In a Q&A, spacesuit designer Amy Ross explains how five samples, including a piece of helmet visor, will be tested aboard the rover, which was launched on July 30.
An advanced spacesuit designer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, she’s developing new suits for the Moon and Mars.
So Ross is eagerly awaiting this summer’s launch of the Perseverance Mars rover, which will carry the first samples of spacesuit material ever sent to the Red Planet.
While the rover explores Jezero Crater, collecting rock and soil samples for future return to Earth, five small pieces of spacesuit material will be studied by an instrument aboard Perseverance called SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals).
Read on as Ross shares insights into the materials chosen and the differences between suits designed for the Moon and those for Mars.
This graphic shows an illustration of a prototype astronaut suit, left, along with suit samples included in the calibration target, lower right, belonging to the SHERLOC instrument aboard the Perseverance rover.
Ross: The materials we’re poking at the most are meant to be on the outer layer of a suit, since these will be exposed to the most radiation.
Ross: On Mars, radiation will break down the chemical composition of the materials, weakening their tensile strength.
How much would spacesuit design differ between the space station, the Moon, and Mars.
The suit is also exposed to two environmental sources of degradation: solar radiation and atomic oxygen.
It’s very reactive and can degrade spacesuit materials.
The Moon doesn’t have the atomic oxygen problem but is worse than Mars in terms of radiation.
You’re pretty close to the Sun and have no atmosphere to scatter the ultraviolet radiation like you do on Mars.
The environments of the Moon and Mars aren’t exactly the same, but the durability challenges — materials exposed over long periods of time at low pressures in a dusty environment — are similar.
Mars spacesuits will be more like ones we use for the Moon and less like those for the ISS.
I’m trying to make the Moon suit as much like the Mars suit as possible.
A division of Caltech, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.
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