Bone of Contention

By Mike Williams

It would be terrible if the first humans to reach Mars stepped onto the surface to discover their legs could no longer hold them. NASA will take extraordinary measures to see that doesn’t happen, of course, and a team of Rice students may play a role.

Team Taurus — Charlie Foucar, Shannon Moore, Evan Williams, Bodin Hon and Leslie Goldberg, all of whom graduated in the spring — designed a device to help astronauts keep their skeletons strong and healthy by measuring bone mineral density loss, literally on the fly. Their design of a bone-remodeling monitor for use in microgravity shared the top prize in NASA’s third annual Systems Engineering Paper Competition. It’s the first national honor to hang in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen.

The team looked at all of the risks it could reasonably address from a bioengineering approach and discovered that NASA had no way of determining bone loss in space. It’s a critical issue. Astronauts lose bone mass at a rate of up to 2 percent per month while aloft. That’s not a big deal on an orbital jaunt of a week or two, but residents of the international space station stay there for up to six months and don’t have the tools on board to get a real-time measurement of what turns out to be a hazard of living in microgravity. Travelers to Mars face a six-month trip as well, and that’s just one way. Long before that can happen, NASA expects to send explorers for more extended periods to an eventual moon base in one-sixth of Earth’s gravity.

Bone-density markers can be found in blood, sweat and saliva, but the team decided that measuring deoxypyridinoline, which is found in urine, would be best because it can be collected noninvasively.

The team’s prototype has three stages: a collection unit that ties into the spacecraft’s waste disposal system, an immunoassay process and a photometer that reads the absorbance spectra of the combined solution and feeds the data to an analysis program personalized for each astronaut.

Ground crews could then determine the proper response, such as prescribing dietary supplements or increasing the astronaut’s physical regimen. Eventually, the technology might be applied to other biological processes to create an all-encompassing health monitor.