What started as a simple question (What happens to the body temperature of an astronaut when he or she is in space?) has resulted in a new technological breakthrough that's being used by doctors here on Earth, the ESA announced on Wednesday.

As the agency explained, people on Earth lose much of their body heat through a process known as convection. In convection, the air around a person is heated by his or her skin, then rises and is replaced by cooler air. Because of the weightlessness, however, convection does not exist on the International Space Station (ISS), and space travelers have long complained about feeling hot.

Hanns-Christian Gunga at the Center for Space Medicine and Extreme Environments in Berlin, wondered what impact this phenomenon would have on the body temperature of an astronaut. His curiosity resulted in the birth of the ESA's Thermolab experiment, which was designed to measure core temperature changes in humans before, during, and after performing exercise on the ISS.

Benefits on the ground

According to the website devoted to the experiment, the objective of Thermolab is to gauge the physiological strain index (PSI) during the course of long-term exposure to a microgravity environment. Gunga developed a new thermo-sensor to measure heat radiated in the forehead, which is then converted to core body temperature using a simple calculation.