NASA is testing the Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), an AI clinical decision support system intended to help astronauts diagnose and treat medical symptoms during deep-space missions.
The project responds to situations where an early return or immediate telemedicine may be impractical, after NASA brought Crew‑11 back from the International Space Station early this year because of a medical concern and as missions to the Moon and Mars will face larger communication delays.
"RamaLama provides the engine to run both large language models (LLMs) for complex medical reasoning and Vision Language Models (VLMs) for image-based symptom analysis," Red Hat stated.
CMO-DA is built on a Red Hat‑backed open source tool called RamaLama, which the company says simplifies how developers run, pull and serve AI models, and the system moved from a cloud-dependent proof of concept to a fully disconnected edge deployment.
The software currently runs on a terrestrial twin of the HPE Spaceborne Computer used on the ISS so responses are produced locally and do not depend on a connection to Earth while engineers refine the system on the ground.
Once validated on Earth, CMO-DA will be demonstrated to NASA leadership for evaluation of further use.
