I got an overview of Russian countermeasures today. In the ISS world, under the name ‘countermeasures’ we mean all that we do to minimize the debilitating effect of weightlessness on muscles, bones and the cardiovascular system.
In the countermeasures family, the Chibis-M wins the trophy for the most bizarre piece of equipment I’ve seen so far!
Here’s the problem it’s meant to counteract: in weightlessness body fluids, in particular blood, are not pulled towards the legs by gravity as they are on Earth. We call this phenomenon fluid shift and it’s the cause of the puffy face and the chicken legs that astronauts typically display when they are on orbit.
When astronauts return to Earth, the effect of gravity can wreak havoc with their cardiovascular system. Here’s where Chibis-M comes in. Don it, make a tight seal around your waist and then reduce the pressure around your lower body, causing some reverse blood shift towards the legs. Do it repeatedly in the weeks before landing and, the thought goes, you’ll have trained your cardiovascular system to better withstand the return to the Earth, where things have a weight.
And if it doesn’t work, nobody will be able to say that you didn’t give it your best try!
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://anne.cpamoa.free.fr/blog/index.php/category/logbook-samantha
17/12/2013