Slashdot Mirror
What To Wear On Mars
Roland Piquepaille writes "If men ever land on Mars, what will they wear to protect them from radiation, micrometeors and the very cold climate? Several students from the University of Alberta tackled the problem and designed space suits for Mars. Their prototype suit is composed of twelve layers of materials, including one made from Demron, a new nanotechnology material developed by a Florida-based company, Radiation Shield Technologies. The students and their professor, Dr. Barry Patchett, think their suit will largely be ready before real missions to Mars start in about twenty years. They also hope that NASA will pick their design. More details and references are available in this overview, including some illustrations."
There will be some people landing on Mars, for reasons of prestige. Putting people on Mars will be a histroic achievement, but I think it will be robots that actually get stuff done. Let the astronanuts plant flags, the robots will continue to do most of the research.
Mod parent up!
Right, let's start out by including a patented product in construction which will likely involve a long-term contract with NASA; even if Demron proves to be not the best choice, or if better fabric/material constructs come along.
I know that spacesuit design is expensive, but is anyone else worried about universities becoming little more than state funded corporate technology parks?
Do they really think they will get NASA to adapt a design that will be twenty years antiquated when they actually use it? You can't run space missions like that! Would we send astronauts into space today with the same technology we used twenty ye... Oh. Maybe I should invest.
Wouldn't these technically be pressure suits or something? Since they would be worn on the surface of mars you wouldn't actually be in space.
These suit designers are right up there with the people doing Mars-on-Earth research (learning the skills and techniques for actual large-scale planetary surface exploration) and human-scale rover designers (building the car to do the exploration in) out there getting it done.
And like both those other lines of research, this one has payoffs right here, right now. Bravo!
As anybody who has been to Alberta in February knows, all you need is walk into the local Walmart, ask for standard gear for the Albertan winter, remove a couple of layers and voila: martian-ready space suit.
On the day the rover sojourner landed in Mars it was colder in Edmonton than in the sojourner landing area (seriously).
The only thing that is different on Mars is that meteorites would get lower before they burn up. But I don't think it would made a difference to people living there if meteorites burned up at 10km instead of 100km. The only meteorites you have to worry about on Mars are the really large ones, that are also quite rare. So saying you need a space suit to protect you from micrometeorites on Mars is complete bull.
What's more, they oddly make a connection between Mars' lack of a magnetosphere and micrometeors, which so laughable that it boggles the mind. Whether this was the work of the "journalist" that wrote the article or the spacesuit designers I can't tell, but applying common statistics, I'd say it was the former.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
bulls**t. how many hours of training do those silly humans take before easy missions in orbit around earth? how many thousands of hours did it take for moon missions? now multiply that time by all the training support staff that had to be present at the training sessions.
write the program once.... use it again and again or train the human again and again, and use him once.
Are they suits weather proof?
There is brief mention of the martian dust in the first paragraph of the technical document, but it isn't addressed elsewere, Martian winds can carry dusts to excessively high speeds and will stick it to almost any material like it were spray paint, nearly impossible to remove.
How do the space suits counter this, and will the dust should it stay on degrade the suits performance?
They should do this on the cheap, using the simplest most standard materials/approaches that they can.
What they would end up with might not be the very best, and probably won't be the final design, but it could set a standard... any final design should be a lot better if it is going to cost a lot more.
With the right publicity (for the next 20 years), this could draw more attention to the school (and its important supply of girl geeks) than developing an expensive design that is out of date and not chosen.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST