October 3 is Nationwide Techies Day…and right here at NASA now we have fairly just a few individuals who get REALLY enthusiastic about know-how. With out techies and the know-how they develop, we wouldn’t be capable to do the wonderful issues we do at NASA, or on Earth and in house.
Our Techies
We love our techies! The passionate engineers, researchers and scientists who work on our know-how efforts allow us to make a distinction on this planet round us. They’re answerable for creating the pioneering, new applied sciences and capabilities wanted to attain our present and future missions.
Analysis and know-how growth happen inside our facilities, in academia and trade, and leverage partnerships with different authorities companies and worldwide companions. We work to have interaction and encourage 1000’s of technologists and innovators making a neighborhood of our greatest and brightest engaged on the nation’s hardest challenges.
Expertise Drives Exploration
Our investments in know-how growth allow and advance house exploration. We’re regularly searching for to enhance our capability to entry and journey via house, land extra mass in additional places, allow people to dwell and discover in house and speed up the tempo of discovery.
Techie Expertise
Superior Manufacturing Applied sciences
When touring to different planetary our bodies, each pound of cargo issues. If we are able to scale back the burden by constructing instruments as soon as we arrive, that’s much less weight we have to launch from Earth and carry via house.
Additive manufacturing is a approach of printing three-dimensional (3-D) parts from a digital mannequin. When you consider a typical workplace printer, it makes use of a 2-D file to print photographs and textual content on a sheet of paper. A 3-D printer makes use of a 3D file to deposit skinny layers of fabric on high of one another, making a 3-D product.
Because of techies, we’re already utilizing this know-how on the Worldwide House Station to print wrenches and different instruments. Our Additive Building for Cell Emplacement (ACME) challenge is investigating methods to construct constructions on planetary surfaces utilizing sources obtainable at a given website.
Uncover extra about how our techies are working with superior manufacturing HERE.
Expertise Demonstrations
Our techies are at all times innovating and creating new cutting-edge concepts. We check these concepts in excessive environments each right here on Earth and in house.
Science missions in house require spacecraft propulsion programs which can be high-performance, light-weight, compact and have a brief growth time. The Deep House Engine challenge is seeking to meet these wants. Our techies are at the moment testing a 100lbf (pound-force) thruster to see if this compact, light-weight, low-cost chemical propulsion system can function at very low temperatures, which permits lengthy period storage capabilities.
One other know-how in growth is PUFFER, or the Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robotic…and it was impressed by origami! This robotic’s light-weight design is able to flattening itself, tucking in its wheels and crawling into locations rovers can’t match. PUFFER has been examined in a variety of rugged terrains to discover areas that could be too dangerous for a full-fledged rover to go.
With our companions at Ball Aerospace & Applied sciences Corp., we’ve additionally collaborated on the Inexperienced Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM), which can flight check a “inexperienced” different to the poisonous propellant, hydrazine, in 2018. GPIM is the nation’s premier spacecraft demonstration of a brand new high-performance energy and propulsion system — a extra environmentally pleasant gas. This know-how guarantees improved efficiency for future satellites and different house missions by offering for longer mission durations, elevated payload mass and simplified pre-launch spacecraft processing, together with safer dealing with and switch of propellants.
Discover out extra about our know-how demonstrations HERE.
Plane Expertise
What for those who might journey from London to New York in lower than 3.5 hours? Our techies’ analysis into supersonic flight might make {that a} actuality!
At present, supersonic flight creates a disruptive, loud BOOM, however our objective is to as an alternative create a gentle “thump” in order that flying at supersonic speeds may very well be permitted over land in the US.
We’re conducting a sequence of flight checks to validate instruments and fashions that can be used for the event of future quiet supersonic plane.
Do you know that with the power to look at the situation of an plane’s sonic booms, pilots can higher hold the loud percussive sounds from disturbing communities on the bottom? This show permits analysis pilots the power to bodily see their sonic footprint on a map because the growth happens.
Study extra about our plane know-how HERE.
Expertise Spinoffs
Do you know that a few of the know-how used within the business world was initially developed for NASA? For instance, after we have been testing parachutes for our Orion spacecraft (which can carry people into deep house), we would have liked to seize each millisecond in excessive element. This could guarantee engineers noticed and will repair any points. The issue was,there didn’t exist a digicam on this planet that might shoot at a excessive sufficient body price – and retailer it within the digicam’s reminiscence – all whereas adjusting immediately from full darkness to full daylight and withstanding the house vacuum, house radiation and water immersion after touchdown.
Oh…and it needed to be small, light-weight, and run on low energy. Fortunately, techies constructed precisely what we would have liked. All these enhancements have now been integrated into the digicam which is being utilized in a wide range of non-space industries…together with automobile crash checks, the place excessive decision digicam reminiscence assist engineers get essentially the most out of testing to make the automobiles we drive safer.
Study extra of our spinoff applied sciences HERE.
Be a part of Our Techie Crew
We’re at all times in search of passionate and modern techies to affix the NASA group. From pupil alternatives to open know-how competitions, see under for an inventory of the way to become involved:
NASA Resolve is a gateway for everybody to take part in our mission via challenges, prize competitors, citizen science and extra! Listed here are just a few alternatives:
Vascular Tissue Problem
The Vascular Tissue Problem, a NASA Centennial Challenges competitors, provides a $500,000 prize to be divided among the many first three groups that efficiently create thick, metabolically-functional human vascularized organ tissue in a managed laboratory atmosphere. Extra data HERE.
For open job alternatives at NASA, go to: https://nasajobs.nasa.gov.
For open internship alternatives at NASA, go to: https://www.nasa.gov/viewers/forstudents/stu-intern-current-opps.html
Keep tuned in to the newest NASA techie information, by following @NASA_Technology on Twitter, NASA Expertise on Fb and visiting nasa.gov/know-how.
Glad Nationwide Techies Day!
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