Every year, ESA selects a medical doctor to spend 12 months at Concordia research station in Antarctica, conducting biomedical research to support future space exploration. In November 2023, Jessica Studer joined DC20, the station’s twentieth winter crew, to endure the extreme isolation and freezing conditions. In a recent two-part podcast by SpaceInfo, Jessica shared insights from her year-long experience living in one of the most remote locations on Earth, farther removed from humanity than even the International Space Station.
Note: the following is a transcript from SpaceInfo‘s recent podcast which you can watch here (part 1, part 2)
Where is Jessica?
This is the very first time I talk with someone who is so far from me. A couple of weeks ago we were talking with astronauts in training and they were experiencing a week of complete isolation, but this is quite different – would you like to tell us where you are located?
I’m currently at the Concordia station in the middle of Antarctica. It is a binational research station jointly operated by the French Polar Institute and the Italian Antarctic Research Program. As I said, we are reallylocated in the middle of Antarctica, more than 1,000 kilometres away from the coast on what we call the Antarctic Plateau Dome C. In Antarctica, there are two mountain plateaus and we are on the second one, that is at over 3,000 metres of altitude.
Life in Antarctica
A couple of days ago you were telling me that you were waiting for an airplane bringing food.
We are actually at the end of our one-year mission in Concordia. For one year we come to this Antarctic region to perform research and now we are at the end. We arrived in November 2023 and in two weeks we are supposed to leave the station.
The first plane was actually supposed to arrive today, but in Antarctica it’s kind of impossible to do prognostics – we have a lot of changes due to weather and visibility conditions. The first plane will probably arrive tomorrow or on Wednesday. It’s always a bit of a surprise and we usually know only a few hours before the plane actually arrives that we need to prepare everything.
We have been isolated with 12 other people inside the station for one year and in a few days we will have the first human contact with people from outside the Antarctic world.
That must be kind of exciting, but maybe difficult as well, to meet other people after such a long time?
The first moment was when the last plane left at the end of January. There are two seasons in Concordia – in the summer season there are about 70 people inside the station, a lot of researchers coming from all over the globe to perform research here. At the end of January the last plane leaves and that was the first strange feeling, to be isolated for the next nine months with 12 other people inside the station – this was the first challenge of our mission.
The new challenge is now to actually cope with people coming from outside. We lived at the station all together, we had our own private room, we had our little routines, we were like a little family, and now we need to readapt to the outside world with new people coming, having to talk to people again… we were so isolated. We had these ‘family dinners’ together, but not a lot of communication with the outside world. And now we need to communicate again, we will have new impressions, so quite a challenge to face in the next few days here in Concordia.
Flexible working hours
Do all the people at the station get up at the same time, go to bed at the same time, or do you have a 24-hour coverage with different shifts?
We do actually have working hours here at Concordia, which is something between 8:30 to 12:30, then we have lunch, and then again 13:30 to 18:30. But during winter-over each of us has a different job inside the station, so each of us adapts their own daily schedule. We have glaciologists who need to go outside to get samples of the snow, which can be quite a challenge for them because of the extreme environment outside, so they have to adapt their schedule a little bit.
I sometimes have to do blood draws early in the morning, so I start really early in the morning and sometimes also finish late in the evening. We do have some schedules, but we are also all working on our specific tasks during the winter-over, so we have the freedom to adapt our work to the needs that this extreme environment brings with it.
What does Jessica do?
What is your main occupation at the station?
I’m a research medical doctor for the European Space Agency and I’m conducting biomedical research for the preparation of future deep space missions. Before coming to Antarctica, I was trained on several experiments that are proposed by principal investigators from all over the globe to be performed in Concordia.
Then I perform what we call a pre-data collection, which is a baseline of data that we need to have from all the participants. Then during the mission I’m performing all the biomedical experiments on my crewmates and also on myself, which can sometimes be quite a challenge, but I get a lot of help from others.
When we leave after our one-year mission, I will also do a post-data collection. It is basically almost the same as in spaceflight, where you have this pre- and post-data collection, you have a one-year mission with different goals of what you need to study in this environment, and you perform these biomedical experiments during one year. That’s my job in Concordia, and one of 13 jobs inside the station.
The extremes of Concordia
What are some medical challenges that this extreme environment brings with it?
One of the challenges is high altitude. We are at an altitude of more than 3,000 metres and since the atmosphere is really thin here, the low atmospheric pressure means you have low oxygen levels in your blood – we call this hypobaric hypoxia, a lack of oxygen in the blood system that can have various impacts on the human body. It can affect your physical performance – so when you go up the stairs, you are really quickly out of breath. When you go outside and you need to walk for several metres, you’re really, really fast out of breath. We can do sports but it’s actually quite difficult at this altitude, because sometimes we even go to 4,000 metres.
It can also affect your cognitive functions and performances, so sometimes we have a lack of concentration or working capacities, so all that high altitude and lack of oxygen can have various effects on the human body that affect you in your daily life.
During the winter‑over period where we are with only 13 people, we have a four-month period of complete darkness, which can have an impact on our circadian rhythms – it can decrease sleep quality, cause us to have less sleep time, we can wake up earlier or have trouble falling asleep.
That can influence not only our physical but also mental health, with mood changes, fatigue during the day… those can all arise when you have problems adapting to this environment during your winter-over stay. This is really important for research, but quite a challenge for the people that actually live in the station.
We are very far away from the coast and one of three bases in Antarctica that operate all year round. The closest one is the Russian Vostok Station, which is 600 kilometres away, so there is no possibility of reaching it. We are completely isolated from the outside world. Especially during the winter months when we have temperatures of about -80°C, there is no possibility of a plane arriving and landing in Concordia, because it’s just too cold.
When you have an emergency on the International Space Station, within three hours you can click the button and within six hours you should be back, depending on the circumstances. In any case, you are able to evacuate someone with a medical issue within 24 hours.
In Concordia during these winter months, we have no possibility of evacuation. In case of a medical issue, we rely on what we have inside the base. That’s a challenge from a medical point of view, but also social. As I said at the beginning, our social interactions are really, really small. so we are living with our ‘family’ here and that’s pretty much it. We can, of course, have phone calls with Europe, we can send text messages, but still – we don’t have real social interactions.
This sense of confinement is a high level of stress for the human body. Just knowing that you are confined, that you cannot go outside, is already a huge stress. I remember when we flew down to Concordia and I saw the station. It appears so small because there is nothing around it – you don’t have any mountains or buildings to compare it with. You arrive and you see these two towers and you think well, that’s where I’m going to be for one year. That’s quite crazy. And you have this feeling of being confined, which goes away a little bit over time. At least here in Concordia you can go for a walk outside the station, which you can’t do on your own on the International Space Station.
So – both a mental and emotional strain for the human body, and a challenge for all potential medical incidents. We have the station’s medical doctor, and we have the ESA medical doctor, that’s it. We are the two doctors of the station. If you imagine having an appendix inflammation or a cardiovascular event during the mission, that would be a huge challenge, because you have only two doctors inside the station that need to manage that.
That brings me to living in an environment with limited resources. You have limited possibilities and also limited equipment. You need to work around these things, and that’s why we train our people to be in a medical team, in a rescue team, in a fire team… We put a lot of effort in training teams that are capable of providing basic life support in case it’s needed.
What’s the worst that could happen?
What was the worst experience you had during this one year?
Our equipment is very limited compared to what you would find in a hospital, so once you have a surgery, you need to act fast and do everything you need to do to make sure people survive. I would say that the worst that could happen would be a surgery that we are not prepared for. Being prepared for everything is the goal.
Prevention is the most important; that’s something that also happens in space flight: you try to prevent any medical issue possible. That’s something that we do a lot – we try to check all the equipment that people are working with, we try to check the environment, we try to tell the people to not go outside when it’s too windy or too cold.
The challenge that we have here in addition to this isolated remote place is the altitude. Altitude can cause ‘mountain sickness’ – basically what can happen is what we call the pulmonary edema: for example, with this lack of oxygen and too much exercise, you can have water in your lungs. You can also have brain edema: water in your brain. These are life-threatening conditions that can happen really, really fast here in Concordia. They have happened here before.
You need to detect things like this, which can get tricky with 70 people inside the station. You need to monitor a lot, that is part of the prevention. The prevention and the monitoring of people are both super important. That’s actually the basics of medical work here. Pulmonary edema and cerebral edema are things that can happen here in Concordia due to the altitude and the extreme environment and that are, next to surgery, the most critical events that can happen at the station.
From classical pianist to medical doctor
Listeners might be wondering, how did you end up going to Concordia? What did your journey to the station look like?
I would say I have quite a crazy past. I was first studying classical music, taking courses in piano, violin, organs, music theory… then I finally became a music teacher with a master’s degree in music and pedagogy in Switzerland – that was my first career.
I always knew I wanted to do medicine but I had a little bit of a career choice to make because I already had a master’s degree. I started with pharmacology, continued with biomedical studies and ended up finally doing medical school, because I saw only that path to be the right one for me. During medical school I was super interested in human physiology and especially in extreme environments, but I could never really combine those, because there are very few opportunities in extreme medicine.
During my final med school year I was put in contact with an association called Asclepios – a student-led analogue mission from Switzerland associated with EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. The goal of this mission is that students learn how to perform an analogue space mission – a simulation of a space mission in extreme environments here on Earth. That was my first contact with space medicine – with space in general – and I would really recommend it, because it opened many doors for me.
The goal of these associations is also to prepare the next generation of space leaders, scientific leaders, to open doors for them and give them an opportunity for a hands-on approach on how to lead a mission, manage a mission, get the financial background of a mission, how to prepare protocols and so on. The association has different teams and all these teams are working for one year to put together one space analogue mission.
That was my first step into space medicine. For three years I worked as a head of the medical team at Asclepios, which is working on medical protocols, emergency protocols, medical equipment… We had to think about what you need in these remote places and what you can actually bring. Then we do healthcare during the mission and also pre- and post-mission. We try to do everything the way we would in a real space mission.
That was my first interaction with space medicine. After that I was super interested in everything related to extreme medicine, extreme environments, space medicine, so I got an internship at the French Space Agency (CNES), within the Spaceship FR project. They are working with MEDES (Institute for Space Medicine and Physiology in Toulouse), where I was actually applying to a position meant for engineers – the title was Crew Health and Performance. I thought, this is quite space medicine-related! I applied and got the job.
I was working on crew health and performance, specifically regarding cognitive monitoring for future astronauts. That was my first research subject within the French Space Agency and it was also where I learned about Concordia as one of the biggest analogue missions in space exploration. I finished medical school and then in January I applied to become the ESA research medical doctor of the next year, for crew DC20.
The selection process was quite busy – first you send a CV and motivation letter, then you have a preliminary interview, then you have diverse medical and psychological tests, because sending people to the most isolated and remote place on Earth requires quite the checkup. You have to undergo cardiovascular and respiratory system testing, diverse psychological tests and a psychological interview. This was all done in Paris. If you pass, you become the new research medical doctor and come down to Antarctica.
Terrestrial ‘astronauts’
With regards to preparation and selection, there are a lot of similarities with space exploration. Are there other similarities?
Concordia is also called White Mars or Planet Concordia, because of the similarities with space and the challenges that astronauts face during their missions. We have these environmental extremes, since Concordia is really located in what you would call a hostile environment. Humans are not made for space, or at least not made to survive in space, physiologically. Humans are also not made to survive in Antarctica. The temperatures that drop to -80°C are quite similar to temperatures you could feel on Mars, that’s something else that we can test here.
What we already talked about a little bit is the lack of oxygen – and this hypobaric hypoxia mirrors the oxygen that is available to astronauts when they wear their space suits or when they are at a future lunar or martian base. Here we have approximately the same level of oxygen that we would expect there. That’s super interesting, because we can do studies here to see how the human body is adapting to these conditions, so that we can make countermeasures for future deep space missions, habitats or space suits.
For now, astronauts go out of the ISS for only a short period of time, but if we have a base on the Moon where people would stay for a longer period of time, that suddenly becomes really important, so we need to know how the human body is adapting. Today, research at Concordia is probably the best way to do so. The data that we have from EVAs (extravehicular activities) is quite small. Here we really have a long period in which we can actually measure these changes.
The remoteness of Concordia really mirrors the isolation and confinement of astronauts inside the ISS. We can test mental resilience, as well as interpersonal relationships. Here in Concordia we have a one-week training all together, but basically except from that we don’t know each other. It’s not like astronauts who train together for many years and really get to know each other. Here we are put in with strangers from different backgrounds and cultures.
We have technicians that are mainly here for the maintenance of the station, we have scientific staff that do research… we really have a bunch of different people that are put together suddenly for one year. That’s quite interesting, understanding our team dynamic, learning more about different cultures in this setting…
Then there’s also sensory deprivation. We don’t have a lot of people here to interact with. Sometimes we use sunscreen just to have something new to smell. A lot of the things we eat here are lyophilized (freeze dried) so they don’t really smell like anything. You really lose your sense of smell, just like you would on a future Moon or Mars base, or on the ISS. That’s also something that you can test here, check whether you can take any countermeasures, and see how people adapt.
Then we have autonomy and self-sufficiency, which is a topic of great focus here in Concordia. During the months when no planes can land here, we need to be super self‑sufficient. We need to rely on all these resources that are limited. One example of that is our grey water treatment system unit.
There are lots of similarities with space to be studied in this extreme environment, with less challenges – at least when it comes to finances – than actually going to space. We can study these things here before we send astronauts on future space missions.
From beehive to ghost town
What were some of the changes happening at the station in the past year?
When you’re living in this small environment, you pay attention to every little detail. When you arrive, there is so much going on at the station, there is a bunch of people coming from everywhere, you have a lot of tasks. Each plane brings new stuff, so you need to help bring it in, you need to work at maintaining the station…
At the beginning I remember noticing the smells of all these people. There was a lot of work being done inside the station, so it was full of life here. About four months ago, when the last plane left, we were suddenly alone. You are walking inside the station and it’s possible that you don’t see anyone, because there are only 13 people.
Before that, you had no time alone. Because you had a room with one other person, it was impossible to have that kind of privacy. During the winter months you have your own room. It’s possible that sometimes you go from one tower to the other without actually seeing anyone. This had really changed over time.
It’s a little bit like being in New York and then suddenly finding yourself in a small village somewhere isolated. During summer we have very little time together and then suddenly during the winter months we are all together all the time. You see a lot of changes in the dynamics of teams and you get to know each of the crew members so well. Especially I do, because I’m doing all the experiments on them so I really need get to know them. They start to become almost like family members, like brothers and sisters. And you know what it’s like with siblings – you love them, but sometimes they annoy you.
What is really interesting in that you are working, but you are also living together. That’s a completely new field of expertise for me. Normally you go to work and then you have your social interactions, your family and so on. Here, you are working with these people, then you see them at lunch, you see them for the movie night… that’s crazy and super interesting, but sometimes challenging as well.
I would say the station really changed over time. It became bigger actually, because when I landed it was super small and very crowded with so many people inside. But in winter I have everything I need.
When I was leaving Europe to come here I was a super excited because I wanted to do so much during this year. You are allowed to take three aluminium boxes and I couldn’t choose all the stuff I wanted to put in them. Looking back, after one year of being isolated here, I didn’t really read any books, I didn’t really do all the stuff I wanted to do. You have your work, your station, your social time with the crew members and that’s basically it.
You don’t really need a lot to survive in Antarctica and that is probably something you could also apply to space exploration. A human doesn’t really need a lot to survive. Then there is obviously the question of how long you can survive for.
After a brief interruption mid-talk caused by loss of signal:
We are super lucky because now we have Starlink. I think last year this would not be possible with the connection we had. When I arrived in Concordia I was only able to send WhatsApp texts, no pictures, no videos. Now I’m able to communicate with you like this – that’s absolutely fantastic.
Towards individualised medicine
How do you see the future of human health in space?
We have now entered a phase of space exploration that is really exciting. After Apollo missions, there was very little advancement in the exploration domain for a long, long time. Today, with the Artemis project, with the willingness of humans to go back to the Moon and eventually further to Mars, a new era of space exploration has started. This also includes all the commercial spaceflights. Human presence beyond Earth orbit is expected to expand.
With this, space medicine becomes super important. We have 20 years of research on the ISS, but there is still so much we don’t know about how the human body adapts to longer stays in space. We have data from six month-periods, sometimes a little bit more or less, but there is no data about how the human body would react when going to Mars: that would be a one-way trip of nine months, without even talking about staying there and coming back again.
Coming back to commercial spaceflight, this brings a completely new and broader range of people that will go to microgravity. First it was only astronauts that are trained for many years, now it will suddenly be people that can go to space without this long training phase, without all this prevention, without this very selective process ensuring that a human being is healthy enough to go to space.
These people don’t have the extensive training, they have varying levels of health and fitness, so now space medicine needs to shift towards providing highly adaptable and user-friendly medical protocols. We need to focus even more on prevention to make sure that these people will be able to go to space and come back healthy, which is the most important.
All this really opens doors for individualised space medicine. We have seen from studies, also in Concordia, that people adapt very individually. You can’t say that 90% of people will adapt in a certain way, so you really need to focus on individualised medicine. That’s also what is happening in medical research in general – more focus on the human being individually. We would need to assess individual risks for conditions like cardiovascular issues, osteoporosis, we would perform genetic testing and so on. This is a completely new health domain that space opens up.
Another point is that all the new flights will enable us to do more research in the domain. So far, we only have data from the few astronauts that are in space. Commercial spaceflights enable us to make more advances, not only for space exploration, but also for Earth-based medicine.
Remote medicine
Research in extreme remote locations is important not only for space exploration, but also for medicine here on Earth, in remote places. For example, we perform different experiments here using ultrasound, we have a portable MRI – that is very unique, because an MRI has never been brought to Concordia before. The technology has been adapted to the remote, extreme environment – the MRI that you know from the hospital could never have been brought here, but this one is portable. It’s not only important for research, but also for diagnosis on site. Imagine one of the crew members having neurological symptoms during the winter-over when no evacuation is possible. Being able to do brain imaging here in Concordia to detect or exclude a stroke – that’s a huge advancement in human health care in remote, extreme places.
For instance, in Africa there are still places so remote that people there do not have access to healthcare. Bringing a portable ultrasound there can potentially save the life of a woman giving birth, for example. It can be lifechanging for people in remote areas.
Doing research in this environment, whether for space exploration or not, you need to adapt all the necessary equipment. You cannot bring a whole hospital to the Moon – it’s impossible. What you need to do is find out how to bring the most-needed equipment, how to adapt and advance augmented reality, how to use protocols that are automated. Also, how to do surgery via telemedicine – that’s something that we rely on here in Concordia. If we had a surgery problem, we rely on telemedicine to communicate with a doctor in Europe to tell us what to do.
Doing research in an extreme remote area is from my point of view really important to advance healthcare in general. It doesn’t matter whether we go to the Moon or not. On Earth, there are so many places that do not have access to healthcare where this technology could be really helpful.
Have you been in contact remotely with a doctor while in Concordia?
Since we are only two doctors at the station, we don’t have all the knowledge of all the specialties. We have a camera that shows exactly what you are doing and that is relayed to people on the continent. This way we are able to communicate and get advice directly from an expert in the field. I think that is also the future of space exploration – you will never be able to send medical staff of all the specialties to Mars. You need to find ways to go around this.
This brings me back to being self-sufficient here at the station. Places like Concordia also help to develop what we call Environmental Control and Life Support Systems – systems that take care of water recycling, temperature regulation, oxygen supply… the essentials that people need to survive, whether it’s on the Moon, Mars or on the International Space Station.
Here in Concordia we have the greywater treatment unit, which is a system for water recycling. Today we are able to recycle up to 80% of the water we use, which is huge for a station like this. The prototype has been supported by ESA, one part has been used for the International Space Station. The MELiSSA project is continuously working on life support systems for the Moon and beyond. You need to work with what you have, and you find new methods that can be potentially used for other purposes on Earth.
I’m living in this remote place, but I’m also really enjoying the fact that we have limited resources, because it allows us to advance research in different fields – not only biomedical, but also ecological climatology and so on. We have a really good platform to do research in all these fields.
Empowering future generations
How do you see your role as a woman at the station?
This topic is quite an important one to me. I come from a small village in Switzerland and basically had a choice of becoming a farmer, a schoolteacher and all the basic role models that we had in the 90s. I am here today because I was impressed by women that do different things in life. For my musical career, my goal was to become like Martha Argerich, a very famous pianist. I had this idea in mind because I saw her on TV – I saw this image of a powerful woman that was playing the piano and I thought, yes, that’s who I want to become, that’s what I want to do. That’s the person I looked up to.
This comes back to where I am today. Women in STEM is a big topic now. I’m happy it’s a big topic, because we need to show that women are equally capable of innovating, leading, solving all these complex challenges – in roles that have been for a long, long period of time only dedicated to men. I think that the visibility of women in STEM is really important. I’m not a quota fan, I think you need to do your work and you need to be eligible for it, but I’m all for the visibility.
It has made me who I am today and I think it’s important for all the little girls out there to see that it’s possible – whether they choose a career in STEM or not. They need to see that they can become a medical doctor, they can go to Antarctica, they can become an astronaut… The only thing that really matters and through which we can help this is true visibility. That’s why women in STEM are super important to me, to empower future generations.
We have also seen in many studies that diverse teams really outperform homogeneous ones – especially when you have high stress levels, for example space exploration missions, but also Antarctic missions, and in all other extreme fields. I think as long as we improve the visibility of women and enable women to become specialists in their field, we can have more diverse teams, and these teams will have a greater capacity for problem-solving and resilience.
We need to showcase the success of women in space and STEM and show that women actually belong in these fields. You speak about engineering – as a little girl, I didn’t even know what engineering was. I finally became a medical doctor, because my mother gave me one of those little doctor kits for children, with little stethoscopes and all that stuff. Had I not received that, I may have never thought about a career in medicine. For me it’s not about fairness or just quota, it’s really about maximizing the potential of a team, the potential of people that work on a specific topic – not only with women, but with people of all fields that bring their own background, which makes work interesting.
I can be in Antarctica today because of the legacy of all those really hard-working women who came before me. It’s not so long ago that women were actually not able to come to Antarctica. Today we cannot understand it, but for a long period of time it had been like that. So I’m really thankful and I think the least we can do today is talk about it and show to the world that it’s possible. For all people to have the opportunity to choose what they would like to become, for them to have an idea of everything that exists to make their own choices when they grow up.
“Whatever you want to do – it’s possible.”
Do you have any advice for people that are enthusiastic about following the same path as you?
You have seen that my career was, and still is, changing a lot over time. Today I’m laughing about it, but I had a lot of moments where I was unsure about what I would become, which path I should choose. I know so many people that always knew what they wanted to become and they focused their life on doing so. For me this was not the case. I had a lot of interest in different fields and today I can say that I managed to put all these fields together – I can do space medicine, I can do extreme medicine, I’m in Antarctica, which has always been a dream of mine. I can also do music, I can play at concerts, so I really have a lot of chances to do what I want to do.
What I want to say with that is that there are points in your life when you’re unsure. I had many times like that – a year of pharmacology, a year of biomedical studies, and I remember saying to my family at the end of biomedical studies that I’m too old to start medicine now. I was older than pretty much all my study peers at that time, but today, looking back, it doesn’t really matter because you do what you want. Maybe you will find another path, but when you’re in it, sometimes you see barriers that you think you cannot go through. But just remember it’s not true.
Whatever you want to do – it’s possible. Sometimes it needs a lot of effort, sometimes you need to pass a lot of barriers. I had to fight a lot of stigmas because I was much older than anyone in my medical studies. Today I’m 34, I finished my medical studies, I’m in Antarctica, I’m a research doctor. That’s really nice, but because I want to go to the US, I need to redo all my medical studies. But I now see life as a continuum of stuff that you want to do and accomplish. And if you really want to do it, you will accomplish it one way or another.
Don’t let yourself be stopped by things that in the end are not important, just follow your path and if you want to do something, just do it, you will be able to. At least it worked for me! I don’t say it’s always easy, but I think life is too short to do things that you don’t really want to do, so do what you want to do and what you’re living for. You will only be good at things that really interest you, so that’s what I would go for. That, I think, would be my message.
Discussion: no comments