Today I spent the morning at the off-site facilities in which Class 1 EVA suits are produced.
The designation “Class 1” means that a piece of hardware is meant to fly to space, as opposed to being used on the ground, for example for training. Today I got to try on Class 1 EVA gloves and to make all the necessary adjustments to have the best possible fit.
Of course we need to try the gloves in their pressurized state, because the overpressure changes the fit completely. Mainly, as you would expect, it inflates the gloves, making them larger. For that purpose we have a dedicated glovebox: when you insert the hands, the rings on the arm seal the volume and air can be pumped out until we get the necessary overpressure of 4.3 PSI in the gloves.
The fitting process is an iterative one involving a lot of patient work by the suit technicians. You put the gloves on, insert the arms in the glovebox, pressurize, see how it feels, discuss the fit with the suit engineer, make the changes that sounds reasonable and try again. Repeat as many times as necessary.
Pretty exciting to work with gloves that will actually fly to space for me!
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://anne.cpamoa.free.fr/blog/index.php/category/logbook-samantha
18/10/2013