One day a surgeon on Earth could use this robot to treat an astronaut on Mars.
NASA is funding a tiny surgical robot, known as MIRA (minitaturized in-vivo robotic assistant), for a 2024 test mission aboard the International Space Station.
The space agency recently awarded $100,000 to startup Virtual Incision, based at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Nebraska Innovation Campus (NIC), where Shane Farritor has spent more than 15 years developing MIRA.
Now, he and engineering graduate student Rachael Wagner will spend another year writing software, configuring the bot, and «exhaustively» testing its use in space. MIRA is expected to get its turn aboard the ISS in 2024—nearly two decades since Virtual Incision’s founding in 2006.
«NASA has been a long-term supporter of this research and, as a culmination of that effort, our robot will have a chance to fly on the International Space Station,» Farritor, a UNL professor of engineering, said in a statement.
