Health and Medicine

NASA Spinoff

NASA Technology

As NASA sets its sights on long-duration missions deeper into the solar system, including a planned mission to Mars, astronauts will need access to...

NASA Technology

In the 1990s, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientist Joy Crisp oversaw an effort to get a cutting-edge, ruggedized, lightweight spectrometer on a lander to...

NASA Technology

In 1969 NASA Ames Research Center received an unusual call for help: a local woman who had given birth continued to experience abdominal bleeding weeks later despite...

NASA Technology

Astronauts know their bodies will be tested during time spent on the International Space Station (ISS), from the multiple sunrises and sunsets per day...

NASA Technology

When paramedics come racing into a home, the last thing anybody is worrying about is where the ambulance was earlier that morning. But traces of those earlier...

NASA Technology

What if, as a pilot was pulling heavy G-forces and headed toward a blackout, a voice in his or her ear said, “Pull out of the turn”? What if ground control had a screen with...

NASA Technology

After earning his doctorate, Debashish Roy set about creating a business from the biological imaging device he’d helped invent as a graduate...

NASA Technology

NASA astronaut Shannon Lucid spent hundreds of hours exercising during her 188-day stay on the Russian space station Mir in 1996. Although it was her least...

NASA Technology

Imagine being stuck in a small space with just a few coworkers for months at a time. Each person’s work is crucial to the success—even the...

NASA Technology

It may seem hard to remember now, with thousands of planets of various types and sizes discovered throughout the galaxy, but back in the 1990s, the field of...

NASA Technology

NASA astronauts are screened for sound health, among a slew of other requirements, but no one is invulnerable, especially in space. For reasons not...

NASA Technology

When Bill Elkins started working on liquid cooling garments to keep early astronauts cool, no one saw a use for them beyond maintaining thermal...

NASA Technology

Neurosurgery is one of those things where you want the tools to be as precise and reliable as possible. One important tool of the trade, bipolar forceps, uses...

NASA Technology

They’re in your cell phone camera and probably in your handheld digital camera, but they may have been in your dentist’s X-ray machine first:...

NASA Technology

A stay on the International Space Station is no vacation. During a visit to the orbiting National Laboratory, astronauts divide their time among a variety of...

NASA Technology

The human body in space is as vulnerable as a fish out of water. Beyond a spacecraft’s protective environment, there is no oxygen to breathe and nothing to...

NASA Technology

Algae-based food ingredients pioneered by NASA-sponsored research in the early 1980s revolutionized the infant formula industry a decade later and have...

NASA Technology

With demanding schedules, a sunrise or sunset every 45 minutes, and extremely noisy surroundings, it’s understandable why many astronauts onboard the International Space...

NASA Technology

Inventions often find unintended uses. The first mechanical clocks in Europe were intended to track the motions of celestial bodies and found their original...

NASA Technology

“A lot of things are not easy to solve when you’re trying to break through a new technology right from the get-go,” says Harish Manohara, supervisor of the...

NASA Technology

Medical training is one of the most important aspects of preparing astronauts for space. Every crewmember must become proficient in basic emergency skills, such as...

NASA Technology

On Earth, gravity might weigh you down, but it also builds you up. For astronauts working in space for long durations, the weightless environment can cause a...

NASA Technology

Over the years, NASA has advanced photovoltaic (PV) technology in order to advance many of its missions. This renewable source of energy is produced when certain...

NASA Technology

In a 1962 speech, President John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but...

NASA Technology

For astronauts working aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in low-Earth orbit, getting adequate sleep is a challenge. For one, there’s that...

NASA Technology

To build a small and mobile monitoring and processing system for use onboard the station to capture, store, and transmit sensor data about astronauts back...

NASA Technology

If you wandered the halls of Johnson Space Center in the mid-1990s, you might have run across Mike Johnson lugging a large container of freshly collected urine down to the lab. There, Johnson assisted the scientists who were tasked with developing...

NASA Technology

The astronaut’s life and work is so different from our own daily experiences that it’s easy to forget that astronauts are people, too. Just like everyone else, astronauts have basic nutritional needs—such as five to nine servings of fruit and vegetables...

NASA Technology

Before Curiosity came the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Before Spirit and Opportunity came Pathfinder and Sojourner. Before Pathfinder and Sojourner, the Mars Global Surveyor, and before the Mars Global Surveyor, the Viking landers. Over the years,...

NASA Technology

You wouldn’t find a big bowl of spaghetti served on the International Space Station (ISS). In microgravity, it would be a complete mess. There is, however, something like spaghetti on the ISS: the wires that connect electrodes for an...

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NASA Spinoff