NASA and Red Hat are building an open source medical system to diagnose sick astronauts on the ISS could a Star Trek Tricorder be next?

Date:
Fri, 03 Jul 2026 21:05:00 +0000

Description:
NASA and Red Hat are testing an offline AI medical assistant called CMO-DA to help astronauts diagnose and treat conditions during deep space missions.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter NASA's AI medical tool works where Earth-based doctors simply cannot reach Deep space has no signal so NASA built its own offline doctor RamaLama runs AI models the same way containers run software predictably Astronauts aboard the International
Space Station (ISS) currently rely heavily on Earth-based doctors whenever medical issues emerge hundreds of kilometres overhead.

That arrangement works reasonably well in low Earth orbit, where
communication delays remain short enough for near real-time consultation sessions. It becomes far less practical once crews travel beyond Earth orbit, where signals can take minutes rather than seconds to arrive. Latest Videos From Watch full video here: An AI doctor built to work without an internet connection Researchers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston are now testing a clinical decision support system called Crew Medical Officer
Digital Assistant, or CMO-DA.

The system is designed to help astronauts diagnose and treat medical conditions during deep space missions, where real-time communication with Earth-based doctors could be limited or entirely impossible. You may like
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Powering it is RamaLama, a Red Hat-backed open source tool built to simplify how developers run and serve AI models across diverse hardware environments.

According to Red Hat , RamaLama treats AI models like container images, running them in isolated, security-first environments using Open Container Initiative-compliant containers that are portable and predictable across hardware. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.

This approach allows the CMO-DA to perform what the team calls multimodal inference processing both large language models for complex medical
reasoning and Vision Language Models for image-based symptom analysis.

The system can therefore evaluate both written symptom descriptions and
visual data without requiring any connection to a terrestrial cloud server.

That offline capability is not a convenience feature but a mission-critical requirement, since deep space communication delays make cloud dependency genuinely dangerous for crew health outcomes. What to read next How NASAs Orion spacecraft uses eight processors to ensure mission success Google's future for healthcare has AI for both the clinician and the patient AMD promotes open platform approach for space AI

Testing is currently running on HPE hardware specifically the terrestrial twin of the Spaceborne Computer already aboard the ISS giving researchers a reliable Earth-based replica of the actual deployment environment.

By using open-source tools throughout, NASA researchers have built a system that is reproducible and auditable, which the team describes as essential for human safety in mission-critical environments. From Earth testing to the ISS and beyond Once the terrestrial testing phase is complete, the CMO-DA will be demonstrated to NASA leadership for evaluation of further deployment aboard the International Space Station.

The next iteration of the system will integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI, known as RHEL AI.

This is to provide a stable, hardened foundation for scaling and managing containerized AI applications in remote and extreme environments.

RamaLama itself was built with a stated goal of making AI "boring" meaning reliable, predictable, and unglamorous in the best possible sense for mission-critical applications.

The same architecture being tested for astronaut health could eventually
serve as a blueprint for delivering medical support in the most remote areas on Earth.

Whether the CMO-DA eventually evolves into something resembling Star Trek's handheld Tricorder remains unknown.

What is known is that an open source AI tool is already diagnosing symptoms aboard a replica of hardware currently orbiting Earth. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/nasa-and-red-hat-are-building-an-open-source-med ical-system-to-diagnose-sick-astronauts-on-the-iss-could-a-star-trek-tricorder -be-next


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