June 2024 - NASA in Your Home: How Space-Based Technology Improves Our Daily Lives
The Eyegaze System enables this boy to communicate using only the movement of his eyes. A video camera focuses on the pupil of the user's eye, tracking its movement. To "press" a key on the screen, the user looks at the key for a specified time, prompting the computer to take the appropriate action.
NASA in Your Home: How Space-Based Technology Improves Our Daily Lives
June 20
Time: 5 p.m. PDT (8 p.m. EDT; 0100 UTC)
Did you know that the microchip in your cell phone’s camera was first developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for use on spacecraft?
The cell phone camera is one of many “spinoffs,” or commercialized products that incorporate NASA technology or expertise that benefit the general public. Spinoffs have been part of our lives for decades: improved GPS, assistive eyesight technology, advanced dental imaging, and even sophisticated videogame landscapes were all originally developed at JPL to study Earth and the universe.
Join us for a live talk as we explore how space-based technology becomes a spinoff, including a deep dive on the NASA-designed and -built instrument at the heart of the Carbon Mapper Coalition’s first two satellites. Called Tanager-1 and Tanager-2, the satellites will pinpoint and measure methane and carbon dioxide sources in communities around the world from low-Earth orbit.
Speaker(s):
Daniel Broderick, Manager of the Office of Technology Transfer at JPL
Andrew Thorpe, Research Technologist, NASA/JPL
Host:
Gregory Smith, Communications and Education Directorate, NASA JPL
Co-host:
Rachel Zimmerman Brachman, Public Outreach Specialist, NASA JPL