A team of six
aquanauts and two handy robotic surgeons will plunge into the Atlantic Ocean
Monday to test new medical and exploration tools for long duration spaceflight.
Led by U.S.
spaceflyer Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, a crew astronauts, doctors and
divers will descend to an undersea laboratory off the Florida coast at 10:00
a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) to kick off NASA's Extreme Environment Missions Operations
(NEEMO) 12 expedition. Piper, NASA astronaut Jose Hernandez and four crewmates
plan to spend the next 12 days staging mock moonwalks and telerobotic surgery
experiments at Aquarius, an
ocean floor laboratory 67 feet (20 meters) underwater near Key Largo,
Florida.
"Telemedicine and robotic surgery could be the key to
maintaining the health of future spacefarers and responding to medical
emergencies in space," said NEEMO 12 crewmember Tim Broderick, a
gastrointestinal surgeon from the University of Cincinnati, of the mission.
During NEEMO 12 crew, Broderick will evaluate the
performance of the 50-pound
(22-kilogram) Raven robot, a portable two-armed automaton built by
researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the M7 surgical
robot constructed by Menlo Park, California's SRI International for possible spaceflight
applications.
Both robots are designed to be operated remotely by surgeons
on land, with a team of three doctors to command Raven via the Internet from
consoles at the University of Washington's BioRobotics Laboratory in Seattle. The robots will be guided through a series of tasks on a simulated patient.
Working alongside Broderick will be Josef Schmid, NASA's
first flight surgeon ever to visit the Aquarius laboratory.
"Schmid's
unique experience in space medicine will benefit the mission itself as well as
the future development of crew care techniques for long-duration human
spaceflight missions," said Bill Todd, NASA's NEEMO project manager at the
agency's Johnson Space Center astronaut training facility in Houston, Texas.
Divers
James Talacek and Dominic Landucci, of the University of North Carolina at
Wilmington which oversees Aquarius for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, round out the NEEMO 12 crew.
Raven
researchers said their surgical robot relies on smaller computers and power
sources that can be disassembled and packed into dive bags for the descent down
to Aquarius. But perhaps most important, Raven engineers provided the NEEMO 12
crew with an instructional manual to assemble the robot and troubleshoot any
unforeseen problems, they added.
"When you build a technology as a lab prototype, it
takes someone with a Ph.D. six weeks to put it together," said Blake
Hannaford, co-director of the University of Washington's BioRobotics Laboratory.
"If you build something for the field, it's got to be repairable, modular
and robust."
Stefanyshyn-Piper,
a trained U.S. Navy salvage diver, is a veteran of two spacewalks and 12 days
in space during NASA's STS-115 construction flight to the International Space
Station in September 2006. Broderick is making a return trip to Aquarius, where
he worked as part of the undersea
station's NEEMO 9 crew in April 2006.
"We need to
figure out better ways to care for astronauts before we make the long trip to
Mars," Broderick said.
advertisement
