Success Stories

  • 4DSP Licenses NASA’s High-Speed Fiber Optic Sensing System

    NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center has licensed its lightweight, compact, ultra-efficient fiber optic sensor system to the Austin, TX-based company, 4DSP. By leveraging NASA’s fiber optics and high-speed algorithms, which are capable of interrogating thousands of sensors at the unprecedented refresh rate of 100 samples per second, 4DSP will bring to market a state-of-the-art turnkey fiber optic system.

  • Starr Soft Support for State-of-the-Art Aircraft Ground Vibration Testing

    A safe, advanced, adaptable isolation system that eliminates the need for critical lifts

    The Starr Soft Support 1-Hertz isolation system incorporates an automatically reconfigurable aircraft jack into NASA’s existing isolators.

  • NASA’s Research to Improve Vehicle Fuel Economy Receives Space Foundation Award

    Aerodynamic design modifications improve fuel efficiency of trucks, buses, and other large vehicles by more than 20 percent

    A Dryden Flight Research Center team of aerodynamicists received the Space Technology Hall of Fame award for groundbreaking research on the aerodynamic refinement of long-haul truck design.

  • NASA’s Ikhana Aircraft Helps Fight More than 1,000 California Fires

    Ikhana team receives prestigious Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer award

    The Federal Laboratory Consortium awarded an Interagency Partnership Award to the Wildfire Research and Applications Partnership (WRAP), a joint effort between NASA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service. WRAP has enabled scientists and engineers to participate in managing forest fires through remote sensing observations on unmanned aerial vehicle missions.

NASA Spinoff Successes from Dryden

    Aerodynamics Research Revolutionizes Truck Design → 

    Thanks to the ingenuity of a Dryden Flight Research Center researcher bicycling through the California desert and a team of engineers in Virginia, the shape of rigs and recreational vehicles today owes as much to the skies as it does the open road.
    Read about this transportation spinoff. → 

    Hybrid Modeling Improves Health and Performance Monitoring → 

    Scientific Monitoring Inc. worked with Dryden under an SBIR contract to create a new, simplified health-monitoring approach for some of the Agency’s flight vehicles and flight equipment. The company has now released a commercial health- and performance-monitoring software product called I-Trend for its intelligent trending, diagnostic, and prognostic capabilities.
    Read about this physical modeling spinoff. → 

    Advanced Air Data Systems for Commercial Aircraft  → 

    Dryden has been working with Ophir Corporation since 1985 on many projects, one of which was a new approach to Optical Air Data Systems (OADS). Through its efforts to develop a lidar OADS for modern aircraft, Ophir has developed a technology it calls senseAir, which overcomes the traditional difficulties of determining the characteristics of the air outside of the boundary layer of an aircraft.
    Read about this lidar spinoff → 

    Harnessing the Power of the Sun → 

    The Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology (ERAST) Alliance was created in 1994 to foster development of remotely piloted aircraft for scientific, humanitarian, and commercial purposes. SunPower Corporation worked with Dryden to create high-efficiency silicon cells for the NASA/AeroVironment Helios and Pathfinder solar-powered aircraft as an alternative source of power that did not add weight.
    Read about this solar power spinoff →