Anthony Capobianco, a Brown senior, said working on spacesuits was a natural fit for the group, which draws its members from RISD Rover, a team that participates in NASA’s annual Human Exploration Rover Challenge, and Brown Space Engineering, a student organization whose custom-built satellite recently completed a two-and-a-half-year mission.  

“I think we ultimately agreed because of our combined strength as engineers from Brown and designers from RISD that [working on] spacesuits would make the most sense,” Capobianco said. “They have extensive textile backgrounds and we could help with things like the electrostatic component.”

The students’ proposed solution, dubbed TEST-RAD, is a three-layer system that covers a spacesuit’s seals and joints, which are particularly vulnerable to dust damage. An insulating bottom layer connects the system to the suit. On top of that, a layer of stainless steel mesh generates an electric field, which propagates up through an outer layer of tightly tufted fibers made of PEDOT, a conductive polymer material. The electric field repels the lunar dust particles, which themselves carry a tiny electric charge. Particles that get through the electric field are likely to be trapped dense fiber tufts. Anything that gets through the tufts will be blocked by steel mesh.

Capobianco says the inspiration for the tufted fibers comes from chinchillas, whose famously dense fur makes it hard for anything to penetrate. That combined with electrostatic approach was what caught NASA’s eye, he noted.

“One highlight from the NASA feedback was that we have these three layers and each of them is doing something different,” he said. “That was one of the reasons they thought our design was so novel.”

With the grant in place, the team now sets to work building a prototype and testing it using simulated lunar soil. They aim to have final test results ready to report to NASA by the end of September.

Capobianco said the team is excited that the hands-on work is getting underway in accordance with the University’s COVID-19 protocols.

“We [developed the proposal] over Zoom and there are some people on our team I’ve never even met in person,” Capobianco said. “It’s like a breath of fresh air because [we hadn’t] been able to do a lot of the project-based stuff, so we’re really excited.”