An aerospace engineer from Maine, the reigning champion of
NASA's Astronaut Glove Challenge, held onto his title Thursday to win first
prize in a competition to build a better space glove than those worn by
astronauts today.
The winner, Peter Homer of Southwest Harbor, Maine, took
home $250,000, top prize at the competition held at the Astronaut Hall of Fame
in Titusville, Fla., close to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. It was the second win for
Homer, who took home first place, and $200,000, in the first-ever Astronaut
Glove Challenge in 2007.
Second prize this year went to artist Ted Southern, another
former competitor from Brooklyn, New York. Southern was awarded $100,000.
"It was a close decision. Both met all
requirements," said Andy Petro, manager of NASA's Centennial Challenges
program, which oversees the competition.
The contest
was held to encourage private innovators to attack the issue of astronaut
gloves, which are difficult to engineer because they must be strong enough to
protect spaceflyers' hands from the vacuum of space, but also dexterous enough
to allow complex movements without fatiguing hands.
"We wanted to see if there were any really creative
solutions that hadn't come up before by opening it up to a broader field of competitors,"
Petro told SPACE.com. "Anyone from anywhere can get into it. You're likely
to get a fresh look at the problem."
During the competition, teams were required to use their
gloves in a box that simulates the vacuum of space, and also fill the gloves
with water to increase the pressure inside them until they burst, testing the
gloves' strength. The gloves had to have both an inner pressurizing layer and an
outer thermal protection layer to shield against extreme temperatures and
micrometeoroids, or small space junk.
NASA has held a number of Centennial Challenges events this
year, including a space elevator contest and a lunar lander competition in which
NASA awarded $3.3 million in prizes in total. In October, competitors vied to
use robots to dig
fake moon dirt. The winners received a total $750,000 in prize money.
"We have six ongoing multi-year competitions and
several ended this year with all the prize money being won," Petro told
SPACE.com. "We hope to announce at least one new one this year, and if we
get additional funding we'd like to announce several new ones."
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