(ORDO NEWS) — The surface of other planets is not the only kind of rugged terrain that researchers of the solar system will have to navigate. In some parts of our planet, you can find obstacles that are equally difficult to overcome. Inner Mongolia, a northern Chinese province, is this type of terrain, especially in winter.
Therefore, members of the search and rescue team of the Chang’e-5 mission, which delivered lunar soil samples to Earth on December 16, were forced to use a valuable modern invention – an exoskeleton for their work on returning the capsule with samples.
It is curious that the workers who used this exoskeleton were not faced with the task of climbing a steep mountain with it or carrying a super-heavy capsule with samples (its weight did not exceed only 2 kilograms).
The purpose of the exoskeleton was to help deliver the equipment needed to establish communication between the field engineering team and the Beijing headquarters of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASTC), which was responsible for conducting search and rescue operations.
Such exoskeletons allow people to approximately double their weight. The local state media of the Celestial Empire indicated that a person equipped with this exoskeleton is able to transfer a 50-kilogram load over a distance of 100 meters over rough terrain and not feel tired.
Recently, exoskeletons of this design have been used by the Chinese military and medical personnel in the Himalayas, where clashes with the Indian military over the controversial line of contact have occurred.
One of the indisputable advantages of this design was that the exoskeletons were completely mechanical and did not require charging the batteries due to the lack of them.
This decision was made deliberately, taking into account the complexity of the conditions in which the rescue and search operations of the Chang’e-5 mission were supposed to be carried out. Bad weather can damage electrical systems, making an electrically powered exoskeleton just an extra burden – and far from being the lightest.
Exoskeletons, fully mechanical or powered by electricity, will soon be widely used in the space industry. The first problem they have to deal with is to overcome the overloads that occur in the bodies of astronauts during the launch of the launch vehicle.
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