Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Spinoffs! Sharing NASA Technology

Episode Date: September 6, 2016

In its nearly five decades, NASA has created or improved thousands of technologies, processes and innovations. Dan Lockney is in charge of making sure these solutions are found and utilized by industries and others in need.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Spinoffs, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of a human adventure across our solar system and beyond. all practical on you today as we once again review a handful of the innovations and technologies developed by NASA for space that are making lives better here on Earth. Bill Nye has bad news and good news from Cape Canaveral, beginning with the launch pad explosion of a SpaceX Falcon 9. And Bruce Betts will take us on another tour of the night sky. Emily Lakdawalla is the Planetary Society's senior editor. Emily, some of the best space photos of the year, if not the decade, and some great sound for us to talk about. Let's begin with Juno.

Juno really returned the science from its first orbital perijove with all science instruments blazing. Of course, I was always waiting for these JunoCam images and they didn't disappoint. We saw some really cool detail on both poles of Jupiter. So I'm just really excited for this mission to get going. I wasn't even sure we were looking at the same planet. Well, you know, we saw hints of this certainly in the Cassini images of Jupiter, but it's just so unusual to have this polar perspective on Jupiter. It's something we've never seen. And I think the coolest thing is that you can see that some of the storms actually have a vertical structure. You can see they cast shadows. That's just really awesome.

Tell us about this little piece of audio. We'll play just an excerpt from it, but of course, people can find it and much more in the blog at planetary.org. Jupiter's magnetosphere has processes that cause the emission of radio waves at different frequencies and with different intensities. And that's what Juno's waves instrument is designed to pick up. But of course, when you're talking about radio with different frequencies and intensities, you can turn that into sound, just like we do in order to hear many of your listeners are listening to the show this way.

And so here, we can engage a different part of our brains to try to understand what's going on in Jupiter's magnetosphere. So enjoy the sound created from the data from the waves instrument. Space science made for radio. I love it. But there are things that you can't capture just with sound, like this absolutely stunning photo of a tiny little spacecraft on a comet. Transitioning to ESA's Rosetta mission, it's just a month before the end, and they're orbiting lower and lower, and they have finally caught an image that has the resolution to clearly, unequivocally identify the location of the Philae lander at last. And there it is in really stunning detail, stuck in a crevice on a comet. I'm so glad they finally found it before the end of the mission. I swear this looks like something out of some Star Trek episode. You know, a starship trapped in this rocky surface. It absolutely has to be seen.

So take a look. We'll put up a link on the show page at planetary.org slash radio. And I'm sure you will continue to write about both Juno and Rosetta, right, Emily? Absolutely. Thank you so much. She is our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. She is our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine.

Up next is the very busy Bill Nye. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, it's bad news and, well, at least pending good news out of Florida this week. Let's start with SpaceX. It wasn't an explosion, Matt. So says Elon, right. It was a very, very fast fire. Yeah, I thought that was a nevermind. But I mean, it's just a difficult business. Everybody got to remember, for those of you just tuning in, the rocket blew up and you don't want that. Nobody got hurt. When you go to a rocket launch, you are kilometers, miles away from the thing.

So nobody got hurt, but still, it's a setback. You don't want fuel leaks that cause fast fires and catastrophic loss of payloads. But SpaceX claims that if humans had been in the Dragon capsule, they would have been flown to safety with the escape system. It's probably true. We always learn something from failures. Good luck to SpaceX. Carry on. In the meantime, not far away, there is a spacecraft sitting on top of a very different rocket.

The Atlas V and the OSIRIS-REx, which is a tortured acronym involving a mission to asteroid Bennu, which was named by a Planetary Society member who at that time was only nine years old. We'll be down there, the Planetary Society team, because we are deeply invested in this mission. And this is where we're going to learn more about asteroids. And as I like to say, our place in space writ large, because asteroids are made of the primordial solar system material. So whatever happened in the ancient days of the solar system or ancient periods of the solar system, we will do our best to learn more about. And of course, Matt, we do not want the Earth to get hit with an asteroid. So the more we learn about them, the better we're going to be. And Matt, this is

unusual. They've strapped a single solid booster to the side of an Atlas V rocket. It's kind of crooked looking. And I guess, like, you know how one might balance a broom on the palm of your hand for fun? And then, I guess, sing the saber dance? Ah! Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da- hockey pucks taped to one side of the broom. It would be like a crooked thing, but it's doable. NASA promises it won't start to pinwheel. Well, it's not their first time, strangely enough. And then, so it's an exciting mission.

I'm very excited to be down at Cape, can I say down, be in the southern part of the U.S. for the launch of another rocket. It's very exciting. There is one more exciting thing that is just ahead. What, early in the new year? As a lot of people now know, and a lot of people are stopping you on the street saying, hey, I heard about your new TV show. Yes, Bill Nye Saves the World. It will be on Netflix. You know, TV show, Matt, is kind of an older reference from us old guys. I'm an old guy. So I know the feeling. But it'll be on Netflix and we're going to do

an episode on space exploration and the value of planetary exploration. And I will make the case that if we were to discover life on another world, it would change this one. It would change the way everybody feels about being a living thing in the cosmos.

It's an exciting time. Let's light these candles. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Matt. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, soon to be the host of Bill Nye Saves the World, as you heard on Netflix. And we're going to go on now and talk about NASA's, some of its small attempts to save the world. We're going to talk about spinoffs with Dan Lockney. They're called spinoffs because they are innovations spun off by NASA from solutions

for space exploration and Development. Some of the best are collected each year in a fascinating publication simply called Spin Off. It divides them into such broad categories as health and medicine, transportation, energy and environment, and industrial productivity. The man in charge of the book and the rest of the space agency's impressive effort to share its technical knowledge and inventions is technology transfer program executive Dan Lockney. Dan recently rejoined me by telephone from his NASA HQ office in Washington.

Dan Lockney, a pleasure to get you back on Planetary Radio to talk about more of those amazing spinoffs. Welcome back. Good to be here. Thanks for having me back. I think we skipped a year or so in there, but no shortage of terrific products and technologies and software and other stuff to talk about. I was all set to talk about the current book, the 2016 book,

but you said you've got the 2017 book almost ready. Yeah, we don't let any grass grow under us. We're always working on the next book. The Ness has been continuously publishing this book since 1976. And as soon as we finish one, we're working on the next. And that's right, 2017 will be out at the end of the year. We're looking forward to it. We have 50 plus stories, one better than the next, covering the full range of consumer goods, industrial applications, and you name it, all the different ways that NASA technology finds its way into your everyday life. I look forward to taking a look at that book,

and we will tell people how they can get a hold of these. I mean, you can read it for free online, but you can also get a free copy, at least I assume if you're here in the United States. It's a great read and great publication. It's beautifully produced. Do you have some favorites out of the things that will be in there? I do. One neat one is out of our Marshall Space Flight Center.

We're designing the Ares rocket, this ginormous rocket that's going to go to the moon, since replaced by the SLS, the Space Launch System. We talk about that a lot on this show. There you go. So this is the precursor to it. And it had developed a vibration, kind of a shimmy on the launch pad. More than a shimmy. It would have caused the astronauts to liquefy before launch. And that is not a good thing to do to them.

And it's no way to start any kind of trip. I said, we need to fix this. If this were something like a stable platform on earth, and it was shaking around, you could just strap it down or throw a bunch of mass at it, bury it in concrete and prevent it from shaking. But because it is a launch vehicle, and you have to actually get it off the earth, you can't strap it down or make it real heavy, and you've got to find ways to make it stop vibrating. So we developed a simple tuned mass damper from a baffle system that controls the slosh of the liquid fuel in the vehicle,

reduced the vibrations significantly using not too many parts and using the existing liquid fuel in the spacecraft. So we're looking at this technology thinking, what else can we do with it? Who else can benefit from this? And we thought, okay, what else is tall and you don't want it shaking? Oh, skyscrapers. So we went up to New York and met with some architects and showed them how it works. And the first tuned mass damper that was developed out of Marshall for the rocket was just installed in the new B2 building in Brooklyn, which is the tallest building in Brooklyn. And then the manufacturer, the firm Thornton Tomasetti, the architecture firm, they've got the same technology slated for their next handful of skyscrapers they're building.

That's a fun, recent example of solving a problem for space that has very practical real-world applications. You bet. I hope there's some builders here in my home region of Southern California that are talking to you as well. Absolutely. A lot of folks are interested in this. When it took one company to take a chance on the technology. I think the NASA name helped get into this, helped us get into this already mature industry that's generally pretty risk-averse.

And they said, well, does it really work? Yeah, we actually have the tallest building in Alabama as our vibration test facility. And we went out there and shook it and flipped this switch and it stopped shaking. We said, it really works. I said, wait, hold on. Y'all have a full building that you use just for shaking? Yeah, we have stuff like that. So that's a real fun one. And that's one of the several stories that's

in this upcoming book. That's a great one. Are there any others that you want to call out? Maybe one more from that 2017 book? There's another neat one. I think that just for the bizarre nature of it, so I live in a city, and I don't know a lot about farming. I imagine there are many people who live in cities and suburbs and don't realize that most of the tractors that run on American farmland are actually not manned, that run on American farmland are actually not manned, which is kind of frightening, you know, as someone who grew up watching the Terminator film and knows what happens when you allow the robot to start taking over. But we can be reassured that they're on precision controls

that are enabled with GPS software that was developed out of our JPL, Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena, California, that allows them to operate within one centimeter of precision. So a lot of the farmland has these unmanned tractors that are working there. They're cropped. So in addition to perhaps being the stuff of nightmares, it also reduces overseeding. It allows for more accurate application of pesticides and fertilizers. We reduce runoff through the efficiency of the lanes that we're creating and fuel efficiency. And all around, it's a good thing, I suppose. I thought that this was just a scene from that 2014 movie Interstellar when the farmer astronaut goes out and kicks his tractor and it takes off and starts doing the fields. Yeah, that'll be here someday.

I had no idea that NASA had already pulled us into that era. I didn't either. And I feel the responsibility, you know, outside of my natural work in tech transfer to just let everyone know that the tractors aren't manned. I think everyone else should know this too this is a story from our twenty sixteen book that also agriculture related and this one's currently up on the website that i think is just fascinating relates to also my ignorance of modern agriculture uh... rice when you picture rice being grown at least for me in these patties of water rice is

grown by flooding it it turns out that isn't entirely necessary and that like other crops it just needs to be watered with some degree of regularity in this flooding in addition to being an inefficient use of water potentially potentially damaging to the crops. We're introducing an unnecessary waste of water and also potential volatility to the crop itself. And a lot of people rely on rice. There's a lot of rice throughout the world that is grown and relied on. We worked with a company called Applied GeoSolutions

that uses NASA data to give information to rice farmers about how much water they should be using and then expected yields from the rice and allows the world agricultural market to better predict rice crop outcomes and to better manage the crop. And again, the part that surprised me in discovering that isn't that NASA data is useful for agriculture. As it turns out, we've known that for quite some time, whether it's our weather forecasting or it's precision work and analyzing precipitation underground or crop management in general. It's that it turns out you don't need to flood rice crops. Dan Lockney is NASA's Technology Transfer Program Executive. He'll tell us more about the latest spin-offs in a minute.

This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month. We've already gone behind the scenes at JPL, partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system. You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect. When you do,

you'll be among the first to see each new show. I hope you'll join us. Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here with big news from the Planetary Society. We're rolling out a new membership plan with great benefits and expanded levels of participation. At the Planetary Society, passionate space fans like you join forces to create missions, nurture new science and technology, advocate for space, and educate the world. Details are at planetary.org forward slash membership. I'll see you around the solar system. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. NASA has created or developed thousands of technologies and innovations for space

that offer valuable solutions down here on the ground. Dan Lockney is sharing a tiny sample of the latest spinoffs. He's the agency's technology transfer program executive. There is one more from 2016 that is somewhat agriculture-related. I did a double-take when I saw who's behind it. Robert Zubrin of the Mars Society, who started a company for, I guess it's not fair to call it a Martian beer factory, but do you know the one I'm talking about?

I do, I do. And this is, you know, when you go off to space, you can't pack everything you need. With these long journeys where you're going to go six, 12 months at a time, you need to find ways to recycle wastewater, you need to find ways to grow your own crops, and you need to find ways to, if possible, use existing resources. Robert Zubrin's company developed a way to use, capture CO2, which is largely what the Martian air is made of, and turn it into a couple things, you know, fuel, oxygen, drinking water, and then also to use the same technology to carbonate beer. So we are seeing Martian technologies for capturing the on-the-land

infested resources that we expect to find on Mars, that same technology of capturing CO2 from the air and infusing it into beer. And sure enough, in the spinoff 2016 book, there's a picture of this. It's actually a fairly portable unit that captures CO2 from the air, whether, I suppose, whether it's here on Earth or Martian air someday. I guess they'll have to grow the crops under a dome or something up there. Yeah, you've seen the Martian. It'll be just like that. Yeah, we'll make potato beer.

There is one more. I don't want to catch you by surprise here, but, I mean, there's so many in all these different categories in the Spinoff 2016 book. But I was fascinated to see, among those in the medical category, some research that may be helping people with osteoporosis here on Earth. A lot of the research that we do has direct correlation to our understanding of aging. correlation to our understanding of aging. The deterioration of the muscles of the astronauts when they don't have the resistance of gravity to push against them helps us understand what happens to your muscles as you get older. The radiation and calcification of the bones and the radiation in the cataracts or the eye issues that could develop from exposure to it. All of these

things that we try to mitigate are also the same types of things that happen to the body as they get older. And I think what you're referring to is a company called Amgen. We worked with them by flying mice up into space, watching their reaction to different medications that could help resist the effects of osteoporosis on mice. And we discovered several different treatments that have now turned into a medication called Prolia. And that's on the market now to treat osteoporosis. And it's all from our brave mouse astronauts and the work that they did up on the International Space Station.

Dan, we could go on and on. The list is not quite endless, but pretty long of all of these great innovations, You bet. But there is one other thing I wanted to ask you about before we run out of time, and that is an announcement that I saw in May of a new searchable database. Tell us about that. Oh, that's so much fun. That is our public domain database, and we've cataloged and made searchable every patent that NASA has had since we first started filing in 1963. And these go back through all the history of the agency. You can watch the agency's technologies mature.

Some of the stuff that's on there is still 20, 50 years ahead of its time. Everything free for the public to use, unlike our patent licensing activity, which is another thousand technologies that are a little more exclusive for companies to form companies around. But these we expect the research community to use and to take full advantage of. And it's a treat to just go through and see all of the odd things. My favorite is something called Jet Shoes, and it is just as absurd and wonderful and futuristic as you might expect it to be. And it comes complete with a drawing of a pair of shoes that have jets in them, and you control and steer and manage the thrust with your toes. And it is definitely fantastic. And there's other things in there that are a little bit more meaty

and might have a little bit more scientific rigor to them, but all in all, the catalog itself is just a fun thing to go through. So who needs a jet pack when you've got jet shoes? Dan, I found this and much more at technology.nasa.gov. Is that the best place to go on the web? That isn't just the best place to get this information. Is that the best place to go on the web? That isn't just the best place to get this information. That's the best place to go on the web. I love it.

You enjoy your job, don't you? I do. It's a lot of fun. Dan, I look forward to talking to you again. Let's not wait too long. Let's talk soon after that 2017 book comes out and talk more about some of these spinoffs from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Good to talk to you again. You too. Dan Lockney, he's the Technology Transfer Program Executive at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. That means he's responsible for all of NASA's management of intellectual property, which they don't tend to hang on to very well.

They'd rather see it move out there across the country and the world and do a lot of good. And if you're one of those who doesn't really think that just going to amazing places around the solar system and beyond or learning about them is enough of a justification, solar system and beyond or learning about them is enough of a justification, well, check out the spinoffs and you may be amazed at just how much good is being done by the work that NASA has accomplished. We close, as always, with Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who is back with a look at the night sky. Let's head into it. Our time is short today. Okay, look low in the west shortly after sunset, and you may be able to pick up Venus, or you can just wait a few weeks as it gets higher and easier to see. And then we've got in the south in the early evening, both Saturn and Mars,

Mars to the left and reddish. And then on the eighth, the moon is very close to Saturn and on the ninth, close to Mars. We move on to this week in space history. Two things that excite Matt, We move on to this week in space history. Two things that excite Matt. 1977, Voyager 1 was launched. And then, as you may be aware, Star Trek premiered 50 years ago this week. 50 years. Half a century of trekking through the universe. And Voyager 1. Yeah, right. Big deal. Oh, that hurt. That hurt. I hope they're not listening over there at JPL. Big deal. Oh, that hurt. That hurt. I hope they're not listening over there at JPL. Go ahead. All right, we move on to Random Space Facts. At aphelion, it's farthest point from the sun.

Mercury is about one and a half times as far from the Sun as it is at perihelion, its closest point to the Sun. Quite elliptical, that Mercurian orbit. Kepler would be so proud. I'm sure he would. Congratulations, Johannes. We move on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, what is the apparent brightness ranking of the Scorpius star and Terry's, which is still hanging out near Saturn and Mars,

compared to the other stars in the night sky. How'd we do? Only the real dive-in-the-wool planratters out there entered this time. Still had quite a few, but not up to the crowds we've had in recent weeks. Good job, wooly planratters. not up to the crowds we've had in recent weeks. Good job, Woolly Planretters. Not enough people wanted to go to the trouble, I guess, of digging this one up.

We did get this entry from Kevin Dietrich, who was chosen by Random.org. He's in Beaux-Arts, Washington. He said, if you include the sun in the list, as it is a star after all, Antares is the 16th brightest star as seen from Earth. In other words, apparent magnitude or brightness. You told people don't include the sun, but he's still right, isn't he? Well, except that I told them don't include the sun. But yes, the ranking is 15th, not including the sun. I also refer to the night sky. And 16th if you feel compelled to include the sun.

Well, virtually everybody else did say 15. But Kevin, we're going to give this to you. So congratulations. That's nice, by the way. Yeah, I know. It's a good thing I'm in charge. That's right. I did a double take when I saw this from John Gallant in Lima, New York.

He said Antares, because it's a super giant, it's as wide as three astronomical units. More than that, actually, from the distance three times the distance from Earth to the sun. Holy cow. Yeah, it's big. That's the technical term. I don't have time to mention all the other great funny stuff that we got, but we did get from Dave Fairchild, Antares is a giant star, the Alpha Scorpio. Apparent brightness puts the star at 15th in the row, but based on real magnitude, the actual you'd see displays a huge diameter and jumps to number three. Poetic. He is, isn't he? All right, we're jumps to number three. Poetic. He is, isn't he? All right, we're ready to move on.

All right, we go to the early days of the human space program. Which Mercury program human missions landed in the Pacific Ocean? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Wow, I like that one. I should be able to answer that, but I can't. You've got until the 13th, September 13th, at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get this one to us. And once again, the prize package will be a gorgeous Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account,

the worldwide network of non-profit telescopes waiting for you to point them at the skies and snap some pictures. Sir, we are done. Thank you for making this one so brief, though I miss going into more detail. Maybe next week. All right, next week. Meanwhile, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about the color of earwax.

Thank you, and good night. With more proof that he is the Planetary Society's very own spinoff right there, that's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who proudly joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its Spun Up members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed the theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser.

I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies. lives.