A NASA technologist is taking miniaturisation to the extreme.
Mahmooda Sultana won funding to advance a potentially revolutionary, nanomaterial-based detector platform. The technology is capable of sensing everything from minute concentrations of gases and vapor, atmospheric pressure and temperature, and then transmitting that data via a wireless antenna — all from the same self-contained platform that measures just two-by-three-inches in size.
Under a $2 million technology development award, Sultana and her team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will spend the next two years advancing the autonomous multifunctional sensor platform. If successful the technology could benefit NASA’s major science disciplines and efforts to send humans to the Moon and Mars. These tiny platforms could be deployed on planetary rovers to detect small quantities of water and methane, for example, or be used as monitoring or biological sensors to maintain astronaut health and safety.
Central to the effort, funded by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate’s (STMD) Early Career Initiative (ECI) is a 3D printing system developed by Ahmed Busnina and his group at Northeastern University in Boston. The 3D printing system is like printers used to produce money or newspapers. However, instead of ink, the printer applies nanomaterials, layer-by-layer, onto a substrate to create tiny sensors. Ultimately, each is capable of detecting a different gas, pressure level or temperature. Read more