The University of Malta’s Boundaries of the Brain laboratory is developing a toolbox that can help study spaceflight’s impact on the brain. 

Travelling to space is possibly the greatest challenge we have overcome. The stars were once a means of navigation, not something to navigate to. Before that, we occasionally sacrificed each other to them. When our early hominin ancestors looked to the sky, it was because giant birds may have snatched them from the ground and eaten them – a rapid ascent wasn’t high on their list of priorities. Our minds’ ambition evolved from “not lining a comically large bird’s nest” to “spaceflight”. Our physical brains, however, are struggling to keep up. We’ve evolved according to the demands of a very specific atmosphere and an even more consistent gravity. Changes to either impact our brains’ health, in ways that are still not fully understood.

Dr Claude Bajada, a University of Malta neuroscientist, heads the Boundaries of the Brain laboratory (BOB lab). He is working on Operation TOM with a team that includes Dr Kenneth Scerri, Dr Liam Butler, and Nina Attard Montalto, with invaluable contributions from students Aitor Alberdi Escudero, Kristian Galea, and other members of the BOB lab. Operation TOM aims to enhance and refine the Vogt-Bailey (VB) Toolbox, an open-source, digital library of data and resources. These tools are for future investigations of spaceflight’s impacts on the brain. And there are many. While oxygen can be taken with us, our atmosphere also protects us from cosmic radiation. Without it, as Bajada states, ‘background radiation is higher, which is a significant issue’. Then there’s gravity. Weightlessness sounds liberating, but ‘in microgravity, our muscles experience much less resistance,’ atrophying them as it decalcifies bone. ‘Anything affecting the body also impacts the brain. It uses a huge amount of our metabolism.’ Just like our muscles and skeleton, it evolved to function in Earth’s gravity. If you take away the gravitational downforce we’re accustomed to, fluid builds up in the brain. Cerebrospinal fluid swells ventricles inside the brain, and this cranial pressure may lead to ‘a condition that can cause blindness, Spaceflight Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome (SANS)’.

The Data from Space

Contrasting with the numerous health problems astronauts face, is the minimal amount of available data. Operation TOM plans to work with MRI scans from about ten individuals, taken before and after spaceflight. Bajada remarks, ‘We will then run brain image analysis techniques that we’ve developed in-house, a data-driven approach.’ Much like spaceflight itself, ‘our research is a little bit exploratory. A lot of the data is opportunistic – you can only study space-related conditions on people who’ve been to space, and there’s not many of them. Because of the limited amount of data and because of our relative inexperience with these types of data, we don’t have the luxury to answer extremely specific questions.’ For example, when a person is being exposed to a multitude of potentially harmful factors including (but not limited to) radiation and microgravity, ‘it’s incredibly hard to disentangle which specific factors are causal’ instead, it’s more feasible to draw broader conclusions about the health impact of spaceflight as a whole.

Project Operation TOM is financed by the Malta Council for Science & Technology (now Xjenza Malta), through the FUSION: Space Upstream Programme.

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