Borrowing astronauts' bodies
MR fluids could be a key component of landing gear that adapt "automatically and instantaneously to the local geo-technical conditions of the landing site," Gaven said.
The downside for space launches is that magnets can be heavy, costing more fuel to escape Earth’s gravity.
But as magnetic technologies improve, we might start to see virtual realty suits that allow experts to "borrow" astronauts’ bodies, as they too wear special suits to perform highly specialized tasks, said
Yoseph Bar-Cohen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Such telepresence is at the core of his Memica program. One surprising virtual reality application conceived of by Bar-Cohen’s research team is training doctors in deep space -- like the starship medical officers we’ve become accustomed to in science fiction who care for crews of hundreds, if not thousands of people coming in with illnesses and trauma on a daily basis.
But our first deep space explorers are likely to be sent out in small crews. A doctor’s skills could rust with disuse. Bar-Cohen would like to see doctors constantly training by operating on virtual patients. MR fluids could simulate the resistance of human flesh, he says, so a surgeon wearing a virtual reality suit will have not only the look, but also the feel of soft tissue under his or her scalpel.
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| A motorcycle shock absorber works by stimulating a MR fluid chamber to
harden or soften instantly to counteract vibration and bumps. Click to enlarge. Credit: CSA Engineering.
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| Particles float freely in fluid until exposed to a magnetic field. They then form stiff chains along magnetic force lines, giving the once liquid material a consistency like paste or hard wax. Click to enlarge.
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Other astronauts also might wear the suits as a routine to provide the kind of full-body resistance needed to combat muscle atrophy in zero gravity, Bar-Cohen notes.
Shape-shifting speculative
One thing that the researchers agreed MR fluids wouldn’t develop into anytime soon is a shape-shifting material.
Ginder dismisses wild speculations in popular media about cars that can emerge from a wreck with a simple reset button.
"The difficulty is delivering a magnetic field to such a large structure and to shape it in such complex forms," he explains. "It’s the same problem
Braille systems would face even on that smaller, simpler scale.
Gaven agrees.
"Morphing shapes using MR materials and magnetic fields ... is far-fetched, in my opinion," he says.
But breakthroughs in precise digital control of magnetic fields could spark an explosion in the emerging field.
"Whenever you say something is not possible," Bar-Cohen said, "someone will beat you at it."
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