Nokea
EART VS SPACE:
Mark Kelly and his identical twin, Scott, were professional astronauts. They served as space shuttle pilots, with each logging multiple flights. In 2015, Scott began a year’s service aboard the International Space Station. NASA cleverly recognized this as an opportunity to do a longitudinal study on the effects of space flight and weightlessness on the human body. By comparing Scott in space to Mark on the ground, researchers could draw some important and valuable conclusions that could be used to plan for extended space travel in the future.
Ten teams of researchers developed a plan to test both men preflight, inflight, and postflight over 25 months. For the most part, the results showed the resilience of the human body even when under such unusual stress as a year in space. Among some of the findings were these: Scott’s cognitive performance was similar to Mark’s on the ground. Scott’s body mass decreased substantially, probably due to his diet of prepackaged food and his increased exercise, but it stabilized and returned to normal postflight. His gut bacteria were significantly different from Mark’s inflight, but they, too, returned to normal afterward.
A potentially troubling finding had to do with inflammation and arterial wall thickening, which appeared in Scott during and post flight but did not appear in Mark. Astronauts have often suffered from vision problems, and a study of fluid shifts determined that a certain protein was elevated in Scott’s system during flight. Some slight DNA damage, possibly due to radiation exposure, also appeared in Scott but not in Mark. Perhaps the most fascinating finding had to do with telomeres, the caps on chromosomes that shorten with age. Unexpectedly, Scott’s telomeres lengthened over his year in space, decreased after landing, and then shortened even more or vanished in the months that followed. Because telomere shortening and loss is connected to age-related diseases, this is an aspect of space travel that researchers want to understand better.
A reader might infer from this passage that NASA ___________.
Correct Answer: C
Rationale: The passage suggests that NASA will use the findings from the twin study to plan future extended space missions.