![]() “Manufacturing processes like our 3D printer would allow you to just bring just bunch of raw materials and then fabricate parts as needed.” You want to be able to repair it or manufacture a new one as soon as possible,” Waddell said. “Imagine you’re on the moon or going to Mars, months or days away from help, and a critical part breaks. One day, 3D printing could also be used for bioprinting, including creating scaffolds for organs, skin grafts or even meats. Techniques that allow for in-space manufacturing, including the 3D-printing technology being developed in Taylor’s lab, could help prevent crises like this by allowing space travelers to create new objects on the fly. In an iconic scene from the film Apollo 13, NASA engineers scramble to design a device to purge carbon dioxide from the craft’s Lunar Module using only a pile of random tools and parts available to the astronauts in space. (Video by Paul Gramaglia/Zero-G) Replacing broken parts on the fly ![]() The 3D-printing team flips and floats during a lunar gravity simulation. Luckily, it was easy to just push people - and then they went away.” “Some people from other teams got close to our experiment, and we got close to others. People were definitely floating in between ,” Waddell said. “I felt so light that I could rotate my body in whatever direction I chose, and the slightest amount of force on the ground would push my body to the ceiling.”ĭespite struggles with motion sickness, both Waddell and Golozar report that conducting experiments on the flight was both fun and successful, if at times uniquely challenging. student in biophysics at Berkeley who works at the Space Sciences Laboratory. “Leaving Earth’s gravity and floating free was like being in the water without the sensation of water on my skin,” said microfluidics team member Matin Golozar, a fourth-year Ph.D. The Flight Opportunities program is funded by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. The Berkeley experiments were selected by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program that rapidly demonstrates promising technologies for space exploration, discovery and the expansion of space commerce through suborbital testing with industry flight providers. In recent years, commercial companies like Zero-G have started providing parabolic flights to private citizens. In addition to zero gravity and hypergravity, these flights also replicate the gravity on Mars and on the moon. The parabolic flight patterns create only brief periods of zero gravity - approximately 20 to 25 seconds - followed by periods of hypergravity, in which passengers experience gravity nearly twice that at the surface of the earth. Parabolic flights have been used for decades by NASA to help acclimate astronauts to the rigors of space flight. student Taylor Waddell, who led the 3D-printing team.īerkeley graduate student Matin Golozar floats above his team’s experiment, a device designed to detect bioorganic molecules near Saturn’s moon Enceladus, during a moment of zero gravity. “The plane behaved as it was supposed to, we have tons of prints that mostly turned out really nice, and the students had a great time doing backflips, climbing up the walls and doing other fun, zero gravity things,” said Berkeley mechanical engineering Ph.D. A second team, composed of collaborators from Berkeley and the University of Utah, operated a microfluidic “lab-on-a-chip” that could be used to search for biomolecules in the icy oceans of Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth-largest moon. One Berkeley team, composed of five graduate and undergraduate students from engineering associate professor Hayden Taylor’s lab, used a light-based 3D-printing technology to print more than 100 objects under zero gravity conditions, including an o-ring, a screwdriver handle and tiny model rockets. ![]() Last week, two teams of UC Berkeley researchers had the opportunity to test their experiments - and stomachs - aboard ZERO-G’s G-Force One, an aircraft that flies in a series of parabolic arcs to mimic the zero gravity conditions of space flight.ĭuring the flight, which took off and landed at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on May 10, the researchers worked alongside other teams from around the country to test new technologies that could be used on future space missions.
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