If deep space exploration is to become a reality, humans will need to be as self-sufficient as possible. Since ordering supplies from Earth won't be practical, the astronauts will have to fabricate their own components for equipment and other products through additive manufacturing, better known as 3D printing.
But the challenges for "Earth-independent manufacturing" are as vast as space itself. The lack of gravity, differences in time and spatial scales, and radical changes in temperature could all stymie the process, resulting in wasted material and unusable parts.
Those challenges may be overcome thanks to modeling software created in the lab of Derek Warner, professor of civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering, and successfully tested aboard the international space station as part of a collaboration between Cornell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), NASA and the ISS U.S. National Laboratory.
The experiment, conducted on Jan. 1, was part of an ongoing effort to demonstrate the functionality of the HPE Spaceborne Computer-2, which was launched to space in Feb. 2021 and installed on the space station as the first commercial, state-of-the-art edge computing system with artificial intelligence capabilities. The new edge computer enables real-time processing of massive amounts of data in space, eliminating the long latency issues, and the waiting, associated with relaying data back and forth to Earth.
For the last year, astronauts have been running a range of data-intensive experiments on Spaceborne Computer-2, from processing medical imaging to DNA sequencing. Additive manufacturing was a prime candidate for testing because it is "absolutely critical to the things NASA wants to do with deep space exploration and going to Mars," according to doctoral student Terrence Moran, who designed the Cornell software.
