From muscle loss to radiation exposure and the psychological effects of confinement, spaceflight takes a toll on those lucky enough to experience it.

European Space Agency flight surgeon Adrianos Golemis, who is responsible for the health of astronaut Thomas Pesquet during the SpaceX Crew-2 mission, shared some insights on the field of space medicine.

Q: What are the major health challenges of space?

A: If we talk about low Earth orbit where the ISS lies, you have almost zero gravity so that takes its toll on your bones and your muscles.

Radiation is a major issue, because here on the ground we are protected by the magnetosphere (magnetic field) and by the atmosphere, but if we go beyond, this protection goes away.

And of course we should not forget we have things that we are just beginning to understand: for example eye pathology (disease), or venous thrombosis (blood clots) that some healthy astronauts develop.

NASA successfully carried out a second flight on Mars on Thursday of its mini helicopter Ingenuity, a 52-second sortie that saw it climb to a height of 16 feet (five meters).

"So far, the engineering telemetry we have received and analyzed tell us that the flight met expectations," said Bob Balaram, Ingenuity's chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California.

Understanding whether Mars was once able to support life has been a major driving force for Mars research over the past 50 years. To decipher the planet's ancient climate and habitability, researchers look to the rock record—a physical record of ancient surface processes which reflect the environment and the prevailing climate at the time the rocks were deposited.

In a new paper published in JGR: Planets, researchers on the NASA-JPL Mars Science Laboratory mission used the Curiosity rover to add another piece to the puzzle of Mars' ancient past by investigating a unit of rocks within Gale crater.

They found evidence of an ancient dune field preserved as a layer of rocks in Gale crater, which overlies rock layers that were deposited in a large lake. The rock remnants of the dune field are known today as the Stimson formation.

The findings help scientists understand surface and atmospheric processes—such as the direction the wind blew sand to form dunes—and potentially how Mars' climate evolved from an environment that potentially harbored microbial life, to an uninhabitable one.