Gallery: This Spacesuit for Exploring Mars Is a Form-Fitting Math Problem
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MIT Professor Dava Newman is a fashion designer to the stars and while you won't see her work on the red carpet, all the most fashionable space explorers will be wearing her designs when they set foot on the red planet. *Photo: Dava Newman*
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For a mission to Mars to succeed, off-world explorers desperately need a new wardrobe to deal with the planet's unique challenges. *Photo: Dava Newman*
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Providing life-preserving pressure requires over a thousand feet of ribbing, which is threaded through the suit at critical strain points and held in place with over 140,000 stitches. *Photo: Dava Newman*
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"The great thing about 3-D printing today is that we can use it for concepts, almost like sketch models, early in our design process rather than 3-D printing for only final designs, as we did in the past," says Newman. *Photo: Dava Newman*
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"Aesthetics are a critical component of design and engineering," says Newman. "I still think space exploration is the most exciting thing going on, and heroic-looking suits might help make more of a human connection for folks." *Photo: Marla Aufmuth*
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"Custom-designed individual suits are critical in my opinion since we want to facilitate extreme exploration," says Newman. "And the best way I know how to improve performance is to provide astronaut explorers with maximum mobility while requiring the least amount of energy expenditure." *Photo: Marla Aufmuth*
