Mars Ep. 10: Suit Up for Mars

NASA is about to make history with Artemis II sending four astronauts on a test flight around the moon. On this official NASA podcast, we're taking you inside the mission and giving you a front row seat to this incredible journey. NASA is also streaming the launch of Artemis II, the lunar flyby when the astronauts see the moon up close, their return to Earth, and every second in between. You can experience NASA's coverage and stay up to date with all things Artemis II at NASA.gov or on social media at NASA. For NASA's official Artemis II podcast series, tune into NASA's curious universe. Find curious universe wherever you listen to Houston we have a podcast. Houston we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center episode 280, suit up for Mars. I'm Gary Jordan and I'll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the expert scientists, engineers, and astronauts all to let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight. We're continuing with a reboot of our series that outlines a human mission to and from the red planet. The 10th episode explains what needs to be considered in the design and operation of a spacesuit that'll be used to explore the surface of the red planet. This episode was recorded on January 20th, 2021. Let's get started. There's a lot that Mars will throw at humans' exploring surface, so we have to be prepared with the right space suit. Luckily, we have a lot of smart people already thinking about how to address some of these issues. Things like those dust storms, mobility, and planetary protection. One of those smart people is Natalie Mary, a systems engineer for the extra vehicular activity or EVA office. It's her job to perform analysis and integration for the exploration EVA system with suit engineers and stakeholders from programs such as Artemis, Gateway, and Mars. So let's get right into it, suiting up for Mars with Natalie Mary. Enjoy. Natalie Mary, thanks for coming on Houston. We have a podcast today. What an interesting topic, Martian spacesuits, suiting up for working on the surface of another planet. It's a huge deal. Natalie, I want to start with just understanding what it takes to work in such an interesting field. How do you get to the point where you are, where you're thinking about how to live and work on Mars in a spacesuit? Yeah, well, like most space nerds out there, I grew up looking at the sky and stars and imagining about exploration. I mean, as a kid, I put to get it as little glow-in-the-dark constellations on my ceiling in my room. And I found I was deep in it, math and science, and decided to go into engineering, sort of engineering field. And so I went to Texas A&M for bachelor's and aerospace engineering. About the time I graduated in 2000, it was perfect. There's NASA with hiring flight controllers, so pretty much as the ISS assembly began. So the flight controller for about eight years and was very privileged to be a part of that. And then after that, I took on more of a like systems engineering kind of role and began working with the extra-vehicular activity office. And so my focus has been on systems engineering such as architecture, interfaces, ops cons for multiple missions, including exploration spacesuit capabilities for lunar, sys-looner, and Mars missions. And so my role has really been mainly on the architecture side of things, but to know that, you need to know what folks want the suit to actually do on the surface of Mars, how the environment of Mars inspects the design of the suit, what kind of architectures the suit interfaces with, like pressurized rovers or habitat. And so that is what I'm doing currently. And by the way, it's kind of cool that you call this podcast "Sing Up for Mars" because you have a public website that you can go to at nasa.gov/suitup. And that has our Artemis generation spacesuits roll out, some really cool references and images. And we have a yearly EVA technology workshop that includes the presentation throughout the years for that. Nice. So if you want to know more about just spacesuits in general, that's a good place to go. So not only when and we start with that spacesuits in general, give folks a sneak peek on what's on that website and sort of what we're going to be talking about today. So some of those things you got to consider when you're designing a spacesuit. What are the things that are that a spacesuit provides that it's necessary for space exploration? Yeah, yeah. So the spacesuits provide the crew member with the life support, environmental protection, and communications capability to allow EVA's outside of the vehicle extra vehicular activity outside of the vehicle and the vacuum of space or on a planetary surface. So it's not disclosed or scuba diving equipment, for example, like if you're going to go scuba diving, you have your dive suit for thermal, your buoyancy control, masks, fins, breathing air, dive computer, things like that. But with a spacesuit, that includes thermal protection and mobility and informatics. But it also protects you from vacuum by providing a pressure garment and oxygen and CO2 removal, communications, power, cooling water, drinking water, and waste management, all the things that you need to survive. And so it's pretty much your own personal spacecraft. That's actually the best way that I've ever heard it being described as your own personal spacecraft or like a spacecraft shaped like a human body. That's essentially what it is. It's doing all these things to separate all the needs or to give all the needs of what the human body is wanting within that environment. Because space or other planets, they just don't provide those needs, right? Exactly. Yeah. Now there's a couple of things about spacesuits. You mentioned a couple when you were talking about your current work on, or on thinking about what a suit is going to be needed for Mars. And some of the things you brought up was like the architecture of Mars itself, right? What's going to be on the surface that the suit is going to need to interact with? What are you going to be doing? What do you want to do? I think like bending up and picking up rocks is probably one of those things you want to do and some of the environment. So you know, I'm thinking about those things, but I wanted to stay with just spacesuits in general, right? So like thinking about, you know, how a spacesuit is designed to meet needs, right? So you're talking about the needs of a planet. Let's back up to like the EMU, right? This is the suit that's on the International Space Station. It's meant for microgravity. What purposes is the EMU? What is the EMU addressing? You know, what is it? How is it designed to operate the most efficiently in a microgravity environment? Okay. So transitioning from a suit made from microgravity to reduced gravity. There's definitely some differences in mobility. So in microgravity, you're really transitioning and translating with your arms and hands and your boots and your legs are pretty much stable for floating, I guess per se. But for the moon and Mars, reduced gravity will need that capability in the lower torso, waist, legs, boots to walk on a surface, kneel down and pick something up and explore on uneven terrain. The EMU was designed for microgravity. So it doesn't have those bearings in the lower torso or hiking style boots designed for walking. And then the life support for microgravity and vacuum is also different. It's designed for vacuum and it's in the EMU. It's a great system and it's called Medox, but it uses a heavy oven and the airlock to kind of bake off that CO2 for CO2 removal. And the suit mask itself is designed. It's not a big of a deal for microgravity, but when it comes pretty important, when you start talking about the mass worn by the crew member on Mars and on the moon. The EMU was also, it wasn't designed to be repaired and remove and replace components on orbit. It was have the ability with ISS to be able to bring back the entire suit and fix things on Earth. And with Mars and the moon, that we're looking at being able to repair components or remove and replace components in situ. I'll see that's a big deal, right? Because it's kind of a it's a it's a much different of a trip to go from low Earth to orbit back to Earth than it is from Mars. I'm thinking about that this features of the suit itself, right? Things that you need. I think you have a you have a great description of just what it's providing. I think another interesting component here is atmospheric pressure, right? So we're used to I think sea levels like 14.7 psi pounds per square inch on the Earth and that is matched within the environment of the International Space Station. Now I know that suits are a little bit different. They go they go lower and I'm curious as to as to why. Yeah, okay. So if you were to have a suit at our sea level atmosphere at 14.7 delta pressure to vacuum, it would pretty much blow up like a balloon and it would be really stiff so that you could barely move your joints, let alone your fingers. So during an EDA the suit pressure is actually lowered to around 4.3 psi d and to do that you increase the oxygen content to 100% oxygen to both allow for improved mobility and to prevent the compression sickness or what you call the bins usually here called during scuba diving. And so you can actually change the atmosphere in the vehicle too, prior to an EDA to reduce that duration of pre-breeds. But when you reduce the pressure you have to increase your oxygen concentration. That also increases flammability risk. And so there is actually some testing going on, it's pretty exciting this year to help come up with those kind of exploration atmospheres to use across vehicles from like sift mooner to the moon to Mars and come up with some commonality and the equal systems. Oh that's pretty cool just like a like a guide for if you're if you're working here. This is the atmosphere pressure you want maybe maybe about composition too. So that's what you're doing. You're making almost a guidebook for depending on where you're exploring. Exactly. Yeah, that will help with probably coming up with the objectives of of a mission or the particular science objective and what you want to do during an EDA. How often you want to go EDA and and that duration. So those different atmospheres will affect that that time that you prepare for an EDA. Cool. So we're talking about atmospheric pressures and and Natalie you went through a lot of the components of and you know what's on the suits that we know these microgravity suits right the oxygen waste management power. Really what we're leading up to here is talking about these next generations of suits. Okay yeah, these are really exciting times to be working with the EDA community because we've already incorporated a lot of things and lessons learned from space suits and 50 years of of EDAs. And so one of the major things I think are incorporating the increased upper mobility and lower mobility to allow those crew members to perform the science that they want and go exploring. And so I had the pleasure of going on a geology field trip with our awesome geologists and it was amazing and while you plan and traverse prior to going into the field you end up finding interesting rocks or transitional regions that just make you want to go climb into the rocks and or dig and collect samples. For instance the scientists want to be able to go into a permanently shadowed crater or region and collect samples or climb on some uneven terrain. And so we've incorporated that mobility by including hip and leg bearings so that you can rotate and bend and get down and onto your knee and collect the sample. And so the upper torso has also been made with greater mobility in mind not only for the smaller crew members but also being able to rotate the shoulders and those side bearings have been moved closer and so that you can reach over and touch you know your shoulder. And so that's really the really interesting for lunar and and Mars surfaces that we can learn from even further. So the discussions we're having now is like mobility right so you got that lower mobility you got the upper mobility the things you're considering is what are we going to be doing on the surface and that's going to inform design. So obviously you know having more ability mobility rather on the lower torso to bend over and on the upper torso to grab rocks and climb stuff the support has to serve a purpose for what you're going to be doing on the surface right so how does how does that come into play why why is that necessary for when you're operating on the moon. Okay yeah so support our technology that you may have seen on the pressurized rover pigs or even here on site at JSC and building nine but we're considering it within the range of technology options being evaluated for our suit technology and which is flexible enough to support it given those things that I just mentioned. And so don't be able to don the suit through the back hatch the suit has that capability as well as the capability of a variable pressure regulator so that you can start at a different or higher pressure differential. This could allow the crew member depending on what's starting pressure they're saturated at to be able to have a shorter pre-breast ingress the suit through that hatch and hop off the vehicle basically so it could decrease that pre-EDA time quite a bit and so there's a lot of discussion on if you want to jump out and look at something interesting or if you want to stay out for longer basically you could have that capability of doing both you would be able to plan your traverses and have the capability to perform a longer EVA if you're out for a long time you want to perform science at a specific site or have the cycle capability if you want to perform multiple EVAs in a day. So let's continue down that path Natalie about exploring the the operations of of performing an EVA on the surface take us through what that's going to be like you already mentioned you know entering through the back port of the suit and doing a pre-breast operations but what's a what's an excursion going to look like let's let's start with the moon what's what would an excursion look like on the moon yeah so we have some operational concepts that we're looking at if you have a habitat say and a pressurized rover looking at going out on excursions in the pressurized rover away from the habitat for maybe a week or two at a time and and kind of doing maybe a clover leaf type traverse kind of going out farther and then coming back in to the locations that scientists want to to go perform their objectives and so maybe during a day you'd go out and your pressurized rover and then your pre-breast already saturated at that that pressure and so you're able to get in your suit or form suit check out egress the the suit port and perform your science objective possibly come back in for lunch or potty break or something like that and then go back out or you could go out for even longer eight hour duration V.A. and come back in and eventually we're we're going to need to perform a suit maintenance on the suits and so to do that we're going to be using a pressurizable volume and bring the suits inside a pressurizable volume like an airlock on the habitat so eventually you go back to that habitat and bring the suits inside an airlock for suit maintenance oh interesting okay so yeah you would have that ability so I guess a suit can yeah would have to be in that airlock so you can regularly work on it the maintenance that you're doing would be like you know switching out internal components maybe are we talking maybe maybe gloves what do you mean by maintenance yeah so we do have experience with with ISS you've got an engineered smooth surface except for micrometeoride so you we do have some debris both hits handrails and things like that so there are sharp edges on the ISS so we have experience with that but we don't have as much experience with is you know the sharp dusty environment of the moon or the dust environment of Mars and so we know just from ISS that we need to change out gloves fairly frequently so that's something that an example of some suit maintenance that we would need to do on the surface and then there's other components that we maybe are called limited life items or things that we know will need to replace after a certain amount of cycle life and so that's when we would bring the suit inside for suit maintenance but that is actually another way we're going to be using the moon as an analog to Mars as understanding further those operations of the pressure is rover suit maintainability and suit reliability so those things we might be able to decrease in time the more we know about the suit and what is with the main components and sparing philosophy will be for the moon and Mars oh interesting yeah that that makes a lot of sense right moon that's part of the Artemis program going to the returning the surface of the moon and performing those operations a lot of this stuff that you're doing there the operations that you're talking about having you know the design of how you're going to be performing an EVA and then how you maintain the suits and everything that's really good really good analog really good practice for when you ultimately end up at the surface of Mars. Exactly yeah it's just it's another stepping stone and what we call or refer to as an analog for Mars and while there are differences and challenges between the moon and Mars that we will need further technology development list there's a lot of similarity there that we'll learn from on the moon. Well let's go into understanding a little bit about what Mars is gonna throw at us when we actually get there on the surface and start working in space suits so what is it about Mars you know what is it about the Mars environment that you're preparing for and that you're putting into the design of a space suit. Yeah okay so Mars does have an you know an atmosphere albeit a small one but there's actually wind and fine particles that will get on the suit. It's also dusty like the moon hopefully less sharp dust because of the atmosphere but the limits surface will get us a lot closer to understanding kind of like a layered engineering protocol to design the suits for removal of dust outside of the habitable volume and removal and cleaning of dust inside the habitat and this will become really important on Mars too because of planetary protection so there's a committee on space research that classifies the moon and Mars differently and we'll likely have to abide by more stringent planetary protection protocol on Mars than we do on ISS and the moon and so that means protecting Mars science from human contaminants or forward contamination and protecting the humans from anything that might be harmful on Mars or backward contamination so supports could also there be an important process of preventing that backwards contamination by what is referred to as breaking the chain or leaving the dusty suits behind on the surface of Mars and with that though with the support design it also does have impacts on or changes that would need to be made from an initial SCNU to Mars suit and so it can add mass to the suit because it has to add a support interface plate that actually is a ceiling surface between the suit and the bulkhead of the pressurized rover so one of the things we're really going to be looking forward to is the technology development of that but the technology development of how we can reduce the mass on the suit from Mars and so that gets really important when you're talking about getting down to Mars surface after being in microgravity for so long getting to that 3/8 gravity as opposed to what we've learned from the moon's 1/6 gravity and so with the crew members having been in space for six to nine months they've really gotten acclimated to microgravity so when you get to the surface you really don't want to battle a heavy suit with a very different you know possibly different CG after being in microgravity and then getting down to the surface and so I know doctors are saying we'll need to acclimate to that higher gravity over a certain amount of time and so we'll stay in the vehicle for a little bit longer possibly before performing an EVA but that mass reduction and understanding the CG will be a big deal for crew members acclimating to the Martian gravity. So now we're talking about taking this what we're thinking about for the X and U right this is the one we're thinking about for the surface of the Mars you're talking about taking a step further what technologies are needed to take that step to eventually work on the surface of Mars max mass reduction is one of those things what else what else do we think about that we some technology we need to develop for for getting ready for working on Mars. Okay yeah we definitely know we have some upgrades that we need to do to develop a suit for Mars and and so materials is one of those things as well we're we're looking we're actually going to have some materials on landing on Mars pretty soon the on the Perseverance Rover. I think that yeah yeah I think that's February 18th right so it'll be carrying a payload called Sherlock which includes materials from the visor and pressure garment system to see how the well they hold up to the radiation on Mars over time and some other technologies are likely mentioned the atmosphere on Mars is more of a CO2 atmosphere and then the thermal environment is different so those are two sometimes what we call gaps that we're looking forward in our strategic planning on technologies that we can upgrade for Mars so our X and U technologies awesome and it's it's really more efficient for vacuum though use it a swing bed technology and so that CO2 is collected on one side of the bed and then once it flips it is vented to vacuum but with the CO2 atmosphere on Mars and that grade will will be necessary and so the same thing goes with the cooling swing beds and the fact that Mars has more of a convective thermal atmosphere with weather and seasons than a radiator like the vacuum of space and lunar surface so we'll be looking at different technologies for CO2 removal and thermal cooling and heating and another change is going to be that that calm delay between Earth and Mars right so it could be I think we were talking up to 22 minutes one way and so we rely a lot on the MCC mission control center to provide guidance and monitor data and commands right now for ISS and also for Mars I mean for Moon but for Mars Cura autonomy is going to be become a lot more important and more important than ever with crew members possibly consisting of scientists and and then greater reliance on software and procedures on the suit and maybe intervehicular crew member guidance like your crew members that are on Mars with you and so that communication is going to become really important and autonomy see that's that that wouldn't even be something that I would think of immediately you know and I actually do commentary for space walks now and you can just hear over the loops just all the behind the scenes work all the behind the scenes chatter that's happening as we're watching a space walk happen real time there's decisions being made and people analyzing data from all these different angles so it's just it's really just understanding that from from my perspective and being a part of that thinking about all of that goes away right all those helping hands all those eyeballs go away because you there's there's no way to efficiently conduct a space walk with your waiting 22 minutes even more more than that for an answer if you have a question a very interesting stuff is there is there thoughts to practice this you know whether it's on the moon or or otherwise just to sort of get used to it before we do it for real yeah we we actually do a lot of analog work and one g on this and even incorporating in delays and calm and then I think that's a great analog for the moon is once we start upgrading our informatics systems and even allowing the the crew members during an UVA to change procedures or make decisions based on the science that they see right in another phase and that it's a really good in a lot to use the moon as well well Natalie I'm super excited about Mars and it just sounds like there's a lot of challenges ahead to take that next step and close those gaps as you're saying right there's just a lot of a lot of work ahead but I'm thinking about the near future I'm thinking about Artemis and how how how near term that very seems to us right now you know going on the surface of the moon and working and doing great science and everything I'm curious from your perspective working on spacesuit I'm curious to hear what you are excited for for for this upcoming period of time where we're going to have a new generation of moonwalkers and what you're looking forward to doing and exploring is going to help you in your job in understanding how to live and work on Mars in spacesuit oh yeah I'm super excited this is an awesome time to be working with the EPA community and and lunar surface and Artemis and so yeah Artemis just offers a great opportunity to test out our systems and and operations closer to home and and understand that maintenance and reliability and and the operations and crew autonomy and so even though some of those aspects of our Mars suit are different than that the Artemis lunar suit there's just so many of operations like dust removal the big thing and instance you shoot maintenance and so I think those were are gonna be an amazing analog to to go for Mars very cool Natalie this has been really really really interesting to dive so deep into you know not even this next generation of suits but it's cool to hear that that there's a team of really smart people thinking about the generation after that right just getting us ready to take those next steps so it's really a pleasure to talk to you about and dive deep into all the fascinating aspects of the Martian spaceuit appreciate your time Natalie thank you hey thanks for sticking around hope you're enjoying our reboot of the Mars series you can skip ahead to the final episode if you want at nasa.gov/podcast and check out any of our episodes in no particular order but there's especially a Mars collection of episodes and you can check out the last one if you want if not don't worry about it we're gonna bring it right to your feed next week while you're there at nasa.gov/podcast make sure you check out some of the other great shows we have across the whole agency if you want to talk to us specifically you can talk to us at the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook Twitter and Instagram you can use the hashtag #AskNASA on any of those platforms to submit an idea for the show maybe ask a question just make sure to mention it's for us at Houston we have a podcast thanks to Will Flado Pat Ryan Heidi Lavell Balinda Polito and Jayden Jennings for their part in this podcast as always shout out to former podcast team members Alex Pyraman Norma and Jennifer Hernandez for their help in the original episode the episode originally aired February 5th 2021 as episode 181 thanks again to Natalie Mary for taking the time to come on the show next week for episode 11 the final episode in our Mars series we chat with NASA's Mars architecture team about the mechanics of returning the first astronauts from the surface of Mars back home to Earth give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you're listening to on and tell us how we did. We'll be back next week.