新宇航服中的大智慧

Now, what might the well-dressed Martian be wearing or at least the men and women the American space agency NASA hopes to be sending to Mars? Well, NASA has been putting some of the possible designs on the show. Our technology correspondent Jane Wakefield told me more.

It looks nice and futuristic. In fact, you know, it bears lots of sort of resemblances to the traditional spacesuit, the suit that we all think of when we think of space. And actually, the main difference of it is on the surface and they've included these light-emitting panels which will allow them to kinds of create special logos. You should be able to potentially identify individual astronauts, I mean, they'll have a different sort of logo on their fronts.

So, a little bit stylish perhaps, but also, you mentioned there, a technological innovation, there's quite a lot of that in the suit, isn't there?

Yeah, I mean, this is really about getting the public involved as well, so they were asked to look at a series of different suits and come up with the one that they prefer the most. And actually, this one was called the technology suits. The two main pieces of technology are using this luminescent wire in it and these light-emitting systems that will allow you to do special things on the surface of it. A lot of the technology behind the kind of spacesuits that designed at NASA, are things that they keep very quiet but obviously they use smart materials and they're constantly updating the way that these suits look.