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Starting with the upcoming launch of space shuttle Discovery, we have our sights set on traveling further into space than ever before. As this ScienCentral News video reports, scientists have developed incredibly tiny, self-assembling machines that could one day help keep spacecraft on course during extended missions.
Where No Man Has Gone Before
More than thirty years after the first moon landing, President Bush has once again set our sights on the moon…and beyond. "We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon, and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own," he said in a speech in 2004.
Journeys to distant planets would take many years. So for some time now, NASA has been considering how to accommodate all the equipment and supplies on board that might be needed for long space voyages lasting up to a decade or longer. "NASA asked me, and a number of other investigators, to look over the horizon at technologies that could be developed to support the interplanetary travel of astronauts," explains Carlo Montemagno, Chair in biomedical engineering and professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles. "One of the ideas that I came up with was using little micro-robotic devices that would be used to perform repair of the spacecraft, or exploration missions or build things very similar to the way ants and termites do." Individually they would be of little use, but the micro-devices would work together as a colony to do jobs together, such as seeking out and repairing damage caused by micrometeorites.
Originally just a pie-in-the-sky idea, Montemagno has now created incredibly tiny, muscle-powered machines – about one and a half times the width of a human hair – that could one day help astronauts keep things running aboard spacecraft.
image: Carlo Montemagno, David Lombardi and Cassanna Ouellette
Montemagno and his research team used rat heart muscle cells, which grew and assembled themselves into a functioning heart muscle fiber attached to a tiny, arched silicon skeleton. "Individual cells grow and self-assemble into muscle bundles that are integrated with silicon skeleton of the bots," he explains.
The researchers coated their tiny, silicon skeletons in a special kind of heat-sensitive plastic polymer, so that the muscle fiber could only attach to the silicon in the desired places. The polymer, called poly-N-isopropylacrylamide, was designed to get hard when it's hot (100ËšF) and melt when it cools. "When muscles work they get fatter and thinner when they contract and expand. If you just grow muscles onto a surface, they attach to the surface it can't expand and contract as they are contained by the surface," Montemagno says. On top of the plastic they deposited a stencil, called a shadow mask, of chemicals that tells the muscle cells where to grow.
"We then take it out of the incubator, this plastic then melts, and now the muscle's free. Now the muscle can move back and forth," says Montemagno. The heart muscle fibers spontaneously contract in the same way they do with each heartbeat throughout our lives – without tiring – making the tiny machines move. "It doesn't dance yet, but it does walk and it can go round in circles and things like that."
The idea of using living muscle to power "microelectromechanical systems" or MEMS is a popular alternative to tiny motors. While motors need electricity, muscles can draw their energy from glucose.
Montemagno imagines the silicon skeletons being made as easily was we make microchips, and due to their tiny size they could be easily transported into space. "You would have a hundred million skeletons that you would keep in a test tube," he explains. "And then, when you needed the robot, you would harvest some cells from the astronauts, stick them together, and – poof – they would grow together and you would have robotic devices." But he knows that the ability to make his muscle-bots communicate and work together like a colony of ants is still decades away.
The muscle-bots might also someday help people who have lost the ability to breathe on their own, for example from a spinal cord injury, to breathe without the help of a ventilator. "We're working on a device for pacing the diaphragm for people who have high central nervous system injuries…like Christopher Reeve-type accidents, where the spinal cord has been severed, and so the information that comes from the brain to tell a person to breathe is no longer there," says Montemagno.
In the meantime, the muscle-bots offer the opportunity to study single muscle fiber – which no one has been able to do before – to test the forces and rates of contraction, as well as studying the issue of muscle deterioration in astronauts, and " for evaluating different drugs and seeing how drugs focus on the changes in metabolism and see how that ultimately affects the function of your muscle," Montemagno adds.
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