Bedbugs no longer have it all their own way (Image: Tim Flach/Getty)
BEDBUGS have had it their own way for a long time, sucking our blood while we sleep and evading detection by dint of their nocturnal lifestyle and millimetre-scale bodies. Our first visit to a comet could mark the point where the tables began to turn. A portable bedbug detector that sniffs out the chemical signals they send to one another is just one of many unusual spin-offs from the Rosetta mission, which arrived at comet 67P late last year (see āRosettaās timelineā).
Itās not surprising that many space technologies soon make their way into less rarefied domains. āSpace stands for low-weight, robust, temperature-resistant technology that has to work,ā says Frank Salzgeber, head of technology transfer for the European Space Agency, which launched Rosetta. āFailure is not an option.ā
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āSpace tech is low-weight, robust, temperature-resistant and has to workā
Rosetta is an extreme example, first because of its decade-long journey through frigid, radiation-fried space to reach its target 800 million kilometres from the sun, and second for the fiddly operation to get its Philae lander on to comet 67Pās rough surface. āJust imagine you ordered your car 12 years ago and got it 10 years ago,ā says Salzgeber. āYou donāt refuel it, it never gets any maintenance and you really treat it like shit: you go to the desert, to Siberia and then on the last day you go to Monza, the motor-racing circuit. The carās papers say it will run at 250 kilometres per hour, so you test it. And it works.ā For a time, anyway ā a rather bumpy landing put Philae to sleep after just two days (see āCome in, cometā).
One of Philaeās tasks was to use a gas chromatograph to separate out organic compounds on the surface of the comet, and a mass spectrometer to compare them with those found on Earth. Mass spectrometers are generally the size of a small fridge, but Philaeās, called Ptolemy, is the size of a shoebox. Itās no coincidence that the new bedbug detector, named APOLLO, is not much bigger and works along exactly the same lines. āIām making an affordable version of Ptolemy,ā says Geraint Morgan of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, who helped design the Rosetta instrument. āAgain we sniff, we separate and we detect.ā
Morgan is working on APOLLO as part of a spin-off company, , together with Jason Littler, a pest controller based in Manchester, UK. Some of the funding is coming from an ESA business incubation centre based at Harwell, UK, one of a network the agency has established across Europe.
Bedbugs beware
Whereas Ptolemy sniffs cometary gases, APOLLO is after pheromones released by bedbugs to attract mates and as a warning signal to others. Bedbugs were all but wiped out in the Western world after the second world war, but numbers have surged in recent years because of pesticide resistance and increased international travel. The detector is being tried out in hotels around Manchester.
Morgan is also involved in another sniffer spin-off. This time the aim is to detect Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that causes stomach ulcers and can raise risk of stomach cancer. In many developing countries where H. pylori is a particular problem, access to labs that can carry out necessary blood and breath tests can be limited. The company Oxford Micro Medical is developing a reusable, smartphone-sized alternative called a mass discriminator card. First the person being tested has to swallow a tablet containing urea labelled with a heavy isotope of carbon, carbon-13. If they are carrying H. pylori, it will break down this urea and the heavy isotope will wind up in exhaled carbon dioxide, where it can be detected by the card.
Like Insect Research Systems, is partly funded by ESA. Morgan says he and his team are āironing out a few wrinklesā, but hope the card can go on sale in around a yearās time. He is coy about how much each card will sell for, but says its simple design means it would be āsignificantly lessā than a standard mass spectrometer.
Other putative spin-offs using Rosettaās gas-sniffing technology range from a on the UKās proposed new fleet of nuclear submarines to a robotic nose that will ādetect the complex, changing mixtures of airborne molecules encountered by consumers in everyday situationsā ā a device that .
The Ptolemy detector was delivered to the Rosetta mission in 2001, a few years before take-off, so Morganās multidisciplinary team has had at least 15 years to refine the technology. Itās a similar story for Rosettaās atomic force microscope MIDAS, which is helping to characterise the dust flung from comet 67P to form its tail. As a dust speck passes through MIDAS, a finely controlled needle gently scans the grainās geometry, creating a three-dimensional picture of it.
Good vibe: Space tech could soon aid heart bypass operations (Image: David Silverman/Getty)
The company that developed the system, , based near Grenoble in France, is now using the needleās sensitive actuators in a device for fiddly coronary artery bypass operations. Such operations usually require surgeons to stop the heart beating, with circulation maintained by a heart-lung machine. But the actuators of Cedratās Cardiolock device dampen down movements in a small area of muscle tissue surrounding the relevant artery, allowing the heart to continue beating. āA small lever connected to the actuator gently touches the heart and it tries to reduce the movement in the heart; it tries to calm down the area,ā says Francois Barillot of the company.
Cardiolock has already shown promise in tests in pigs. More prosaically, the company is working with skiing equipment manufacturer Rossignol to see whether a similar system could make skis vibrate less at high speeds.
But while the spin-offs from Rosetta are numerous, thatās not always the case, much to Salzgeberās frustration. āThe ābestā missions for technology transfer are the ones that are cancelled, because then the engineers are forced to do something with the technology,ā he says. Some countries and research organisations are better than others at encouraging spin-offs, says Salzgeber. āItās about the recycling rate of your ideas, similar to the recycling rate of paper.ā Get it right, though, and bedbugs worldwide beware.
Read more: āRosettaās wrong water could be right after allā
Spin-offs from space
Smoke detectors, water filters and memory foam are all innovations from the golden years of the space race ā and the inspirations keep on coming
Tomato booster
A European Space Agency spin-off, , based in the Netherlands, is hoping to find terrestrial uses for the porous beads that scrub carbon dioxide from the air aboard the International Space Station. The idea is to capture atmospheric CO2 to boost the growth of greenhouse tomato plants, make carbonated drinks and cement or ā in the first prototype ā to pump it into aquariums to help keep water plants healthy.
Flame-resistant underpants
āThunderwearā ā prototype flame-resistant bras and underpants developed by Swedish clothing maker Bjorn Borg in collaboration with ESA ā was launched at a fashion show in Stockholm last year. Made from Nomex, a fabric used in spacesuits, Thunderwear emerged from discussions between ESAās technology transfer team and Jernkontoret, Swedenās association of steel-makers. Steel workers struggle with conventional underwear as cotton retains heat, and can easily catch fire from a stray spark.
Dream green home
A human mission to Mars would be a logistical nightmare, and NASA uses specially designed software, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to analyse permutations of technologies for cost, mass and chances of success. aims to do the same for building firms. It juggles options such as types of windows and boilers, and levels of insulation, to find the best trade-offs between the annual cost of heating a home and the cost of building it.
The ultimate virtual archive
The Vatican Libraryās collection of 180,000 manuscripts and 1.6 million books is being digitised using a system developed by ESA and NASA to store data from satellites. The Flexible Image Transport system was designed to be backwards compatible, so it will still be readable by computers even hundreds of years from now. The first 500 manuscripts digitised using FITS can be seen at .
This article appeared in print under the headline āWhat Rosetta did: It came from out of spaceā
