The future of space suits could be in shrink wrap, not balloons Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. More Geek robot Humanoid robot learns to control a flight simulator nonstick head Geek Answers: How do non-stick coatings work? bump mark Bio-reactive label that replaces food expiration dates wins James Dyson Award overpopulation head Earth has an 80% chance of hitting 11 billion people by 2100 black hole Hubble Space Telescope finds big surprise in teeny tiny galaxy Science! By Graham Templeton Sep. 19, 2014 8:14 am MIT-Compression-Suit-01_0 Looked at from a certain perspective, even ultra-modern space suits look a bit archaic. They have the general aesthetic of a diving bell, like a steam-punk imagining transported into space. The diving bell itself was basically a huge pressurized balloon, a way of taking the atmosphere at the surface down into the depths of the sea, but it’s very difficult to keep a balloon inflated against the crushing pressure of the deep; eventually, the bell gave way to modern diving suits, and divers learned how to deal with the pressure changes through behavior and specialized equipment. That’s made diving both safer and easier and more accessible than ever before, and now scientists think we might be able to do the same thing for space. A team of researchers from MIT hope to use mechanical pressure to replace the pressurization of the balloon suits we use today, making suits both far lighter and less restrictive to use. Rather than climbing into a huge suit, they would strap on this space “garment” like a onesie, and it would tighten itself around them like shrink-wrap. They only tested a single cuff’s worth of material in this experiment, but got the raw physical force numbers they say they needed to make a survivable space-suit possible. The secret science behind the advance are tiny metallic coils made of a shape memory alloy (SMA) that criss-cross the suit’s interior like a web. When subjected to heat (in this case, via the application of an electric current) it contracts to a pre-defined second “memory” form. With a switching heat state, the SMA coils can go back and forth between tightened and relaxed states almost indefinitely. For those paying attention, this means that the suit would require a sustained current to keep its occupant alive — and a big, heavy battery pack would undo much of this suit’s hypothetical advantage. The team is looking into a mechanism, either macro- or microscopic, of locking the coils into their tightened state once there, so they only have to power the initial tightening. Right now, the bulk of a conventional space suit is used to astronauts’ advantage in some ways, as the sheer volume allows it to house enormous amounts of electronics and monitoring equipment. In a shrink-wrapped future we might imagine a more modular approach, with backpacks and strapped-on pieces of equipment going on after the suit tightens and secures the astronaut’s precious fluids against the sucking vacuum of space. Neal Stephenson’s $526,000 Kickstarter sword fighting game officially canceled iPhone 6 Plus teardown reveals a surprisingly repairable smartphone The future of space suits could be in shrink wrap, not balloons GEEK NEWSLETTER Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. More Geek robot Humanoid robot learns to control a flight simulator nonstick head Geek Answers: How do non-stick coatings work? bump mark Bio-reactive label that replaces food expiration dates wins James Dyson Award overpopulation head Earth has an 80% chance of hitting 11 billion people by 2100 black hole Hubble Space Telescope finds big surprise in teeny tiny galaxy Science! By Graham Templeton Sep. 19, 2014 8:14 am MIT-Compression-Suit-01_0 Looked at from a certain perspective, even ultra-modern space suits look a bit archaic. They have the general aesthetic of a diving bell, like a steam-punk imagining transported into space. The diving bell itself was basically a huge pressurized balloon, a way of taking the atmosphere at the surface down into the depths of the sea, but it’s very difficult to keep a balloon inflated against the crushing pressure of the deep; eventually, the bell gave way to modern diving suits, and divers learned how to deal with the pressure changes through behavior and specialized equipment. That’s made diving both safer and easier and more accessible than ever before, and now scientists think we might be able to do the same thing for space. A team of researchers from MIT hope to use mechanical pressure to replace the pressurization of the balloon suits we use today, making suits both far lighter and less restrictive to use. Rather than climbing into a huge suit, they would strap on this space “garment” like a onesie, and it would tighten itself around them like shrink-wrap. They only tested a single cuff’s worth of material in this experiment, but got the raw physical force numbers they say they needed to make a survivable space-suit possible. Even this prototype Z2 suit from NASA is big, bulky, and filled with air. Even this prototype Z2 suit from NASA is big, bulky, and filled with air. The secret science behind the advance are tiny metallic coils made of a shape memory alloy (SMA) that criss-cross the suit’s interior like a web. When subjected to heat (in this case, via the application of an electric current) it contracts to a pre-defined second “memory” form. With a switching heat state, the SMA coils can go back and forth between tightened and relaxed states almost indefinitely. For those paying attention, this means that the suit would require a sustained current to keep its occupant alive — and a big, heavy battery pack would undo much of this suit’s hypothetical advantage. The team is looking into a mechanism, either macro- or microscopic, of locking the coils into their tightened state once there, so they only have to power the initial tightening. Right now, the bulk of a conventional space suit is used to astronauts’ advantage in some ways, as the sheer volume allows it to house enormous amounts of electronics and monitoring equipment. In a shrink-wrapped future we might imagine a more modular approach, with backpacks and strapped-on pieces of equipment going on after the suit tightens and secures the astronaut’s precious fluids against the sucking vacuum of space. Here we see a PMA coil in its relaxed and tightened state. Here we see an SMA coil in its relaxed and tightened state. The issue of temperature — of the near-absolute zero of space coming just a centimeter from an astronaut’s fleshy exterior — is mitigated by the fact that space, while very cold, is also very empty. Energy transfer occurs due to the collision of particles, and with virtually no particles to do the colliding, space is actually quite bad at cooling things down. People could probably survive quite a while in the vacuum of space — this suit might not cut it in Antarctica, as a modern balloon-suit would, but it should be good enough for space. Heres the cuff mechanism used to test the coils ability to tighten and apply force. The SMA tech on display here could also be used in any number of ways, allowing a soldier’s shirt to auto-tourniquet a wound without the need for any outside direction. The usefulness of easily reversible deformable metal objects is almost limitless, from easy-flipping tiny mechanical rotors to self-securing straps on prosthetics. In the context of space, though, it could well bring humanity closer than ever to the universe beyond Earth, letting an astronaut pick up a handful of dirt and feel the grains run through their fingers. Suits like this would have profound implications for precision maintenance work, for instance, but the most exciting aspect of this work is its potential to improve the experience of space.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 04:20:12 +0000
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