If you are not an aerospace enthusiast I guess that probably you have questioned once or twice the motives and the benefits for society from space exploration. Luckily, with the widespread use mobile technology the GPS quickly comes now to mind when such questions arise.
I just stumbled upon the latest outreach campaign from NASA and I wanted to share some of its features here.
Let’s go first to aviation. See in the tweet below the different contributions that NASA has made to commercial aviation and which today enable your cheap, safe, reliable, on-time flights in holidays:
Then, there is a series of videos under the theme “International Space Station Benefits from Humanity“.
The series covers, among others, water purification technologies or tooling used in neurosurgery developed from robotic arms at the ISS. Here I wanted to share a video on how the Vessel-ID System has contributed to make navigation around the oceans safer, as ships emit an Automatic Identification System (AIS) signal very much like airplanes do with air traffic control. The signal is received by the European Space Agency (ESA) Columbus module at the ISS and then sent to a centre in Norway which continuously evaluates them.
See in the video below how this technology works and has contributed make navigation safer and safe lives:
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NOTE: Compare this scenario with the disaster of the Titanic.
The Blog by Javier 