The MIT BioSuit, a skintight spacesuit that offers improved mobility and reduced mass compared to modern gas-pressurized spacesuits.
Photo-illustration: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT
Spacesuits of the future may resemble a streamlined second skin.
For future astronauts, the process of suiting up may go something like this: Instead of climbing into a conventional, bulky, gas-pressurized suit, an astronaut may don a lightweight, stretchy garment, lined with tiny, musclelike coils. She would then plug in to a spacecraft’s power supply, triggering the coils to contract and essentially shrink-wrap the garment around her body.
The skintight, pressurized suit would not only support the astronaut, but would give her much more freedom to move during planetary exploration. To take the suit off, she would only have to apply modest force, returning the suit to its looser form.
Now MIT researchers are one step closer to engineering such an active, “second-skin” spacesuit: Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, and her colleagues have engineered active compression garments that incorporate small, springlike coils that contract in response to heat. The coils are made from a shape-memory alloy (SMA) — a type of material that “remembers” an engineered shape and, when bent or deformed, can spring back to this shape when heated.
The team incorporated the coils in a tourniquet-like cuff, and applied a current to generate heat. At a certain trigger temperature, the coils contract to their “remembered” form, such as a fully coiled spring, tightening the cuff in the process. In subsequent tests, the group found that the pressure produced by the coils equaled that required to fully support an astronaut in space.
“With conventional spacesuits, you’re essentially in a balloon of gas that’s providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere [of pressure,] to keep you alive in the vacuum of space,” says Newman, who has worked for the past decade to design a form-fitting, flexible spacesuit of the future. “We want to achieve that same pressurization, but through mechanical counterpressure — applying the pressure directly to the skin, thus avoiding the gas pressure altogether. We combine passive elastics with active materials. … Ultimately, the big advantage is mobility, and a very lightweight suit for planetary exploration.”
The Latest on: Spacesuits
via Google News
The Latest on: Spacesuits
- NASA channeled its inner Buzz Lightyear with this wild Z-1 spacesuit concepton June 20, 2022 at 6:37 am
While the project is no longer happening, contractors do have access to its development history to create their own future spacesuits for agency needs, including moon missions. The green-striped Z-1 ...
- Boeing Unveils New Spacesuits For Astronauts; To Be Worn During Starliner's ISS Missionson June 19, 2022 at 4:14 am
Boeing unveiled its brand new spacesuits which would be worn by astronauts during the company's future crewed missions to the International Space Station.
- NASA announces who will develop new spacesuits for lunar astronautson June 2, 2022 at 8:20 am
NASA announced the companies that will develop the next spacesuits for moonwalking Artemis astronauts and those working outside the International Space Station.
- These are the next-gen NASA spacesuits that’ll help put man back on the Moonon June 1, 2022 at 5:00 pm
NASA’s next-generation spacesuits will be created by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace. The space agency shared the news this week. The two companies will work to create next-generation suits ...
- NASA selects partners to develop new spacesuits for return to the moonon June 1, 2022 at 2:53 pm
seems like Neil Armstrong's first steps onto the moon have cemented images of classic spacesuits into the minds of people worldwide for generations. Everybody can conjure up *** picture of how ...
- NASA selects partners to develop new spacesuits for return to the moonon June 1, 2022 at 2:49 pm
New spacesuits made by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace could be worn by astronauts that land on the moon later this decade through NASA's Artemis program, the agency announced Wednesday.Related ...
via Bing News