Spinoff (2/2/23)

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NASA Spinoff

NASA technology has gotten humanity literally to the moon and back, and it’s set to do it again in the coming years. Once a year, though, the agency takes a beat to showcase all the projects outside of the space domain where companies have used NASA technology to push forward in their fields.

That report, called Spinoff 2023, was released online this week. The topics span from robotics to medicine to aviation, and among the 40+ companies and projects featured in the report, there are plenty of scientific advances here on Earth to celebrate. Here are just a few of the highlights.

Medical headway: Many of the life support systems that NASA developed to keep astronauts happy and healthy off-Earth have made their way back into medical research at home. The report dives into a pandemic-era example, where NASA researchers took agency-designed ventilators and slimmed them down, using off-the-shelf components not used in traditional ventilators to create the Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally (VITAL) system. Companies were then able to manufacture their own version of this cheaper, more accessible design.

Another feature explores how medical light therapy methods developed by NASA for keeping astronauts healthy and strong over long periods in microgravity have been applied to physical therapy approaches on Earth. Though NASA never used this technology in orbit, terrestrial medical companies have used it to create small handheld devices that can be used at home.

Lay of the land: As part of this year’s Spinoff, NASA is celebrating 50 years of the Landsat program. Landsat has been surveying the Earth’s surface since 1972, sending home imagery that has been used to monitor land usage, groundwater levels, deforestation, agricultural yield projections, and myriad other things. In a feature story, the report details a handful of companies and initiatives that have leveraged Landsat data to better understand the global environment and how it’s changing.

How’s the weather? NASA developed a sensor technology called radio occultation to observe the atmospheres of other planets, This method involves sending a spacecraft on a trajectory around another celestial body and measuring how its signal home is altered as it passes behind that body. JPL scientists used this method to sound out the atmosphere of Mars in the 80s.

Back then, using this method on Earthly targets was a far more complicated endeavor since it required multiple opposing sensors in space. Now, though, things have changed. Over the course of the last 40 years, researchers have used existing and new radio sensors in space to gather insights about weather patterns and events in the upper atmosphere right here at home.

Other News from the Cosmos

• Perseverance dropped its tenth and final sample on the surface of Mars for future recovery by Mars Sample Return.

• Ingenuity, Perseverance’s helicopter partner on Mars, has completed 41 flights.

• NASA plans to design JWST’s successor, tentatively named the Habitable Worlds Observatory, so it can be robotically serviced and upgraded.

• Reduced gravity affects how water condenses and evaporates, and researchers at Purdue University say they “are ready to literally close the book on the whole science of flow and boiling in reduced gravity.”

• SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers used machine learning techniques to identify notable signals in a previously dismissed dataset.

The View from Space