Space is the place for researchers

Self-healing is a concept that might soon be a reality not only for living organisms, but also for space vehicles — and UNC could have a hand in the technological revolution.

Three years ago, NASA selected UNC and several other schools to develop new materials that will revolutionize space travel and the way astronautic machines are built.

The collaboration — which includes Northwestern University, Princeton University and the University of California-Santa Barbara — is called the University Research Engineering Technology Institute.

Chemistry professor Ed Samulski, who heads the NASA-sponsored team at UNC, said NASA is interested in research in “smart” materials that could fix themselves if damaged.

“Biological things can repair themselves, so NASA has asked us to think about self-healing materials,” he said.

“You can imagine that (if) a satellite traveling millions of miles away from the earth gets hit by a small meteor, NASA could lose the entire mission if they are not able to repair this satellite.”

Samulski said the project will take ideas from biology and use those to create new materials.

“We look at bone that is very high strength and yet rather light, and we look at the structure of bone and ask ourselves if there is a way we can make a similar structure out of materials,” he said.

The NASA program also has been beneficial to the chemistry department: The funding the organization provides covers nine faculty members at UNC and pays the salaries for about 15 to 20 graduate and postdoctoral students, Samulski said.

He said the NASA-sponsored program also makes researchers tackle difficult issues.

“I think that we are the long-range thinking arm of NASA,” Samulski said.

“They want us to think about these impossible kinds of problems, and they are counting on the fact that something useful can come out of the fact that we have tackled such hard problems.”

This project is not UNC’s first collaboration with NASA. From the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, Morehead Planetarium trained almost every astronaut who participated in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz space programs.

Star Theater Director Richard McColman said astronauts came to Morehead to learn navigational techniques.

“Astronauts needed to look out a very limited narrow view that they would get of space, recognize constellations and parts of constellations, and use various techniques to determine what their orientation was in space,” he said.

The program at the planetarium ended in 1975 when space shuttle navigation no longer required astronauts to have in-depth knowledge of the constellations and stars, McColman said.

Tony Jenzano, longtime director of Morehead Planetarium, said the University’s long-standing association with the space program has brought recognizable prestige.

“Carolina is the only university in the country — in fact, the world — that can claim all the astronauts as alumni,” he said.

And Samulski reiterated that NASA’s recent involvement at UNC also speaks highly of the school’s science departments.

“This is evidence that Carolina science is competitive with that in the best universities in the country.”

Contact the Features Editor at features@unc.edu.