Chang’e 5 recovery team use exoskeletons to aid mission
- Wearable machines make it easier for workers to trudge through Inner Mongolian snows, set up communication centre
- Exoskeletons were last seen being put to good use by Chinese soldiers in the Himalayas
As soon as the capsule arrived back on Earth in the early hours of Thursday morning in the Siziwang banner of the north China region, a team from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, which was responsible for the entire lunar mission, had to race to set up a temporary communication station to connect the landing site with its Beijing headquarters, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
And carrying the mountains of gear needed to create such a facility would have been a lot more difficult were it not for the wearable machines.
“I would have been exhausted after walking 20 or 30 metres, but with the help of the exoskeleton, 100 metres or more was not a problem,” one of the operators said as he carried a 50kg (110lb) pack through the frosty terrain, where the temperature often falls below minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit).
The CCTV report said that by using an exoskeleton, people can carry more than twice what they can without one.
The suits were designed by the Human Function Enhancement Technology Research Centre, under the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp (CASIC), to enhance the performance of soldiers working at high altitude, Chinese newspaper Global Times reported last month.