Plasma care

The plasma care® uses a unique technology to produce cold atmospheric plasma, the so-called Surface Micro-Discharge (SMD) technology. Battery-driven and easy to use, it has the size and weight of an old telephone handset.

When cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev took the first plasma chamber onto the International Space Station (ISS) in 2001, to investigate complex dusty plasma crystals, nobody imagined that this would one day help the struggle against multi-drug resistant organisms.

Krikalev's experiments on the ISS were conducted under the guidance of Professor Gregor Morfill from the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE). Morfill took advantage of weightlessness in orbit to study the complex plasmas, which on Earth would have been rather difficult because gravity causes the plasma crystals to be flat.

The initial 2001 tests were followed by a long series of experiments on the ISS, with the most recent fourth version of the experiment still working on the space station.

This makes the plasma study experiment the longest-running in space and it also provided the impetus to develop cold plasma technology.

Plasma is usually a hot, electrically charged gas but MPE developed a method for generating ‘cold plasmas’ at room temperature.