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Products of Tomorrow

The technologies NASA develops don’t just blast off into space. They also improve our lives here on Earth. Life-saving search-and-rescue tools, implantable medical devices, advances in commercial aircraft safety,...

Control Solutions Synchronize Operation of Space Launch System Heavy Transporters

Beckhoff Automation Savage, MN 952-890-0000 www.beckhoffautomation.com Large NASA production facilities, such as the Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) in New...

Anti-Creep Mechanism Enables Ultra-Precise Motor Table Positioning

Motion control is essential for the digitization and automation of high-tech equipment, but bearings remain basic to frictionless movement. Bearing Engineers, a bearing...

Vibration Sensors Add New Touch to Prosthetics

The sense of touch is complex, and an instructor at the University of California – Santa Barbara (UCSB) has the technology to prove it. Yon Visell, assistant professor in the Department of...

Making Sense from Sensors: How to Build a Sensor Fusion Engine

The presence of more than 1 billion sensor-rich smartphones and the intense interest surrounding the Internet of Things has drawn wide attention to all the potential and...

John Hanson, Nodes Deputy Project Manager and Technical Lead, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA

On December 6, 2015, two small satellites, or CubeSats, successfully launched to the International Space Station. As part of NASA’s...

Product of the Month

Molex, Lisle, IL, offers Soligie® printed electronic sensor systems that provide a thin, flexible alternative to rigid printed circuit boards (PCBs) or copper flex circuits in a range of applications in the medical,...

The Future of Exploration Starts With 3D Printing

Last year, engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, tested an additive manufacturing process that is being used to make some of the parts for NASA’s new rocket,...

3D Imaging Reveals Battery Degradation in Real Time

Using sophisticated 3D imaging, a team at University College London, The European Synchrotron (ESRF), University of Manchester, Harwell Oxford, Oregon State University, and the National...

Filtering in Machine Vision

There are many different types of filters in machine vision that can be utilized to improve or change the image of the object under inspection. It is important to understand the different technologies behind the...

Using UV LEDs to Cure Fiber Optic Cables

Modern fiber optics have undergone remarkable advances since their development in the 1960s. The growing demand for fiber-optic cable, especially in the telecommunications industry, has led to an...

Customized Drone Maps Glaciers

Using a custom-designed drone, a researcher from The Ohio State University mapped glaciers and wetlands in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range. Despite a discovered drop in glacier growth, the findings from...

Space Blanket-Inspired Cases Protect Expensive Devices

NASA Technology Nick Blanton spends a lot of time outdoors, skiing in the winter months and hiking when the weather’s warm. All of this takes a toll on his electronic gadgets, which are...

Products of Tomorrow

The technologies NASA develops don’t just blast off into space. They also improve our lives here on Earth. Life-saving search-and-rescue tools, implantable medical devices, advances in commercial aircraft safety,...

Solar Orbiter Instrument Filters Powered by Brushed Motor

maxon RE 13 brushed DC motors maxon precision motors Fall River, MA 508-677-0520 www.maxonmotorusa.com In 2018, the European Space Agency (ESA) will send the Solar Orbiter into space. A...

Tunable Edge Filters

Semrock (Rochester NY) has launched the new VersaChrome Edge™ tunable long- and short-pass filters. The three new families of filters are designed to work together to create the equivalent of a single passband filter in...

Line-Scan Cameras

Chromasens GmbH (Konstanz, Germany) has introduced the Chromasens 10k and 15k allPIXA wave cameras. The 102 × 100 × 56 mm allPIXA wave 15k camera offers a maximum line rate of 15360 pixels × 3 to 18.4 kHz (55 kHz mono). The...

Low Noise, High Sensitivity Radiometer

Ophir Photonics Group (Logan, UT), a Newport Corporation, recently announced the RM9-PD Radiometer, a sensor for measuring the power of very low level CW or quasi CW sources. The RM9-PD integrates a...

High-Speed Cameras

The Fastec IL5 camera from Fastec Imaging (San Diego, CA) records high-speed production lines. The Fastec IL5 can be controlled over Gigabit Ethernet via Fastec FasMotion software. Additional models take video ranging from...

Laser Machining Software

Prima Power Laserdyne’s (Champlin, MN) ShapeSoft™ feature simplifies the creation of programs for producing cone, oblique cone, fan, racetrack, and a variety of shaped holes in a wide range of turbine engine...

High-Speed Cameras

Vision Research (Wayne, NJ) has released the Phantom® Miro® C-Series. The high-speed cameras feature a 12-bit, ½- inch CMOS color or monochrome sensor. The camera records 800 frames per second at its full 1280 × 1084...

Spatial Light Modulator

Hamamatsu Corporation (Bridgewater, NJ) has expanded its LCOS SLM (Liquid Crystal on Silicon – Spatial Light Modulator) family with its X13138 series. Featuring higher resolution (1272 × 1024 pixels) and the precise...

Pulsed Semiconductor Laser

Excelitas Technologies® Corp. (Waltham, MA) has introduced the Surface Mount 905 nm Pulsed Semiconductor Laser (SMD Laser), offering the capability of automated pick-and-place high-volume assembly. In addition, the...

Deep UV LEDs

Crystal IS (Green Island, NY) augmented the Optan SMD (surface mount device) product line for instrumentation with the addition of higher light output and wavelength specific bins (SKUs). This newest offering resulted from...

Auto-Focus Cameras

The PL-D755 industrial USB 3.0 camera from PixeLINK® (San Francisco, CA) includes an auto-focus liquid lens that incorporates Sony’s new Pregius IMX250 sensor. Liquid lenses reconfigure themselves in tens of milliseconds....

GigE Cameras

Teledyne DALSA (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada/Billerica, MA) has added six models to its Genie Nano series of GigE Vision® cameras. The M1930, C1930, M1930-NIR, M2590, C2590, and M2590-NIR are built around On Semiconductor’s Python...

Industrial Housing

The Camera Case EyeMount (CCEM) from EVT Eye Vision Technology GmbH (Karlsruhe, Germany) features a robust industrial housing for Basler and IDS cameras. The housing is available in both protection classes: IP65 or IP67. The...

Adaptive Optics Kit

To explore wavefront sensorless adaptive optics, Edmund Optics (Barrington, NJ) has announced the Iris AO Adaptive Optics Kit. The kit includes a MEMS-based deformable mirror, optics, optomechanics, camera, and GUI software....

Multimode Laser Diode

eagleyard Photoonics (Berlin, Germany) offers the new 808 nm broad area semiconductor laser diode. The device delivers 20 Watt peak power under pulsed operation from a single emitter. Multimode laser diodes operate...