Hello and welcome to NASA Science Live.
Today we're featuring a special climate edition.
On NASA's innovations and efforts to help the environment.
I'm your host, Jasmine Hopkins.
Since Earth is our home planet.
Today's conversation is not just about us.
We want to hear from you.
So we invite you to join the conversation.
Using hashtag ask NASA in the comment section.
Wherever you are watching.
Now let's dive right in.
Now that does much more than explore space.
In fact, many of the technologies
NASA developed for space
missions are also used to help protect planet Earth.
And although much of the climate
related news these days is pretty grim.
Today we are happy to introduce you to some positive solutions.
I have two special guests joining us to do this right now.
So we'd like to welcome our NASA experts.
First we have Doctor Kate Calvin.
NASA chief scientist and senior climate advisor.
Welcome, Kate.
Hi. And Dan Lockney, new technology transfer program
executive and NASA's space technology mission Directorate.
Welcome, Dan. Hi, Jasmine.
All right, so first we want to start
by getting to know you a little bit better.
So Kate and Dan, can you tell us a little bit
more about your roles here at NASA?
Kate, we'll start with you.
Yeah. Thanks, Jasmine.
So I'm NASA's chief scientist and senior climate advisor.
And there's a few different aspects of that role.
So part of my job is to serve as an advisor to NASA
leadership on all things climate and on science more generally.
I also work to connect within the agency.
We have a lot of climate and science
throughout our agency, and I work to connect
those aspects internally.
And then I spend a lot of time communicating
what we do with the public and people like you.
Thanks so much, Kate and Dan.
I love my job.
So at NASA, I have the responsibility
for ensuring that the technologies and innovations
we create for our space missions and aeronautics activities.
All the cool stuff that we get asked to do.
That those ideas, concepts and innovations
technologies come back down to the earth
in the form of practical terrestrial benefits
that improves our lives, saves lives,
boost the US economy and just cool gadgets
and things we have in our life.
As a result of the neat work that NASA gets to do.
Thanks so much, Dan.
Glad to know that you love your job here at NASA.
So you guys both have excellent positions within the agency.
So today we're going to talk about NASA
and the technologies that benefit Earth
and the life on it.
These have many touch points throughout the agency.
But first we want to talk about something
that many of our viewers can relate to.
And that's either driving in a car or flying in a plane.
So, Dan, can you explain how NASA's
technology is improving the way we travel more sustainably?
Absolutely.
So the first a NASA's aeronautics
and if you've been on a plane,
it has benefited from NASA research.
And there's countless ways that it happens.
But one of my favorites,
goes back a couple of years, and it's the
blended upturned winglets.
And that's if you've seen these,
these aircraft out on the, the tarmac or in the sky,
you've got that, edge of the wing folded up a little bit.
Now, intuitively, you know, if you ever made a paper
airplane, curled up the wings a little bit, like, shown here,
you thought across the room, and it just flies
a little bit better.
But our NASA engineers did that with metal,
attach it to airplanes, real airplanes.
And it turns out it works on the real ones, too.
And it improves fuel efficiency, allows for steeper takeoff.
So that it's quieter
above, in areas directly around, airports.
So you could put residences a little bit closer.
And it overall makes the airplane
fly a little bit smoother.
And that's been around for 20 plus years.
And it's on every Boeing aircraft.
And they've estimated billions of gallons of fuel saved.
There's a new technology
called digital, winglets
that very similarly
takes its name from the original metal winglets
very similarly makes air travel
a little bit safer, more convenient, more efficient.
And it's this neat concept where the plane and the ground
can communicate with one another and redirect a flight path
to get a plane to, changes altitude or direction
in order to, avoid turbulence, avoid bad weather,
find more efficiency in the road,
and then also, not collide with other things in the air.
This neat digital winglet
concept that that planes can reroute
from the original fixed flight plan
get us there safer and more efficiently.
And, just one of the many ways, two of the many ways that
NASA tech is in
with you when you fly.
Thanks so much, Dan.
And I hear that you mentioned
fuel efficiency a couple times there,
which is important to the agency as well as the United States.
So the U.S.
has a goal to achieve net zero emissions from aviation by 2050.
Kate, can you tell us how NASA is supporting that goal?
Yeah, absolutely.
So as Dan mentioned,
we've worked with the aviation industry for decades to reduce
energy use and emissions associated with flying,
and we are continuing now to
work on reducing those emissions and energy use, even further.
And we work in different areas.
We work on airport operations as well as aircraft design.
And one of the things we're working on
is a new experimental plane.
Or explain, called the X 66, a, and the X 66 A is a change
in the design of the airplane in the materials, used to, to,
to build it
in a way that will reduce the amount
of energy use and emissions associated with flying even more
and help us get towards net zero emissions from aviation.
That is wonderful to hear.
Thank you so much, Kate.
We are already seeing questions pour on online.
Please keep those coming to us.
And remember
you can join the conversation using hashtag Ask NASA
or posting something directly
into the comment section wherever you are watching.
So our first question comes from a viewer on
saying fascinating topic.
Can you share any specific
examples of NASA technology improving energy
efficiency, efficiency on a large scale?
Okay.
Go ahead Dan. Okay.
So one of my favorites,
this is several years old,
but it takes a while for technology to be adopted.
And then it become ubiquitous.
And then you ask for large scale.
And is that that doesn't happen overnight.
So this is several decades old,
but in the 1970s,
there was an engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center
in Alabama, who developed this voltage control device
that changed the amount of energy an electric motor used
according to how much load was on that motor.
And we used it for saving energy
and space, saving energy and everything that we do.
Automation and, robotics.
We know we want to save energy.
The practical application here on Earth, though,
is every escalator,
every elevator, in every moving sidewalk
that's been built in the world since the 1980s
has this device in it that NASA invented.
And we know this is true because there's a limited number
of manufacturers of elevators, escalators, moving sidewalks.
I think there's four who make all of them,
and they all use this device.
And the concept is pretty straightforward,
but I'll describe it.
If you call an elevator to your floor and it's empty,
it now knows and senses that it's empty and uses
less electricity to to bring the elevator
to your floor versus prior to having this device,
the motor didn't know
and it would always operate at full speed.
So in terms of large scale
picture, every escalator,
every elevator and every moving sidewalk
you've ever seen, and they all have this device on them.
Thank you so much, Dan.
That is a great example of large scale.
NASA is always with us,
whether it's on an escalator or an elevator.
Next we have Roland on it and he asks, what
tech is NASA looking at most in terms of renewable energy?
What about 30 years from now?
Where do you hope we will be at in terms of our ability
to harness renewable energy?
Yes, I guess maybe I'll start and then Dan can add on that.
So I think we work in a
I think about this in a few different ways.
One of the areas we work in is providing information
to people around the world about what's happening on Earth,
so they can better plan their own energy use,
and, you know, respond to things happening in their community.
And so a lot of our space based data
and Earth satellites
can help us understand that and understand
what the possibilities are in the future.
But we're also an agency that is thinking about our own
environmental footprint.
And so we take a lot of actions
at our centers and our facilities
to improve our climate resilience
and reduce our energy use.
And so there we think
a lot about what is possible, where we are
and what can you do with the different parts,
that we operate in around the country.
Thanks so much, Kate.
And we actually have another question to you, Kate.
You mentioned it before, but can you explain what is net
zero for the net zero emissions?
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's think I
probably should have explained that from the start.
So net zero is, is means with any positive,
emissions from human activity are balanced by removal.
So if you are putting greenhouse
gas emissions into the atmosphere,
you're also taking out an equal amount.
So the net total is zero emissions.
And the reason that's important to scientist
is when we get to net zero carbon dioxide emissions,
that will that's what we need to do in order to limit warming.
So as long as carbon dioxide
emissions are positive, warming will continue.
And so in
order to halt warming, we need to get to this net zero.
And so that's what we, you know,
we think about is balancing those emissions with removals.
Perfect.
Thank you so much for adding that explanation, Kate.
Now we have a viewer on YouTube asking,
is there technology that could improve the impact of pollution?
Dan, do you want to start on this one?
I think yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
So that there's several ways to to reduce pollution.
One is to prevent it from happening in the first place,
and the other one is trying to mitigate the results of it.
And we're doing work in both of those areas.
One of my favorites,
and this is this might sound smaller scale
than every escalator you've ever seen.
But we developed a device to scrub the air of pollutants,
for spacecraft that has since been applied to,
toll taker boots at, on highways
so that the people who have to stand there
and collect your $2 when you go through the booth
and, pay the toll to cross the bridge
or keep moving on the highway.
That air's cleaner.
Now is a result of, research that NASA has done.
We've also done,
you know, how plants clean the air.
I think everyone kind of knows this.
We intuitively knew it, but NASA approved it.
We tested it.
And it came as a result of early space station designs.
So one was all inorganic materials,
plastics and and glues and and no windows
because you can't really pop open a window in space.
We're trying to figure out
how to make these contained environments.
We realized, the crew's training in these
simulated environments were getting headaches.
So we experimented with plant growth
in these chambers
in order to see if we could use them to clean the air.
And it turns out we could,
and then we tested to see which plants would provide
the most clean air, which plants would be the best to grow?
There was a couple years ago.
But now when you go to Home
Depot or Lowe's or wherever you buy your house plants,
the things you find in your home,
in the house plant section of the Norfolk pine,
the different ferns and, and all of those things.
It's not a coincidence that those are the plants
that you find in the store.
Those are the ones that that, the snake plant.
All of those were on the list of NASA top air cleaning plants.
So everything from large scale to small, the house
plant that you're looking at in your, in your living room,
we're a little bit everywhere.
Thanks so much, Dan.
Again, a good reminder that NASA is everywhere around us.
Okay.
We're going to switch gears now to talk about our next topic,
but please keep those questions coming online
using hashtag ask NASA.
So now we're going to go into wildfire detection.
Kate, can you tell us
how NASA is improving the ability to spot wildfires
so that first responders can know about them sooner?
Yeah, absolutely.
And wildfires is an active area of study for us.
And we're really trying to help,
both understand fire as well as help
our first responders respond to fires.
And we work in different areas looking at before, during
and after a fire and provide different information for each.
So before fire, we can provide information on,
you know,
where there's drive, agitation conditions,
where you might have fuel for fire during a fire.
We can look at where there are active fires.
So we have a platform called firms
or the fire information for resource manager system.
And you may have
actually seen this on the news, but it's showing you
where there are active fires now.
And it's using a bunch, several satellites
to pull information from space about where those fires are.
But we're continuing to work now
to make sure we can get information to first responders
quickly and efficiently so they know what's happening
and how to respond.
So we work closely with people like the U.S.
Forest Service
and the Bureau of Land Management,
trying to understand the challenges
they face in fighting a fire
and thinking about
what we can do to help improve their, their response.
Thanks so much, Kate.
It's great to know what we're doing
to keep our first responders and the public safe.
So next, Dan, now the technology is also helping
improve ecosystems.
Can you give us a few examples of how
I could also add some firefighter ones?
But, you can always call me my my information is always
available online, so I'm easy to find.
And I could do this all day.
So ecosystem.
And another weird fun one is, we think of beavers.
We all do as, destructive animals
that just go chop down trees and for for,
decades, centuries,
hunters and farmers would try
to eradicate the beaver thinking it was just a nuisance animal.
It turns out, though, there's an advantage
to having these dams that they prevent the,
drying up of wetlands.
And with the removal of beavers, we ended up with longer,
straighter, deeper rivers and then drier areas around them.
So using NASA satellite data,
researchers are now trying to figure out
where in the US that they can repopulate beavers,
with the intention of not having
a significant impact on, that the human population
or putting the beavers where they shouldn't be.
In this picture, by the way,
is one of the ways we attract beavers.
That's a, manmade, dam meant to entice a beaver to,
you know, head start on a beaver dam.
Those clearly weren't chewed by beaver.
But the idea is that we would help the beavers
repopulate, these areas, and it would reduce,
runoff.
It would reduce the, drought,
and it would, overall improve the watershed
satellite data to help
repopulate beavers in the US.
Thank you so much, Dan.
I can't help but love all those pictures of beavers.
And like you mentioned earlier,
NASA is kind of everywhere we look, including in our food.
So now let's talk agriculture, which is where our food is grown
and harvested.
Kate, how has NASA technology helped farmers?
For example?
Yeah, two, two ways that we can help farmers.
One is through earth observations.
We can help farmers better plan their crops and fields so we're
able to observe crops from space so we can see what's growing.
We have satellites
and instruments that can tell us things about soil moisture,
drought conditions, plant health.
And we can use that to provide information to farmers
about when to plan and their irrigation.
So we have a tool called open EBT
that can help farmers in the US understand how
how much water their fields are losing
and better plan the irrigation for that.
And farmers have used it,
and they've saved a lot of water while still producing crops,
and growing food that we can eat.
Thanks so much, Kate.
Again, great to see how NASA is affecting our daily lives.
And speaking of that, let's get back to those viewers online.
So first we have Debbie on YouTube asking, how about going
to the moon again?
Help us to better understand our own planet Earth and to plan
for a more sustainable future.
I guess I'll start with that one.
So one of the things that, you know,
we learn from going to the moon,
the moon is, you know, it's
part of our solar system, and it contains a history
of our solar system.
So by learning about the moon, we can learn more about Earth,
from a science perspective,
but also in our process of
going to the moon, we're developing all
a lot of technologies and learning a lot
that can help us with sustainability on Earth.
So when we think about going to space,
we have to bring everything with us.
And so we're very careful about how much weight we put on,
what we think about doing in space.
And a lot of the research that we do to get space,
get to space and live in space helps us right here on Earth.
So we have a lot of challenges around food, around, energy.
So we have a challenge called What's on the moon
that's looking at power on the moon and energy storage,
but it also can help us with power
and energy storage here on Earth.
So we're always thinking, you know,
we're going back to the moon for science,
but we're also learning about Earth and learning
and taking that technologies here to benefit us.
Thanks so much, Kate.
Yes, learning a lot about Earth from the moon.
And we'll have some more information
on these challenges later in today's program.
So next we have entered to infinity on YouTube asking,
how is net zero possible?
What are the technology advancements, used by NASA
to accomplish this?
Great.
So I'm going to talk a little bit
about net zero in general. And then I'll talk
about the part that NASA is working on.
So in general, you know there's two aspects of net zero.
It's reducing emissions as well as removals.
And some of the ways you can remove
emissions from the atmosphere are things like planting trees.
So trees take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere
and can help counterbalance any positive emissions for now.
So the the main part that we're working on, on
achieving the US goals on net zero is through our aviation.
So we do research on aircraft
so that we can reduce the environmental impact of flying.
So so when you do fly it has the minimal environmental impact.
And that's the primary way that we've been doing
research on technology related to net zero.
But we also monitor Earth from space.
So we can see where you've planted those trees and monitor
changes in forest cover over tim
Thanks so much, Kate.
We have a lot of interest in net zero.
Next we have Tarn Todd on ECS.
An asset, that he
that he has been riding a bicycle for the last 30 years.
Very nice.
He wants to know if 50% of the people,
if it's 50% of people did this, would that be the power
saving impact and carbon emissions that we need?
This is a great question.
So one of the things
there are people that do research on
what happens
if you change the way you train, you travel
and what that means for emissions.
And I don't have the precise numbers off the top of my head,
but one of the ways you can reduce emissions
associated with travel is by walking,
biking or public transit.
It's not available to everyone, but it does tend to be lower
emitting than other ways of travel.
So so there would be emissions reductions if people did bike
and walk, but not everyone has access to that.
Thanks so much for that answer, Kate.
Dave on X asks, does humanity have an ability
to directly scrub CO2 or methane
from the atmosphere?
So there are ways of removing
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I mentioned trees before.
There's also other ways.
So one of the things we actually do
on our spacecraft is we capture carbon
dioxide out of the spacecraft
just to provide clean air to astronauts.
It's at a small scale, the level of a few astronauts,
but there are people doing
research into technologies
that are larger scale versions of that.
So Department of Energy is responsible for that.
But there are different ways of removing carbon dioxide.
The one that people are most familiar
with probably are trees.
Thanks so much, Kate.
We have another one asking can anyone use NASA's
climate technology?
This might be a question for Dan.
Yes, anyone can use it.
We actually have we have several portfolios.
One is, software portfolio.
It's software that NASA.gov
and, that's free to the public to use.
You can search it by keyword and hunt through it
and, find something might be of interest to you.
We also have our, our patent portfolio,
which is available for licensing, and that's it.
Technology dot nasa.gov again keyword searchable.
And and some of the keywords will, will help you, hone in
on what you're looking for.
But there's also bins
that you can search, for example environmental or climate tech.
But yeah, take a look.
There's a ton of technology, a lot of opportunities out there.
Thanks so much, Dan.
We actually have something related
to that as NASA technologies for everyone.
Darth on YouTube asks Dan if I, as a non U.S.
citizen, want to use some of the NASA
technology I found on the NASA technology report Server
is the Small Business Innovation,
Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Program.
The only way
Darth
that there's there's three different questions in there.
First, the technology available is on those two sites
that I mentioned, software that NASA.gov and technology
don't that I gave
the NASA Technical Report server
the entries is actually all of our scientific, publications.
And those are that's data content knowledge
that we've published that,
that we want people to have to know when to use.
It's somewhat different than the technology side of things.
And then third, the small business Innovation research
and the small business technology transfer research
programs, are not necessarily for NASA technologies,
but rather their solicitations where we ask people,
to help us solve a problem, we provide funding for them.
And that is only available to US citizens.
But that SBIR STR programs, both are,
innovative small dollar,
research contracts and grants to help people,
advance their own commercial potential with technology,
but then also helping us to meet a mission. Need.
So that was a complicated answer.
Check out the website,
and if you get confused, you can always be a know.
Awesome.
Thank you so much, Dan.
We appreciate you telling
that NASA is an open science, open
technology agency, and we hope to see
some involvement after today's show.
Remember, you can continue to send us
those questions by posting them directly in the comment section
wherever you are watching or using hashtag ask NASA.
So now we've talked agriculture, aviation and
and now we're going to get into energy.
Over the years,
humans have developed systems to harvest and store energy
from sources such as wind, sunlight, and tidal action.
And these are known as renewable and alternative energies
that can be replenished in a short period of time.
So, Kate and Dan, how has NASA help expand renewable
energies across the globe?
Yeah.
Thanks, Jasmine.
Maybe I'll start and then Dan can add some specifics.
So, you know, one of the ways when we think about, you know,
climate change is driven by greenhouse
gas emissions, principally, and we think about ways
we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Some of the options that have really high
potential to reduce emissions are things like wind and solar.
And we have a
there's a lot of research on wind and solar, some solar
research at NASA, but a lot also at the Department of Energy.
But one of the other things we do
at NASA is help people understand
what the potential is, where they live.
So we have an application called power and NASA Power App,
and it will tell you what the,
what what renewable potential is where you are.
So it takes information
about incoming solar radiation and wind
and provides information about renewable energy.
So you know what's possible where you are.
And you think maybe, Dan,
you got some other specific examples, perhaps one of them.
So we had this website spin off dot nasa.gov,
and we call these these, practical terrestrial benefits,
these products and services
and technologies and devices and things
that make our everyday life better.
As a result of NASA's research.
We call them spin offs, spin off of the original research.
We have thousands of them online.
One of them is one of my favorites.
So we're building this big rocket.
It's going to take astronauts to the moon and then to Mars.
Big rocket. Biggest rocket that's ever been built.
Beautiful thing.
And during the design phase, they discovered
that it was vibrating pretty violently on the launch pad.
This is all computer design.
This is not,
you know, up on a launch pad like, oops, we made a mistake.
This is during the design.
And as Kate mentioned earlier, you can't
you have to
you're we're very conscious of weight restrictions
when we talk about launch and space travel
is you gotta leave Earth and you can't have it too heavy.
And if if something was
vibrating on Earth,
you could just
put a stack of books on it or something, or like,
weight it now on the concrete or put a rock on it.
You can't do that with the vehicle
that you needed to have to leave Earth.
We'd even changed at this point,
the paint job on the rocket to save weight.
Like, that's how dialed in we were with trying to save
weight on building this rocket.
But it's vibrating, so we realized
we had to find a solution that didn't add a lot of weight.
And the researchers who were working on it,
the engineers and physicists developed a system of baffles
that would, insert into the liquid fuel tank.
And when you look at the rocket,
like the big NASA rocket, that's mostly liquid fuel.
And the little the little action part on top is that big.
And the rest of the rockets, most of the rocket.
So liquid fuel, that's most of the mass.
And they've determined that if you can control the slosh
of that liquid fuel as it's burning down very quickly,
if you can manage that,
you could transmit the stability to the rest of the vehicle.
That solved the problem without adding a ton of weight.
We quickly then realized
that we could put that
in skyscrapers, tall buildings, and high rises, for earthquake
mitigation and in areas that that were prone to high winds.
But as we got going with it, we then realized
we say we not me, the scientists and physicists
who are working on this very interesting problem.
They started working with some researchers
up at the University of Maine who were trying to build, wind
turbines, offshore wind turbines that, you know,
five, ten miles off the shore would float on the on the sea
and then collect wind and turn it into energy.
And these things would get
beat up by the Atlantic, I mean, storms and saltwater
just I mean, it's not a it's not an easy place to have
a piece of equipment float around bobbing up and down.
And they discovered that putting these baffles
that stopped the rocket from vibrating underneath
the floating platforms of these wind turbines,
they could provide stability to the turbine,
allowing it to, not get beat up
as much and to be a little more predictable in its operation.
So the estimate is that they would extend the life
by at least ten, 15 years of these ocean bound,
floating turbines.
And it all came from NASA building a big rocket
that's going to moon, the moon.
And that goes back to Debbie's question that
what do we expect humans are going to get out of
going to the moon?
There's certain things
like, hey, mentioned the, saving power and learning about,
recycling of air and water and, the vantage point of space.
But for me, it's all the weird stuff that we don't expect.
Like, did you know we're going to build
this rocket, run into this vibration problem,
and next thing you know, it's over in wind turbines off the,
shore of Maine.
And that's the fun part of of innovation
and the exploration.
Thank you so much, Dan.
So from a moon rocket to wind turbines to the NASA power app,
I appreciate you both for
tag teaming that answer on renewable energies.
As a reminder to our audience, please continue
sending us our questions using hashtag ask NASA
in the comment section wherever you're watching.
And now we'll get back into that Q&A.
So, King Throne on YouTube asks,
what is your stance on embracing regenerative agriculture?
To move CO2 from the atmosphere into the soil?
I think, you know, as a science and technology agency, our view
is that we provide scientific information and technology
about what, what is happening and what might happen.
So we do a lot of, monitoring of earth,
soils and as well as plants from space.
And so we can provide that kind of information.
But we're our primary role is in providing scientific
information and, and technologies.
Thanks so much, Kate, for taking that question.
Now a viewer on YouTube asks, is nascent
involved in any energy storage solutions?
Absolutely.
It's yes and yes I would.
That's I will tell you a quick one.
And this one goes back a few years.
Remember when those,
I forget what they're called, things people.
And for Christmas, you'd stand on them.
They had two wheels and you kind of, like, roll around on them
and people would fall and bus their teeth out and,
roller boards. I'm going to call them roller boards.
You know what I'm talking about.
When those first came out,
in addition to people falling and getting hurt, remember
they were also lighting on fire, like fairly regularly.
And and we're back 15 years ago or so when, like, laptops
would light on fire like that was a thing
these lithium ion batteries were like,
they're great new technology.
They're lightweight, had a lot of, energy.
But occasionally they'd light on fire.
And NASA's solved that problem
because we wanted to use the batteries, too,
but we didn't want them
lighting on fire in space because, well,
you can't really get the fire department up there
as quickly as you'd like it
would you have to train them and get them off.
And so it's, it's, it's it's a mess.
So the, the simpler thing is to avoid the fire altogether.
So NASA researchers went out to the Department of Energy
and they studied
how to make these lithium ion batteries not light on fire.
So you might be saying but then they don't light on fire, that.
That's correct. We did that.
But we've
been working in, power storage in generation
in numerous ways and for decades.
Thank you.
Dan, masterful storytelling.
I didn't know how you're going to connect
the lighting on fire, NASA, but you did it.
All right, so moving on to our next question.
If you are on YouTube asks what are NASA's plans for helping
civilian and commercial industry for small nuclear reactors
or green hydrogen tech?
I think I'm not the best person, for that,
we do have people that think
about both hydrogen as well as nuclear,
but I it's,
I don't know if Dan has any examples there,
but that might be a better question
for one of our other colleagues in space technology,
I the only thing I would add is, is if we had technology
the NASA developed in those areas,
we would make them available to the public.
Awesome.
Thank you so much, Dan and Kate.
Next, if you are on aircraft, great
to hear about NASA's innovations helping our planet.
Could you share more about how these technologies
improve renewable energy or make travel more efficient?
I think you guys have both
touched on that, but anything else to add?
Make travel more efficient?
Well, on the renewable energy,
I think the one thing we haven't really talked about,
we talked a little bit about our Earth observations.
We talked a little bit about wind turbines.
We haven't talked about solar as much now.
So we use a lot of solar power in space.
Most of our satellites have solar panels.
The International Space Station does.
And we've developed, rollouts, solar panels though.
Dan, you want to give more details on that?
Sure.
There's actually two different
roll-out solar arrays that we've developed.
One of them is kind of neat.
So you picture a solar panel
and it's just fixed, rigid thing in picture it like bolted
to the top of a house or, a building.
So NASA developed rollable, deployable ones
that we,
we launch them into space,
and you don't want to launch this big flat like,
sheet of plywood into space.
So we want this, like, tube,
like a rug that you could, you could roll out.
So we developed these rollable solar panels.
That same concept has been applied to simple ones
that you could take camping or hiking
or roll out on a picnic, charge your radio, your telephone.
You kind of like
take it out your backpack and roll out this solar panel.
That's kind of a small scale version for charging
a single device.
There's another neat one we've been working on.
Because in addition to rolling them out,
you also want to make sure they're not, like, delicate.
And then they can do it.
They can withstand a little bit of a beating
because space launch is difficult
and it's kind of rough on things.
And then rolling something, I'm just having it float out,
in space is also, you know,
you want to make sure that it's
that it's strong and you can't
you can't easily pop up to repair it.
So we developed these,
solar panels that you can attach to,
a building for between two trees, like a hammock
or even put it on, say, the top of a gazebo or pagoda.
That'll withstand weather and wind
and take a beating outdoors.
And then when you're done using it,
you can roll it back up.
And the neat advantage here is that you could actually have
solar, power delivered to your home
without having to go through the, expense and
permanency of actually bolting those rigid ones to your roof.
So this would work if you were renting,
or if, in a circumstance where you had to set up
emergency tents or something in an, in a, in an environment
like a field hospital, you could put these things out
and they would withstand rough weather,
and you grow them up and pack them away when you're done.
Thank you so much, Dan and Kate, for those examples
of solar energy.
Glad that we were able to loop
that into the conversation as well.
Sam on YouTube asks what,
potential future endeavors in
terms of finding various renewable energy sources.
What are the crucial factors taken into,
into condition for this purpose?
In the point of view from NASA scientists?
I think from, you know,
we're continuing to explore both our home planet
as well as space and learn as we go.
And you never know what you might find.
I think that's the findings, particularly,
as Dan mentioned, about his job.
When you're looking at one
challenge, you might find solutions to another.
And so I think we're always exploring.
We're always learning.
We're always understanding and we're always sharing.
So we share what we can with the world.
Thanks so much, Kate.
Yeah, it's nice to see how many missions
might affect others here at NASA.
So if you were on Twitch asks,
how does plant, how do you plant satellite
imagery aid in overall food production and growth?
So I yeah, I think we've got a number of different ways
that we're able
to study plants from space so we can see what's growing.
We have a satellite called Landsat.
It's actually a series
of satellites in partnership with the US Geological Survey.
And we have more than 50 years of records of this.
And it can tell you where
there are trees, where there are crops.
And we've worked, you know,
with people like the US Department
of Agriculture to identify
which crops, you can tell from space
what's growing by when it greens the precise color that it is.
We can also we have other satellites
that can tell us about plant health.
So we have one, an instrument on the International Space
Station called Eco Stress
that it measures
temperature at this really, really high precision.
And what it turns out you can learn from
that is when plants are water stress.
So when plants don't have enough water,
they get a little bit hotter so they get a fever.
And we can see that from space.
And so this instrument that can show us urban heat
island can also let us know when plants have water stress.
But we're continuing to learn about agriculture and learn
what we can do to provide more information
to farmers about what's happening,
and what might happen in the future.
So we also have an active
area of research around looking at future crop yields
and future crop production to understand
how changes in the environment in the future
might affect our ability to grow different crops.
Thank you.
So so yeah, we're doing oh, Dan, would you like to add I do.
Well,
we also have some fascinating research
being done down at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida
on vertical farming.
And, okay, mentioned sensors.
We use sensors to dial in
exactly on what a plant needs.
So rather than having to use,
you know, just throw more water at it.
Just hope for the best.
Put more, put more light on it, take a little light off
and kind of see what happens.
We can read plant health and stress up close
and figure out what needs a little more of this nutrient.
It needs a little bit more of,
a little bit more water, a little less water, maybe.
Needs a little more wind passing through.
Maybe the temperature's not quite right.
And we can, We can grow perfect crops
with very little, if any.
Fertilizers and no pesticides necessary,
because this is largely done indoors.
By the way, we were working on it at NASA
was plant growth for long duration space flight.
And these banks, these walls of
of of plants that you could eat lettuces and such,
don't require a lot of growing medium.
It's not like, your Miracle-Gro, soil.
This is, you know, generally a goo
that they grow in, a nutrient dense goo.
Sometimes it's water hydroponics,
but a very light base.
And then a wall of sensors, and you grow the, the plants
off of it.
So the cool application.
And by the way, we just made this information
publicly available. We said, have fun.
You all grow some plants.
The cool thing is there's multiple companies
now that are farming this way.
And you're seeing in dense urban environments.
So as as the planet gets more populated,
we're gonna have more people.
They're going to be in urban environments,
and we're going to have fewer or fewer,
ways to feed them good green, healthy food.
And we're going to have less farmland.
So growing these plants indoors in order to,
feed people is, kind of neat.
And you can literally in cities on the East Coast
and the West, purchase.
Now when you go to the grocery store and lettuces
that were grown indoors and you virtually
indistinguishable from the other lettuces that you might find,
and yes, it's primarily lettuce.
It's right now, but but the sky's
the limit on what you could grow in these neat vertical farms.
Thanks so much, Dan, for that addition.
And yes, lettuce is a start, but we have much more coming.
A viewer on YouTube now asks, what are the experts
most excited for to see technology
that is being developed right now?
A really expert, that's a great question.
The most excited,
I have to say, every time I hear
about something that's happening,
I get excited about it. So it changes.
Since we were just
talking about food, I always like learning.
And the International Space Station, we grow crops, so
our astronauts are farmers.
And they've done a lot of research on things like LED
lighting, on fertilizers
that we use in some of those indoor
agriculture facilities that Dan mentioned.
And it's kind of fun to think about what we can learn.
And it's also fun to think about growing crops in space.
But we have a lot of other fun research around food,
around energy.
And you never know what we'll learn next.
Thanks so much, Kate.
A lot to be excited about.
Dan, would you like to add what you're most excited for?
I'm going to fall back into one of my other answers,
and I'm I'm most excited about what we don't know yet
and the wacky places that
we're going to see technology turn up.
Like one of my favorite stories is a few years back.
Not climate related at all,
but we developed a device at request,
by a for our marching band in Michigan.
They needed a way to keep their reeds warm
for the wind instruments during, subzero marching season.
So, yeah, we got that battery technology.
You can use that
because otherwise you'd be kind of, like, stuck on your reed,
and then you take it out and it would freeze you.
And in order
to prevent that from happening, we made these reed warmers,
and there was no way we could have predicted that.
And it helped some people and some kids
didn't get chapped lips as a result.
And they played their, their instruments and, and
I don't know where that's the fun part.
That's why I love my job.
Like, who knows what's around the corner.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Stan.
So growing plants in space
and then reed warmer and lots to be excited about here at NASA.
So Kate, you just mentioned this,
but if you are on ECS as as an engineer
who's worked on space launch systems
and now the International Space Station,
what is a major contribution NASA has made to life on Earth
and have,
we have an amazing station powering things, from solar,
maintaining livable atmosphere, a water recovery system.
How do those improvements help us on Earth?
Yeah.
So we talked a little bit about food,
but now I'll talk about water.
So one of the other things you do on
the International Space Station, we need to make
sure our astronauts have clean water to drink.
And so we recycle water on the International Space Station.
And we've done
a ton of research on water filtration and water recycling.
And that's been used all around
the world in places where they don't
have access to clean water.
Thank you so much, Kate. Yes.
Bringing that benefit right back here to Earth.
Sorry.
Are you using an AI in any of these innovations?
And I think that question and go to both, Kate and Dan.
So we use AI and machine learning.
I'm trying to think about if we've mentioned anything yet.
But I will instead mention
things are doing, going forward.
So we use a lot of AI and machine learning.
We have for decades.
It's how we land a rover on Mars.
But some of the things we're doing
that are Earth and climate related
involves sort of using AI and machine learning to better,
track and identify features in, satellite imagery.
So we have some scientists
that have counted trees in northern Africa
using machine learning.
They taught the computer what a tree looks like,
and then they could count trees
all across, a large portion of Africa.
We also have, people
that are working on tracking wildfire emissions.
So when a wildfire burns, there's a lot of smoke from it
that causes air quality concerns,
not just where the fire is, but also pretty far from it.
And we're able to track that from space and in model that.
But we've used machine learning to make that faster.
So if you can track where the smoke is going,
you can put out air quality alerts
and help people, particularly those that have asthma
or other respiratory conditions, understand
what the air conditions are like outside.
I think so much.
Dan, would you like to add?
Of course.
So this is very specific.
Back to machine learning and tracking
of large data sets and making sense of, of
rapidly of these large data sets.
We developed an,
an algorithm and a tool for
making sense of all of the reams of data
that were coming back from the Hubble Space Telescope,
making sense of these star patterns.
We started working with researchers
at the University of Florida, to use the same tool
to track whale sharks, because whale sharks
have a distinctive spotting pattern on their bodies
that, much like the human fingerprint,
remains the same for the entire life of that animal.
So we were able to, with photography
and much more readily than, you know, swimming up
and tagging them with GPS sensors.
We're able to give a whale shark picture,
we're able to, to rapidly, determine
and accurately determine where these whale sharks were
and tractor migratory patterns.
And, and that helps us keep an eye on this,
endangered species.
So then, similarly,
these researchers at University of Alaska found out.
And then, much like the human fingerprint
and the markings on the whale shark,
they explained to us the polar bears
have a distinctive marking on their muzzles,
a spotting pattern
that stays the same for the life of the animal.
So polar bears are easily recognizable.
Easily, right?
If you know what to look for by the markings on their snout.
So now, if you wanted to track migration
and populations of polar bears in Alaska,
rather than have to sneak up
and tag them or learn all their names,
what you would do instead is
you could snap
photographs of them
and other people could snap photographs,
and you could put all this data together.
And then using those Hubble star tracking tools
to determine which polar bear you snapped a picture of.
And then finally, there's the human fingerprint.
There's the markings on the whale shark.
There's a snout of the polar bear,
a dog's nose
is like the human fingerprint, distinct to that animal.
And every dog has its own nose print that is, that dogs
and they're distinguishable by that.
There's no nasty technology there.
But like, isn't that awesome?
The dogs each have their own little nose markings.
I love it.
That's fascinating.
Thank you so much for that answer, Dan.
So now we're going to switch to the topic of carbon.
If you were asked, is NASA actively pursuing carbon
sequestration and carbon dioxide
analogies?
So I think the primary way we work in this area is around,
sort of monitoring Earth in particular things like, land.
So forests and, and other ways that people
might, begin to move carbon from the atmosphere.
And so we're able to monitor
that, and see what's happening and track that over time.
And we not just look at where there are trees.
We also have an instrument on the International Space
Station called Jedi
that can give us information
about how tall those trees are and the canopy structure,
and that can help us really understand
how much carbon is coming out of the atmosphere.
I think the other thing I would just mention here,
I mentioned earlier that one of the other things
we do is think about our own operations and facilities.
And at Kennedy Space Center, they've done
mangrove replanting.
So we've actually planted mangroves,
and try to keep the coastal ecosystems really healthy.
And those can take a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere.
Thank you so much, Kate.
I always love hearing about what NASA is doing,
even at our center level.
So now a viewer on Twitch asks, how do you acknowledge
the reality of climate change while keeping good mental
health?
That's a great question.
And as a climate scientist, I think I get this a lot.
And I think we do have to acknowledge that,
you know, temperatures are rising
and they are causing impacts
to people and ecosystems all around the world.
And we see devastating impacts across the world,
including close to home in the United States.
And that is a reality.
And as a scientist, we are trying to in a science agency,
we're trying to better understand
what's driving that,
provide that information
publicly and help people understand
what the actions are, where they live.
I would say for me personally, someone once told me
that science is help,
so I like to think about what we're doing it,
NASA, or what scientists are doing around the world.
And we know what's driving climate change,
which means we know how to stop it.
And there are people
working on this every day, and people like Dan figuring out
how things that we might not have thought of,
this climate can help us address climate.
And that helps me every day.
I'll go back to Todd.
Also, I think his name is Todd.
I wrote a bike for 30 years riding a bike.
Yeah.
I mean, not only does it help, but like, exercise is great
for the mental health and good for the environment.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for adding that, Dan and Kate.
I mean, mental health is extremely important,
so I'm really glad we got a question on that.
So unfortunately that looks like all the time
we have today to take your questions.
But thank you so much, Dan and Kate,
for taking the time to be here with us and answer them.
I'll give you now a chance to say goodbye to our audience.
Thank you so much, Jasmin.
Thank you all. A lot of fun.
All right.
And thank you to everyone who joined us online.
We had some fantastic questions come in today
and we love getting to engage with you, our viewers,
so you can learn more about NASA technology and stay up to date
on the latest innovations by following NASA
on both Facebook and ECS.
And you can also learn more about the NASA transfer
or technology transfer and spinoff technologies
by visiting NASA's spin off website.
There are also some fun ways that you can get involved
in our sustainability efforts, and the NASA Luna Recycle
Challenge is one of them.
So this is a $3 million competition
that invites innovators just like you
to design recycling solutions to reduce waste for long term
missions on the moon, like we'll do with Artemis.
So the challenge may also inspire us to improve
how we reduce, reuse and recycle right here on planet Earth.
You can help us inspire better sustainability
on and off the planet by going to go dot NASA
gov forward slash Luna, recycle challenge.
And finally, we invite you to stay updated on
all that
is happening here on planet Earth
and how we're protecting the people on it
by going to NASA Earth on Facebook, Instagram and X.
Thank you so much again for joining us,
and we hope to see you next time on NASA Science Live.