Official News page 7

REAL LIFE NEWS: CAMPING ON MARS

by Hazed

If you plan to camp out in the open then you need a tent to protect you from the elements. Here on Earth that's not too hard: the worst you are likely to encounter is a rainstorm, perhaps a bit of hail.

But what about visitors to Mars? Astronauts on a mission to the red planet will need living quarters and it would be a lot easier to just erect a tent rather than having to build something solid.

Student engineers from North Carolina State Uni think they've come up with the answer: an inflatable habitat that is radiation-proof and tough enough to protect its inhabitants from meteors.

Brent Carter, one of the students involved in the project, said "Currently, NASA uses solid materials like aluminum, fiberglass and carbon fibers, which while effective, are large, bulky and difficult to pack within a spacecraft." The solution of the team, comprising engineers from the textiles and aerospace departments, is a 1900 square foot tent which includes radiation-proof fabric of the kind used in protective suits, and gold metallic film to reflect away harmful rays. It's airtight so it can be inflated with a breathable atmosphere, and it has a Sabatier reactor, a gadget used to produce water from the Martian atmosphere. This is used on the Interstellar Space Station but is big and bulky, so the students have come up with a new design to make it a lot smaller.

The students intend to enter the Mars tent and the improved Sabatier reactor in a NASA competition next month.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/01/mars_tent/

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