{"id":173809,"date":"2025-11-10T21:17:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T21:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/173809\/"},"modified":"2025-11-10T21:17:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T21:17:11","slug":"new-structures-could-keep-astronauts-fit-during-long-missions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/173809\/","title":{"rendered":"New Structures Could Keep Astronauts Fit During Long Missions"},"content":{"rendered":"

From muscle atrophy to bone loss, astronauts face a number of health risks while in space.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to understand why.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The human body relies on Earth\u2019s gravity to work out muscles and support other functions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a particularly serious issue for astronauts on long missions. Just look at NASA astronauts Barry \u201cButch\u201d Wilmore and Sunita \u201cSuni\u201d Williams, who were aboard the International Space Station for nine months. Both returned to Earth with a decrease in muscle mass, balancing issues, fluid buildup and more.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

One way astronauts in space try to counteract microgravity\u2019s negative effect is by using specialized exercise equipment, but the available options still fall short in many respects in actually preventing muscle or bone loss.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

A team of researchers that includes Jeffery Lipton<\/a>, a Northeastern University mechanical and industrial engineering professor, may have just offered the best solution yet in addressing the issue \u2014 and they turned to geometry to do it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lipton and his colleagues have created a new class of deployable structures that could one day be used to create artificial gravity space habitats for astronauts to maintain their muscles during long-duration missions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These high-expansion-ratio deployable structures, or HERDS, are composed of a series of triangle-shaped pop-up extending trusses, or PET, that use a scissor-based mechanism to retract and expand.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"FourJeffery Lipton, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern, was one of several researchers who boarded a parabolic flight to test the structure. Courtesy photo<\/p>\n

These systems are small enough \u2014 both in size and weight \u2014 to be stored compactly on a spacecraft, but are capable of expanding into a kilometer in length and function properly at high spin rates.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lipton and his colleagues tested the HERDS in microgravity this year aboard a parabolic flight<\/a> \u2014 a type of flight that simulates space travel. The trip was a test of the hardware, and also an opportunity for the team to refine the software side of things, he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need to prove you have a really good way of modeling these systems, and you can\u2019t really model them just on Earth,\u201d he says. \u201cWe wanted to make sure that we could build a software model that could accurately capture the dynamics and the individual eccentricities of these complex moving part assemblies.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was certainly a unique experience, Lipton explains.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe crazy part was the switching between zero G and 2Gs,\u201d he says. \u201cIn zero G, it feels natural \u2014 like nothing at all,\u201d he says. \u201cBut your entire sense of how to move is wrong. One time I pushed off too hard and rocketed right into the ceiling. Once you got the hang of it, though, you just learned to push gently and coast up to where you wanted to go. However, when 2Gs came, you couldn\u2019t and didn\u2019t want to move.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the HERDS system\u2019s potential applications extend beyond just space exploration, Lipton explains. This technology could be used to create things like deployable stretchers, temporary cellphone towers and concert staging.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cDeployable structures have a wide range of uses \u2014 anytime where you need to get something either into a small area or into a small volume and then expand it out on the other side,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Other deployment structure methods that have been used in the past have some major tradeoffs, Lipton explained. Tethered-based deployable structures are built using rope or straps, for example, which \u201care great as long as they are taut, but as soon as they go slack, they are dangerous,\u201d Lipton says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What sets HERDS apart is that they are safe either deployed or stored flat and have the proper rigidity and stiffness to handle heavy loads like humans, he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now that Lipton and his colleagues have better modeling data for the structure, they\u2019ll double down on derisking the technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one is going to go from this to, \u2018OK, let\u2019s build that space habitat for astronauts.\u2019 It\u2019s too risky and expensive,\u201d he says. \u201cNow, we have to look for different applications that we can do both on Earth and in space with both our deployable structures and our software so that we can build the confidence in this and get larger things deployed and eventually lead to this kilometer-scale structure in space.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From muscle atrophy to bone loss, astronauts face a number of health risks while in space.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[18,9656,135,19,17,133,451],"class_list":{"0":"post-173809","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-engineering","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-space"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115527486673465358","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}