NASA Releases its Spinoff 2017 Report

NASA has released its 2017 Spinoff report. Spinoff’s noted this year fall into the following categories; Health and medicine, transportation, public safety, consumer goods, energy and environment, information technology and industrial productivity.
Some of the highlights include:

– NASA’s work at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory on precise GPS measurements enabled John Deere to build the first widely available self-driving tractors, which now work much of the world’s farmland;

– the agency’s longstanding investment at its Glenn Research Center in heat pipes helped Thermacore Inc. adapt the technology to wick away dangerous heat during brain surgery;

– a high-speed, high-resolution camera designed to monitor the Orion spacecraft’s landing parachutes at NASA’s Johnson Space Center now is improving data in automobile crash tests.

NASA also highlights these spinoff’s: laser imaging technology that discovered snow on Mars and now helps archeologists uncover humanity’s past; Earth-observing satellites that spot forest fires before they spread; and software that might help create supersonic jets we could all fly on.

“The stories published in Spinoff represent the end of a technology transfer pipeline that begins when researchers and engineers at NASA develop innovations to meet mission needs,” said Stephen Jurczyk, associate administrator of the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate in Washington. “This year’s spinoffs includes products and services at work in every sector of the economy. They are innovations that make people more productive, protect the environment, and much more.”

You can download print and digital versions of Spinoff 2017 from the spinoff website;
http://spinoff.nasa.gov