Innovation Now

NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex is the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid. And soon those samples will have a new home.

At NASA, researchers use computer programs to conduct large complex simulations to predict how air moves. Now a team is pitching baseballs to validate their results.

For decades NASA researchers have studied lightning, looking for patterns in the dancing bolts that light the sky.

Innovative new tires will let Artemis astronauts set new records for distances driven on the Moon.

Tire sensors transmit information via low-frequency radio waves to the vehicle’s onboard computer, alerting drivers to a problem.

With the extra sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope, we can now see more detail of this planet that takes eighty-four years to orbit the Sun.

Working with NASA, racing engineers adapted a space technology to create a filter that provides drivers with fresh clean air.

NIAC seeks innovators from diverse and non-traditional sources, people with far-reaching ideas for the future.

This mobile scanner uses a laser light detection and ranging system to provide millions of measurement points per second that can help map uncharted areas.

LIDAR could be used to create maps of vegetation and surface roughness to help firefighters find the easiest path to safety when fighting wildfires.

Helicopter ambulance, law enforcement, and search and rescue operators utilize night vision goggles to reduce flying risks.

A constellation of CubeSats could be used to map small orbital debris by detecting plasma solitons to mitigate on-orbit collisions.

Volcanic activity, lasting thousands of centuries and erupting massive amounts of material may have helped transform Venus.

On July 14, 1914, Robert Goddard, a Massachusetts physics professor, registered his first two patents describing a multi-stage rocket and a rocket fueled by liquid propellants.

A special instrument aboard the spacecraft Juno was included specifically for citizen scientists.

Webb is the world’s first space deployable telescope. But in order for the telescope to do its remarkable work, it had to be sent to a specific location in space.

NASA’s Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter are busy exploring Mars, one-tenth-scale buildable models are touching down in homes around the globe.

Astronauts, mission controllers, and scientists rely on a communications network to transmit messages and commands.

Members of the public are invited to add their names to an original poem dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission before the spacecraft begins its journey to Jupiter’s moon.

Power systems that utilize spinning rotors take advantage of dense atmospheres, utilizing drag forces to generate electrical power.