LAKELAND, Fla. — Spacewalk repairs are no small task for NASA astronauts, but thanks to students at Florida Polytechnic University, the process could soon get a lot easier.
Each piece of the tool that they created is part of a spacewalk tool that David Chazbani and Eduardo Jirau helped create.
The purpose is to make it easier for astronauts to secure two overlapping pieces of fabric while outside the International Space Station.
“There’s a lot of insulation out there around every single capsule that they have, so that way they’re able to protect any type of electronics or any type of device they have from radiation from the sun,” Jirau said. “Whenever they have to go out on space repairs, they have to cut out a piece of the fabric so they can access the electronics on the backside of that fabric. So currently they don’t have a way to put a Band-Aid over that hole they’ve created.”
The two mechanical engineering students were tasked last August with developing a solution as part of NASA’s Micro-g NExT Challenge. They were one of 17 college teams across the country selected to participate.
The Florida Polytechnic University’s AlbertX team is made up of Dr. Alexander Murphy, team mentor and assistant professor of mechanical engineering; seniors Jirau, Chazbani, and Katelyn Godell; and Dr. Apurva Patel, team mentor and assistant professor of mechanical engineering.
Jirau said it took them roughly nine months to develop the final product. Once it was complete, he said he knew they had created something special.
“We did a lot of testing, and every time, we wanted to make sure it worked before we actually took it out there, and so we were pretty confident in that what we did would work,” Jirau said.
The fastening device works by holding the new piece of material in place with a consumable.
Chazbani and Jirau said NASA tested the tool in a lab underwater to simulate conditions in space at the U.S. space agency’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The result? Nothing short of amazing.
“They said our device looked like something that NASA would’ve made,” Chazbani said.
The project could simplify future spacewalks and push Chazbani and Jirau’s limits beyond the sky.
Alexis Jones
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