Back to silverish spacesuits: Aouda outer layer material choosen

"The Aouda suit team has been narrowing down a list of several hundred potential suit material candidates" explains Gernot Groemer (Austrian Space Forum) "down to a handful of excellent materials for laboratory testing."

The final choice has been a mixture between Panox and Kevlar with an aluminium coating which is vaporized onto the textile surface under vacuum conditions. This material, produced by a specialized company in Germany, is called "F 1120 AL" and is able to keep its mechanical protection even at temperatures as low as -80° - conditions, which the Aouda suit has to be qualified for. "The big advantage -from the contamination point of view is the smooth alumninum surface which reveals itself under the microscope, so soil particles will have a hard time of sticking onto the textile", Gernot Groemer comments on the qualification tests, "however, we do not know much about the adhesive behaviour of the -potentially contaminated - surface dust, yet." Hence, the next development steps will be to use a modified JSC1a Martian soil simulant to analyse the conditions under which the coating might retain part of the environmental dust grains.