(Neuro-) muscular and exercise research into muscular force regulation

MARES is a general-purpose instrument for (neuro-) muscular and exercise research on the International Space Station. MARES is capable of assessing the strength of isolated muscle groups around joints by controlling and measuring relationships between position/velocity and torque/force as a function of time. This is done during exercises, while the MARES motor puts a programmed load on the astronauts movements. With MARES, it is possible to easily set up an experiment to investigate the effect of the adaptation of the neuromotor control system to microgravity. MARES can be used to investigate the capability of a human subject to regulate his muscular force in order to follow a predetermined positional target, while being challenged by changing loads of three different kinds: a randomly varying inertial load, a randomly varying viscous load, and a randomly varying elastic load.