A Real Life-Saving NASA Spinoff
NASA FINDER Technology Aids Search Following Mexico Earthquake, NASA JPL
“Disaster relief workers on the ground in Mexico City were responding to this week’s 7.1-magnitude earthquake by using a suitcase-sized radar instrument capable of detecting human heartbeats under rubble. This technology was developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate in Washington. FINDER, which stands for Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response, was developed as a collaboration between the two agencies. Since 2015, two private companies have acquired licenses for the technology. They have since taken it to disaster zones, training relief workers to use it and manufacturing new units.”
Using Space Radar To Hear Human Heartbeats in Nepal, SpaceRef (with detailed hardware and operations information)
“On 24 April 2015 a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal – a nation woefully unprepared to respond to such an event. Nearly 300 aftershocks of magnitude 4.0 or greater have rattled the country for the past month. One especially large aftershock of magnitude 7.4 on 12 May caused the already-shattered infrastructure to collapse further. Nepal needed help – help that did not rely upon a non-functional infrastructure. Much of the help was traditional. But some of that help arrived in the form of assets in space and space-derived assets on the ground. One piece of NASA-developed hardware utilized in Nepal was able to detect human heartbeat amidst huge piles of rubble. And it saved lives. Other machines orbited overhead in space analyzing the earthquake itself and how Nepal changed as a result. Both technologies shared similar technology.”
NASA and DHS sponsored a demonstration of FINDER technology at the Virginia Task Force One Training Facility in Lorton, Virginia, on 7 May [2015]. Personnel were able to find someone hiding in an unknown location in the rubble at the facility. Several dozen media were in attendance. As best as I can tell, I was the only one covering space technology who was there. Unfortunate.
I remember when NASA Human Space Flight had several 60 foot 18 wheeler trailers that were sent all over the country.
One of the trailers advertised NASA’s spin offs from space; another had a sit-down movie theater; others had a full scale interior of the space station complete with animatronic robots. These trailers were on the road almost continuously to state fairs, museums, schools, conventions, auto races; anyplace that would draw a crowd and hundreds of people, tens of thousands over the course of a year, would wait to get in and see the NASA show.
A big, national company even offered to pay the bill to maintain and operate these trailers for NASA, if NASA would simply place the trailers near the company’s own displays so that the crowds who came to see the NASA show would simply be in the vicinity of their own advertising.
NASA decided these trailers were not worth the effort and they trashed the trailers; excessed all of them.
A couple years later, the same NASA manager thought the idea of a traveling trailer exhibit was wonderful and they built a small trailer in which about 10 people could stand and watch the latest ISS video. Biggest problem is that the people are standing in front of the video screen, so nobody really sees very much.
As far as spin-offs, I don’t think too many ever hear about them anymore. Its not the subject of the NASA videos.