A laser-mild sensor that can identify micro organism in a wound could seem much-fetched, but it is now turning out to be a reality, thanks in component to NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. The technological know-how is going to Mars for the initial time on Perseverance, which will contact down on the Pink World in February, but it is now detecting trace contaminants in pharmaceutical manufacturing, wastewater cure, and other vital functions on Earth.
That’s not the only technological know-how headed to Mars which is now paying dividends on the ground. Here on Earth, these improvements are also enhancing circuit board manufacturing and even led to a specific drill bit structure for geologists.
NASA has been discovering Mars because the 1960s, pushing the frontier of innovation to get to the pink planet and find its tricks. This new technological know-how has often located other employs below on Earth as properly. A several highlights can be viewed on the infographic. Credits: NASA
Giving Geologists a Split
Honeybee Robotics has been working on robotic missions to Mars and other planetary bodies because the 1990s, including a variety of jobs funded by Little Business Innovation Study (SBIR) contracts from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. A single of the key contributions to occur from that operate has been sample selection technological know-how, including a drill bit for extracting rock cores. Fifty percent a dozen coring bits made from exploration that started out additional than twenty several years in the past are now in area for the initial time, all set for use in the rover’s turret, or “hand,” at the close of its robotic arm.
On Earth, soon after drilling a core with a hollow bit, a geologist typically employs a screwdriver or other resource to split the sample off and pull it out. This can result in a fragmented or even contaminated sample. A robotic demanded a thing distinct.
New York-dependent Honeybee arrived up with a breakoff tube nested in just a coring bit. Immediately after the core has been drilled, the breakoff tube rotates relative to the bit, shifting its central axis and snapping off the core. As opposed to other breakoff procedures, these kinds of as pinching the base of the core, the breakoff tube applies pressure along the length of the sample, minimizing the hazard of fragmentation.
Honeybee has provided grinders, scoops, and other sampling devices that flew on past Mars missions. This is the initial time the company’s coring bit technological know-how is going to Mars, simply because it is the initial time NASA has planned a long term mission to carry samples of the Martian surface area back to Earth. Perseverance will collect and package deal all those samples.
“It’s the key component of the sample return mission,” stated Keith Rosette, who managed the rover’s sampling and caching procedure for JPL. “You genuinely just cannot collect a sample on Mars if you don’t have a drill bit that can retrieve it.”
Although obtaining a sample return auto household from Mars will pose a host of problems, it will allow researchers do nearly limitless tests with a wide array of instruments, Rosette stated. “Rather than trying to carry all all those instruments to Mars, it is a lot less hard and even additional valuable to carry samples back.”
In the meantime, Honeybee has commercialized its patented breakoff bits in coring toolkits for geologists on Earth. The bits can be applied with a regular drill, earning the technological know-how quick and inexpensive, stated Kris Zacny, Honeybee vice president and director of exploration technological know-how.
Honeybee has also been in talks with businesses interested in using the bits for nuclear disaster remediation wherever it is as well unsafe to mail in human investigators, Zacny stated. “If there are concrete tanks that are leaking, for illustration, then robots can go in and take samples to look at radiation ranges.”
The technological know-how was invented by Honeybee’s late Chief Engineer Tom Myrick. “Tom would have been very proud that his invention produced a variance to planetary missions,” stated Zacny.
Home Video clips from Mars
Collecting samples for return to Earth is not the only initial that engineers have planned for Perseverance. For the initial time, NASA has constructed a procedure that could mail back high-top quality movie of a rover’s dramatic entry and landing sequence.
Honeybee Robotics designed its rotary percussive corer drill to collect rock samples on Mars. The model which is flying on the Perseverance rover has key variances, but they share a novel technological know-how for breaking off core samples, which Honeybee has now produced available to geologists on Earth. Credits: Honeybee Robotics
Although the Curiosity rover despatched back a collection of compressed illustrations or photos displaying the Martian surface area through descent, Perseverance’s entry, descent, and landing package deal incorporates six high-definition cameras and a microphone that aims to capture all the drama of the “seven minutes of terror” in between hitting the outer atmosphere and touching down. In addition to viewing the planet’s surface area, the cameras are positioned to check out the parachutes unfold and also to glimpse back at the descent stage and down at the rover as the two independent.
Home Video clips from Mars
Collecting samples for return to Earth is not the only initial that engineers have planned for Perseverance. For the initial time, NASA has constructed a procedure that could mail back high-top quality movie of a rover’s dramatic entry and landing sequence.
Although the Curiosity rover despatched back a collection of compressed illustrations or photos displaying the Martian surface area through descent, Perseverance’s entry, descent, and landing package deal incorporates six high-definition cameras and a microphone that aims to capture all the drama of the “seven minutes of terror” in between hitting the outer atmosphere and touching down. In addition to viewing the planet’s surface area, the cameras are positioned to check out the parachutes unfold and also to glimpse back at the descent stage and down at the rover as the two independent.
What appears to be like a picture of a printed circuit board is in fact a laptop or computer-generated simulation dependent on laptop or computer-aided structure data files for a board-to-be. Tempo Automation made this “fabrication simulation” capability although working on a circuit board for the procedure of cameras and a microphone designed to report the Perseverance rover’s Mars atmospheric entry, descent, and landing. Credits: Tempo Automation
The digicam parts are off-the-shelf styles, but the circuit board that manages their interface and power was designed by JPL. It was then constructed by San Francisco-dependent Tempo Automation. Launched in 2013, just soon after NASA introduced the Mars 2020 mission, Tempo applied the operate to improve its manufacturing procedures.
As its title indicates, Tempo Automation’s concentrate is swift, automated manufacturing of printed circuit boards, even in small batches. A single established of instruments the organization presents to that close is the process for earning every ingredient “traceable,” to retain keep track of of who touched it and what was completed to it at every single issue in the board manufacturing process, as properly as which ingredient good deal the piece arrived from. This info helps make it simpler to zero in on the induce of a challenge and see what other boards could have been afflicted, stated Tempo cofounder Shashank Samala.
To satisfy JPL’s stringent documentation prerequisites, Tempo added X-ray illustrations or photos, ionic cleanliness knowledge, and knowledge from an automated optical inspection for every ingredient, all of which is now component of the company’s regular technique.
A resource distinctive to Tempo is what it calls fabrication simulation – software that interprets a laptop or computer-aided structure (CAD) product into a photorealistic representation of what the remaining board will glimpse like. A team was prototyping the resource when the JPL operate started in early 2018, and that operate helped them total it, stated Samala. It debuted the pursuing 12 months.
The simulation allows consumers look at their designs for any challenges or flaws right before manufacturing begins, he stated. “A simple blunder can charge a good deal of cash and time.”
Although it was conceived to help consumers finalize their designs, the organization discovered that it was useful in-residence as properly. The manufacturing process can result in discrepancies in between the authentic CAD product and the remaining solution, Samala described. The simulation “serves as a resource of fact on the manufacturing facility ground, to converse the designer’s intent. The initial detail we glimpse at is the simulation.”
He stated delivering a solution that met NASA benchmarks has helped the organization get into a number of other area devices, including satellites and rockets.
In the meantime, Chris Basset, who designed the circuit board at JPL, looks ahead to the instant the digicam footage is beamed back from Mars soon after Perseverance’s landing Feb. 18, 2021. “This is so much outside the house of what we typically do that it is tremendous-enjoyable,” he stated. “I just cannot hold out to see all those illustrations or photos.”
Ultraviolet Lasers Scan for Chemical Clues
A further technological know-how whose roots achieve much back into NASA’s Mars Exploration Program is also flying for the initial time on Perseverance and has numerous possible apps below on Earth.
When two longtime colleagues established Photon Programs in 1997, exploration confirmed unbelievable promise for spectrometers – equipment that use mild to figure out a sample’s composition – functioning at deep-ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths. These had the possible to identify a micro organism or detect even the slightest chemical traces. But sources for mild in the 220- to 250-nanometer selection had been as well big, hefty, and sensitive to environmental interference, and had numerous other challenges.
William Hug and Ray Reid established out to develop a miniature, lightweight, rugged deep-UV laser resource for spectroscopy in the field. Their initial outside the house expense arrived in 1998 from a pair of SBIR contracts with JPL, which was interested in a spectrometer that could detect nucleic and amino acids, organic and natural components that are foundational to all acknowledged everyday living. Considering that then, the Covina, California-dependent organization has received a variety of NASA SBIRs, primarily with JPL, as properly as funding from NASA programs aimed at establishing instruments for planetary and astrobiology science.
Now the area agency will get the initial huge returns on its extensive expense in the technological know-how: Perseverance is outfitted with the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemical substances (SHERLOC) instrument, which employs a Photon Programs laser to spot beforehand invisible clues in its lookup for symptoms of previous everyday living on Mars.
Deep-UV photons interact strongly with numerous components, specifically ones made up of organic and natural molecules. This effects in bigger detection sensitivity and better precision when in comparison with infrared or even visible-mild laser sources.
Deep-UV spectroscopy has been completed in exploration labs, but Hug and Reid arrived up with a design that was much more compact, less difficult, and much less expensive to create than any present alternative. “Deep-UV lasers get started at $one hundred,000. That’s why they are not applied in marketplace,” Hug stated, noting that laboratory instruments using the technological know-how could take up three laboratory tables and take a month to established up.
A single major obstacle has been the stage of perfection the technological know-how necessitates. The identical sensitivities that empower tiny, high-strength wavelengths to detect even a virus make them susceptible to the slightest defects. A microscopic imperfection in a lens or other surface area can disrupt or scatter them, and Hug stated it has taken innovations throughout several industries to satisfy the needed benchmarks.
Photon Programs focuses on two sorts of spectroscopy wherever deep-UV laser sources provide major advantages around longstanding spectrometer technological know-how, and SHERLOC will use equally. Fluorescence spectroscopy observes the mild that most organic and natural and numerous inorganic components emit when fired up by selected ultraviolet wavelengths, just like detergent glowing underneath a black mild. Each individual emits a unique spectral “fingerprint.”
Raman spectroscopy, on the other hand, observes the mild that a molecule scatters, some of which will shift to distinct wavelengths due to interaction with molecular bond vibrations in just the sample. These shifts in wavelength can be applied to identify the components in a sample. The bigger-strength photons of UV mild elicit a substantially more powerful Raman scattering sign from organic and natural molecules than decreased-frequency mild. And simply because deep-UV mild is not existing in natural fluorescence or in sunlight, using these really small wavelengths eradicates sources of interference.
In recent several years, the organization has started out establishing the technological know-how into solutions, including handheld sensors and equipment that monitor private exposure to contaminants, as properly as lab gear. Their most significant markets now are in the pharmaceutical, food stuff processing, and wastewater cure industries, stated Hug. Deep UV can identify and evaluate selected compounds at substantially decreased concentrations than any other system, offering unprecedented precision in top quality management, regardless of whether measuring the active components in prescription drugs or guaranteeing the cleanliness of equipment and amenities.
In wastewater cure, the technological know-how can identify and evaluate contaminants, letting the operator tailor the cure process and conserve on power for ozone infusion and aeration. “For a small wastewater cure plant, the entire procedure pays for alone in a lot less than a month,” Hug stated.
An software the armed service has invested in is pinpointing micro organism and viruses. Figuring out which micro organism are existing in a wound, for illustration, would help pinpoint the suitable antibiotic to deal with it, relatively than using broad-spectrum antibiotics that hazard causing drug resistance.
And swift, inexpensive deep-UV spectroscopy holds promise for professional medical exploration, from diagnostics to pinpointing proteins, peptides, and other organic product.
“NASA has been a constant companion in our journey to day, and the laser is only component of the story,” stated Hug. “It’s also the deep-UV Raman and fluorescence instruments we constructed for NASA and the Office of Protection around the several years that are now furnishing breakthroughs for pharma, wastewater, and water top quality in normal, and now scientific tests for viruses.”
More than twenty several years of NASA funding has helped Photon Programs carry down the charge of deep-ultraviolet (UV) spectroscopy and shrink it to a handheld sizing. A single of the company’s deep-UV lasers is flying to Mars for the initial time aboard Perseverance. Credits: Photon Programs
On Mars, SHERLOC will glimpse for organic and natural components and assess the minerals bordering any possible symptoms of everyday living so researchers can realize their context, stated Luther Beegle, principal investigator for SHERLOC at JPL. This will provide additional facts about the record of Mars and also help to identify samples for return to Earth. The instrument, which also incorporates a digicam able of microscopic imaging, will be ready to map a rock’s mineral and organic and natural composition in high detail, furnishing tons of vital knowledge.
“We’re going to make a brand-spanking-new measurement on Mars,” Beegle stated. “This is a thing which is never ever even been tried right before. We think we’re genuinely going to transfer the needle on Mars science and discover some fantastic samples to carry back.”
NASA has a extensive record of transferring technological know-how to the private sector. The agency’s Spinoff publication profiles NASA systems that have transformed into professional solutions and products and services, demonstrating the broader advantages of America’s expense in its area method. Spinoff is a publication of the Technological know-how Transfer method in NASA’s House Technological know-how Mission Directorate.
Source: NASA