What do you do if you suddenly need urgent surgery when you're in space? There's not a lot you can do, and you probably don't have a lot of options. A Nebraska-based technology is developing a mini robot space surgeon that can actually climb inside an astronauts' body.

The machines are about to begin trials, and while it does sound kind of creepy, the fact that there's no real way of dealing with emergencies in space makes it even scarier.

The robot is made by Virtual Incision, and it is designed with a satellite link back to Earth where a doctor on Earth can control its surgical arms, while the robot navigates the abdomen with the help of a camera.

There's a lot of challenges for this. For one, space is zero-gravity. The weightlessness environment can make any type of bleeding extremely messy. To mitigate these problems, the robotic surgeon will start zero-gravity tests in an airplane in the next few months.

Sounds similar to that ugly Prometheus surgery scene in the video below: [New Scientist]