Slashdot Mirror
Spacecraft, Heal Thyself
carpdeus writes "The European Space Agency, citing the fact that we don't glue ourselves together when we nick ourselves, has funded a study toward creating a spacecraft that could fix itself. By replacing a few of the fibers in the resinous material that make up a spacecraft's skin with hollow fibers containing adhesive, the material has a chance to fix itself when it encounters minor damage, much the way our skin does when blood wells up and clots. While admittedly years away, such material makes longer duration missions a possibility."
Sound like the smelly green goo inside of my bicycle tires... or fix-a-flat... same idea just in small capsules embedded
It is the electronics and science instruments that need the care, not the hull. It would probably be cheaper, and perhaps lighter, to have a tough hull than a complex one than can close itself up. Pits and holes on the outside are not where the problems usually are. Unless, perhaps it is some kind of tank or sealed instrument. However, their process appears way too slow to seal that up fast in the vacuum of space. They are not clear on what is being protected and comparing it to the alternatives, such as gels and styrofome-like substances.
Table-ized A.I.
The key word in the article is "minor". This would work for small abrasions, but would it really be useful? Think of all the accidents in space we have had so far. None of them would have been prevented by this technology.
They'd save themselves a lot of time & money, if they just asked the DND to let them research the makeup of self-healing metal found in Roswell
"I happened to notice when I put that piece of foil in that box, and the damn thing just started unfolding and just flattened out. Then I got to playing with it. I'd fold it, crease it, lay it down and it'd unfold. It's kinda wierd. I couldn't tear it. The color was in between tinfoil and lead foil, about the thickness of lead foil."
From: http://www.qsl.net/w5www/roswell.html
(about 1/2 way down - use CTRL+F)
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Okay... so you have a spaceship that not only meets requirements of getting folks safely into space, but has to carry enough "glue" to repair itself. Mind you, it would probably need much more glue than it would ever need, because it would have to be stored relatively uniformly around the exterior of the ship.
Would the excess weight requirement make this not practical?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I'm sure we're all aware of just how much stuff came to us as a spin-off from the space industry. If this technology works, it could revolutionise so many things - roofing felt that lasts hundreds of years, GRP car bodywork that unscuffs itself, effectively crackproof consumer electronics and a plethora of stuff I'm too dull to think of. Early doors, but a fascinating pre-nanotech advance in materials technology.
A pretty standard sci-fi image will be tossed on its head... how many books, tv shows, and movies have featured spaceships in the future being repaired, often by a robot or by someone in a spacesuit outside the ship? If the ship can heal itself without the intervention of the crew, well, that changes things.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
So far we've had Cryogenics, Nemesis, and a discussion on how small town economics works. And now an article on long lasting spacecraft programs. Is there some sort of space theme building? And is slashdot really the best place to recruit colonists? 'And now we're here, open the cryostasis and everyone out, including their mothers! inflate the inflatable basements! and dont forget to wake the women we brought along!' 'Sir, we were unable to bring any women! they refused to live in basements!' 'Well, dang'.
The Icarus Hunt:
He set to work with his squeeze tubes again. "I'll never understand about that stuff," Shawn commented. "If it's so good at fixing hull cracks and ridges, why not coat the whole hull with it?"
Seems like Sci-Fi writers believe we'll still have problems even a few hundred years in the future!
This again raises the concept of Gaia. Isn't the Earth itself just a big living spaceship? If we want to travel beyond our solar system, we ought to build something like Earth, only smaller.
This idea has been well-represented in sci-fi for decades.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
http://slashdot.org/science/01/02/15/041205.shtml
And my, what an old dupe it is!
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Following a spacecraft healing itself:
Kent Brockman: Well, this reporter was...possibly a little hasty earlier and would like to...reaffirm his allegiance to this country and its human president. May not be perfect, but it's still the best government we have. For now.
[notices "HAIL ANTS" sign taped up, tears it down]
Oh, yes, by the way, the spacecraft still in extreme danger, may not make it back, attempting risky reentry, bla bla bla bla bla bla. We'll see you after the movie.
Developers: We can use your help.
raise power to the shields! there's incoming tiny star dust particles hitting us!
Self-sealing aircraft fuel tanks date back to WWII. This is a comparable level of self-repair: a material that expands to fill and seal gaps.
I think the scarier thing is that someone took the time to search for a duping. ....unless you actually remembered a Slashdot story from 5 years ago. Impressive, but very scary.
Will we now have to be assimilated?
Reality is a big nasty dragon. Fortunately I don't believe in dragons.
I'm not sure if they're trying to say that our bodies don't naturally glue themselves back together or that we don't apply glue to cuts, but either way, they're wrong.
not some small-size cosmic garbage. Mir flew for more then decade at once, under protection of magnitosphere, but not atmosphere. Did it have any problems with "small damage"? Not really (collision with supply ship is a big damage). Do interplanetary probes suffer from micrometiorites? If memory serves me well, they suffer from human mistakes and radiation/cosmic rays...
"That's the Germans for you," he said. "Everything they make turns into something else in case there's a war..."
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
they found the solution to drunk space probe drivers. Minor crash? No problem. And you don't get charged with DUI.
The old article wasn't talking about space ships
I heard about stuff like this a few years ago, where minor fractures could be 'healed.' I also remember jay leno making jokes about it, saying that now women in california will live forever :eek:
What are the chances evaporated resin and hardener are going to condense on nearby objects like camera lenses? And it won't be easy to bake the stuff off either.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
...we could have car tires that repair their own minor punctures!
So , a can of bicycle fix a flat is what, $4 tops ?
NASA should be able to do 10 oz. of the goo for 20-30 million fucking dollars!
Perhaps this is the first step towards bioships, à la species 8472? As well as the ability to heal themselves, I've often thought that deep space vehicles should be able to actively find fuel and even to reproduce. This is largely based on the notion of interstellar unmanned probes, which have to be intelligent enough to make decisions on their own. The best way to do this may be to make use of the amazing systems which Evolution (or the Creator) have provided us with, and have biological elements in our probes. Of course there are serious ethical questions we must ask ourselves before beginning such an endeavour, but this is something to take seriously.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
Cells reproduce. To bring that technology to spacecraft, the spacecraft would either have to be biologically engineered or constructed solely (the self-healing part, anyway) of a mass of nanomachines ("smart matter") that can reproduce themselves from particles and energy flowing through the smart matter in something analogous to an animal's bloodstream.
I suppose that the type of spacecraft self-repair described in the article is analogous to blood clotting, but a) they didn't say that (they exaggerated by referring to skin repair), and b) blood clotting is a temporary fix not meant for years of sustained use (animal skin starts the repair immediately and finishes to "good as new" state in relatively short order).
And they're using adhesives to mimick the way our skin heals itself?
"Yeah NASA. Could you send up another box of those extra large Band-aids? Damn Russian Statelite nailed our port side again. They really need to start making them bigger. The one meter Band-aids just aren't cutting it. Oh and no more Snoopy ones. The Europeon's are still laughing their asses off about that last batch."
"In other news, a fleet of scabbed F-18s just landed in Edwards Airforce Base after a intense aerial fight with Mexican F-16s. One plane is suspected to have a sprained ankle. More at six."
"...citing the fact that we don't glue ourselves together when we nick ourselves..."
Well, duh... I use duct tape for that.
This sounds like too much effort. Why not just license some R2 units from George Lucas.
Oh and if that doesnt work I welcome our new spacecraft healing overlords!!
Or more to the point, how does the current stuff work? What is the trigger for it turning from the liquid form into a solid?
I can make two guesses, either it hardens in the presence of oxygen (or something else in the air), which won't work in space, or it remains liquid under pressure and hardens once the pressure eases (eg it has sprung a leak). The pressure thing would result in the whole lot hardening once a hole occured, which still wouldn't work.
hmmmm....
Agreed, I'm a "rocket scientist", (kind of, work with commercial satellites). The most common failure in spacecraft is electrostatic discharge. The best way to invest your money if you want to reduce failure rates in equipment in space is to invent better grounding systems.
In the vacuum of space, electrostatic charges build up as the effect of charged particles emitted by the sun that hit the spacecraft. Since there is no air to conduct the charges away, they accumulate until something breaks, unless there are conducting paths from everywhere to some conductive part of the craft's chassis. The trick in designing the systems is to make sure there will always be some conducting path.
Unfortunately, for scientific spacecraft there may be some instruments that need a very high insulation. Worse, since parts are usually outsourced to different manufacturers, it's very difficult to make sure they are all compatible with respect to charge dissipation. If you have parts with very low conductivity, the slightest variation in conductivity between different parts may cause a very high voltage difference to appear in some interfaces.
What is even more interesting is that the proposed self-healing mechanism is similar to that used in tires which Sears once sold (still sells?). If a nail punctured the tread of one of these tires, a gooey liquid would ooze out of the hole. Exposure to air caused the liquid to quickly solidify, plugging up the hole.
I tried to search for more information about those tires but was not successful. Perhaps, another Slashdotter will have better luck. (Please use Google. It is the only search-engine company willing to stand up to "Big Brother".)
Just use all this space debris. Two problems solved at once...
Am I the only one thinking of Lexx?
I recall an article that was as old if not older though, not fron the internet, probably from a newspaper or even some book. I'm sure it wasn't the fiberous thing they mentioned here; but more of a self-exapnding foam in between two walls of the cabin. So the concept has been out there for a while but the materials to accomplish it may not have been.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
That's hardly a "minor scratch".
From what I can tell from the article, the self-healing skin will heal only small holes.
Even so, I doubt very much that it could heal even a small hole in the leading edge of a shuttle wing, which has to be made of a special heat-resistant material.
As metioned in TFA, this material would be much more useful on long-duration space missions.
Or you could always just re-route life support through the ancillary adjunct backup processor of the brussard collector's hyperdyne relay.
That should give you plenty of time to reach the next starbase.
If auto-repair circuits were possible in Blake's 7, with their budget, it should be trivial for modern engineers.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That's not a dupe - it's self-repair for your memory.
Astrochicken!
they already have fiberglass that does this kind of thing. I has adhesive embedded in the fibers to fix itself.
clancey