Ahilan Anantha Krishnan from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and Himel Barua, a student at the University of Akron along with his team mates - two people of Indian origin - are among top three individual and team winners of the NASA Space Suit Textile Testing Challenge that aims at creating new concepts for protective suits for future exploration missions.

Recently, NASA announced the winners of two competitions: Space Suit Textile Testing Challenge, in which the two Indians won; and In-Situ Materials Challenges - aimed at creating new concepts for construction and human habitation on future space exploration missions, including the agency’s journey to Mars. Both Indians won prizes in the Space Suit Textile Testing category which offered three prizes of $5,000 each for winning ideas on how to test the outer protective layer of spacesuit material for performance in different kinds of planetary environments, such as like Mars or large asteroids.

While, Krishnan won the prize for his for his proposal on evaluating space suit textile abrasion in planetary environments, Barua and his team mates got the prize for their proposal of a cylindrical abrasion method. These two challenges, managed for NASA by global innovation firm NineSigma, launched in October 2015 under the umbrella of the NASA Tournament Lab, yielded innovative concepts for spacesuit testing and in-situ building materials use for habitat construction.