Chris Hadfield on how eyesight is affected in space — Transcript

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1. 0:06hi I'm Ashley and I'm in grade 9 and my
2. 0:09question is how does being in space for
3. 0:11so long affect your body it affects us a
4. 0:21lot of different ways it it affects your
5. 0:25bones your muscles but one of the ways
6. 0:27that we're learning recently is it
7. 0:28affects your vision we don't understand
8. 0:30why but it makes some people's vision
9. 0:31worse and we're studying it and trying
10. 0:33to figure it out so we have a lot of new
11. 0:35equipment on board just to test and
12. 0:37understand our vision one of the things
13. 0:39we have is its own ometer this this is
14. 0:45actually like a pressure gauge that you
15. 0:47touch to your eyeball we put drops just
16. 0:49it's weird to put drops in your eyes
17. 0:51with no gravity you sort of touch the
18. 0:53little drop thing to your eyeball it
19. 0:55spreads over your eye and then one of
20. 0:56the other astronauts will just tap the
21. 0:58center of my eyeball really carefully
22. 1:00about ten times and this lovely little
23. 1:04turn ometer we'll figure out the
24. 1:05pressure inside my eyeball that's one
25. 1:07way to measure our eyes another is to
26. 1:10look into the back of them and so we put
27. 1:12those drops in your eyes that dilate
28. 1:13your eye and then I actually put this up
29. 1:15against my eye and plug this into a
30. 1:17computer and then I can look into the
31. 1:20back of my eyeball and there are expert
32. 1:22doctors on the ground who are looking at
33. 1:24the my eyeball while I'm doing it
34. 1:25and we could take photographs and videos
35. 1:27of the optic nerve and or at least where
36. 1:30it comes into my eyeball and the veins
37. 1:32and then the stuff that's inside my eye
38. 1:34so we can do it that way and then also
39. 1:37we actually do ultrasounds of our
40. 1:40eyeballs and that's in order to see how
41. 1:43our eyeballs are changing what's going
42. 1:45on with the optic nerves and so we have
43. 1:47a full ultrasound machine on board but
44. 1:49we don't need gel you just put a ball of
45. 1:51water in your eye and then you touch the
46. 1:54ultrasound to your eyeball or just to
47. 1:56the water above your eyeball and move it
48. 1:58back and forth and with that we can see
49. 2:00our whole optic nerve we could see the
50. 2:03the lens and the cornea and everything
51. 2:05in beautiful resolution it's something
52. 2:07we've just started doing and we have
53. 2:09experts on the ground who are helping us
54. 2:10do it but with all of these things we're
55. 2:12trying to figure out
56. 2:13how the human body works and what
57. 2:16controls vision and how it changes when
58. 2:18you take away something as simple as
59. 2:19gravity we're learning more about
60. 2:21eyeballs but we're also learning more
61. 2:23about how to stay in space permanently
62. 2:24so if you go to Mars you won't show up
63. 2:27there with with with bad vision