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Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member... More by Keith Cowing
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So…I know someone will ask, so I’ll just ask first.
Do NASA EVA suit gloves work on a touch screen? I know gloves usually don’t, but the mechanic gloves that I bought recently do, as do a pair of red fleece gloves that I got for my wife recently.
If by touchscreen you mean a standard smartphone or tablet, no. By the time smartphones and tablets became popular, consumer touch displays were already transitioning from resistive displays to capacitive. Resistive displays, like those used on older PDA’s worked by pressure, so they could be used with gloves, a stylus, even fingernails. Capacitive displays however require electrical conductivity with your skin. There are relatively inexpensive gloves widely available that have electrically conductive thread sewn into the fingertips, those work pretty good with capacitive touchscreens. You can also get lucky sometimes with a pair of thin, cloth gloves like the ones you described. However thicker gloves especially leather or rubber are unlikely to work, which would include spacesuit gloves which have silicone rubber fingertips.
However besides resistive there are several other types of touch display technologies which would possibly work with spacesuit gloves.
I think we’d need to know more about the spacesuit glove before we say it wouldn’t work with a capacitive touch screen. Is there an electrically conductive layer in the material? There are a number of issues involving electrostatic charging in space (e.g. photoelectric current on the sunlight side but not the un-illuminated side of an object) and space_craft_ often try to have conductive surfaces. I’ve never heard what the practice is for space_suits_.
Spacesuit construction is complex, that’s for sure. I am pretty sure the fingertip silicone is on top of layers of other materials. However even if one or more of those layers are electrically conductive the silicone is what contacts the touchscreen and it would act as an insulator. And possibly making matters worse another thin glove is worn underneath the EVA glove, although I don’t know if the inner glove includes fingertips.
That being said, the fingertips are apparently the thinnest part of the spacesuit in order to provide dexterity, to the point that I have heard astronauts say that their fingers can get pretty cold during an EVA. But I still doubt that spacesuit gloves would work well with capacitive displays, if at all, at least not reliably.
Although there are other factors that would affect a choice of display type for EVA’s, such as how well they handle glare and reflections.
Pretty good ad, it grabs the viewers attention with the orbital stuff, and then shows the Hyundai. But I question whether anyone can actually figure out what is going on, the woman astronaut triggers his car to unlock. I had to watch it a number of times to figure it out. However, this may be a strategy, ads these days are kind of like that, they want you to not figure things out, and watch again and again to try to figure it out.
To defeat that ever-present “Skip” button. 😉
Some people? Texting, social media, microwaves, tv, computers… This entire species is in the midst of the most profound social, physical and psychological experiment on it since we became a differentiated species some 200,000 years ago. This “exponential experiment” based on technological advancement and population growth pressures is roughly 65 years in the making. Very little of your physiology has changed in all this time but our interaction with the world has, and so rapidly that we are affecting human brain development. The vast majority of people dont understand that this is even happening. The children we are having now are developing along a different path than anyone born before the 1990s. The results will be interesting at best, detrimental to survival at worst.
Kim Stanley Robinson attempts to describe a ‘next generation’ that has become very separated due to technological advances in his “Blue Mars”.
The entire Mars trilogy is a must-read, for lots of reasons, although it gets bogged down in parts, especially the debate about a Martian government.
Still: he’s not afraid of the big issues. His imagined future generation is blessed with very, very long life, and with genetic splicing that yields, for instance, women who have the ability to purr at…certain…times.