MIT team designs sleek, skintight spacesuit
July 16th, 2007
In the 40 years that humans have been traveling into space, the suits they wear have changed very little. The bulky, gas-pressurized outfits give astronauts a bubble of protection, but their significant mass and the pressure itself severely limit mobility.Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, wants to change that.Newman’s prototype suit is a revolutionary departure from the traditional model. Instead of using gas pressurization, which exerts a force on the astronaut’s body to protect it from the vacuum of space, the suit relies on mechanical counter-pressure, which involves wrapping tight layers of material around the body. The trick is to make a suit that is skintight but stretches with the body, allowing freedom of movement.http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/biosuit-0716.htmlSource: http://www.slashdot.org
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