Eyes on Mars

If humans ever grow old in space, they’ll almost certainly need cataract surgery—the routine operation that swaps a clouded eye lens for a clear artificial one. The trouble is, no one knows how those replacement lenses hold up beyond Earth. A research collaboration involving the University of Utah’s John A. Moran Eye Center aims to find out.

The project began with Texas surgeon Morgan Micheletti, who teamed with a NASA materials-testing program to send 135 types of artificial lenses to the International Space Station. For six months, the lenses sat mounted outside the station, directly exposed to the harsh conditions of space: intense UV radiation, wild temperature swings, and high levels of atomic oxygen.

Then they came to Utah. Liliana Werner, co-director of Moran’s Intermountain Ocular Research Center—a lab that analyzes lens materials for companies and physicians worldwide—examined the returned lenses both there and in a U electron-microscopy lab. What she found was unlike anything in her long career.

“Cobblestones, bubble wrap, burn scars,” is how Werner describes the damage—pitting and scarring on lenses that had been smooth and clear. “This damage does not happen on Earth,” she says. Not every lens was harmed, she notes, likely due to where it sat and how it was stored.

The team plans to publish its findings as the work continues. “In my lifetime, someone will have cataract surgery off of this planet,” Micheletti says, “and we need to figure out how to send lenses there.”