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Very soon, a robot surgeon could begin its orbit around our planet, and although it won’t be a metallic humanoid machine dressed in a white coat and holding a scalpel, its mission is fascinating.
On Tuesday (Jan. 30), scientists will send a series of groundbreaking experiments to the International Space Station via Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft. It is scheduled to launch no earlier than 12:07 pm ET (1707 GMT) and, if all goes according to plan, it will arrive at the ISS a few days later, on February 1.
In fact, one of the experiments on board is a two-pound (0.9 kilogram) robotic device, about as long as your forearm, with two controllable arms that respectively hold a gripper and a pair of scissors. Developed by a company called Virtual Incision, this type of medical robot is designed to one day be able to communicate with human doctors on the ground while inserting itself into an astronaut patient to perform medical procedures with high precision.
“The most advanced part of our experiment will control the device from here in Lincoln, Nebraska, and dissect simulated surgical tissue in orbit,” Shane Farritor, co-founder of Virtual Incision, said during a presentation about Cygnus on Friday.
For now, as it is in preliminary stages, it will be tested with rubber bands, but the team has high hopes for the future as missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond begin to move forward in the space exploration process. Remote space medicine has become a hot topic over the past few years as space agencies and private space companies lay out plans for a variety of future manned space missions.
Related: The International Space Station will host a surgical robot in 2024
NASA’s Artemis Program, for example, hopes to have boots on the moon in 2026; Furthermore, that is supposed to pave the way for a day when humanity can say it has reached the Red Planet. And together, these missions are expected to pave the way to a distant future in which humanity embarks on Deeper space travel, perhaps to Venus or, if we are really dreaming, beyond the solar system. So to ensure that astronauts stay safe in space (an environment they are literally not made to survive in), scientists want to make sure that space medical treatment advances alongside the rockets that will take those astronauts wherever they go. . .
A quick example that comes to mind is how, in 2021, NASA flight surgeon Josef Schmid was “holoported” to the ISS using HoloLens technology. It’s kind of like virtual reality meets FaceTime meets augmented reality, if that makes sense.
However, as the team explains, this robotic surgery mission could not only benefit people exploring the vacuum of space, but also those living here on Earth. “If you have a specialist who is a very good surgeon, that specialist could reach out to different locations and help with telesurgery or remote surgery,” Farritor said. “Only about 10% of today’s operating rooms are robotic, but we see no reason why they shouldn’t be 100% robotic.”
This would be a particularly crucial advantage for hospitals in rural areas where fewer specialists are available and where operating rooms are limited. In fact, as Farritor explained, Virtual Incision is not only funded by NASA but also by the military. “Both groups want to perform surgeries in crazy places,” she said, “and our little robots lend themselves to mobility like that.”
What else is going up?
The little medical robot won’t be alone on the Cygnus spacecraft as it heads to the ISS; During the same presentation in which Farritor talked about the virtual incision, other experts talked about what they will send out on Monday.
For one thing, he’ll have a robot friend joining him in the orbital lab: a robotic arm. This arm has been tested before within the limitations of the station, but with this new mission the team hopes to test it in completely unpressurized conditions.
“Disconnect, reconnect, move objects, that’s the kind of thing we did in the first research,” said May Murphy, program manager at the company NanoRacks. “We’re increasing the complexity… we’re going to disable what tools we’re using, we’ll be able to use screwdriver analogs and things like that; that’ll allow us to do even more work.” “.
“We can look even further than just removing something that the team would have to spend time working on,” he continued. “We also now have the ability to do additional work in more hostile environments that we don’t necessarily want to expose the crew to.”
Meanwhile, the European Space Agency will send a 3D printer that can create small metal parts. The goal here is to see how the structure of 3D printed metal fares in space compared to 3D printed metal on Earth. 3D printed semiconductors, key components of most electronic devices, will also be tested for a similar reason.
“When we talk about having vehicles in space for longer periods of time without being able to get supplies on and off, we need to be able to print some of these smaller parts in space, to help the integrity of the vehicle over time.” said Meghan Everett, deputy scientist for NASA’s ISS program.
According to Everett, this could also help scientists learn whether some types of materials that cannot be 3D printed on Earth can be 3D printed in space. “Some preliminary data suggests that we can actually produce better products in space compared to Earth, which would directly translate into better electronic energy production capabilities,” he said.
Another experiment launched Monday looks at the effects of microgravity on bone loss. Known as MABL-A, will look at the role of mesenchymal cells (associated with the bone marrow) and how they might change when exposed to the space environment. This could offer insight into bone loss in astronauts. An important and well-documented problem for space explorers. – as well as in the dynamics of human aging. “We will also look at genes involved in bone formation and how gravity affected them,” said Abba Zubair, professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at Mayo Clinic.
Lisa Carnell, director of NASA’s Physical and Biological Sciences Division, spoke about the upcoming Apex-10 mission, which will see how plant microbes interact in space. This could also help figure out how to increase the productivity of plants on Earth.
Computers and retinas
Two of the other key experiments discussed during the presentation include a space computer and an artificial eye; Well, an artificial retina, to be exact. We will start with the latter.
Nicole Wagner, CEO of a company called LambdaVision, has an astonishing goal: restore vision to millions of patients who are blinded by end-stage retinal degenerative diseases such as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.
To do this, she and her team are trying to develop a protein-based artificial retina that is built using a process known as “layer-by-layer electrostatic deposition.” In short, it involves depositing multiple layers of a special type of protein on a scaffold. “Think of the scaffold almost like a tightly woven gauze,” Wagner said.
However, as she explains, this process on Earth can be hindered by the effects of gravity. And any imperfections in the layers can ruin the performance of the artificial retina. So… what happens in microgravity? To date, LambdaVision has flown more than eight missions to the ISS, she says, and experiments have shown that microgravity creates more homogeneous layers and therefore better thin films for the retina.
“On this mission,” he said, “we are considering sending a powdered form of bacteriorhodopsin to the ISS that will then be resuspended in a solution, and we will use special instruments, in this case spectrometers, to observe the quality and purity of the protein in the International Space Station, as well as to validate this process used to bring the protein into solution.”
Can you imagine if doctors could one day commission some artificial retinas to be grown in space and then sent to Earth to be implanted in a patient? And that this whole process could give someone back their sight?
Regarding the space computer, Mark Fernández, principal investigator of the Spaceborne Computer-2 project, raised a hypothesis. “Astronauts go on a spacewalk, and after their work day, they examine their gloves for wear,” he said. “This must be done by every astronaut, after every spacewalk, before the gloves can be used again.”
Typically, Fernández explains, the team takes a bunch of high-resolution photographs of potentially contaminated gloves and then sends those images for analysis.
This analysis, he says, typically takes about five days to complete and return. So, hoping to solve the problem, the team developed an artificial intelligence model in collaboration with NASA and Microsoft that can perform the analysis directly on the station and pinpoint areas of interest. Each takes about 45 seconds to complete. “We’ll go from five days to just a few minutes,” she said, adding that the team also performed DNA analyzes normally performed on the space station in about 12 minutes. Normally, he emphasized, that would take months.
But the team wants to make sure Spaceborne Computer-2’s servers are working properly while it’s on the ISS, hence the Cygnus payload. This will mark the company Third mission to the ISS.
“The ISS National Laboratory has so many benefits it attributes to our nation,” Carnell said. “It creates a universe of new possibilities for the next generation of scientists and engineers.”