Life Imitates Star Trek: NASA Pursues Life Scanner
With scientists attempting to build technology to locate life on other worlds, they may be constructing a useful device to locate lost future travelers hiking on foreign soils.
(Red Orbit) NASA-funded researchers are refining a tool that could not only check for the faintest traces of life’s molecular building blocks on Mars, but could also determine whether they have been produced by anything alive. [...]
“Urey will be able to detect key molecules associated with life at a sensitivity roughly a million times greater than previous instrumentation,” said Dr. Jeffrey Bada of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Bada is the principal investigator for an international team of scientists and engineers working on various components of the device.
Despite the fact it may be a century before we find any signs of life on Mars (although we may have settled the planet by then), this life scanner could prove to be quite useful not only on planets, but for detecting life aboard dying space craft as well (an advanced version for rescuers that is).
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Space Doctor, Anyone?
Despite the fact that science fiction shows usually cast space doctors as a main character, it is ironic that we are only now seriously considering “casting a role” for one within our solar travels.
(Universe Today) If humans are going to be spending longer periods in space, on the Moon, or even on Mars, it’s just a matter of time before they’ll need surgery. Can delicate surgery even be done in the weightlessness? [...]Professor Adam Dubrowksi of surgery doesn’t see why not, and he’s making space surgery a focus of his research.
There’ll be a need for it once astronauts in the International Space Station begin to stay on board for extended periods, says Dubrowski, who is also a kinesiologist in the Surgical Skills Centre at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Although astronauts are given some medical training (several hours at best), a skilled physician will be a “necessary good” onboard, especially for deep space missions towards the Moon or even Mars.
The Canadian Space Agency is already planning to develop a “surgery training protocol” for future astronaut doctors, in order to make sure that they are prepared for operating within a microgravity environment.
(Universe Today) Space-surgery training will be three-pronged, Dubrowski explains. The first step is adaptation to zero gravity using an inverted paradigm in which experimental participants are placed upside down on something similar to a bed to “get more of an idea of weightlessness.”
The second step will be simulating zero gravity in a swimming pool [...]
Third, trainees will take their basic surgery skills on parabolic flights in which an airplane ascends and descends roughly 40 times, creating a transient zero-gravity environment on the descents.
These tests will probably be expanded once humanity establishes a strong presence on the Moon. Although medical personnel may become a common scene aboard the space station and elsewhere, hopefully they will be as exciting as the doctors seen on Star Trek or Babylon 5.
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Violators (and hosts) can be prosecuted under national and international laws.
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