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It鈥檚 one small step for a mannequin, one giant leap for womankind. Mannequins designed to represent female bodies will be sent into space for the first time on NASA鈥檚 Artemis I mission later this year to study how radiation affects women in space.

NASA aims to send the first female astronaut to the moon as part of its planned series of Artemis space flights. The first mission, Artemis I, will be an uncrewed test flight of the Orion spacecraft, which will head beyond the moon and back to Earth over four to six weeks.

Organs such as breasts and ovaries are particularly sensitive to radiation, putting women at a greater risk of cancer caused by radiation than men.

Powerful radiation is abundant in space, but all previous studies of radiation have been on mannequins with a male form, such as the Matroshka mannequin that was on the International Space Station in 2004. The effects on non-cis-male astronauts, including women and trans men, are less well understood.

at the German Aerospace Center in Cologne and his colleagues have designed a pair of mannequins to mimic female torsos and the organs within. The mannequins, named Helga and Zohar, have radiation sensors placed in sensitive regions, such as the locations of organs. Zohar will wear a radiation-blocking vest, built by the Israeli Space Agency, whereas Helga will be vestless.

鈥淭he Artemis I mission is the starting mission for going back to the moon, so in this sense it鈥檚 a perfect mission to do this experiment,鈥� says Berger. 鈥淵ou get baseline data from the radiation load a human female would receive while flying in a spacecraft which is actually built for humans.鈥�

The two mannequins will each contain 5600 passive radiation sensors, tiny crystals that count the cumulative radiation dose over the course of the mission. They will also contain dozens of battery-powered sensors to provide time-stamped snapshots of the radiation experienced at certain points of the trip. Researchers can then build a 3D image of the radiation exposure over the course of a spaceflight for each mannequin and see which parts of the female body might be particularly vulnerable.

鈥淲hen experiments are related to things where there are difference in sexes鈥� we need to make sure that we have sex-disaggregated data,鈥� says at the UK Space Agency. 鈥淢ost astronauts who have travelled are male. Female astronauts are less well represented, and they are also less well represented in the mannequin experiments that have been done.鈥�

Berger and his team hope to see how both the cosmic background radiation and solar radiation might affect astronauts. But the latter will depend partly on how active the sun is during the Artemis I trip. Even if the sun doesn鈥檛 produce significant solar flares during the flight, Berger says that exiting and re-entering Earth鈥檚 Van Allen radiation belts, which trap ionising particles similar to those ejected from the sun, could mimic the effects of a solar flare.

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