SPACE Contribution

Phase Change Materials use a particular ingredient developed in the late 1980s by NASA for the astronauts’ gloves, so they can face temperatures that can range between 120 °C and -120 °C. Known under the English acronym PCM, they are compounds that can “change phase”, going from solid to liquid and vice versa, depending on temperature, storing large amounts of heat above their melting temperature and releasing heat when the temperature falls below that threshold. The same thermal material is used by steelworkers through a technology transfer triggered by the Swedish ESA Technology Transfer Network broker. The company Björn Borg AB (also from Sweden) came up with prototypes for modern undergarments explicitly designed to cope with the extreme conditions of a steel mill. 

In Portugal, PCM has been used, for instance, by LMA, a textile company that manufactures anti-cut suits for security forces. 

If you have a dog or a cat with a sense of adventure, it is natural that you have already had some moments of real panic for not knowing where the animal is. Findster was born to solve all your anxieties. The startup company, one more that has been incubated by ESA BIC Portugal, uses GNSS satellites and EGNOS antennas to provide you whit a real-time and high-precision position of your pet.

Designed to have a minimal impact on the environment, green buildings are one of the major opportunities in our hands to reduce the human ecological footprint. Green buildings are not as common as they should be, but if we use satellite data, we can take the term “environmentally friendly” to another level.

In fact, some companies are already doing it. In London, you can find the More London complex, a building incorporating a 16,500 square metre glass facade, that has been rated ‘outstanding’ for its environmental sustainability. By using extraordinary space technology, the glass has a new layer that diminishes the heat transfer to just a third of that of 1980s glass, while preserving light transmittance of 80% to reduce the need for electrical lighting. The high-performance glass coating process draws on a sensor initially developed for ESA to detect highly erosive atomic oxygen in low orbit. 

The behaviour of atoms and molecules changes in Space, just like the performance of the human body. Space-specific conditions provide very different circumstances to conducted experimental and research activities. Vision is one of the areas already studied aboard the ISS, including the investigation performed by an international team led by Professor Andrew Clarke of Charité Medical School in Berlin. They developed an eye-tracker to examine how the eye reflex behaviour alters in weightlessness. Making a long story short, the team developed an essential tool in corrective laser eye surgery, as the technology proved ideal for precisely directing a laser scalpel, monitoring eye motion a thousand times per second. Sold by the German Chronos Vision company, the method is also used for market research, tracking test subjects’ gaze to see what attracts them.