Members of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx curation team practice with a mock glove box at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The curation team will be among the first to see and handle the sample OSIRIS-REx is returning from asteroid Bennu. They are also responsible for storing and distributing the sample to science team members around the world. Most of the sample will be stored for future generations. Credits: NASA Johnson/Bill Stafford

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is cruising back to Earth with a sample it collected from the rocky surface of asteroid Bennu. When its sample capsule parachutes down into the Utah desert on Sept. 24, OSIRIS-REx will become the United States’ first-ever mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth.

After seven years in space, including a nail-biting touchdown on Bennu to gather dust and rocks, this intrepid mission is about to face one of its biggest challenges yet: deliver the asteroid sample to Earth while protecting it from heat, vibrations, and earthly contaminants.  

“Once the sample capsule touches down, our team will be racing against the clock to recover it and get it to the safety of a temporary clean room,” said Mike Moreau, deputy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Materials for coating spaceplanes maintain comfort in outerwear, sports uniforms, jeans

NASA intended its Reusable Launch Vehicle program of the 1990s to demonstrate technologies that would enable hypersonic spaceplanes to make affordable, repeated trips into space. It was never intended to improve the performance of hunting, skiing, and sports gear, but, more than 20 years after its cancellation, that’s what’s happened.

One of the program’s most successful spinoffs has been a substance dubbed Protective Coating for Ceramic Materials, or PCCM, which NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, invented to protect the spaceplanes’ heat shields during atmospheric re-entry. NASA patented the coating, and Wessex Inc. – now known as Emisshield Inc. – licensed it and started developing commercial products.

The material isn’t a traditional insulator, and it’s not reflective. Instead, it has remarkably high emissivity, meaning it could absorb heat from a heat shield and radiate it away from the spacecraft. Emisshield has adapted PCCM into dozens of formulas now coating industrial equipment around the world (Spinoff 2001, 2004, 2011, 2019).

In 2013, Brad Poorman and Jim Hind incorporated Clean Textile Technology LLC, now of North Naples, Florida, and were looking for a niche in high-tech textiles when they learned of PCCM. They approached Emisshield, which agreed to license its technology exclusively to them for use in fabrics in exchange for a share in the brand.

The Defense Department is using geospatial, or mapping, technology in a tool that will soon be available to assist countries and organizations dealing with the deadly consequences of hurricanes, earthquakes and other disasters and humanitarian crises, experts from DoD and U.S. Southern Command said in a recent DoD News interview.

Uber, the popular ride-hailing service, regularly spars with regulators. But on Thursday, the company seems to have found common ground with lawmakers in at least one city.

To achieve its National Defense Strategy goals, defense officials have said the Defense Department must increase the pace by which critical technologies are integrated into the force. The deputy director for engineering in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering is working with stakeholders from the Joint Staff and military services to implement mission engineering methodologies to facilitate technology integration aligned with future joint force needs.

The Defense Innovation Unit focuses on leveraging technology from six areas: artificial intelligence/machine learning, autonomy, cyber, energy, human systems and space.