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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."
Geek girl developing space suits. How hot is that?
;)
Man, i'd tap that radiation shielding if I had a chance
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!
Just don't invite Trinny and Susannah, they'd probably throw all the current stuff out the nearest airlock.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
I was hoping to see wide lapels, or padded shoulders that look like airplane wings.
Instead it talks about material make up.
How is that what to wear?
Y'know, Mars has an atmosphere ...
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
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?
Whatever their mummies tell them to wrap themselves in ;-)
So that they can unzip their spacepants and piss on a rock and say "Ha ha! Take that Mars!".
What else would be the point of spending $9346294673945639046723548409 dollars to send a manned mission to Mars instead of 345767 unmanned probes to all the other planets and moons, and also another bigass space telescope?
Well according to my wife if it's after labor day then it can't be white.
http://www.leadmagnet.50megs.com
All Mars explorers will need are Grizzly Bear Proof Suits.
They're well armoured for micrometeorites and, hey, you never know about those Martian grizzly bears.
Trolling is a art,
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.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
For the physisists out there: There is no magic involved. According to the specification from the Radiation Shield Technologies homepage:
"CIVILIANS DEMRON(TM) is effective as a radiation shield, comparable to lead in terms of g/cm2 and tantalum according to the mass attenuation coefficient, against gamma, x-ray and beta emissions."
Which gives that the weight for equal protection as a certain thickness of lead will be the same!
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!
Check out this pdf for a full 10 page report.
Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. Excellent reading and well researched. If you like this topic, check out the series.
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).
When the chairman introduced the guest speaker as a former illegal alien, I got up from my chair and yelled, "What's the matter, no jobs on Mars?" When no one laughed, I was real embarrassed. I don't think people should make you feel that way.
Their prototype suit is composed of twelve layers of materials ... [they] 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.
Jesus NO!. Just think of the deaths that will happen without the "13th-layer". If I were nasa, I would demand more layers. 20 years should be enough time to come up with one more.
Nothing is immune to radiation -it's all a matter of dosage
Ionizing radiation damages DNA, protein, lipids etc both directly and by generation of free radicals (hence the term ionizing...). Organisms differ greatly in sensitivity mainly due to different efficiencies in repair but nothing is *immune*.
With enough juice the cockroach eventually fries like the rest of us...
This is cool and all but the article is a bit misleading about the demands of a Moon suit as opposed to a Mars suit.
- Radiation. Mars has little to no magnetosphere but it does have some atmosphere. This provides some protection that the Moon does not. Also, the Moon is much closer to the sun so the levels of radiation from it are higher. There are also little baby north and south poles around the planet. Landing in one of those will provide a bit more protection.
- Temperature. The Moon has much higher and lower temperatures to worry about than Mars
- Sandstorms. True, the Moon doesn't have these but with the low gravity, thin atmosphere and fact that they won't be sleeping in hammocks, explorers/settlers should be able to handle them as long as they wear something thicker than a windbreaker.
In short, Mars suits have fewer extremes to deal with than Moon suits. The article exhibits some FUD about Mars.
Blaze a trail to the New World
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
My Question is this: If I'm on Mars, will I have to wear a tinfoil hat to keep the people on Earth from reading my mind?
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.