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Orbital Mechanics - Blog Posts

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2 months ago

Overhead view of the international Space Station orbiting above Earth as day turns to night. Credit: NASA

Spinoffs: Space Station Innovations in Your Cart (and Heart!)

You might think NASA technology is just spaceships and telescopes, but did you know the camera in your cell phone is, too? It’s one of many NASA innovations now found everywhere on Earth.

The International Space Station has had crew living on it for 25 years straight. In that time, the space station has enabled a tremendous amount of research, helping NASA and scientists better understand long-term living in space – but it’s not just knowledge coming back down to Earth! Technologies developed for the space station and experiments conducted aboard the orbiting lab also benefit people on the planet below. Here are a few of these inventions, or spinoffs, you can find in your everyday life.

A woman applies sunscreen to a young girl’s face at the edge of a swimming pool. Credit: Getty Images

A Sunscreen That Blocks Radiation in Space – and on Your Face

After surviving for 18 months outside the International Space Station, an extremely hardy organism is now improving sunscreens and face cream products from a cosmetics company, which licensed use of the organism from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Astronaut Sunita Williams flexes her arm muscles as she uses a resistive exercise device on the International Space Station. She wears what looks like football shoulder pads, which have cables connecting them to the device. Credit: NASA

A man uses the Bowflex Revolution exercise machine. He is holding a strap attached to a cable. Credit: Bowflex

Build Muscle With or Without Gravity

Muscles atrophy quickly in space, so when astronauts began long stays on the International Space Station, they needed some specialized exercise equipment. A resistance mechanism made of a coiled metal spring formed the basis of the first way for astronauts to “lift weights” in space. Soon after, that same design became the heart of compact home gym equipment.

Fresh chile peppers are pictured growing inside the International Space Station's Advanced Plant Habitat shortly before being harvested. Credit: NASA

Fresh Greens Every Day of the Year

The need to grow fresh food in space pushed NASA to develop indoor agriculture techniques. Thanks to the agency’s research, private companies are building on NASA’s vertical farm structure, plant-growth “recipes,” and environmental-control data to create indoor farms, resulting in higher crop yields and better-quality produce while conserving water and energy and eliminating the need for pesticides.

NASA astronaut Megan McArthur installs a new ADSEP-2 (Advanced Space Experiment Processor-2), which looks like a metal rectangular box, containing ADSEP-UMAMI samples inside the Kibo laboratory module aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

Cultivating Hearts and Knees in Space

Gravity is a significant obstacle to bioprinting cells and growing human tissue on Earth because heavier components settle to the bottoms of petri dishes. In the absence of gravity, each cell layer stays in place, which is how it’s possible to grow heart and knee tissue on the space station. The same principle also allows mixing of complex pharmaceuticals on orbit.

Three rows of solar panels stand at an angle in a grassy field at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The sky is bright blue. Credit: NASA/Frank Michaux

Storing Oodles of Energy

NASA chose nickel-hydrogen batteries to power the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station because the technology is safe, reliable in extreme temperatures, and long-lived. NASA’s improvements brought down the cost of the technology, which is now used by large-scale utilities and renewable power plants that need to store energy generated by intermittent sources.

You can read about many more products sourced from the ISS on spinoff.nasa.gov.

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