#Mini robot space surgeon to climb inside astronauts It could one day answer the prayers of astronauts who need surgery in deep space.
The miniature surgeon slides into the body through an incision in the belly button. Once inside the abdominal cavity which has been filled with inert gas to make room for it to work the robot can remove an ailing appendix, cut pieces from a diseased colon or repair a perforated gastric ulcer.
The fist-sized robot, a product of Virtual Incision in Lincoln, Nebraska, will have its first zero gravity test in an aircraft flying in parabolic arcs in the next few months.
The hope is that such robots will accompany future astronauts on long deep-space missions, when the chances are higher that someone will experience physical trauma."
if you would consider surgery in space, "says team member Shane Farritor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Medical emergency For now, the only humans in space venture no further than the International space station.
Astronauts are screened carefully for health issues before leaving Earth, and the ISS has an escape capsule standing by in case of emergencies,
Many worrisome health issues that can occur in space return to normal back On earth. But NASA has plans for human missions to an asteroid and eventually Mars
and getting home quickly won't be an option. Surgery in space would be extremely difficult. Without gravity, it is easy for bodily fluids like blood to float free
and contaminate the cabin. And space capsules can only carry a certain amount of weight, so medical tools need to be relatively light but capable of handling many kinds of situations."
"Everything that we take for granted, even something as simple as putting a Band aid down on a table,
is difficult in space, "says Dmitry Oleynikov at the University of Nebraska Medical center.""That difficulty increases logarithmically
when you're trying to do complex procedures such as an operation.""Virtual Incision has been working on its design for a few years.
Space surgeons Prototypes have performed several dozen procedures in pigs. The team says the next step is to work in human cadavers
Remote-operated technologies would have a disadvantage in space because the further away a spaceship gets, the greater the time delay in communications signals.
Virtual Incision hopes to avoid this problem by training astronauts to perform procedures on each other.
James Burgess at Carnegie mellon University in Pittsburgh thinks robots like these could be particularly useful
and performed in space, "says Burgess. This article will appear in print under the headline"Surgery bot fits in astronaut's gut a
#Earth raises a plasma shield to battle solar storms Earth can raise shields to protect itself against solar storms.
For the first time satellites and ground-based detectors have watched as the planet sends out a tendril of plasma to fight off blasts of charged solar matter.
The discovery confirms a longstanding theory about Earth's magnetic surroundings and offers us a way to keep track of the planet's defences.
It's changed our thinking about how the system operates says Joe Borovsky at the Space science Institute in Boulder Colorado who was involved not in the research.
Earth doesn't just sit there and take whatever the solar wind gives it it can actually fight back.
Earth is surrounded always by a bubble of magnetism called the magnetosphere which protects us from the bulk of the solar wind a stream of high-energy particles constantly flowing from the sun
. But sometimes the sun's magnetic field lines can directly link up with Earth's in a process called magnetic reconnection which opens up cracks in the magnetosphere.
Charged particles can flow along these lines into Earth's atmosphere leading to dazzling auroras as well as geomagnetic storms that can wreak havoc on navigation systems and power grids.
Gas in Earth's upper atmosphere is ionised by ultraviolet light from the sun and the resulting plasma becomes trapped by magnetic fields in a doughnut-shaped ring around the planet.
Previous observations of this plasmasphere showed that plumes sometimes emerge from this region. Theory had suggested that an extra-strong electric field from the sun can rip plasma away from the plasmasphere during reconnection triggering a plume.
If this plume reaches the boundary between the earthly and solar magnetic fields it would create a buffer zone of dense material.
This would make it harder for magnetic field lines to meet up and spark further reconnection. But while ground-based measurements can see a plume forming their resolution isn't good enough to tell for sure
whether the material reaches the magnetic boundary. Brian Walsh at NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER in Greenbelt Maryland and his colleagues have clinched now it.
In January 2013 GPS sensors on the ground mapped electrons in the upper atmosphere and saw a tendril of increased electron density curling away from the north pole indicating that a plume of plasma was veering off towards the sun. At the same time three of NASA's THEMIS spacecraft
which are designed to study solar storms crossed through the magnetic boundary during the event. The craft saw a 100-fold increase in the number of electrons at the boundary
which would probably have been deposited by the plume. For the first time we were able to monitor the entire cycle of this plasma stretching from the atmosphere to the boundary between Earth's magnetic field
and the sun's says Walsh. It gets to that boundary and helps protect us keeps these solar storms from slamming into us.
Not every solar storm generates a plasma plume which means ground-based observations will continue to be vital for understanding the phenomenon.
To measure things with spacecraft we have to have them in just the right place
but the ground stations can measure this stuff almost constantly says Walsh. We want to know
when does the Earth decide to protect us? By validating this tool we're now able to figure that out t
#Interplanetary comms get easier with a nanotech boost E t. MANAGED to phone home. But what about our own future Mars colonies or space probes millions of kilometres away?
Spacecraft currently use radio waves to beam information back home. Laser signals carry more data but the light is almost undetectable
by the time it reaches Earth. Now a nanoscale light detector could make such deep-space missives easier to read.
So says Richard Mirin at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder Colorado who developed the detector with NASA.
Data must be encoded before it can be sent. The most reliable way of doing this is to vary the time interval between light pulses with a long interval representing a 0 say
and a shorter gap representing a 1. But false readings dent accuracy. Mirin made a nanowire detector that operates at-270 C. This boosted the number of photons it received each second by two orders of magnitude compared with regular detectors.
Laser communication is one of the technologies we are considering says Bas Lansdorp CEO of the Mars One project which aims to place a human colony on Mars by 2025.
#Japan's huge magnetic net will trawl for space junk SOMEWHERE in Earth's orbit a satellite explodes into a terrifying cloud of debris. Moments later Sandra bullock
and George Clooney are left scrambling to dodge the deadly space junk. This problem isn't confined to the Oscar-nominated space thriller Gravity#scientists are struggling with it in real life.
Now a rather unusual solution is being tested: a really big net. Next month the Japanese space agency JAXA will pilot its electrodynamic tether for the first time.
It is one of many possible solutions that have been proposed to deal with space debris (see Catch'em drag'em blast'em.
Hundreds of thousands of pieces of spacecraft satellites and other equipment from human spaceflight zip around our planet some travelling faster than the speed of sound.
According to a report released by the US Congressional Research Service this month running into even a small piece of junk can be disastrous.
An object 10 centimetres across could catastrophically damage a typical satellite it says. One just 1 centimetre across could disable a spacecraft.
The worst-case scenario is the Kessler syndrome proposed by astrophysicist Donald Kessler in the 1970s.
Too much trash he warned and the pieces would collide with each other resulting in more and more debris. To build its debris-catching net JAXA brought in Nitto Seimo a company that specialises in fishing equipment Unlike a net you would use in the ocean this one is a 700-metre-long mesh of aluminium
and steel wires that hangs from an uncrewed spacecraft. The net is fitted with sensors that look for light reflecting from small pieces of debris
and automatically aligns itself so that it can attract the material. The tether changes its orbit thanks to an electrical current flowing through the wires
which creates an electromagnetic field that attracts the debris and pushes the net away from Earth's geomagnetic field.
Once the net has grabbed enough debris it is ordered to slow down and deorbit allowing the debris spacecraft
and net to burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere. JAXA thinks the net's main advantage is its simplicity#it's lightweight
and doesn't require any propellant to move. If next month's test launch goes well it plans to build a 10-kilometre-long version to capture satellites that have reached the end of their lives.
However the test will also explore some possible drawbacks. One concern is that the net will work very slowly taking several months or even a year to deorbit.
Then there is the risk that the net will run into operational satellites. The engineers also worry that the debris they are fighting could fight back.
There is a possibility of the tether being severed by impacts of small debris objects or micrometeoroids says a JAXA spokesperson.
Not everyone is convinced of the idea. A net isn't necessarily the best option to collect debris says Hugh Lewis an aerospace engineer at the University of Southampton UK.
He has reservations about the net's ability to deal with space junk. In particular he believes it could actually generate debris
if it collides with a large satellite. There is a growing trend for organisations to put forward a concept for a debris removal device without considering fully the potential risks involved in deploying
and operating the device says Lewis. I believe that these ideas should be subjected to international scrutiny before they are deployed.
This article will appear in print under the headline Gone junk fishin i
#China lands on moon kicks off next lunar space race Let the modern moon rush begin.
China has placed successfully a lander and rover on the lunar surface the first time any nation has touched down there in almost four decades.
China's first moon landing which took place on Saturday afternoon (GMT) marks the rekindling of humanity's love affair with our only natural satellite.
and 2020 many from burgeoning space powers or private ventures that would also be making their first attempts.
This flotilla of 21st-century moon explorers should arrive bristling with technologies that will help them map the moon's uncharted regions
and prospect for resources that could one day sustain lunar outposts and missions further afield (see a map of planned landing sites).
The crew of the final Apollo mission lifted off from the moon's Sea of Serenity on 14 december 1972.
After that three robotic Soviet spacecraft made it to the surface the final one in 1976.
For the next few decades the moon's only visitors were a dozen or so orbiters and deliberate crashes such as NASA's LCROSS mission in 2009
Hopefully the lander doesn't tilt said Bernard Foing director of the International Lunar Exploration Working group a forum sponsored by multiple space agencies before the landing.
and South korea are also in the running to send missions to the moon that would involve combinations of landers and rovers.
The moon is the nearest island in space out from the Earth says Igor Mitrofanov at Russia's Institute for Space Research in Moscow the project scientist for two planned Russian-led rover missions.
As countries develop their space programmes the moon is a natural first foray beyond Earth that allows remote-controlled robots to get their sea legs
while staying within a 10-second call of the planet's shores. But the moon is more than a test bed for space missions.
China's Yutu rover will venture a few kilometres away from its landing site to snap images take stock of minerals with onboard spectrometers and probe below the surface with radar.
and evolution of the moon is to know those of Earth says Tatsuaki Hashimoto of the Japan aerospace exploration agency the lead scientist for a proposed lunar rover called SELENE-2. The moon is thought to have coalesced from the debris of an impact between a Mars-sized world and Earth
It's a part of the Earth says Foing. I call it the eighth continent. Several of the proposed exploration missions are targeting the moon's poles
which have never been visited by a lander. But data from orbiters support the idea that the rocks
and any organic material it might hold in deep freeze could shed light on where Earth got its water
The damp moon could also be a useful resource for future robotic and human exploration says Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston Texas. Astronauts could drink moon water extracted from its rocks or use it as radiation shielding.
Water could also be split into hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket fuel. Much of the weight of today's rockets comes from their own propellant so having a source of fuel already in space would pave the way for much more ambitious human missions.
If we're really interested in extending our reach to Mars and beyond we don't want to have to bring fuel with us says Anthony Colaprete of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field California.
He is the project scientist on a proposed robotic mission called Resource Prospector which could launch in 2018 to try to extract water from lunar rocks.
Private groups are also hoping to get in on the action. The Google Lunar X Prize is offering $20 million to the first private team that by the end of 2015 launches a lunar spacecraft that can land on the moon travel 500 metres
and send back video. Some of the teams vying for the prize also have their sights set on selling lunar-derived rocket fuel.
and teams of human miners to the moon to supply water for fuel depots that it would place in Earth orbit t
#Boxy Cubesats get a propulsion boost in new space race Tiny liquid volcanoes that spray beams of charged particles could make space history next year.
They are one of two technologies vying to be the first to let cheap, miniature satellites called Cubesats fly in formation,
switch orbits or voyage to other planets feats usually reserved for large, expensive craft. They could even provide us with a global Wi-fi system On earth.
Paulo Lozano leads a team working on Cubesat propulsion at the Massachusetts institute of technology. He has been given the go-ahead to launch two propelled Cubesats in 2014 one funded by the US Department of defense
the other by private donors. Meanwhile, Benjamin Longmier at the University of Michigan in Ann arbor, who leads a rival project, announced that his team also has private funding
and a slot to launch their Cubesat on a NASA rocket next year. The race is on.
Cubesats are made from off-the-shelf components. The initial aim was to make access to space easier and more affordable.
They are typically put into low Earth orbit by a rocket where they remain for around 6 months,
before spiralling in and burning up in Earth's atmosphere. Although they have made space accessible to groups who wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford it most recently a team of high-school students Cubesats haven't done much cutting-edge science."
"They were considered like toys, "says Lozano. Some Cubesats have basic steering, but getting them to change orbits,
let alone visit other planetary bodies, requires new technology. That's because even today's most efficient propulsion method, the ion engine, doesn't scale down to Cubesat size.
Instead, Lozano and his colleagues will propel their craft with an unusual substance called an ionic liquid,
made solely of positively or negatively charged ions. In the engine, a reservoir of ionic liquid soaks into a porous, metal chip and forms tiny pools in the pores of spikes on its surface.
The result is an array of between 500 and 5000 focussed ion beams that stream from each of the eight chips on the Cubesat when the electric field the strength
and calculate that just 8 grams of ionic liquid will propel a 2 kilogram Cubesat and change its orbit by 100 kilometres.
the aim is to send such a satellite to an asteroid to collect a scoop of dust.
Their Cubesat Ambipolar Thruster, or CAT, uses xenon, like traditional ion engines. The difference is that the CAT adds an intense
000 target, the appeal prompted a private donor to offer to pay for the technology and a launch next year aboard a NASA rocket.
They hope their propelled Cubesats will one day fly to Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa, both
A fleet of Cubesats with propulsion in orbit around a planet or moon can do a lot of things that big expensive satellites cannot, such as monitoring several locations in the atmosphere at once.
Propelled Cubesats could even be useful back here On earth. Creating a universal"satellite Wi-fi""like existing satellite phone coverage,
would require thousands of big satellites, which is prohibitively expensive. But you could dump a thousand Cubesats in one place then spread them out to the right points, for a fraction of the price.
Longmier's team has launched just a second Kickstarter campaign, which could fund some add-ons, including a camera.
and propel the Cubesat next year.""We might have a little space race on our hands,
"says Longmier s
#India blasts off for Mars: here's what it will Do it's the Mount everest of the solar system conquered only by an elite group.
Now India is set to join the US Russia and Europe in the exclusive club by sending a probe to Mars. The Mars Orbiter Mission blasted off from the southeastern coast of India on 5 november.
Established in the 1960s India's space programme has focused so far on aiding the country's development building satellites to spot potential sources of groundwater and monitor deforestation.
Then in 2008 it launched Chandrayaan-1 a lunar orbiter and now has plans for further probes to study the moon and space weather.
These projects may seem divorced from India's development goals but could lead to spin-off applications in areas like remote sensing
and shape a new generation of scientists and engineers says K. R. Sridhara Murthi who worked at the Indian Space Research Organisation for nearly 40 years.
The main goal of the $73 million Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) is to prove that India can put a working probe into Mars orbit.
That is no small feat more than half of all Mars missions so far have failed. It's a stretch goal says Scott Pace director of the Space Policy Institute at George washington University in WASHINGTON DC.
One big challenge will be making sure the spacecraft's electronics function reliably in the harsh temperature
and radiation conditions at Mars he says. This was a problem for Chandrayaan-1 which discovered water on the lunar surface but died more than a year early
because its electronics could not withstand the heat radiated from the moon. MOM should also help to unravel some of the planet's mysteries.
It will carry five scientific instruments including a methane sensor to try to pick up the gas in Mars's atmosphere.
On earth methane is produced mainly by life so there was a stir when Earth-based instruments and a European probe detected traces of it in Mars's atmosphere a decade ago.
Some are sceptical of those results believing they were triggered by methane in Earth's atmosphere
or perhaps water in Mars's and recently NASA's Curiosity rover added to the scepticism by finding no methane when it breathed in the Martian air.
I'd say the data are equivocal at the moment says John Mustard of Brown University in Providence Rhode island.
MOM may also help reveal how Mars became a cold dry planet with an atmosphere too thin to support liquid water for long periods.
Gaping canyons and river-like channels point to large amounts of water and therefore a thick warming atmosphere in the past.
A study published this week suggests a form of natural geoengineering was partially responsible for the red planet's global cooling.
NASA's MAVEN mission also due to launch next month will tackle that same puzzle but with a larger suite of instruments.
To have India executing a successful orbiter mission would be great for space science says Mustard d
#Virgin galactic joins the reality TV space race Reality TV is set to become a little more out of this world.
This morning Virgin galactic and NBC announced plans for a Survivor-like series that will send the winner to space.
Dubbed Space Race it is one of three space-based reality TV SHOWS that could be gracing our screens in the coming years assuming producers can get their hands on a working spacecraft.
For the past 10 years I have pursued relentlessly my dream of using a TV SHOW to give an everyday person the chance to experience the black sky of space
and look down upon mother Earth says executive producer Mark Burnett who has created previously other reality shows like Survivor and The Voice.
Virgin galactic's Spaceshiptwo is a six passenger two pilot suborbital craft designed to give wannabe astronauts a few minutes in space.
The company has sold more than 600 tickets so far with prices currently set at $250000 but has yet to conduct a commercial launch.
All we know is that participants will gradually be eliminated as they compete for the winning ticket to space
and viewers will get a behind-the-scenes look at Spaceport America in New mexico. Space Race is not Burnett's first attempt to televise space flight.
In 2000 he announced Destination Mir a programme that would have seen contestants train for a mission to the Russian space station Mir
but the plans were scrapped after the station was orbited de in 2001. It is also not the only space-related show currently attempting to get off the ground.
Last month Sony Pictures Television announced a partnership with Dutch firm Space Expedition Corporation (SXC) for a show called Milky way Mission
which will see celebrities compete for a flight to space aboard an XCOR AEROSPACE Lynx craft.
SXC previously announced a non-televised competition to send 22 people to space and plans to film a sci-fi movie aboard a Lynx
For those looking beyond low Earth orbit Mars One is also continuing with its plans to send humans on a televised one-way mission to the Red planet by 2023.
Mars One does not yet have a craft capable of leaving Earth but CEO Bas Lansdorp says it plans to launch its first show in 2014 detailing the crew selection process.
but says Mars One will be different. This is much more serious than selecting a few people who are going to become pop stars it's more like The Apprentice.
It's a very serious job position that we're selecting the best people for r
#Crack a comet to spawn the ingredients of life Some of the key ingredients for life may have been shocked into existence.
A physical simulation of a comet's impact with a planet shows that the conditions are extreme enough to create amino acids within the comet's ice.
Astrobiologists have wondered long whether life or its ingredients could have travelled to Earth on the back of a comet or asteroid.
Comets are known to contain the organic precursors of amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins.
What's more one comet Wild 2 was shown recently to contain the simplest amino acid glycine.
But how such an amino acid could form there is still a mystery. We do however know that high speed impacts are a ubiquitous process as we see impact craters on every solid surface in the solar system says Mark Price at the University of Kent UK.
Theoretical studies had suggested that the shock of an impact could rearrange the components of the ice into something more interesting.
The idea is that a comet would contain the raw materials for life-building compounds says Nir Goldman of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who made the theoretical calculations.
When a comet impacts a planetary surface it creates very high pressures and temperatures. Those will then drive the raw materials that already exist in the comet to form more complex things that could be life-building.
To find out if this works in practice Price and colleagues made model comet ice in the lab containing various amounts of ammonia carbon dioxide and methanol.
Then they shot the ice with a steel pellet travelling at about 7 kilometres a second to simulate the comet smacking into a planet
or another body colliding with the comet. The goop that remained after the ice was evaporated away was analysed by Price's colleague Zita Martins at Imperial College London who found it contained the amino acids alanine and norvaline.
This is significant as we now have a simple realistic mechanism to generate amino acids Price says.
As impacts between icy bodies occur throughout the solar system then complex organic molecules are also very probably widespread.
This is a neat way of suggesting prebiotic material could be produced regardless of the external conditions of the planet says Goldman.
You could have a planet that isn't really conducive to forming amino acids like early Earth supposedly wasn't he says.
But then you can have a comet come in and that impact will drive prebiotic processes within the comet itself regardless of
what the planet looks like. Journal reference: Nature Geoscience DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1930correction: When this article was published first on 15 september it did not give details of the researcher who detected amino acids in the ice.
These have now been included d
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