Back in March, NASA asked the public to vote on the exterior design for its prototype Z-2 spacesuit as part of a collaboration with ILC Dover and Philadelphia University with the intent of highlighting various mobility features. The winning design was announced in April.
And, although it appears to improve on the wearer’s mobility, it’s still a pretty bulky suit.
Researchers at MIT want to fix that by completely reimagining the space suit. Current spacesuits are all puffed up, limiting mobility. The team at MIT is working on greatly improving mobility by making the suits form-fitting, like a “second skin.”
“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,” explains Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT. So, for the past decade, she and her colleagues have worked on developing active compression garments that eliminate the need for gas pressure.
“We want to achieve that same pressurization, but through mechanical counterpressure — applying the pressure directly to the skin, thus avoiding the gas pressure altogether,” she explains. “We combine passive elastics with active materials . . . Ultimately, the big advantage is mobility, and a very lightweight suit for planetary exploration.”
The form-fitting, flexible spacesuit incorporates spring-like coils that contract when heated. The coils are made from something UFO buffs will think sounds pretty similar to material that was allegedly recovered from the debris of the 1947 Roswell UFO incident: memory metal. It’s actually called shape-memory alloy. This material is given an engineered shape. It can be bent and deformed, but when heated to a certain temperature, it returns to its designed shape.
MIT explains that an astronaut wearing a suit incorporating this technology would essentially plug in to the ship’s power supply, causing the coils to contract, essentially shrink-wrapping the astronaut.
This “second-skin” spacesuit is detailed in the journal IEEE/ASME: Transactions on Mechatronics.
