Bizarre Orbit of Weird Asteroid's Moon Revealed.

If you had to imagine the weirdest-looking space rock, you might imagine the form of asteroid 624 Hektor, the largest known Trojan asteroid in the solar system. Its bi-lobed shape makes it look like a really big cartoon dog bone, or even a huge peanut. What’s more, despite its knobbly appearance (and just as knobbly gravitational field), it even has its own moon. Now astronomers have taken a long, hard look at this exotic rocky beast and pinned down the bizarre orbit 624 Hektor’s moon, finding that the orbit will remain remarkably stable for billions of years.

The 250 kilometer (155 mile) wide 624 Hektor was discovered in 1907 by German astronomer August Kopff, but the existence of its 12 kilometer (7.5 mile) moon wasn’t revealed until 2006 by a team led by SETI Institute astronomer Franck Marchis. Now, eight years of observations of the motion of 624 Hektor’s natural satellite have finally hit paydirt.

Trojans are a special sub-class of asteroid. Trapped in an orbital resonance with Jupiter, they orbit the sun with the same period occupying two regions 60 degrees ahead and 60 degrees behind the gas giant. 624 Hektor is the only Trojan known to possess its own moon.

The technical hurdles are many when trying to observe Trojan asteroids — they are distant and very faint, requiring time on the world’s most powerful observatories, a hurdle that contributed to the long period of time it took to pin down the moon’s orbit.

“The satellite can be seen only with a telescope like Keck Observatory’s fitted with LSG-AO (laser guide-star adaptive optics), but time on the mighty Keck’s is highly prized and in limited availability,” said Marchis in a SETI Institute news release.

The Keck Observatory, located atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii, consists of two telescopes and in this study, Marchis’ team used the Keck II telescope that is outfitted with a precision adaptive optics system that fires a powerful laser high into the atmosphere, creating an artificial star as seen by the telescope’s optics. The motion of the guide star reveals turbulence in the upper atmosphere (the same effect that causes stars to “twinkle”), which can be actively compensated for, revealing deep space objects that would have otherwise been impossible to resolve from ground-based telescopes.

ANALYSIS: Astronomers Bounce Radar Off Monster Space Peanut

But it was 624 Hektor’s moon’s orbit that also contributed to the complexities of the observation. “(T)he orbit of the satellite is so bizarre that we had to develop a complex new algorithm to be able to pin it down and understand its stability over time,” added Marchis.

With assistance from the Institut de Mécanique Céleste et de Calcul des Éphémérides (IMCCE) of the Observatoire de Paris, the moon was found to orbit 624 Hektor every 3 days at a distance of 600 kilometers (372 miles) in an ellipse inclined to 45 degrees from the asteroid’s equator

“The orbit of the moon is elliptical and tilted relative to the spin of Hektor, which is very different from other asteroids with satellites seen in the main-belt,” said SETI Institute scientist and co-author Matija Cuk. “However, we did computer simulations, which include Hektor being a spinning football shape asteroid and orbiting the sun, and we found that the moon’s orbit is stable over billions of years.”

With these observations, the researchers have been able to theorize how 624 Hektor came to form in the strange bi-lobe shape and why it has its own moon. Using Keck II and photometric observations of the asteroid since 1957, the researchers managed to refine the asteroid’s shape and they believe the system was created through the slow collision of two asteroids that fused together. The moon was formed from ejecta from this collision.

“We built several models of equal quality from the photometric data, but we favored a model made of two lobes since some of the best adaptive optics observations suggest that the Trojan asteroid has a dual structure,” said Josef Durech, co-author and researcher at the Charles University in Prague.

Also, it appears Hektor didn’t originate at Jupiter’s orbit; it migrated from the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy rocky bodies around the orbit of Pluto, during the early history of the solar system.

“We also show that Hektor could be made of a mixture of rock and ices, similar to the composition of Kuiper belt objects, Triton and Pluto,” said Julie Castillo-Rogez, researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “How Hektor became a Trojan asteroid, located at only 5 times the Earth–sun distance, is probably related to the large scale reshuffling that occurred when the giant planets were still migrating.”

These fascinating results have been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Eight years after its discovery, Hektor’s moon remains nameless and Marchis and his team will consider any nomination from the public. If I had to make a suggestion, I’d vote for the name Astyanax, the son of Hector, Crown Prince of Troy and Princess Andromache of Cilician Thebe. Unfortunately, Astyanax has a rather gnarly and untimely death according to Greek mythology, so the discoverers may want to seek out another, more palatable name for their bizarre little asteroid satellite. (That said, I’m still voting for Astyanax.)

NOTE: There is, in fact, an asteroid named 1871 Astyanax, another Trojan asteroid. But my nomination still stands for Astyanax, little moon of Hektor. The IAU may need some convincing, however.

Source: SETI Institute

Construction of Giant Telescope in Hawaii Could Begin This Summer.

Construction of a massive telescope triple the size of the world's largest current optical telescopes is set to begin on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano this year.

The Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT), which will consist of interlocking, segmented mirrors with a diameter totaling 30 meters (98 feet), has raised 83 percent of its funding, and builders could break ground by this summer, the project's leaders say.

"We're really ready to go with this telescope," Dr. Michael Bolte, associate director for the TMT project, said last month at a meeting of the American Astronomical Association in Washington, D.C. [Thirty Meter Telescope: Hawaii's Giant Space Eye (Gallery)]

If construction goes ahead on schedule, the telescope will have its "first light" in 2022. 

The TMT is closely modeled on technology used by the twin 10-m Keck telescopes in Hawaii, currently some of the world's most powerful optical telescopes.  The TMT will have nine times the light-collecting power of Keck, and 12 times sharper images than the Hubble Space Telescope using the tools of adaptive optics, Bolte said.

The new observatory will enable exciting new studies of the first epoch of star formation, the assembly and evolution of galaxies, the discovery and characterization of exoplanets, and other areas.

Like all ground-based telescopes, the TMT will be subject to atmospheric turbulence, which is the reason why stars appear to twinkle. But the TMT will have technology known as adaptive optics to "de-blur" the images it captures with its giant mirror.

Design is underway for a suite of sophisticated instruments. The Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (IRIS) and The Infrared Multi-object Spectrometer (IRMS) will be able to study the chemical composition, or spectra, of astronomical objects in near-infrared light, and will be capable of "diffraction limited" imaging, which has a resolution as good as the instrument's theoretical limit. The Wide Field Optical Spectrometer (WFOS) will enable imaging and spectroscopy in visible and near-ultraviolet light.

The project has spent $120 million on the design of the observatory, and the operations cost will by $27 million per year, Bolte said. Refurbishing costs tack on another $12 million. Funding for the project is still 17 percent short, however, Bolte said.

Nevertheless, the project received a building permit in 2011, and initial preparation of the Mauna Kea site began in August 2013.  Construction is nominally set to begin in April, though Bolte said it would more likely happen this summer.

The TMT project is an international collaboration between Caltech, the University of California, the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Department of Science and Technology of India.

Source: Space.com

Could Jupiter become a star?

NASA's Galileo spacecraft arrived at Jupiter on December 7, 1995, and proceeded to study the giant planet for almost 8 years. It sent back a tremendous amount of scientific information that revolutionized our understanding of the Jovian system. By the end of its mission, Galileo was worn down. Instruments were failing and scientists were worried they wouldn't be able to communicate with the spacecraft in the future. If they lost contact, Galileo would continue to orbit the Jupiter and potentially crash into one of its icy moons.

Galileo would certainly have Earth bacteria on board, which might contaminate the pristine environments of the Jovian moons, and so NASA decided it would be best to crash Galileo into Jupiter, removing the risk entirely. Although everyone in the scientific community were certain this was the safe and wise thing to do, there were a small group of people concerned that crashing Galileo into Jupiter, with its Plutonium thermal reactor, might cause a cascade reaction that would ignite Jupiter into a second star in the Solar System.

Hydrogen bombs are ignited by detonating plutonium, and Jupiter's got a lot of hydrogen.Since we don't have a second star, you'll be glad to know this didn't happen. Could it have happened? Could it ever happen? The answer, of course, is a series of nos. No, it couldn't have happened. There's no way it could ever happen… or is there?

Jupiter is mostly made of hydrogen, in order to turn it into a giant fireball you'd need oxygen to burn it. Water tells us what the recipe is. There are two atoms of hydrogen to one atom of oxygen. If you can get the two elements together in those quantities, you get water.

In other words, if you could surround Jupiter with half again more Jupiter's worth of oxygen, you'd get a Jupiter plus a half sized fireball. It would turn into water and release energy. But that much oxygen isn't handy, and even though it's a giant ball of fire, that's still not a star anyway. In fact, stars aren't "burning" at all, at least, not in the combustion sense.

Our Sun produces its energy through fusion. The vast gravity compresses hydrogen down to the point that high pressure and temperatures cram hydrogen atoms into helium. This is a fusion reaction. It generates excess energy, and so the Sun is bright. And the only way you can get a reaction like this is when you bring together a massive amount of hydrogen. In fact… you'd need a star's worth of hydrogen. Jupiter is a thousand times less massive than the Sun. One thousand times less massive. In other words, if you crashed 1000 Jupiters together, then we'd have a second actual Sun in our Solar System.

But the Sun isn't the smallest possible star you can have. In fact, if you have about 7.5% the mass of the Sun's worth of hydrogen collected together, you'll get a red dwarf star. So the smallest red dwarf star is still about 80 times the mass of Jupiter. You know the drill, find 79 more Jupiters, crash them into Jupiter, and we'd have a second star in the Solar System.

There's another object that's less massive than a red dwarf, but it's still sort of star like: a brown dwarf. This is an object which isn't massive enough to ignite in true fusion, but it's still massive enough that deuterium, a variant of hydrogen, will fuse. You can get a brown dwarf with only 13 times the mass of Jupiter. Now that's not so hard, right? Find 13 more Jupiters, crash them into the planet?

As was demonstrated with Galileo, igniting Jupiter or its hydrogen is not a simple matter.

We won't get a second star unless there's a series of catastrophic collisions in the Solar System.

And if that happens… we'll have other problems on our hands.

Source: PHYSORG

Tiny Blobs and Tunnels in Meteorite Revive Debate Over Life on Mars.

Eighteen years after a Martian meteorite sparked a debate over alien-looking "nanofossils," researchers are reporting that different structures inside an even bigger space rock suggest biological processes might have been at work on the Red Planet hundreds of millions of years ago.

"We're convinced that this is another one of the important data points that is going toward answering the big question: Was there life on Mars?" Everett Gibson, a researcher at NASA's Johnson Space Center who was involved in both studies, told NBC News.

He made clear, however, that even the latest study won't settle the big question. "We don't come out and say we have found life on Mars," Gibson said.

Microscopic structures

Gibson and his colleagues focused on microscopic structures deep within a 30-pound (13.5 kilogram) meteorite known as Yamato 000593, which was found in Antarctica by a Japanese team in 2000. An analysis of the rock's composition showed that it was formed on Mars about 1.3 billion years ago and altered by interaction with water on Mars. Scientists say the rock was blasted into space by a cosmic impact and fell to Earth within the past 10,000 years.

In February's issue of the journal Astrobiology, the research team — led by Lauren White of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory — describes microscopic tunnels that thread their way through the meteorite's interior, as well as tiny blobs of carbon-rich minerals that are embedded within layers of rock.

This photomicrograph shows bands of minerals inside a meteorite from Mars, including "micro-tunnels" that researchers say are suggestive of microbial weathering.

The red circle in this photomicrograph highlights spherules in a meteorite from Mars that are enriched in carbon, compared with the background material indicated within the blue circle.

The team says such structures are suggestive of ancient weathering through biological processes. If the meteorite had come from the bottom of Earth's oceans, "we'd say, 'Gee, this rock contains evidence that there was microbial activity that was eating away at the rock,'" Gibson said.

The researchers emphasize that they "cannot exclude the possibility that the carbon-rich regions in both sets of features" are the product of non-biological processes. However, they say the "textural and compositional similarities to features in terrestrial samples, which have been interpreted as biogenetic, imply the intriguing possibility that the Martian features were formed by biotic activity."

White told NBC News that she didn't want to make any "life on Mars" claim prematurely. "I definitely don't think this is a 'smoking gun' paper," she said. "I want the reader to decide in the context of everything that we show."

Revisiting controversy

A similar tale was told in 1996 about a Martian meteorite known as ALH84001. Back then, researchers said that chemical analysis as well as wormlike features they called nanofossils supported their view that life was once present. The report caused a sensation — but other experts insisted that the features weren't biological in origin. As a result, the "life on Mars" claims faded into scientific limbo.

Since then, Gibson and other researchers who were involved in the original ALH84001 study have been trying to gather more evidence for their case. White joined the team as a summer-session researcher in 2007 and was asked to take a close look at Yamato 000593. "Who's going to turn that down, right?" she said.

White was intrigued by the micro-tunnels and the spherules, and worked with other researchers to determine they were similar to geological features on Earth created through biological processes. The key challenge was to show that the features were the result of activity on Mars rather than earthly contamination. "Whatever these are, they definitely came from Mars," White said.

One of the paper's authors was NASA scientist David McKay, who took center stage during the controversy over ALH84001. McKay died a year ago after a long struggle with heart problems. His health difficulties complicated the years-long publication process.

"He was actually working on this paper the day he passed away," White said. "I promised his wife that I would publish this paper, because it meant so much to him to keep this work going."

Skepticism persists

Most planetary scientists accept the view that Mars was once warmer, wetter and more Earthlike — and thus more hospitable to life — than it is today. It's also plausible to suggest that if life did exist on ancient Mars, it should have left characteristic traces in rocks from the Red Planet. But the evidence laid out in the Astrobiology paper isn't likely to settle the controversy.

"I don't think the science community will find 'textural and compositional similarities' compelling enough to be proof of a biological origin," Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center and no relation to David McKay, told NBC News in an email.

We have our critics, and that's what science is all about."

Gibson acknowledged that the case for life on Mars is far from closed. "We have our critics, and that's what science is all about," he said.

He and his colleagues are following up on their findings with more detailed chemical analysis. "We have to go to the next step of going in there and tearing these carbon molecules apart," Gibson said.

NASA's Curiosity rover is searching for evidence of organic carbon on the Red Planet. But to settle the big question conclusively will probably require bringing fresh rock samples back from Mars and analyzing them on Earth with high-precision scientific instruments. That could take a decade or more.

"Until that time, we need to use the best thing we have," Gibson said, "and that's the meteorites from Mars."

In addition to White, Gibson and McKay, the authors of "Putative Indigenous Carbon-Bearing Alteration Features in Martian Meteorite Yamato 000593"include Kathie Thomas-Keprta and Simon Clemett.

NBC News' Alan Boyle will discuss the latest from Mars as well as developments in commercial spaceflight from 10 to 11:30 p.m. ET Tuesday on "The Space Show," a live streaming-audio program hosted by Dr. David M. Livingston.

Source: NBC News

Water Found in Atmosphere of Nearby Alien Planet.

Water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of one of the first alien planets ever identified by astronomers.

Advances in the technique used to scan the atmosphere of this "hot Jupiter" could help scientists determine how many of the billions of planets in the Milky Way contain water like Earth, researchers said.

The exoplanet Tau Boötis b was discovered in 1996, when the search for worlds outside our solar system was just kicking off. At about 51 light-years away, Tau Boötis b is one of the nearest known exoplanets to Earth. The planet is considered a "hot Jupiter" because it is a massive gas giant that orbits close to its parent star. [A Gallery of the Strangest Alien Planets]

To analyze the atmosphere surrounding Tau Boötis b, scientists looked at its faint glow. Different types of molecules emit different wavelengths of light, resulting in signatures known as spectra that reveal their chemical identify.

"The information we get from the spectrograph is like listening to an orchestra performance; you hear all of the music together, but if you listen carefully, you can pick out a trumpet or a violin or a cello, and you know that those instruments are present," study researcher Alexandra Lockwood, a graduate student at Caltech, explained in a statement.

"With the telescope, you see all of the light together, but the spectrograph allows you to pick out different pieces; like this wavelength of light means that there is sodium, or this one means that there’s water," Lockwood added.

Scientists have used spectrographic analyses to find water signatures on other alien planets before, but only when those worlds passed in front of their parent stars. Tau Boötis b does not transit in front of its parent star from our viewpoint on Earth, but Lockwood and colleagues were able to tease out the weak light emitted by the planet using the Near Infrared Echelle Spectrograph (NIRSPEC) at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Researchers had previously used a similar technique to find carbon monoxide around Tau Boötis b. That compound is thought to be the second-most common gas in the atmospheres of hot Jupiters, after hydrogen.

The new analysis showed that the glow of the planet's atmosphere matches the distinct molecular signature of water, the researchers say.

The spectrographic technique is presently limited to big planets orbiting closely to bright stars, like hot Jupiters, but it could eventually be used to study super-Earths (planets slightly larger than Earth) and worlds in the "habitable zone" around their parent stars, where liquid water and perhaps life as we know it could exist.

"While the current state of the technique cannot detect Earth-like planets around stars like the sun, with Keck it should soon be possible to study the atmospheres of the so-called 'super-Earth' planets being discovered around nearby low-mass stars, many of which do not transit," Caltech professor Geoffrey Blake said in a statement.

"Future telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will enable us to examine much cooler planets that are more distant from their host stars and where liquid water is more likely to exist," Blake added.

Astronomers found the first evidence of an exoplanet in 1992. Since then, more than 1,000 worlds have been discovered outside of our solar system, and many more await confirmation.

The new findings were detailed in the Feb. 24 online version of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The results are also freely available on the preprint service Arxiv.

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @SPACEdotcom,Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

No Mars For Muslims? Mars One Asks Imams To Rescind Fatwa.

Martian colonization is a risky proposition. So risky, in fact, that a group of Islamic leaders in the United Arab Emirates issued a religious ruling saying Muslims should not go to the Red Planet. The General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment (GAIAE) ruling compares a Mars mission to suicide, and says that those who attempt it can expect the same consequences in the afterlife. In fact, GAIAE went so far as to claim that those seeking to escape God's judgment on Mars would be unable to do so, saying: "This is an absolutely baseless and unacceptable belief because not even an atom falls outside the purview of Allah, the Creator of everything."

Martian colonization is certainly dangerous. NASA's Curiosity rover has found water in Martian soil, but it also found toxic chlorine gas. There are promising signs of flowing water, though that's still uncertain. Even if space travelers had sufficient food, water, and heat, the confined spaces and isolation of a Mars colony would be really bad for colonists' mental health. Plus, high levels of radiation would likely make Martian humans quite sick. On top of all of this, the nearest non-colonist humans will be anywhere from 34 million to 250 million miles away, making any rescue mission difficult, if not impossible.

Private Mars colonization organization Mars One still thinks the journey is worth it. Today, they issued a response to GAIAE, citing the Quran and the specific example of Ibn Battuta, a 14th century explorer.

"And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the variations in your languages and your colors: verily in that are Signs for those who know." (Quran 30: 22)
The Muslim world has a rich tradition of exploration. The verse from the Quran above encourages Muslims to go out and see the signs of God’s creation in the ‘heavens and the earth’. The most influential example of this was the Moroccan Muslim traveller, Ibn Battuta, who from 1325 to 1355 travelled 73,000 miles, visiting the equivalent of 44 modern countries. Among the countries Ibn Battuta visited were Russia, Afghanistan, India, the Maldives, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and China. 

  Mars One continues, imploring the imams to rescind the ruling, and instead think of the risk to humanity posed by not colonizing Mars.

If we may be so bold: the GAIAE should not analyze the risk as they perceive it today. The GAIAE should assess the potential risk for humans as if an unmanned habitable outpost is ready and waiting on Mars. Only when that outpost is established will human lives be risked in Mars One's plan. With eight successful consecutive landing and a habitable settlement waiting on Mars, will the human mission be risk-free? Of course not. Any progress requires taking risks, but in this case the reward is 'the next giant leap for mankind'. That reward is certainly worth the risks involved in this mission. 
Mars One respectfully requests GAIAE to cancel the Fatwa and make the greatest Rihla, or journey, of all times open for Muslims too. They can be the first Muslims to witness the signs of God’s creation in heaven, drawing upon the rich culture of travel and exploration of early Islam.

Read more about Mars One here.

Source: Popular Science

Space research pays for itself, but inspires fewer people.

To say space research is a waste of money is wrong. For every US$1 put into US space agency, its citizens get US$10 as payback; in Japan and the European Union that amount is more than US$3. 

The growing private space industry is built around these government space programs and would not exist without them. The UK's annual US$500m contribution to the European Space Agency (ESA) has catalysed the formation of the fastest growing industry. Its private space industry contributes US$15.2 billion a year to the economy. Similarly, Japan's US$2.3 billion into the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has enabled its private space industry to contribute US$31 billion.

Not only do space agencies pay for themselves directly, they create jobs and are boosting the global economy by US$300 billion annually through private industry.

The thousands of inventions and innovations spun out from space research have become an integral part of our daily life: weather forecasting, satellite television and communications, disaster relief, traffic management, agricultural and water management, and global positioning system (GPS), are but just a few.

As space research required bigger and bigger investment, the nature of international research changed. The space race became a space collaboration, which is symbolised by the International Space Station.

If nothing else, as Pete Worden, Centre Director of NASA Ames, told me, "Space is cool". It inspires the new generation of kids.

The Apollo missions inspired a generation. The number of US graduates in the science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM subjects), from high-school through to PhD, has doubled. The relative growth rate since then has dropped drastically, even though the total number has gone up. Doubling a population's scientific literacy when it is living in a world so dependent on science and technology was a good move, and it slung the US into the dominant position it has stood in for the past five decades.

While they still inspire, some would say today's space agencies lack direction. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, said, "Instead of pioneering new worlds like those explorers of the past, we have left our sailors in the harbour for half a century to see the health effects from doing so".

The average annual expenditure of NASA during the Apollo Era was US$23 billion in today's money. NASA's average spend in the last decade was US$17 billion. Even with similar budgets, the progress made in the last decade is simply not comparable to what was achieved in the 1960s.

Space research has opened our eyes to real risks we face as a species: global warming, asteroids impacts, vulnerable ozone layer, and even warning about how our electronics would be affected by the sun.

Dreaming big

One way to push the speed of progress would be to make life multi-planetary. Visionaries like Astronmer Royal Martin Rees believe explorers would have a human base on Mars by 2100. He claims that if do not spread soon this will be "our final century".

Space agencies around the world are slowly converging on the grand challenge of sending a manned mission to Mars. Mars is the next logical step. Zubrin said, "The Moon is to Mars, what Greenland was to North America in the previous age of exploration".

Mars has all of the resources required for a technological civilisation. With a 24.6 hour day, fertile soil, a CO₂ rich atmosphere, and an abundance of water, the introduction of flora is a real near-term possibility. Transformation of the atmosphere into something more hospitable may not remain science fiction.

But it is no longer reasonable to just assume that the first human expedition to Mars will be carried out by astronauts from the US or Europe. As the late Jacob Bronowski once put it, "Humanity has a right to change its colours".

Through industrialisation, the economies of China and India have been doubling in scale every decade, and are forecast to overtake the US by 2023 and 2048 respectively. Though some are still resistant, the West has slowly begun to realise that if it does not take the next step for humanity, someone else will.

Some believe that a manned mission to Mars would require multi-national collaborative effort, however Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of ESA, has said:

Coupling this ever growing obsession we in the West have with risk aversion, to the bureaucracy and difficulty of international collaboration, though I really want us to do it, such a mission would be impossible for us to achieve.

Two privately funded teams, Inspiration Mars and Mars One, are set on sending a manned mission either to or around Mars in the coming decade. But Elon Musk, who leads SpaceX, is worried that the real question is not who, but when. He wonders "for how long humanity will have the technical capability of sending people into and beyond orbit."

Source: PHYSORG

RoboDoc to the rescue: NASA to send robotic doctor to space

NASA is developing a humanoid robot to perform medical procedures, including surgery, at the International Space Station and even en route to Mars.
The robot, which is named 'Robonaut 2,' is now undergoing further development and tests at Houston Methodist Research Institute.

Dr. Zsolt Garami, an instructor at the institute, told Computerworld that there is already a robot at the space station that can perform basic tasks, such as pressing buttons. However, he stated that Robonaut could serve a different, more advanced purpose than its predecessor - by acting as a nurse or physician.
"Our motivation was really when we saw astronauts perform ultrasounds on each other or on themselves. Why not have a robot help? There's already a robot up in the space station, and he's already shown that he can switch buttons reliably. Why not make him a nurse or a physician?" said Garami.
Robonaut 2, or 'R2,' is the twin of an earlier R2 robot which was taken to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2011.
It has taken about 11 years to build the $2.5 million robot, which runs on 38 PowerPC processors. Those processors include 36 embedded chips that control the joints in its legs and arms.
Garami said he is confident that the robot will not have any trouble at the ISS, adding that his humanoid student is working much faster and more dexterously than his human students.
"I would say that within an hour I trained him more than with other students I've been working with for a week, so I think he's learning really fast," Garami said in a video released by NASA.
In the video, the automaton performs an ultrasound scan on a mannequin and demonstrates using a syringe as if it were giving an injection.

"His motions, without shaky hands, are very precise and gentle. There were no sudden motions," Garami told Computerworld.
Research shows that robots may be better at carrying out certain kinds of surgery than humans.
A study by the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 2008 showed that patients who underwent minimally invasive heart-bypass surgery using a robot had shorter hospital stays, faster recovery times, and fewer complications than patients who had undergone traditional surgery.
Garami wants Robonaut to perform surgery in space one day.
"Say you're sending two people to Mars and one has a medical emergency. One astronaut needs help but they're going to be 15 to 20 minutes with no video signal. They're left alone with no connection to Earth...I feel Robonaut could be a partner for them, helping them," he said.
Robonaut can't perform surgery just yet, but it is just about ready to perform CPR.
But Garami also has earthly intentions for Robonaut, believing the robot could be a huge asset to the military. He says that instead of sending a nurse or an army medic to save a life, Robonaut could carry the soldier out of danger and give medical assistance at the same time.
A spokesperson for NASA was a bit more grounded about how soon Robonaut might be on active duty, whether in space or on the battlefield.
"We are really just starting to explore this capability down here on the ground, and theirs is a significant amount of research to do before we would be able to make the jump to space," he said.

Source: Voice of Russia

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At Mars, Is the Doctor In?

It sounds like something from a science-fiction survival film: A colleague on a Martian outpost breaks a leg during an extra-vehicular activity (EVA), but not far from base. Brought back safely, the colleague is unconscious and losing blood. To make matters worse, the immediate crew includes someone trained in foundational medical practices, but to reset the bone and properly close the wound, this team needs guidance.
Recently, the MarsCrew134 Analogue Astronaut Expedition simulated a mission to Mars over the course of two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the Utah desert. Dr. Susan Jewell, MarsCrew134 Medical Officer and founder of the International Space Surgery Consortium, led an experiment to play out the above emergency medical scenario.

 The scenario began outdoors with a crew member down. Jewell conducted a spinal assessment, as best as possible given the limitations of the suit. Two additional crew members brought the "injured" colleague back to a make-shift operating table on base. A dummy used in hospital training acted as the Marsonaut in need of aid while Jewell and team scientist Vibha Srivastava prepared to perform surgery with minimal, prior training.
To help and guide the MarsCrew134 team, they called for help: Doctors on "Earth" (Matthieu Komorowski in Lille, France, the medical officer of MarsCrew133) and "Mars" (the European Space Agency (ESA) Concordia research team in Antarctica) joined the operation remotely. The goal of the experiment was to determine if minimally trained crew personnel could perform anesthesia, and even an operation, in an emergency.
Doctors stationed at the ESA Concordia research station in Antarctica simulated another human outpost on Mars, with nearly real-time communication. As signals between Earth and Mars take between a half dozen and twenty-two minutes to propagate, one-way, "The patient has stopped breathing! What should I do?" would likely result in the patient dying before the reply was received.
In this particular scenario, a Skype session invoked a 3- to 5-second delay in video and audio, due to the latency of the satellite feeds on both ends. This relatively minimal delay, combined with poor visual quality and intermittent sound was ample to invoke many of the issues imposed by Earth-to-Mars communication. It was not easy!
Once the operation was underway, a computer software system simulated the patient's vital signs based on real-life data correlated to that particular kind of injury. The prospects did not look good: The patient had lost one liter of blood and was in shock. In this case, it was vital to anesthetize and treat the wound. Blood pressure was 57/38, heart rate was 127 beats per minute, respiration was 24 breaths per minute, and oxygen saturation was 94 percent.
Following the materials checklist under Komorowski's supervision, the crew members addressed suction, oxygen, airway, drugs, intravenous fluids (IV) and monitors — all confirmed in working order and ready.

nce the IV was in place, Komorowski instructed the fluid to be administered at the highest setting. Oxygen was given through a face mask. Komorowski described getting the intubation tube into place with Concordia stepping in to give advice. The procedure was delayed by a tube getting lost in the hectic action, but with Komorowski's approval, Jewell and Srivastava improvised and found a way to make the situation work.
Jewell and Srivastava got the job done, and the patient survived. Drugs administered brought the patient back to consciousness and the eyes opened and responded to basic input, such as the squeezing of hands. The patient was anesthetized and conscious!
To treat the wound, Concordia base doctors Tindari Ceraolo and Adrianos Golemis took over, leading their colleagues on Mars. The two sites were using a satellite feed for the telesurgery — video was blurry and unreliable. To compensate for the difficult circumstances, Jewell described in detail what the MDRS crew was seeing and doing.
ESA-sponsored medical doctor in Antarctica, Adrianos Golemis, instructed Jewell to clean the wound while Komorowski monitored the vital signs from France. From needle size to insertion angle, Golemis directed the MarsCrew134 how to sterilize, clean and sew up the wound and protect it with gauze.
The operation was over in less than an hour, and most importantly the simulated "patient" survived to see another Martian sunrise.

Srivastava had been helping Jewell throughout the procedure on-site at the MarsCrew134 habitat, and as a crew scientist without a medical background she found it difficult to follow some of the technical instructions such as 'auscultate chest.' Future experiments might benefit from labeling equipment so crew members can find what is needed more quickly. Reaching for tools was a struggle and coordination was difficult. Without prior training, such things are unavoidable.
During the debriefing, Jewell remarked, "Finding the challenges and working out how to solve them s what all this is about." Similar, future endeavors are in development by the International Space Surgery Consortium.
To learn more about MarsCrew134, visit www.marscrew134.org.

This article is adapted from one that appeared on the European Space Agency blog Chronicles from Concordia. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Space.com.