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Anonymous ID: a5a1f8 Feb. 15, 2023, 5:05 p.m. No.18355035   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Former Football Player Revamps NASA Air Filter Invention

Feb 15, 2023

 

From grimy dirt and dangerous bacteria to tiny spores and pollen grains, air filters remove harmful particles from the air we breathe. But changing filters once they’re soiled can prove time-consuming, costly, and complicated — especially in space.

 

On spacecraft, air filter systems must be cleaned constantly. To get the job done easier, NASA invented a technology called the Multi-Stage Filtration System, designed to limit the number of replacement filters NASA needs to bring to space and reduce the time astronauts spend maintaining them.

 

Now, a former NFL Raiders player is using this long-lasting, automated technology to improve air filtration here on Earth. Aaron Wallace has licensed NASA’s filtration system and launched a new startup named Onedrus, aimed at serving large institutions with hard-to-access filters in multiple buildings, like schools and universities.

 

Onedrus’ air filter, essentially a sheet-metal frame with coarse, fabric filter material pleated inside, can intercept ultrafine particles only a few microns big. The filter — adapted from technology invented by Juan Agui and Rajagopal Vijayakumar at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland — can be retrofitted to commercial buildings’ ductwork and HVAC systems.

 

Users can check how dirty the filter is remotely via a computer. With one click, the soiled filter will roll up, and fresh, clean filter material will scroll in to take its place.

 

“You can change your filters with the press of a button,” Wallace said.

 

After retiring from football, Wallace attended an NFL Players Association Technology Transfer bootcamp program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. He then participated in NASA’s FedTech Startup Studio in 2020, a virtual program hosted by NASA Glenn to help entrepreneurs explore startup formation.

 

“Finding entrepreneurship was a turning point for me, finding something that made me motivated, something that gave me that drive again,” Wallace said. “Towards the end of my football career, that was something I had lost.”

 

From there, he was paired with the air filter invention, secured a startup license for NASA’s patents, and began developing his product.

 

Wallace isn’t the only one working to commercialize NASA technology. Plenty of other inventions intended for space applications have already made people’s lives better here on Earth, with others continuously being developed. Memory foam, superelastic tires, baby formula, and cell phone cameras are just a few examples.

 

“Some of these technologies are so forward-thinking, so innovative and so useful that they can be spun into other products that can go on and be exploited for other purposes,” said Jeanne King, technology manager for NASA Glenn’s Technology Transfer Program. “We just need people to open their minds and say, ‘What are the possibilities?’”

 

NASA Glenn’s Technology Transfer Program has about 200 technologies in its catalog that are available for licensing. The program had its best year yet in 2022, with 32 new licenses executed for 55 different patents and patents pending.

 

Creating a startup can present many hurdles and risks, but Wallace keeps pushing through because he’s drawn to the challenge.

 

“I think it comes from sports and football and trying to make it to the NFL for so long, chasing this dream that people told me was impossible,” Wallace said.

 

And NASA Glenn’s Technology Transfer Program has provided support during every step of Wallace’s journey, helping connect him to regional resources like partnerships and business pitch competitions. Onedrus has won several of them.

 

Onedrus’ prototype has undergone rigorous testing, with Wallace’s team working to make it thinner, lighter, and more durable so it can last for a decade without replacement. And Wallace isn’t ready to stop at this invention.

 

“Hopefully one day when I’ve accomplished my goals with the air filter, I can go back into the NASA patent catalog and do it again,” he said.

 

Wallace says he’s an example that anyone who wants to be entrepreneur can do well with the right resources and support, and that working with NASA Glenn has been extremely rewarding.

 

“I’d like to contribute to the portfolio, be able to say I took a NASA technology and made it successful,” Wallace said. “I think it’s really cool, how much NASA technology is helping everyday people.”

 

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/glenn/2023/former-football-player-revamps-nasa-air-filter-invention

Anonymous ID: a5a1f8 Feb. 15, 2023, 5:07 p.m. No.18355048   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>5117 >>5126

NASA’s Webb Uncovers New Details in Pandora’s Cluster

Feb 15, 2023

 

Astronomers have revealed the latest deep field image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, featuring never-before-seen details in a region of space known as Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744). Webb’s view displays three clusters of galaxies – already massive – coming together to form a megacluster. The combined mass of the galaxy clusters creates a powerful gravitational lens, a natural magnification effect of gravity, allowing much more distant galaxies in the early universe to be observed by using the cluster like a magnifying glass.

 

Only Pandora’s central core has previously been studied in detail by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. By combining Webb’s powerful infrared instruments with a broad mosaic view of the region’s multiple areas of lensing, astronomers aimed to achieve a balance of breadth and depth that will open up a new frontier in the study of cosmology and galaxy evolution.

 

“The ancient myth of Pandora is about human curiosity and discoveries that delineate the past from the future, which I think is a fitting connection to the new realms of the universe Webb is opening up, including this deep-field image of Pandora’s Cluster,” said astronomer Rachel Bezanson of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, co-principal investigator on the “Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization” (UNCOVER) program to study the region.

 

“When the images of Pandora’s Cluster first came in from Webb, we were honestly a little star struck,” said Bezanson. “There was so much detail in the foreground cluster and so many distant lensed galaxies, I found myself getting lost in the image. Webb exceeded our expectations.” The new view of Pandora’s Cluster stitches four Webb snapshots together into one panoramic image, displaying roughly 50,000 sources of near-infrared light.

 

In addition to magnification, gravitational lensing distorts the appearance of distant galaxies, so they look very different than those in the foreground. The galaxy cluster “lens” is so massive that it warps the fabric of space itself, enough for light from distant galaxies that passes through that warped space to also take on a warped appearance.

 

Astronomer Ivo Labbe of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, co-principal investigator on the UNCOVER program, said that in the lensing core to the lower right in the Webb image, which has never been imaged by Hubble, Webb revealed hundreds of distant lensed galaxies that appear like faint arced lines in the image. Zooming in on the region reveals more and more of them.

 

“Pandora’s Cluster, as imaged by Webb, shows us a stronger, wider, deeper, better lens than we have ever seen before,” Labbe said. “My first reaction to the image was that it was so beautiful, it looked like a galaxy formation simulation. We had to remind ourselves that this was real data, and we are working in a new era of astronomy now.”

 

The UNCOVER team used Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to capture the cluster with exposures lasting 4-6 hours, for a total of about 30 hours of observing time. The next step is to meticulously go through the imaging data and select galaxies for follow-up observation with the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), which will provide precise distance measurements, along with other detailed information about the lensed galaxies’ compositions, providing new insights into the early era of galaxy assembly and evolution. The UNCOVER team expects to make these NIRSpec observations in the summer of 2023.

 

In the meantime, all of the NIRCam photometric data has been publicly released so that other astronomers can become familiar with it and plan their own scientific studies with Webb’s rich datasets. “We are committed to helping the astronomy community make the best use of the fantastic resource we have in Webb,” said UNCOVER co-investigator Gabriel Brammer of the Niels Bohr Institute’s Cosmic Dawn Center at the University of Copenhagen. “This is just the beginning of all the amazing Webb science to come.”

 

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/nasa-s-webb-uncovers-new-details-in-pandora-s-cluster