Martian Aerogel Jacket - Mercury edition

Inside this jacket is a completely new type of aerogel built by the same team building the new aerogel heat shield for the next Mars Rover. And protecting the inside is an outer shell built with the only fabric currently on Earth, Mars and Titan – an extreme strength parachute used to land the first probe on Titan and the last Rover on Mars.

If you’ve never heard of aerogel before, it’s an insulator, and an astonishingly effective one. Which is exactly why NASA use it to line spacesuits. It’s almost impossible for cold air to pass through it as its individual nanopores are 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. But while lots of aerogel composites now exist, most are still physically weak or don’t actually contain much aerogel. And that’s because in its raw form it’s not only fragile, but disintegrates when it gets wet. Ours is different. It’s the first aerogel that is flexible, durable, and waterproof.

When we first started talking the aerogel insulation in this jacket hadn’t even been invented yet. They were still in the middle of an R&D challenge that’s taken them 10 years to solve – which is how do you create aerogel composites that maintain incredible insulation properties at the same time as making them durable? Their solution represents a breakthrough. The aerogel in this jacket is not only flexible, durable, and waterproof, but there’s also very simply a lot of it. Half the volume, and 20% of the total weight is aerogel, which is enormous considering aerogel is only 3x more dense than air.

The solution combines aerogel with an organic foam to create an ultra-thin, highly flexible, waterproof sheet. The sheet is just two millimetres thick and comes laser-drilled with hundreds of micropores for enhanced breathability. And it has incredible thermal performance for its thickness and weight. Unlike regular down insulation, it can be totally compressed or soaked in water and still carry on insulating. While it’s never been used in regular clothing before, it’s currently being trialled in rescue dive suits deployed in the freezing waters of the Baltic Sea.

We tested the jacket the same way we test our largest puffer jackets, by taking it into the lab and exposing it to the extreme cold. A lucky volunteer gets to put on the jacket and take a seat in our controlled climate chamber before we turn the temperature dial right down. We’re generous and let them wear things like gloves too. Even with the test subject sitting completely still at -20°C, the jacket kept their core temperature stable for 20 minutes. It’s incredible performance from a jacket so thin.

Aerogel was invented at Stanford University in the 1930s. Sixty years later it was adopted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA, and it’s been travelling to and from space ever since. When the Pathfinder Sojourner Rover landed on Mars in 1997, it was aerogel that was used to insulate the electronics box because of its thermal properties. And on the Stardust spacecraft, it was aerogel they used to collect samples of interstellar dust from a comet that was moving six times faster than a bullet. So it has a decent CV.

The future applications for aerogel are potentially limitless. A 2019 paper in Nature Astronomy by researchers at Harvard proposed that greenhouses constructed with aerogel could generate enough heat to melt water ice on the surface of Mars, which would allow settlers to produce food in situ. Aerogel would simultaneously protect crops from the solar radiation that filters through the thin Martian atmosphere.

Back on Earth, harnessing aerogel could help to shape the future. Studies show that incorporating it into construction materials like paints and plasters, creates a viable solution to reducing the fossil fuels we currently rely on to heat buildings. A new photocatalyst made from modified aerogel may be able to convert sunlight into hydrogen energy on an industrial scale. And emerging intelligent aerogels promise to convert air into drinking water, or detect harmful viruses.

Protecting the aerogel is a material that’s just as advanced. On 18 February 2021, the Perseverance Rover was heading towards Mars at 20,000kmph, or Mach 16. It needed something to slow it down. And to do this it deployed a parachute that reduced its speed by over 98% in just a couple of seconds to 320kmph. The impact shock of slamming on the brakes at hypersonic speed is incredible. But NASA had created the lightest, strongest and most temperature resistant parachute fabric ever produced. And we use this exact material to build the outer shell and inner lining of the Aerogel Jacket.

With missions costing billions of dollars you don’t want the parachute to be the thing that fails. So an incredible amount of R&D goes into them. In this case, the high-tenacity, heat-proof nylon took 15 years to develop. Spun at high speed before being washed, coloured and processed with a special finish to ensure rapid deployment, they are the lightest, strongest and most heat resistant parachute fabrics ever produced. They are baked at 275°F to kill any microorganisms that might contaminate other worlds, before travelling through space at temperatures well below freezing.

16 years earlier the same technology was used to land the Cassini-Huygens probe on Titan during Saturn’s first ever space-research mission. On Christmas Day 2004, after a 7 year journey, the parachute deployed about 180km above Titan’s surface. On 14 January 2005 Cassini began successfully broadcasting images of Titan’s surface from Huygens back to Earth. It became the first probe to land in the outer Solar System – the furthest any spacecraft has ever landed.

With the entire jacket built from materials that include ‘travelling through space’ as their day job, we wanted to make sure it looked ready for interplanetary action. As the Space Race started heating up in the late 1950s NASA built its first spacesuits for Project Mercury – the first space flight program aiming to send a human into orbit. And today the jacket’s subtle metallic shine, black contrast seam taping and zigzag stitching are based on the aluminised nylon and angled zippers of these early spacesuits. The material also comes with a transparent finish to create a window into the laser-drilled aerogel technology underneath.

On the side of the jacket you’ll find two large pockets with storm flaps that close with metal snaps. There are two more pockets with zippers on either side of the chest that fit phones, wallet and keys. And there’s a fifth zipped pocket inside the jacket on the left hand side.