2
Trips to other worlds aren’t short, and packing enough food and supplies to keep astronauts alive for months at a time is a major challenge. One proposed solution? Deep sleep, or, more accurately, an induced state of hypothermia resulting in torpor, a kind of hibernation. You know, like bears do.
Except in this case, NASA-funded researchers plan on inducing torpor with RhinoChill, a device that uses invasive tubes to shoot cooling liquid up the nose and into the base of the brain.
When it comes to space travel, “anytime you introduce humans, it gets an order of magnitude or two more challenging,” says Bobby Braun, NASA’s former chief technologist. This is especially true when it comes to eventually shipping people to Mars.
