(Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center)
A new discipline was born as humans continued to explore space. With the expansion of the human footprint beyond Earth, emerges the new frontier -- astroforensics.
What Is Astroforensics?
Astroforensics refers to the study of crime in space. "Astro" relates to space, planets and other objects in space while "forensic" denotes the application of scientific methods to investigate and solve a crime.
This discipline, which is still in its infancy, is driven by human nature's inevitable course. The space environment is distinct and challenging for forensic investigations. Future explorers will encounter environments with changed gravity, cosmic radiation, dramatic temperature swings, and the requirement for oxygen-producing climate systems, to name a few extraterrestrial characteristics.
In contrast to Earth, where gravity acts as a constant factor that molds many parts of our world, the substantial decrease in gravity in space poses new difficulties for interpreting the behavior of the evidence. Forensic disciplines such as bloodstain pattern analysis, which mostly depends on gravitational effects to identify the conditions in which blood stains occur, would be greatly impacted by this change.
When one thinks of gravity in space, pictures of floating gymnastics on the International Space Station (ISS) or astronauts ominously suspended in the vastness of space instantly come to mind.
True zero gravity does, however, exist distant from all celestial bodies. There will be a gravitational pull whenever something is near a body like the Moon or a planet, even in orbit around the Earth.
Consequently, rather than having zero gravity, the majority of space habitats have low or microgravity. Experts rarely think about gravity since it is so common and mostly constant; instead, they just reflexively include it as a constant in their computations.
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Altered Gravity in Space
Gravity is important for forensic science fields like bloodstain pattern analysis. It is essential to the process by which liquid blood in the air reacts with a surface to produce stain patterns.
In criminal investigations, bloodstain pattern analysis is the application of fluid dynamics, physics, and mathematics to comprehend the flight and origin of blood and analyze its deposit on a surface.
A parabolic flight research plane, whose up-and-down flight path causes brief moments of microgravity, was employed in a recent study. The term "vomit comet" has been used informally to describe this kind of flight.
A number of blood droplets would be projected onto a piece of paper during this freefalling microgravity phase, and the resulting bloodstain would subsequently be examined using standard earthbound procedures. Even though the idea seems straightforward, providing a secure location for tests aboard a plane that was essentially plummeting to Earth for 20 seconds was difficult.
The glove box-a converted pediatric incubation chamber-served as the experimental site. In space medicine research, this chamber is used to examine bleeding control.
Because there were concerns about biohazards in the plane's cabin, synthetic blood was utilized in place of real blood. This analogue replacement replicated the surface tension and viscosity of blood. The analogous blood was first put into a syringe to start the experiment. After microgravity was created in free fall, the needle was manually depressed to project the blood 20 cm onto a sheet of white paper.
The forensic investigator is more interested in the relationship between the blood and the surface than in the projection mechanism itself, even if this has little in do with genuine criminal situations. Following standard protocols, the bloodstained documents were then captured on camera and examined.
The researchers discovered that the blood behave differently in microgravity. Blood on Earth often falls in a parabolic pattern as a result of gravity tugging on it until it hits a surface. However, in this instance, the blood kept going straight ahead until it reached the surface.
Larger microgravity conditions will be needed to expand study in this new forensic discipline.
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