Two people of Indian origin – Ahilan Anantha Krishnan from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and Himel Barua, a student at the University of Akron along with his team mates – are among top three individual and team winners of the NASA Space Suit Textile Testing Challenge that aims at creating new concepts for protective suits for future exploration missions.
NASA last week announced the winners of two competitions – Space Suit Textile Testing Challenge in which the two Indians won, and In-Situ Materials Challenges – aimed at creating new concepts for construction and human habitation on future space exploration missions, including the agency’s journey to Mars.
Both the Indians won prizes in the Space Suit Textile Testing category which offered three prizes of $5,000 each for winning ideas on how to test the outer protective layer of spacesuit material for performance in different kinds of planetary environments, such as like Mars or large asteroids.
“These two challenges offered the opportunity to think about two basic needs of exploration – protective suits and building materials – in a new way,” said Steve Rader, deputy manager of NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. “Our journey to Mars will require innovations in design and technology; opening our process up to the public gives us more creative paths to follow,” he said.
Krishnan won the prize for his for his proposal on evaluating space suit textile abrasion in planetary environments while Barua and his team mates got the prize for their proposal of a cylindrical abrasion method.
These two challenges, managed for NASA by global innovation firm NineSigma, launched in October 2015 under the umbrella of the NASA Tournament Lab, yielded innovative concepts for spacesuit testing and in-situ building materials use for habitat construction.
“It is expected that these submissions will help to advance the testing and analysis of candidate materials that may be incorporated into space suits designed to protect astronauts during future deep space missions,” according to NineSigma.
The CoECI was established with support from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to assist NASA and other federal agencies in using new tools such as challenges to solve tough, mission-critical problems.
The center launches challenges under the umbrella of the NASA Tournament Lab and offers a variety of open innovation platforms that engage the crowd-sourcing community in challenges to create the most innovative, efficient and optimal solutions for specific, real-world challenges.
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