Casper goes for lift off!!
With a title like that many questions could be asked…. including who the F**k is Casper and what the hell has it got to do with Limerick?? Well, - Casper is the name of an experiment that will travel with the space shuttle Discovery to the International Space Station (ISS) where an astronaut will wear a special vest designed to monitor his sleep patterns over a period of 150 days! Two researchers from UL are involved in the experiment.”The quality of sleep, or more particularly the poor quality of it, is a major issue for NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) and one of the big stumbling blocks of long-distance space travel,” said Dr Derek O’Keeffe, a UL lecturer in the Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering and biomedical engineer. According to the UL lecturer, an astronaut in orbit finds it very difficult to get a good night’s sleep.”There is no gravity to keep you in the bed and even worse, your system has to cope with 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in a 24-hour day. Disturbed sleep isn’t refreshing and leaves flight crews feeling sleep-deprived and less able to concentrate,” he added.
At present, shuttle and space station crews are given sleeping pills but little data is available on how this enforced sleep compares to normal sleep on earth.Dr O’Keeffe and his UL colleague Dr Marc O’Griofa, who was a medical student at UCD when they started the project, hope to greatly improve this situation with their experiment, Cardiac Adapted Sleep Parameter Electrocardiogram Recorder or CASPER.
CASPER will leave with the space Shuttle Discovery on Saturday and spend 150 days in space and return to earth with the Russian spacecraft Soyuz.