Tuition freeze to continue, Abbott reminds Texas universities<\/a><\/p>\nIn addition to handling extreme temperatures, the handle also has to be ergonomic. For astronauts in bulky, pressurized suits with limited finger mobility, gripping a tool cart handle for hours can be fatiguing in lunar gravity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy are we making the job harder for the astronaut?\u201d von Paumgartten said. \u201cWhy don’t we just make something that makes their lives easier, especially when they’re already on [the moon] for us doing all this work?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
To solve this problem, the team used a design based on a dog clutch mechanism to create a handle that primarily relies on the astronaut moving their thumb, rather than their entire hand.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat this does is allow the astronauts to manipulate and adjust our handle using as little hand flexion as possible, making it very non-fatiguing, ergonomic, and reliable,\u201d Hudson said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Over the course of 10 months, team lead Nat Sullivan estimated they went through about 12 to 15 different prototypes, with dozens of smaller tweaks between each one. At its most intense, team members put in 20-40 hours per week. Adisan Hammel, the project\u2019s computer assisted design lead, said it felt like a part-time job.<\/p>\n
![\"Nat]()
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Nat Sullivan (from left), Adisan Hammel and David von Paumgartten work on the UTD team’s tool cart handle design. The team will present its design at the Johnson Space Center this week.<\/p>\n
james coreas\/University of Texas at Dallas<\/p>\n
\u201cI haven’t had the chance to work with anybody this motivated outside of this group, so it’s really been something special,\u201d Sullivan said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Von Paumgartten said the most rewarding aspect of the project for him was being able to inspire his little cousins, who lovingly call him a \u201cspace cowboy.\u201d Coming from a low-income household as a first-generation college student, working on this team has meant \u201ceverything\u201d to him.<\/p>\n
For Hudson, it was exciting to work with NASA so early on in his career, especially to solve an issue that astronauts are facing in real life.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt’s one thing to learn formulas that you can use to see how much stress a part can carry,\u201d Hudson said. \u201cIt’s something else, getting to apply it in a very real-world application, where your work is going to be looked over and checked by professional engineers working for NASA.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, Judy and Jim Gibbs, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Ron Steinhart, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks, and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0A group of UTD engineering students tackled a redesign of a tool cart handle for NASA\u2019s\u00a0Micro-g Neutral Buoyancy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":318169,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[732,97766,223,160,162,161,89396,89204,89398,89275,88971],"class_list":["post-318168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-plano","tag-article","tag-business-technology","tag-news","tag-plano","tag-plano-headlines","tag-plano-news","tag-tp-ed-lab-college-career","tag-tp-education-lab","tag-tp-higher-education","tag-tp-richardson","tag-tp-science-and-medicine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/318169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}