The University of Saskatchewan’s Diefenbaker Canada Centre is featuring a new exhibit about the health challenges astronauts have in space.
The DCC’s curatorial, collections, and exhibits manager, Helanna Gessner, says the display has many opportunities for visitors to interact with it. These include touch screens for education and exploration, audio messages, and quizzes to take to see if you would be a good candidate to go into space. She adds that there is also a disorientation wheel experience that replicates the feeling of space.
Gessner says the type of health-related research happening in space can benefit the health care in rural, northern communities, and vice versa. Astronauts have a field doctor on Earth that they communicate with, a similar idea to the ‘doctor in a box’ which has been proposed to provide health care for people in rural and remote areas.
The exhibit, developed by the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency, is open through the summer until September 10th.