IPOL.ID – If someone dies on Earth, then in general there are several ways that are used to handle the corpse.
But what happens if someone dies in space, on Mars, or en route to Mars?
First, there’s really no official protocol for what happens to a person’s body when they die in space.
Official NASA policy is that decisions will be made jointly between NASA leadership, international partners, and flight operations.
According to astronaut and former International Space Station commander Chris Hadfield, however, the space agency ran a “simulation of death” with astronauts looking out for this scenario.
“If someone died during the EVA, I would take them into the airlock first,” Hadfield said of his conclusion from the exercise.
“I would probably hold them in their pressure suits; bodies actually decompose more quickly in spacesuits, and we don’t want the smell of rotting flesh or exhaust gases, that’s not clean. So we’ll keep them in their suits and store them in a cool place at the station,” he said quoted from IFL Science.
One alternative proposed by a research team formed by NASA is attaching a dead body in a bag to a robotic arm outside the spacecraft.
The body will freeze solid, at which point the arm will begin to vibrate the pouch for 15 minutes until the fragile body is reduced to tiny pieces.
The water was allowed to evaporate out of the bag through the vents, leaving the ship with about 25 kilograms (55 pounds) left to carry back to earth.
As Susanne Wiigh-Masak of eco-burial company Promessa told Vice, “Everything on board had to be minimal and carefully weighed and stored. There isn’t much extra space, so if you have a full-sized deceased body, where are you going to store it?”
For this purpose, it only needs the same number of body bags as the crew members, minus one. As Wiigh-Cook puts it, those extra bags “can’t be filled alone.”
But what happens to the body if someone dies on Mars?
In terms of process, again not much has been set in stone – it will most likely come down to discussions between the astronauts on the mission and the team on earth.
NASA is very careful not to contaminate Mars and prefers cremated remains to kill all of Earth’s microbes.
If that isn’t possible – say, on the initial mission to this planet – or something happens to the entire crew, it could be that they are buried or left behind on the Martian surface.
If a person is left on the surface of Mars, then his body will not decompose like it does on earth.
If someone died during the day on Mars, bacteria would start the normal process of destroying the body.
However, once night falls, the body will freeze and the bacteria will stop in their tracks. Without bacteria, the body will not decompose. The soft tissues would still be safe and the bodies would begin to mummify on Mars. (far)
