From GPS to water purification—everyday technologies born from space exploration.
6 articles
Your phone's location depends on the clocks aboard GPS satellites 20,000 km overhead. Relativity makes those clocks run 38 microseconds fast every day, enough to throw your map off by about 10 km if nobody corrected it. So engineers build the satellites to run deliberately slow before they even launch. Einstein, it turns out, helps you find your way every single morning.
Freeze-dried miso soup that rehydrates in hot water, and the DHA in baby formula, both trace back to NASA space food research. Drying cuts weight to a fifth while keeping 98% of the nutrition. Here's how space ended up in your kitchen.
ESA floats volunteers in water covered by a waterproof sheet for days at a time, deliberately recreating how astronauts' bodies decline in orbit. Stripped of support, bones and muscles start wasting and fluid rushes to the head. The data from these tanks is becoming the blueprint for getting long-term bedridden patients back on their feet.
A battery-free sensor designed to monitor astronauts aboard the space station is now implanted in the pulmonary arteries of heart failure patients. One year after implantation, heart failure hospitalizations dropped 73%. A story about how an engineering constraint built for extreme environments ended up quietly at work inside the chests of people who need it most.
The chip behind your selfies started life as a miniaturized 'eye' engineered at JPL to fly to Mars and the Sun. The same sensor design is now made roughly 7 billion times a year, nearly one for every person on Earth.
The closest photo of Japan's SLIM lander lying face-down on the Moon was taken by SORA-Q, an 80mm, 250-gram sphere built with transforming-toy technology from Takara Tomy. At roughly 1/4000th the weight of NASA's Mars rover Perseverance, why did such a small, simple design hold up so well in a brutal environment? SORABUMI explains.