"My goal is to make these arms become almost like the new paradigm for astronauts."
Call to Arms
We could all use a helping hand from time to time. And when you're an astronaut on the Moon, where the gravity is strange and your fine motor skills seem to desert you, you could find yourself in need of a handy pair of robot arms.
Enter "SuperLimbs," a system of wearable robotic limbs that attach to a spacesuit's life support backpack, making them more than slightly resemble the mechanical tentacles worn by Doctor Octopus. First developed a decade ago by an MIT professor, the device is designed to help astronauts get up when they unceremoniously fall during a moonwalk.
Whether an intrepid lunar explorer finds themselves flat on their face or like a turtle on its back, SuperLimbs can deploy an appendage or two to provide the extra push needed to get them on their feet again.
"My goal is to make these arms become almost like the new paradigm for astronauts," Erik Ballesteros, a MIT researcher who worked on SuperLimbs at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab over the summer, told CNN.
Moon Struggle
Tumbles are a real menace in low-gravity environments. As CNN notes citing a study, the astronauts who moonwalked during the Apollo missions fell or nearly fell close to fifty times in all. Repeatedly having to get up can be an exhausting — but kind of hilarious, we can all agree — struggle.
"Astronauts are physically very capable, but they can struggle on the moon, where gravity is one-sixth that of Earth's but their inertia is still the same," Harry Asada, a mechanical engineering professor at MIT who originally developed SuperLimbs, explained in a statement earlier this year. "Furthermore, wearing a spacesuit is a significant burden and can constrict their movements."
In its current form, the device is operated with a joystick-like controller, and preliminary tests so far using a prototype have shown that SuperLimbs helped test subjects get up with less effort.
The limbs also provide a less obvious advantage. Moondust is "super toxic," Ana Diaz Artiles, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M who was not involved in the device's development, told CNN — so the less time astronauts spend rolling around in it, the better.
Arm and a Leg
There are some questions surrounding SuperLimbs. Will they be robust enough to survive the harsh environment of space? And will they be useful enough to make up for the bulk they add? Ballesteros believes that in a year or two, these details will be ironed out for another human demo.
"We can't just duct tape and throw things together; we have to be very precise and very careful," he told CNN.
His goal is to eventually have the limbs double as functioning extra legs, allowing astronauts to move around "a lot quicker and without using as much energy," he said, helping them stabilize if they start to lose their footing.
"I want it to become almost like a natural extension of their bodies... so the astronaut almost feels awkward not having them," Ballesteros told CNN.
With any luck, maybe astronauts returning to the lunar surface on NASA's upcoming Artemis missions could be bumbling around with extra appendages.
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