Skip to main content

Innovation without borders (NASA)


It may be that crewmembers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will one day—while inhaling the luxurious, comforting scent of freshly baked bread—mark April 22, 2012, as a turning point in the effort to make life in space more like life at home. That Sunday, in Oxford, England, NASA project manager Nick Skytland bumped into a young man named Sam Wilkinson.


“Do I have time to tackle another challenge?” Wilkinson asked.


Skytland checked the time. It was the second and final day of the International Space Apps Challenge—a unique, globe-spanning collaboration bringing together teams of programmers, engineers, students and just about anyone else interested in joining with NASA for 48 hours to tackle some of the important problems in space exploration. At that moment, linked via the Internet and a shared belief in the power of small contributions to create big outcomes, citizen innovators in 25 locations scattered across all seven continents were toiling feverishly to develop solutions to more than 70 challenges related to the exploration of space and the improvement of life on Earth.



Wilkinson wanted to take a crack at a method for making bread in space. Like many other tasks taken for granted in our daily lives, baking bread is far more complicated in space than it is on Earth. Baking requires significant energy that cannot be spared, and bread creates crumbs that could float into and disrupt a spacecraft’s delicate electronics. (This is why ISS crewmembers must make do with tortillas.) Skytland was skeptical about Wilkinson’s chances of revolutionizing space-based baking. The student was only 16 years old and was working on his own.


And he had less than 4 hours to find a way.

The International Space Apps Challenge is the brainchild of Skytland and his colleagues Chris Gerty, astronaut Ron Garan and Kristen Painting of NASA; Ali Llewellyn, Sean Herron and Samantha Snabes of Valador, Inc.; and William Eshagh of Dell, Inc. The idea was inspired by Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), an international hackathon that challenges participants to develop open-source solutions to real-world problems. 


Sponsored by NASA, Microsoft, Yahoo!, the World Bank, HP and Google, RHoK has been a repeat success—but it is not focused on meeting the needs of NASA’s space exploration objectives, according to Skytland. His team saw the potential in creating a similar event with twin goals: to develop technologies that will advance space exploration and to implement NASA technologies that can improve life on Earth.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research. NASA was established NASA is under presidential orders to land humans on Mars by 2033, and NASA-funded engineers are studying a way to build potential human habitats there by producing bricks from pressurized Martian soil. The European Space Agency has a long-term goal to send humans but has not yet built a crewed spacecraft NASA has made use of technologies such as the multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG), which is a type of radioisotope thermoelectric generator used to power spacecraft.[170] Shortages of the required plutonium-238 have curtailed deep space missions since the turn of the millennium.[171] An example of a spacecraft that was not developed because of a shortage of this material was New Horizons 2.[171] The Earth science research program was c...
1 comment
Read more

About Portable power

PORTABLE POWER That 10% low power warning on your phone or the red battery on your tablet are helpful reminders to plug in. But they’re also a sign of trouble when you’re in the woods, all the outlets in the airport waiting area are taken, or you forgot your charger. Having a lightweight, affordable portable solar panel that makes it convenient to recharge all those batteries is now a viable alternative, thanks to NASA. “We’ve had a lot of small business partners looking not just at advanced cell technology, but also at maintaining low costs,” says Mike Piszczor, chief of the Photovoltaic and Electrochemical Systems Branch at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “For space applications, a typical cell that’s about 1.5 by 3 inches is $400–$500, and that’s because they go through flight qualification in addition to the manufacturing process used. It saves in the long run, because even with that very expensive cell technology, it’s so efficient that it saves in overall system co...
1 comment
Read more

Biological life raft☣️

🌍 Earth is a biological life raft thatsustains human life in the inhospitable environment of the cosmos. This planetary closed-loop system provides oxygen, water and essential nutrients while recycling waste, purifying contaminants and renewing resources. It does all of this using only the things that already exist in the biosphere. And NASA is learning just how this life raft functions in order to create a portable replica of the biological system we call home. A closed-loop system only uses the resources on hand. In other words, no resupply shipments make it necessary to reuse and recycle everything. On Earth, biology takes care of these processes naturally and efficiently, according to Jitendra Joshi, an engineer based at NASA Headquarters. Joshi studies the systems that sustain human life in space, such as microbiological systems for waste treatment for long duration space missions.   A closed-loop system only uses the resources on hand.   “The water we drank this morning...
Post a Comment
Read more