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In the future, machines everywhere will monitor their own health and request help when something’s wrong, according to the engineers at CEMSol LLC, a young technical services company that is developing such a system with NASA technology. “There’s going to be an integrated system-health engine as part of every system out there, and it will be able to interface with other systems and components,” says David Cirulli, engineering vice president of the Phoenix-based company he cofounded. “That’s what’s missing today.” CEMSol’s software is rooted in a system developed in 2003 by a computer engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center to monitor an experimental hybrid rocket engine test bed that used both gas and solid fuel. During a test launch of the Orion Crew Vehicle in December 2014, the Inductive Monitoring System (IMS) that CEMSol later licensed was used to monitor electrical systems on the space capsule. PreviousNext Traditionally, this task would have been accomplished by buil...

Before NASA can put astronauts on Mars, the space agency will have to get them there and have a plan for getting them back. No current in-space transportation system can do this, but in the race to develop one that can, nuclear thermal propulsion appears to have some clear advantages. The first human mission to Mars will probably be fueled either with a more advanced version of the traditional chemical propulsion we have been using for decades—perhaps coupled with a solar electric system—or else with nuclear thermal propulsion. The latter, which works by passing hydrogen gas through the engine’s nuclear reactor to create hot exhaust, was tested and demonstrated in the 1960s and 1970s but never actually flown.   Nuclear thermal heavily leverages existing chemical propulsion systems.   The technology owes a lot to traditional chemical propulsion. “While it hasn’t been done yet, nuclear thermal heavily leverages existing chemical propulsion systems that you see, for e...

🌚Space exploration used to be an extremely exclusive activity and understandably so. It costs a lot of money to put traditional spacecraft on rockets, explains Robbie Schingler, who worked as part of the Office of the Chief Technologist at NASA before cofounding an Earth-imaging company called Planet. “And if you’re going to put something like that on a rocket, you want to make sure that it works. It needs to be designed and built perfectly. There is no room for risk because there is only one shot. And then, before you know it, the satellite has a lot of redundancy,” he says. “You only use components that have flown in space before, so you know they’ll actually work, and then you end up with a satellite that’s actually quite large and therefore quite expensive—and complex. The situation has evolved dramatically over the last 15 years, as small spacecraft and the science experiments they carry have become smaller, cheaper, and easier to get into space. First, academia stand...

NASA spends a lot of time creating technology to accelerate spacecraft, but it also thinks about ways to accelerate technology itself — to bring futuristic concepts into reality. With the Space Technology Research Grants (STRG) program, NASA is engaging academia in the pursuit of exciting, early-stage space technology research through the next generation of space scientists and engineers. The program’s investments take the form of four types of grants that are announced in annual or biennial solicitations: NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship grants, Early Career Faculty grants, Early Stage Innovations, and the Space Technology Research Institutes. Recipients are selected on the merits and relevance of their projects. “The objective of the program is to engage the entire spectrum of academic researchers, from graduate students and early-career faculty members to fully tenured faculty,” says STRG program executive Claudia Meyer. “As an organization, we want to tap into ...

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 de...

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...