Although there are no people on Orion this morning, there are a few characters who made it. One of them is Commander Moonikin Campos – he is the captain and will be sitting in the commander’s seat throughout. She’s a mannequin. Like Boaty McBoatface before him, Moonikin Campos was named through a public vote. It honors Arturo Campos, an engineer who helped bring Apollo 13 safely back to Earth. Not content with sitting in the commander’s seat as a bona fide Captain Kirk, Moonikin Campos will also wear an Orion Crew Survival System suit and be equipped with radiation, acceleration and vibration sensors. Moonikin Campos will be accompanied by two female body mannequins – Helga and Zohar. Helga was named by the German Aerospace Center and Zohar by the Israel Space Agency. As Sky’s David Blevins discovered before one of Artemis’ missed summer launches, both are made of materials that mimic a woman’s soft tissue, organs, bones, lung and brain tissue to test how radiation passes through the body. The trunks have more than 5,600 sensors and 34 radiation detectors to measure radiation exposure to different organs during the mission. Zohar will wear the AstroRad, a radiation protection vest, while Helga will be unprotected. Joining the mannequins will be a soft toy of Snoopy the dog, who will float around the spaceship as an indicator of zero gravity.
