Inspiration
Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) Events are extremely dangerous to astronauts and difficult to predict. Astronauts on a lunar EVA might need to take immediate shelter. But what if they're far away from their habitat? We were inspired by lifeboats, and fire shelters used by wildland firefighters. We need a shelter that can provide temporary life support in order to wait out one of these emergencies that also provides radiation protection.
What it does
Instantly deployable shelter Protects from Radiation, also insulates the habitat Provides temporary life support (CO2 Scrubber, Oxygen, Pressurization)
How we built it
Our team of motivated NASA interns built our idea from the ground up, quite literally. We started drafting our idea through first spending hours debating and brainstorming a valid idea before all coming together towards solving a common goal--Challenge Six.
Challenges we ran into
Deciding what to build. We wanted to come up with the a simple, elegant solution that still provided robust radiation protection and life support to give astronauts enough time to be rescued or wait out a solar energetic particle event.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Coming up with several novel ideas that have promise. The solution we ended up with was the best solution we could think of for the specific problem we were trying to solve. However, in the process, we also came up with interesting solutions that could be applied to different problems, such as fluidization of lunar regolith to rapidly sink a habitat.
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