12 | New Scientist | 25 July 2020
Space explorationYOU can now get a back rub without
needing another human, thanks to
new robot masseurs. French firm
Capsix Robotics and researchers at
the University of Plymouth in the UK
have both made robots that can give
personalised massages.
The Capsix model is available to
rent, but not buy, and has a robotic
arm with sensors and a camera thatallow it to adapt to the individual
user’s body shape. It has been
programmed with a range of
massage protocols developed by
physiotherapists, and users can
adjust the firmness of the massage.
François Eyssautier at Capsix,
who engineered the robot, says
more than 4000 people have tried
it and most have enjoyed it. Some
people are a bit unsure at first, but
“after 3 or 4 minutes, they forget
it’s a robot and just relax”, he says.
A robot masseur is particularly
useful in the covid-19 era whenclose contact with others isn’t
recommended, he says. “Also,
sometimes we don’t want to be
touched by other people, we just
want to relax on our own.”
The University of Plymouth
robot is still at the research stage.
It works in a similar way, but can be
customised even further. Users teach
the robot to perform the movementsthey like by physically guiding its
arm in a training session (Frontiers
in Neurorobotics, doi.org/d377).
However, there is a long way to
go before robot masseurs can be as
good as human ones, says Shane
Kertanegara, a physiotherapist
based in Sydney, Australia.
“A human physiotherapist can
feel where someone is tight and
concentrate on that spot, but
a robot can’t get that sensory
feedback and adjust its manual
therapy accordingly,” he says. ❚THE United Arab Emirates
(UAE) is headed to Mars. The
Emirates Mars Mission’s Hope
orbiter has now embarked on
a seven-month journey to the
Red Planet, where it will study
its atmosphere and weather.
Hope blasted off from the
Tanegashima Space Center in
Japan aboard a Japanese rocket
on 20 July at 6.58 am local time.
The launch had been delayed
twice due to bad weather. If all
goes well, the spacecraft will arrive
at Mars in February 2021. This will
make the United Arab Emirates
just the fifth spacefaring power
to reach the planet, after the US,
the Soviet Union, the European
Union and India.
Once Hope is orbiting Mars, it
will measure the atmosphere daily
to try to trace how the weather
and climate there changes. “The
geology of Mars has been studied
quite extensively. We are only just
getting started on the atmosphere,”
says Sarah Al Amiri, the UAE’s
minister for advanced sciences and
the science lead for the mission.
The spacecraft carries three
scientific instruments: a camera
to take high-resolution images of
Mars’s surface and look for waterice; an infrared spectrometer
to measure dust, ice and water
vapour in the lower atmosphere;
and an ultraviolet spectrometer
to measure the composition of
the upper atmosphere.
Rather than simply circling
the planet, Hope will follow an
elliptical orbit that will bring it
relatively close to the surface –
about 20,000 kilometres up –
every 55 hours. This will allow it
to observe the same locations at
different times of day, building
a model of how the weatherresponds to changes in sunlight
throughout the day.
Observing Mars’s weather in
such detail will hopefully help
researchers understand not only
the day-to-day conditions on the
planet, but also the more extreme
weather events like the colossal
dust storm that engulfed the
whole planet and killed NASA’s
Opportunity rover in 2018.It could also help us figure out
how Mars has changed since its
formation. Planetary scientists
think that Mars used to be warm,
damp and possibly habitable, but
for some reason lost the bulk of its
atmosphere over the course of
billions of years, which turned it
into the dry, cold and inhospitable
world it is today.
“We want to find out how it
went from a dense, much wetter
atmosphere to a dry and very thin
atmosphere,” says Al Amiri. Hope
will measure the gas that is still
leaking away from the Martian
atmosphere in an effort to
understand how that process
may have worked and how it
is continuing now.
The mission marks the start
of a busy period for Mars missions.
Right now, Mars and Earth are
relatively close together, a
conjunction that only happens
once every two years. Later in July,
China’s space agency aims to send
an orbiter, lander and rover to
Mars. Shortly after that, NASA
plans to launch its Perseverance
rover. If these missions are unable
to take off while Mars is nearby,
they will have to wait until 2022
for another chance. ❚“ Sometimes we don’t want
to be touched by other
people, we just want to
relax on our own”Robotics
The Emirates Mars
Mission’s Hope orbiter will
study Mars’s atmosphereLeah CraneMBRSCNews
Missions to Mars begin
An orbiter called Hope is the first of three missions blasting off this month
Robots can now
give personalised
massages at homeAlice Klein