NASA Spinoff
Topics:
Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources
Electrified Bacteria Clean Wastewater, Generate Power
NASA Technology
NASA recently sent into space organisms that might sound like they came from space to begin with—microbes that can essentially breathe electricity.
Spinoff: Public Safety
Detailed Spectrometry Makes Dangerous-Materials Testing Safer
NASA Technology
In Chris McKay’s search for signs of life on other worlds, some of the strongest clues can be found by identifying isotopes.
Spinoff: Transportation
Super-Accurate Atomic Clocks Could Aid in Navigation, Communication
NASA Technology
Do you know what time it is?
Spinoff: Transportation
Shuttle Tire Sensors Warn Drivers of Flat Tires
NASA Technology
How many people can think of a time when they got to their destination only to realize one of their car tires was dangerously low on air? Or they heard an ominous...
Spinoff: Industrial Productivity & Manufacturing Technology
Vibration Isolator Steadies Optics for Telescopes
NASA Technology
Anybody who has ever tried to hold a camera steady for a long exposure in low light knows exactly what inevitably happens: the camera shakes, and the image blurs....
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
Unique Polymer Finds Widespread Use in Heart Devices
NASA Technology
A material that a NASA scientist stumbled on in the early 1990s has now helped to keep hundreds of thousands of patients’ hearts beating properly all over the...
Spinoff: Industrial Productivity & Manufacturing Technology
IonCCD Enables Fast, Reliable, Inexpensive Mass Spectrometry
NASA Technology
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has a long history of pioneering the use of the charge-coupled device, or CCD, which it used to build some of...
Spinoff: Public Safety
Methane Detector Sniffs Out Leaks
NASA Technology
Methane is everywhere on Earth, for better and for worse. Among other things, it’s the main ingredient in the natural gas that powers heating, cooking, and electricity. It’s...
Spinoff: Public Safety
Wrapped Tanks Cut Weight on Everything from Buses to Paintball Guns
NASA Technology
What do naval anti-missile guns, infant incubators, the Phoenix Mars lander, and high-end paintball guns have in common? All these...
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
Sterilizing Fogger Cleans Ambulances with a Breeze
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...
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
Biometric Sensors Optimize Workouts
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...
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
Optimized Imager Tracks Cancer, Stem Cells in Medical Research
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...
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
Weightless “Weight”-Lifting Builds Muscle on Earth
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...
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
Virtual Therapist Offers Out-of-This-World Depression Treatment
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...
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
Compact Spectrometers Unveil Clues to Diagnose Cancer
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...
Spinoff: Transportation
Innovative Design Propels Small Jet Faster, Farther with Less Fuel
NASA Technology
These days computers handle a lot of the work for designing an airplane, but when it comes to seeing how well the new design will really handle in...
Spinoff: Transportation
Design Software Transforms How Commercial Jetliners Are Built
NASA Technology
In the late 1990s, as computers were becoming vastly more powerful, Stuart Rogers began working on Pegasus 5—software that made use of this...
Spinoff: Transportation
Original Cryogenic Engine Still Powers Exploration, Defense, Industry
NASA Technology
At a time when cell phones and automobile features are outdated after a few short years, it may seem impossible that any technology would...
Spinoff: Transportation
Time-Triggered Ethernet Slims Down Critical Data Systems
NASA Technology
Ethernet computer networks date back to the 1970s and are now used virtually everywhere, including in space. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and easy to use,...
Spinoff: Transportation
Simplified Aircraft Modeling Packs Weeks of Analysis into Minutes
NASA Technology
It wasn’t Walt Silva’s job to invent a technique to dramatically speed up computational modeling of aircraft. But the NASA researcher did it...
Spinoff: Public Safety
Radar Device Detects Heartbeats Trapped under Wreckage
NASA Technology
Late on a sweltering morning in July 2016, David Lewis Jr. crawls into a concrete tube in a heap of rubble amid what used to be a Northern Virginia prison...
Spinoff: Public Safety
Surveillance System Captures, Maps Lightning Strikes
NASA Technology
On July 7, 2011, as Space Shuttle Atlantis sat on the launch pad just one day before it was due to make the final voyage of NASA’s 30-year Shuttle program,...
Spinoff: Public Safety
Virtual Reality Platform Helps Pilots Land in the Sky
NASA Technology
When a plane overshoots the final approach for a landing, often the pilot’s natural—and dangerous—instinct is to pitch up the aircraft to slow down and...
Spinoff: Public Safety
Autonomous Robots Take On Dangerous Warehouse Jobs
NASA Technology
“Where does a 600-pound spider go? Anywhere she wants to.”
Spinoff: Public Safety
Drone Traffic Forecasts Show Commercial Skies of the Future
NASA Technology
It’s a safe bet that the skies of the future will be hosting a lot more drones than they do today. If you can see beyond the low-flying pizza and...
Spinoff: Public Safety
Offshore Oil Workers Learn Survival Skills in Astronaut Training Pool
NASA Technology
To simulate weightlessness while rehearsing for NASA’s 1966 Gemini 12 mission, astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Gene Cernan practiced spacewalks...
Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation
Apollo 11 History Archive Helps Virtual Reality Program Come to Life
NASA Technology
Imagine yourself in the cramped cockpit of the Apollo spacecraft heading to the moon. Look around to see Earth out one window and stars lighting...
Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation
Light-Induced Oxidation Cleans Air, Surfaces, Clothes
NASA Technology
In late 2015 and early 2016, while Southern California Gas workers struggled for months to stop a natural gas leak from a well at Aliso Canyon in Los Angeles,...
Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation
Ferrofluid Technology Becomes a Magnet for Pioneering Artists
NASA Technology
In 2008, when Nikola Ilic came across an online video of moving ferrofluid sculptures by Japanese artist Sachiko Kodama, with black liquid rising into...
Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation
The Martian Garden Recreates Red Planet’s Surface
NASA Technology
After the Phoenix lander settled into the northern polar region of Mars in 2008, its operators discovered that icy soil scraped from the planet’s surface was...