New NASA Spacesuit Looks Like Buzz Lightyear's

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New NASA Spacesuit Looks Like Buzz Lightyear's

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 21, 2012 @02:30AM from the to-copyright-infringement-and-beyond dept.

SternisheFan sends this excerpt from Space.com: It might make the astronaut wearing it look like a real-life Buzz Lightyear, but a new prototype spacesuit that NASA just finished testing represents the first major overhaul in spacesuit technology since 1998. Flexible, white, and lime green accented, the suit — known as the Z-1 — is designed not only to help astronauts comfortably maneuver during spacewalks in microgravity, but also to deftly move about when walking on the surface of a planet or other smaller heavenly body, like an asteroid. [Engineer Amy Ross] said, 'the shuttle EMU splits at the waist and you put pants on and you put the top on separately and they connect in the middle. Whereas with this suit, the subject crawls in through the back, and then we just shut the door.' Creating a back-entry suit solves a few of the problems spacewalkers often face during trips to the International Space Station. Using airlocks to depressurize is a time consuming, exhausting process. By using a back-entry design, the astronauts won't need to go through an airlock at all. The suit hooks up to the outside of the spacecraft using the "space port" opening, and the spacewalker simply climbs in and detaches."

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mud room by phrostie · 2012-12-21 02:36 · Score: 5, Insightful

"The suit hooks up to the outside of the spacecraft using the "space port" open"
what always worried me about this is leaving the suits out exposed and then needing to trust them.
I hope they atleast use some form of a mud room. unpressurized, but not constantly exposed to radiation and micro metorites.
just my .2061 USD
1. Re:mud room by egcagrac0 · 2012-12-21 03:17 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Yeah, but a mud room means less patching of holes in the suits, while still being able to do pressure tests.
To infinity...... by who_stole_my_kidneys · 2012-12-21 02:38 · Score: 5, Funny

.....and [Censored by Disney due to copyright infringement]
...and a dupe by dereference · 2012-12-21 02:39 · Score: 5, Informative

From July: http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/07/26/2258227/
1. Re:...and a dupe by Sarten-X · 2012-12-21 03:11 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  56k modems in the US are/were limited by FCC regs to about 53k [lowendmac.com].
  From this url [2fords.net]:
  The chilling news came just days before U.S. Robotics shipped its x2 modems: the FCC won't let modems transfer data at a rate faster than 53 kbps. The legal snafu has to do with a long-standing FCC regulation known as Part 68, which was never intended to affect modems. The problem is that if you send too much power through the phone line, your conversation can get loud enough to creep into neighboring lines. This is called crosstalk, and Part 68 was meant to prevent it. But to reach 56 kbps, the new modems must send more power down the line.
  I win, right?
  
  --
  You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
These guys tend to thing about everything... by egcagrac0 · 2012-12-21 03:25 · Score: 4, Interesting

Any word on the purpose of the lime green accents?
1. Re:These guys tend to thing about everything... by slashmydots · 2012-12-21 03:32 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  From NASA: "It's to fend off alien predators by confusing them and making it hard to focus their eyes on the suit."
Main difference... by Richy_T · 2012-12-21 04:42 · Score: 5, Funny

When you pull the string, instead of saying "To Infinity and Beyond", it says "To the moon and that's enough for another 40 years or more"