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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

NASA's Next Moonsuit Is Going to Be Damned Impressive:

"The xEMU [Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit] has been designed from the very beginning to be safer and have fewer catastrophic failure modes than any of its predecessors," Chris Hansen, the EVA Office manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, explained in an email. (EVA stands for extravehicular activity, which is NASA-speak for anything done outside of a vehicle, whether that's in Earth's orbit or on the surface of another planet.)

Space is a dangerous place at the best of times, but the Moon presents some added challenges.

"Going outside of low-Earth orbit and to the surface of the Moon, the suits will be subjected to higher radiation levels and temperature extremes than our current [ISS] suit," said Hansen. "The new suits have more complex avionics [electronics] than the Apollo suits, so we have to be very careful to select parts that are radiation hardened and designed to operate in that environment."

[...] Hansen said he's particularly excited about two new technologies in the xEMU that have never been incorporated into a suit design before.

"One is our new cooling system called the SWME—we pronounce it 'swimmy'—which is the Spacesuit Water Membrane Evaporator," he said. "The SWME uses water evaporation to cool the suits and their astronauts, rather than the process of sublimating ice, which is used by all previous suit designs. This system is much more robust than current sublimators used on the EMU."

The second new piece of technology is called "Rapid Amine," or RCA, which is a new type of carbon dioxide scrubber.

Original Submission