Astronauts may soon have a portable MRI machine to keep an eye on their muscles and bones during a spell on the International Space Station. The custom-built, lightweight MRI should be ready to fly by 2016. Bone and muscle loss in microgravity is a major health issue in orbit – astronauts are usually checked before and after missions. “But we don’t know how bone and muscle density change with time during a mission,” says Gordon Sarty at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “You can only guess with the before and after data we have today.”
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