MURDERS IN SPACE
CSI: ISS
When it eventually happens, a murder
in space will be unlike any that has occurred on Earth. So how do you investigate an astronaut’s killing when your crime scene lacks gravity?
by DR CLAIRE ASHER
GETTY IMAGES
A confined space, a limited number of suspects, a lack of contact with the outside world. These are the makings of a juicy murder mystery. They’re also eerily similar to conditions aboard the International Space Station (ISS), where astronauts – highly trained personnel selected for their resourcefulness, endurance and almost impossibly cool composure – spend months on end trapped together.
Though we like to think of Earth’s best and brightest scientists as incorruptible, who hasn’t considered murdering a co-worker from time to time? And extended stays in high-stress environments are enough to make anyone snap. As cosmonaut Valery Ryumin chillingly wrote in his personal diary during a stint in space in 1980: “All the necessary conditions to perpetrate a murder are met by locking two men in a cabin of 5 x 6m [18 x 20ft] for two months.”
In the worst-case scenario where something gruesome does happen in space, we’ll want to know who did it. But we’re starting off with a disadvantage: the forensic methods we’ve developed on Earth won’t necessarily cut it in the face of low-gravity, off-planet environments.
With civilian space travel on the horizon, some experts are calling for investment in the emerging field of astroforensics – and the first research in this area has already landed.
So, awkwardly pull on a trench coat over your spacesuit and perch a fedora on your helmet, because it’s time to go crime-solving… in space.
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A HOMICIDE
One thing investigators are sure to notice missing in their first extraterrestrial case? Gravity.
“Gravity is all pervasive around us – it’s the number-one environmental variable that we’re always dealing with,” says Zack Kowalske, a forensic detective in the Crime Scene Investigations (CSI) Unit at Roswell Police Department in Georgia, in the US. His PhD research, on how environmental factors influence forensic bloodstain analysis, led him to a rather unusual question: how would blood spatter patterns change in low or zero gravity?
“EXPERTS ARE CALLING FOR INVESTMENT IN THE EMERGING FIELD OF ASTROFORENSICS”
Bloodstain pattern analysis is a crucial forensic tool that uses fluid dynamics, physics and mathematics to calculate the trajectory of blood droplets to understand how they hit a surface. On Earth, gravity influences that pattern. In space, however…