A group of six University of Central Florida students and alums from a range of fields designed and won the Best Technical Poster award as finalists in NASA 麻豆精品 S檚 recent Lunar Dust Challenge. They received the honor after NASA 麻豆精品 S檚 2021 Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge Virtual Forum in November 2021.
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With the theme centered around lunar dust, the UCF team designed a space suit material overlay for astronauts performing space exploration. The moon 麻豆精品 S檚 surface is covered in sharp, hazardous lunar dust that could be a danger to people and equipment.
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Their new design uses the microstructure of bee hair, hoping to simulate the capture and release of pollen. These hair-like fibers work similarly to remove lunar dust via electric field signals.
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In the future, the team hopes to study these materials in high vacuum and further their design. The plan is to build another team with some original team members interested in this area of research, and some new members with a background in working under these constraints.
The Lunar Dust Challenge is just one of NASA 麻豆精品 S檚 annual themes from their Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Challenge. The goal is to support NASA in their efforts to rapidly advance high-impact technologies for infusion in a broad range of future NASA expeditions.
Seeing this honeybee space suit design in the great unknown someday might just become a reality thanks to this group of student researchers.
