The existing space-environment connection is not clear to a lot of people, both inside and outside of the agency. I absolutely think NASA should keep doing the “S”/ space in its name (that’s why I work at NASA!), but I also believe that its past and current work have directly aligned the agency with helping to understand and mitigate many environmental issues of today.
Some connections between NASA/ space and the environment:
• NASA launches and manages many Earth-observing satellites, which have provided data critical to understanding climate issues.
• Following on this previous point, NASA hosts the scientific talent to address many climate related issues of the day.
• NASA technologies used for spaceflight (solar panels, water recycling, many more) can have practical uses for terrestrial sustainability/ environmental/ climate problems.
• NASA’s system engineering approach has many parallels with the Earth Systems complexity of Spaceship Earth.
• The first whole, beautiful pictures of our Earth came from Apollo astronauts.
I think a lot of other folks have a lot to add to this conversation, so will make this initial post short.
March 6th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
You bring up an interesting issue. It’s not just this that people are unclear about. But rather the benefits that NASA brings to society. Along the climate and environment front, NASA also studies other worlds, namely Venus and Mars, with two different extremes of what could happen to Earth (not that I’m saying this is likely). As well, technology derived from NASA in some commercial ventures can provide great assistance in the case of a natural disaster anywhere in the world (i.e. the Disaster Monitoring Constellation from Surrey). Lastly and along the same lines, Langley’s FireSat spacecraft design (I can’t remember if it was ever actually sent up) would monitor biomass burning and wildfires. Which you could imagine it could be very useful.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
The similarities of NASA work in the environmental engineering arena is much closer than the average citizen realizes. Almost all technology we use in advanced life support related to air, water, and carbon cycling has its roots in terrestrial applications. Numerous environmental engineers such as myself have worked at Ames, KSC, and JSC and have spent their entire careers adapting environmental technologies to such areas as closed loop plant growth, gravity insensitive water filtration, and numerous animal, human, and plant microgravity studies. Of course I always hear the bad refrain that absolutely nobody (and few in my current work as an environmental engineering grad student) even realize what NASA has been doing for decades in this arena. I have a 5 minute presentation that I typically give to explain this relationship before any academic talk.
For me the major difference between space and terrestrial applications of environmental engineering relate primarily to the size of human mass and energy flows in comparison to the whole system, but of course as our population increases on our ‘earth-ship’ these two environments will become depressingly similar. I was recently talking to a plant biologist who was heading out to study stressors on urban plants in Beijing. We were able to relate quite well based on a summer I spent characterizing plant hormone scrubbing in a closed environmental plant growth chamber. Apparently the two problems primarily revolved around the release and cycling of ethylene, a natural plant hormone found in numerous human activities both on board spacecraft and in urban environments. And this is only one small subfield of the work that NASA does.
March 7th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Has anyone heard of the JSC chapter of Engineers Without Borders? Engineers at JSC got together to form a chapter of this group to bring clean water, energy and food to rural communities. They have done a lot of work in Rwanda and also have a project in Mexico. You check out what they’re doing here:
http://www.ewb-jsc.org/
I think its a great way to give engineers a chance to use technology and lessons learned through projects developed for the space program to help real world problems… maybe people at other NASA centers or aerospace companies might want to start their own chapters?
March 7th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Great post! At Langley Research Center our Science Directorate makes observations about the Earth and its atmosphere that better inform policy decisions and create a societal benefit. We continually improve how the Earth’s changing atmosphere is measured and monitored by creating new tools and instruments. Additionally, we collect and translate data into meaningful knowledge that inspires action- by other scientists, policymakers, public and private enterprises, and the general public.
Also wanted to point out how this website makes NASA data easily accessible to the K-12 and citizen scientist communities.
http://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/
March 10th, 2008 at 12:41 am
You know, I read this post and thought, “duh, of course NASA plays a vital role in the environment.” But I work at Goddard, and earth science is much of what we do… without even trying, I can come up with many spacecraft that we’ve built and flown… Aura, Aqua, Terra, Landsats, GOES, TRMM, etc. I don’t think we communicate the benefits from these missions within the agency, let alone outside the agency!