London: French surgeons have performed the first operation on a person in weightless conditions. In the 10-minute procedure four doctors cut out a cyst from a patient's arm aboard a free-falling aircraft.

The experiments will help to develop surgical procedures for astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), and, further in the future, for longer missions to the Moon and Mars.

Dominique Martin, head of Bordeaux university hospital's plastic surgery unit and the doctor who led the operation, said the experiment had gone perfectly to plan. ``All the data we collected allow us to think that operating on a human in the conditions of space would not present insurmountable problems,'' he said.

In weightless conditions, though the body behaves differently, the principles of the surgery are the same. ``It is much less traumatic than you might think,'' said Kevin Fong, an expert in space medicine at University College London.

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