A tiny robot is on its way to the International Space Station to prove remote space surgery possible
What would happen if, years from now, an astronaut felt sick during a space mission to Mars?
A trip to the Red Planet takes approximately seven months and over 480 million km, according to NASA. That’s not a small distance to navigate in a medical emergency.
It’s a problem that experts have been trying to solve for years, and the answer might be a tiny robot surgeon called MIRA (short for miniaturised in vivo robotic assistant), which will be sent to the ISS for a test mission in 2024.
MIRA is the creation of Shane Farritor, a professor of engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the US, who has been researching the technology behind the robot’s functioning for the past 20 years.
His team’s work has grasped the attention of NASA, who awarded the Nebraska university $100,000 to get the robot ready for deployment.
The tiny robot, which weighs less than a kilogram, essentially looks like a cylinder with two movable prongs at its bottom able to cut through human tissue and hold objects (and body parts).
But don’t be deceived by its relatively simple appearance.
According to its creators, MIRA can work both as an assistant to a doctor physically present in an operating room - as it’s so tiny it can be inserted inside a patient’s body through a small incision, allowing doctors to perform abdominal surgery in a minimally invasive way - and as a device allowing doctors to perform surgery remotely.
In this way, the robot is revolutionary, and could potentially allow astronauts involved in long, distant space missions, such as those to Mars, to be medically attended to in case of urgent need, even when a surgeon is not physically present.
Onboard the ISS, MIRA will work autonomously without the direction of an in-person
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