An
inflatable habitat designed for explorers on the moon or Mars is headed for an
Antarctic test run, NASA said Wednesday.
The habitat
– built by ILC Dover and resembling
an inflatable backyard bounce for children
– will make its South Pole debut early next year. NASA demonstrated the
inflatable prototype on Wednesday at ILC Dover's Frederica, Del., facility.
"We
deflated [and inflated] it in about ten minutes," said Larry Toups,
habitat lead for NASA's Constellation Program Lunar Surface Systems Office, in
an interview.
Toups and
several other habitat designers from NASA's Johnson Space Center and ILC Dover
will attempt to deploy the structure in the Antarctic this coming January.
Their goal: to use just four people and deploy everything in four hours.
Working in bulky cold weather gear will also make the deployment more analogous
to the challenges facing astronauts clad in cumbersome spacesuits on the moon.
The habitat
prototype will eventually serve as a multilayered test platform for new
technologies such as health monitoring systems, self-healing materials, and
protective radiation materials. When not inflated, the habitat can save on
space and weight during transportation. It's just one of several models,
including another prototype that stands
on eight legs and has two pressurized cylinders connected by an airlock
door, under scrutiny by NASA engineers.
Other
researchers at McMurdo Station in Antarctica will use the inflated habitat as a staging area from January 2008 to
February 2009, allowing the designers to monitor its performance using human reports
as well as data from embedded sensors. NASA and the National Science Foundation
hope to learn how the habitat material behaves in a cold environment and how
well the structure retains heat and atmosphere.
Toups said
the field demonstration will show that the structure can be "packaged in a
small volume" but still "expand
to a usable, habitable volume," even in an extreme environment. If
NASA likes what it sees, a second or third generation inflatable habitat could
deploy to the moon as early as 2020, with four-person crews making weeklong
trips to get a lunar base operational.
The U.S. space agency is not alone in considering inflatable
living modules. A private company, the Las Vegas, Nev.-based Bigelow Aerospace,
has already launched
two inflatable modules into Earth orbit in anticipation of assembling a new
space station by 2012.
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