We want to find out why astronauts lose bone since healthy astronauts get osteoporosis in space flight as older people do here on Earth.
Bone loss is one of the major physiological 'show stoppers' in sending humans to Mars.
We cannot reproduce 0-gravity here on earth, so we must go into space to create our test conditions. We are currently in the process of analyzing our spaceflight samples. Our goal is to find the molecular basis of bone loss in 0-gravity so we can look for pharmaceuticals or environmental conditions to fix the problem. The crew added a growth stimulator during spaceflight inside the Biorack glovebox. The next day, they froze the cells and brought them back home for analysis.