Pills being loaded into a MISSE carrier on board the ISS. Photo NASA.
Pills sent into space by the University of Adelaide are being prepared to be installed outside the International Space Station (ISS).
The pills are being loaded into Alpha Space’s Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE) Science Carriers on board the ISS U.S. National Laboratory. They will then be placed outside for six months where they will be exposed to one of the harshest environments known.
In the mission to the ISS, which was launched in February, the experiment is part of the University of Adelaide’s program to discover how exposure to microgravity and space radiation affects the stability of pharmaceutical tablet formulations.
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A batch of pills will be on its way into space where they will be placed on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS) to test how they withstand the full effects of zero gravity, extreme temperatures, and some of the highest levels of radiation found beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.
“One day, pills might have to withstand being taken from Earth to Mars and back again to help keep astronauts healthy, so we need to know how they will be affected by one of the harshest environments known: space,” says Prof. Volker Hessel. He is the research director of the Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources, and professor in the School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials at the University of Adelaide.