Each chip is an “avatar” – an attempt to model key aspects of the biology of Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen, Christina Koch and Reid Wiseman, the four humans whose courage and wonder have captivated the world.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe historic test flight that blasted off from Earth last week lays the groundwork for NASA’s goal of establishing an “enduring human presence” on the moon as a stepping stone to explore the rest of the solar system. But the Avatar program – which stands for A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response – could also become a key part of that story by helping NASA understand the effects of deep-space flight on human biology, particularly the risks of radiation exposureFor now, the biology experiment aboard the Orion spacecraft is a first step. Will the chips survive the journey? How closely will changes to the cells in the chips mirror what happens in the astronaut’s bodies? Scientists won’t know until after splashdown, when the chips are recovered from the Orion spacecraft.“This is really a proof-of-concept, because to get space on a mission like this is precious,” said Donald Ingber, founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, whose laboratory and start-up company, Emulate, are working with NASA on the project.The long-term hope is that the chips, which can be used to model different organs, including lungs, livers and hearts, could be sent up in advance of a real human crew. If they reflect what happens to the body, NASA could use them to anticipate health effects and even preselect personalized medical regimens for protecting and treating astronauts based on their own biology.AdvertisementAdvertisement“I think this is going to pave the way for us in so many ways, in understanding the radiation and microgravity, partial gravity effects on the humans before we send them out,” said Lisa Carnell, director of NASA’s Biological and Physical …
