NASA Spinoffs in Your Life

Predict

Look at the camera on a phone. Inside sits a tiny chip that turns light into a picture. Did a NASA engineer invent the kind of camera chip that’s in phones?

Circle one. Yes / No

Why?

Watch

1. #NASADidThatyoutube.com/shorts/lYgULUuiJBU

Word of the day

Satellite (SAT-l-ite). An object in space that travels around a bigger object, like a planet. The Moon is Earth’s natural satellite. People launch satellites too, like the weather satellites that watch storms.

• The Latin word means bodyguard. A bodyguard sticks close to a person, and a moon sticks close to its planet.
• In 1957, Sputnik 1 became the first satellite people ever launched into space. In Russian, spútnik means “traveling companion.”

Bonus word. Aeronautics (air-uh-NAW-tiks). The science of flight. Aeronautics is the A in NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The word joins Greek āḗr, “air,” and naûs, “ship.”

Questions

1. Raven’s rap opens with “Satellites up, hurricanes spin.” NASA builds and launches the GOES weather satellites, and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, runs the satellites. GOES satellites take pictures and measurements of storms from high above Earth. How do weather satellites help keep people safe from hurricanes?

   Hint. What can forecasters see from space that people on the ground can’t?

2. In 1966, NASA paid an engineer named Charles Yost to make airplane seats safer in a crash. He came up with a soft foam that takes the shape of your body and then slowly springs back. Today the same kind of foam, called memory foam, is in mattresses. Why would foam made for airplane seats also make a good mattress?

   Hint. What does the foam do when your body sinks in?

3. The rap says, “Drop a pin, where’s your house?” A map app drops that pin with GPS, a system of satellites that helps a phone find its location. The US Air Force built GPS. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote software that fixes small GPS errors. A company uses NASA’s fixes to help 911 operators find people who call for help. What part did NASA play in the pin on your map?

   Hint. Who built GPS, and what did NASA’s software do?

4. In the 1990s, Eric Fossum, an engineer at a NASA lab, invented a new kind of camera chip for cameras in space. His chip used much less power than older camera chips. And it squeezed most of a camera’s parts onto one small chip. Why was Fossum’s camera chip a good fit for phones?

   Hint. What powers a phone? How much room does a phone have inside?

5. Back to the rap’s first line, “Satellites up, hurricanes spin.” For each storm in the Atlantic Ocean, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center (NHC) predict where the storm’s center will be two days later. The forecast error is the distance between that spot and where the center ended up. In the 1970s, the average two-day error was 252.5 nautical miles. The average was 226.4 in the 1980s, 157.2 in the 1990s, 103.7 in the 2000s and 67.7 in the 2010s. From 2020 to 2025, the average was 55.2 nautical miles. A nautical mile is a little longer than a regular mile. What pattern do you see in the hurricane forecast errors? How does that pattern help people in a storm’s path?

   Hint. Compare the error in the 1970s with the error from 2020 to 2025. Then think about who gets warned when a forecast comes close to the storm’s path.

Exit ticket