NDX, NASA and UND
Then there’s the mobility issue, de León said, comparing the NDX suit with the current day “zero-g suit” worn by astronauts doing spacewalks while tethered to the International Space Station (ISS). “The ISS suits are almost immobile from the waist down because you don’t need any walking capabilities in that environment, even though it’s called a space ‘walk,’” de León said. “All they have to be able to do is attach their feet into a foot restraint located at various points on the ISS. “What we try to do is the inverse of that: we aim to develop suits where you can use your legs and arms in order to facilitate your work on a planet’s surface.” In addition, de León said that the NDX team is designing and building suits that can be serviced and repaired on the planetary surface. Most of the suits developed so far are Earth-servicing only, designed to be used in low-Earth orbit, such as on ISS, and then taken back to Earth after a couple of space walks. “But for a mission to Mars, which is expected to last at least three years, you can’t take your suits back for repairs or maintenance. You have to be able to do that right where you are — on Mars,” he said.
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De León foresees that UND will be testing and working a lot more with NASA, which has funded his team’s work, and with the space industry and international partners to make these missions a reality. “The idea is that as a university, we’re going to create useful knowledge,” de León said. “That includes producing prototypes such as our NDX system that are useful to NASA and the companies that will actually build the suits.” Proof of UND’s influence in the spacesuit system sphere is a recent second edition of U.S. Spacesuits, a book by Kenneth Thomas. He is a historian and engineer at Hamilton-Sundstrand (HS), one of the two primary builders of U.S. spacesuits. In that book, one of UND’s NDX suits is prominently featured in photos and text.
No ordinary spacesuit One of the key elements of equipment for a future human expedition to Mars will be a spacesuit that allows astronauts to roam the surface. Martian explorers will face a bitterly cold, dusty environment with a thin atmosphere of mainly carbon dioxide. They’ll have to rely on their spacesuits to provide oxygen to breathe and a comfortable temperature, pressure, and atmosphere in which to work.
An interesting place
PHOTO BY JACKIE LORENTZ
Space Studies graduate student Tiffany Swarmer puts one version of UND’s NDX spacesuit through an exercise to demonstrate its flexibility and range of motion.
16 n UND Discovery n University of North Dakota
De León sees space exploration, including a trip to Mars, happening relatively soon. “But we’re not going to do it one country at a time,” he said. “It’s not necessarily going to be done by the United States all by itself. Because of the cost and complexity of a crewed mission to Mars, you’ll see a consortium of partners that have already been successful in space, working together to get to that goal.” De León sees the NDX system as a key player in the development of future space missions. “This all puts us in a very interesting place,” he said. “We have a starting point to become a university known globally for having a unique system that we can offer organizations such as NASA.” De León said that for students on his team — both undergraduates and graduates — the work is highly participatory. “Ultimately, it’s about our students. Because we’re very hands-on oriented and because I have extensive experience in the space industry, I believe that our students should not just be working from a stack of texts and papers,” said de León. “Our students come to us from all over the world because they’re excited about the research we’re doing here.” n
John Reid
Continued from Page 6 “That was in the days when comfort and communication were more primitive,” he recalled. “Our tents, for example, had no floors, just the snow.” Still, it was a fruitful experience. It was here that he chiseled rare chunks of surface glacier ice from the Ross Ice Shelf, the largest mass of floating ice in the world (500 miles long by 500 miles wide, moving a half-mile per year — the “speed of light” for geologic time). It was this glacial ice that Reid would eventually have shipped to UND a few years later, making a splash in local and national media — and one aforementioned editorial. Reid and UND enjoyed the publicity that the exotic Antarctic ice brought. More practically, Reid used the samples to educate his students and to study geological theories of the time. “The formation of mountains is perhaps the most embarrassing problem that geologist have,” Reid wrote in 1965. “The pertinence of this analogy lies in the fact that ice is a rock, composed of the mineral, ice. Ice deforms plastically under very slight pressures. Hence, we can watch a mountain form in ice form in a very short period of time. To see the same amount of deformation in other types of rocks would require hundreds of thousands of years.” Reid retired from UND in 1999, but UND’s geomorphological research in high, cold places of the world didn’t end with his departure. Reid said he’s quite aware of the work that another UND faculty member and fellow geomorphologist, Jaakko Putkonen, is doing with his own students in Antarctica and the Himalayas. “I applaud Jaakko for his dedication to glacial geomorphology and to his willingness to involve students in his research,” Reid said. “Students learn best from direct participation.” In 2000, Reid and his wife of 57 years, Barbara, moved from Grand Forks to Fort Collins, close to the Rocky Mountain National Park, where they enjoy hiking. Ever the teacher, Reid continued working with his last Ph.D. student after retirement. He also volunteered for five years at local high schools in geoscience classes, organizing rock and mineral collections. Today, he assists three days a week in the computer labs of a nearby elementary school, and volunteers as an ombudsman at two nursing homes for the County Office on Aging. “So, even though I have turned 80 — I keep happily busy.” And, apparently, still happily teaching. n