Spinoff: Transportation

Hydraulic Carts Streamline Structural Tests for Aircraft

NASA Technology

Facilities for mechanical loads testing of aircraft and spacecraft are often jungles of cables, wiring, and hoses.

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Fluorescent Diagnostic Test Readers Offer Fast, Low-Cost Results

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...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Space-Based Bone Scanner Expands Medical Research

NASA Technology

What happens to bones after months in microgravity? The answers are of keen interest to researchers, who can use the information to offer new insights into...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Cooling Garments Find New Medical, Athletic, and Industrial Uses

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...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Mini Heat Pipes Wick Away Heat in Brain Surgery

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...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Temperature-Regulating Fabrics Keep Babies Comfortable

NASA Technology

NASA’s astronauts are among the world’s most capable, resourceful, and highly trained individuals. Now technology originally created to keep them...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Active Pixel Sensors Lead Dental Imagery into the Digital Age

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:...

Spinoff: Transportation

CO2 Sensors Monitor Vehicle Emissions from Above

NASA Technology

Life on Earth is surrounded by, and dependent on, carbon dioxide (CO₂). Plants need it for photosynthesis; people and animals exhale it; industry and...

Spinoff: Transportation

Orion Parachute Innovations Carry Commercial Rockets Back to Earth

NASA Technology

No human venture into space is a success until craft and crew have safely returned to Earth.

With their familiar orange and white...

Spinoff: Transportation

Reconfigurable Radio Tracks Flights Worldwide

NASA Technology

When Malaysia Air Flight 370 disappeared somewhere over the Indian Ocean in 2014, it had flown far beyond radar range. Under a new space-based air tracking system, no...

Spinoff: Transportation

Software Opens Computational Fluid Dynamics to the Uninitiated

NASA Technology

Sukra Helitek Inc.’s simplified, user-friendly computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software package began with Ganesh Rajagopalan essentially trying...

Spinoff: Transportation

Design Software Shapes Future Sonic Booms

NASA Technology

It’s been more than 70 years since an airplane first broke the sound barrier, and yet supersonic flights remain mostly out of reach for civilian passengers, in large...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Rocket Technology Stops Shaking in Its Tracks

NASA Technology

Rocket launches—or earthquakes—are already punishing experiences. But it turns out there are some things that can make them worse: like if the vibrations hit the...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Micromachined Sensors Monitor Train Rails, Predict Failures

NASA Technology

Sensors originally designed to predict failures in a helicopter transmission have found an unexpected use detecting problems in train tracks. When...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Fast-Flow Nanofiber Filters Purify Water at Home and in the Field

NASA Technology

More than a billion people around the world lack easy access to clean water—some trek for miles just to fill jugs for themselves and their...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Orion Video Requirement Advances High-Speed, Compact Cameras

NASA Technology

Parachute deployment is usually a fairly simple—if crucial—operation. A small pilot parachute tossed into the wind might pull free a pin securing...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Miniaturized Vacuum Pumps Play Big Roles on Mars and Earth

NASA Technology

As its name implies, the Curiosity rover lowered into Gale Crater on Mars by sky crane in August 2012 has a lot of questions to answer. The most...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Wire Sensors Alert to Dangerous Conditions in the Clouds

NASA Technology

One common hazard facing airplanes is ice: not just on the ground, but in the air, where it can coat wings or engines. But how do you know when icing...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

CMOS Sensors Enable Phone Cameras, HD Video

NASA Technology

“People told me, ‘You’re an idiot to work on this,’” Eric Fossum recalls of his early experiments with what was at the time an alternate form of digital...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Novel Threading Enables New Approach to Golf Clubs

NASA Technology

NASA scientists routinely pioneer advances in cutting-edge fields like lasers and computer chips, but sometimes it’s the innovations they make in simple...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Blue-Light-Cancelling Lens Gives Skiers a Clearer View

NASA Technology

Of all the colors the human eye is capable of seeing, it is particularly sensitive to blues and greens, which comprise the middle wavelengths of the visible...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Professional Development Program Gets Bird’s-Eye View of Wineries

NASA Technology

Virginia might not yet rival California when it comes to wine production, but a growing number of wineries and vintners are cropping up across...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Rechargeable Hearing Aid Batteries Draw from NASA Research

NASA Technology

We often imagine that inventions are born whole: Thomas Edison creates the incandescent light bulb and lights up Christie Street in Menlo Park on New...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Carbon Nanotube Resin Shores Up Boats, Bikes

NASA Technology

At 100 times the strength of steel and just one-sixth the weight, it is easy to see why engineers, and not just at NASA, were immediately excited by the potential in...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Large-Scale 3D Printer Brings Manufacturing to the Masses

NASA Technology

When the nearest Home Depot is out of reach and Amazon.com doesn’t deliver, finding spare parts or a new tool can be a challenge. That can be true...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

Mineral Analyzer Shakes Answers Out of Soil and Rocks

NASA Technology

How do you search for signs of life on a planet you’ve never been to? If you’re NASA, you send robots to do your dirty work, sifting through the soil and...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

Building Sensor Monitors Power Usage, Device by Device

NASA Technology

When NASA wanted to build the greenest, most energy-efficient Federal building in the United States, it needed a way to keep track of the energy being...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

Computer Learning Program Inventories Farmers’ Fields

NASA Technology

There are now countless Earth-imaging satellites circling the globe, with more being sent up each year than the previous year. Yet with all those lenses...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

Low-Cost Flow Meters Bring Efficiency, Reliability to Nuclear Plants

NASA Technology

The technology looks unassuming enough: circular metal plates with multiple holes in them. The plates usually sport a large central hole...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

Controlled-Release Fertilizer Takes Root in Fields, Groves Worldwide

NASA Technology

Astronaut ice cream may be an exotic treat for kids, but for real space explorers, it turns out a fresh, crunchy salad could sometimes really...