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Efficacy of Medications in Space Determined By Raman Spectroscopy: Aspirin Degradation

Stuart Farquharson, Zack Gladding, Carl Brouillette, Wayne Smith, Amelia Farquharson, Chetan Shende

Medication is the primary defense against the deleterious effects that astronauts experience in space due to weightlessness, such bone loss and headaches. Recent studies of medications returned to earth from the International Space Station suggest that high radiation levels of solar particle events (SPE) and galactic cosmic rays (GCR) can degrade medications, and potentially render them inadequate during a long mission, such as a roundtrip journey to Mars. In an effort to predict medication shelf-lives, proton irradiation at ground-based laboratories has been used to simulate SPE and GRC conditions, as quantified by high-performance liquid chromatography. Unfortunately,such predictions do not take into account extreme SPEs and/or CGRs that can occur during such long duration missions.We believe that medications, the active pharmaceutical ingredient, as well as the potentially toxic degradants, can be tested on-board space crafts at the time of use by a compact Raman spectrometer. Here we present the forced degradation of an aspirin tablet by acid hydrolysis, representing the high energy protons that make up ~85% of the SPEs and CGRs.Raman analyses of this tablet, and 10 expired twelve-year-old aspirin tablets and their toxic degradant, salicylic acid,are presented.