Langley
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NASA's heat shield tech could save firefighters' lives
NASA has teamed up with the Department of Agriculture's Forest Service to see if the agency's heat shield technology could be adapted to protect people during forest fires. Currently, firefighters carry a 4.3-pound "personal fire shelter" -- a large tinfoil snuggie that's designed to keep them safe from extreme heat. NASA, however, thinks that the technology it developed to prevent spacecraft from burning up in the atmosphere could do a vastly superior job.
NASA's 10-engine electric UAV now flies as well as it hovers
NASA's ten-engine UAV, dubbed the Greased Lightning (GL-10), recently showed off a slick new trick in the skies over Hampton, Virginia. The drone, which is under development by a team at the Langley Research Center, had already passed its initial hovering tests last August; but that was the easy part. As the long and miserable development of the V-22 Osprey has shown, the real challenge is switching over from hover mode to conventional forward flight without the vehicle falling out of the sky. But on Thursday, NASA's battery-powered tilt-rotor aircraft successfully did just that.
NASA's shuttle PCs sold with sensitive data intact, insert WikiLeaks joke here
Let this be a warning for John and Jane Q. Public (always a cute couple, those two) to always wipe sensitive / secret data from your hard drives before selling a computer. Or better yet, take out the drive entirely and physically destroy it. That's what we'd expect from our government entities, but an internal investigation found that a number of PCs and components from NASA's shuttles had been sold from four different centers -- Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers, and Ames and Langley Research Centers -- that "failed sanitization verification testing," or weren't even tested at all. In Langley's case, while hard drives were being destroyed, "personnel did not properly account for or track the removed hard drives during the destruction process." Meanwhile at Kennedy, computers were found being prepped for sale that still had "Internet Protocol information [that] was prominently displayed." Helluva way to start a shuttle launch retirement, eh?
