NASA’s “CREW-2 MISSION”

• Current Context: US launched 4 astronauts to the International Space Station(ISS) as part of collaboration between NASA and SpaceX under the Commercial Crew Program. The mission is called Crew-2 Mission.

Crew-2 Mission:

• Crew-2 Mission is the second crew rotation of the SpaceX Crew Dragon and the first with international partners.
• The mission carried four astronauts to ISS. Among them, two are from NASA and two are from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the European Space Agency (ESA).
• The central focus of the mission will be to continue research on a series of Tissue Chips in Space studies.

Tissue Chips:

• Tissue Chips are small models of human organs that contain multiple cell types that behave similarly to the human body organs.
• According to NASA, these chips can potentially speed up the process of identifying safe and effective drugs and vaccines.
• Scientists can use these tissue chips in space to study diseases that affect specific human organs, which would take months or years to develop on Earth.