NASA and CSIRO in Australia are working together to build future spacecrafts able to detect, diagnose and fix damage, whether inflicted by impacts or caused by equipment failures. The CSIRO team has developed a spacecraft skin based on the concept of a multi-cellular sensor and communication network. The current model is composed of 192 separate cells which can act as a reconfigurable network when a cell detects an impact and is using a software algorithm based on the ant colony metaphor. As writes New Scientist, "Ant logic makes sense in space." According to different documents from NASA, these nondestructive evaluation and health monitoring systems could be deployed by 2015, at least for some limited experiments in space. Read more...
Sources: New Scientist, September 12, 2005; and various web sites
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