Helga & Zohar are mannequin torsos that took flight on Orion. Rather than astronauts, a mannequin named Commander Moonikin Campos helmed the spacecraft, with two mannequin torsos called Helga and Zohar along for the ride. Helga and Zohar will experience deep Space radiation inside Orion.

They are made of materials that mimic the soft tissue, organs, and bones of a woman to test how radiation passes through the human body. The two ‘phantoms’ each consist of 38 discs, are 95 centimetres tall, and weigh 36 kilograms.

Zohar weighs 62 kilograms with the protective vest. Inside them are organs and bones made of plastics of varying density. More than 6000 passive radiation detectors made of small crystals are installed there and on the surface, and 16 active detectors on the body’s most radiation-sensitive organs – lungs, stomach, uterus and bone marrow.

The passive radiation measuring devices (dosimeters) measure continuously and thus provide a value of the radiation over the entire mission duration. By retrieving the information from the crystals, a three-dimensional image of the human body can be created, which shows how high the total radiation exposure is on bones and organs in different places during a flight to the Moon and back.

Zohar will wear AstroRad, a radiation protection vest, to test how effective it could be if future crews encounter a solar storm, while Helga will be unprotected. The AstroRadvest was recently tested on the International Space Station.

Check out this video: NASA’s Artemis I ‘Passengers’