From Supercomputers to Symbiotes, NASA in Silicon Valley Invests in the Earth - EARTH

From buildings that generate their own energy to trees that clean polluted groundwater, there’s no shortage of environmental innovation at NASA. This Earth Day, we’re highlighting a few of the programs at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley that are helping to understand, mitigate, and prepare for Earth’s changing climate.

Strengthening Diversity in the Earth Sciences

During the Student Airborne Science Activation summer program, students from groups historically underrepresented in the geosciences will collect data about land, ocean, and atmospheric phenomena from aboard NASA’s P-3 research aircraft. The airborne observatory, based at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, is shown here in January 2022 at Wallops during NASA’s IMPACTS mission studying snowfall from winter storms. Credits: NASA/Keith Koehler

NASA’s Student Airborne Science Activation program (SaSa) is on a mission to broaden the ethnic and racial diversity of researchers in the Earth sciences. SaSa is designed for first- and second-year undergraduates enrolled at Minority-Serving Institutions to participate in an authentic NASA field research campaign. The program’s name is an acronym, but has a double meaning. In Kiswahili (the language also known as Swahili), the word “sasa” means “now.” It was adopted by the program to convey the urgency of their mission to mentor, train, and inspire students from historically underrepresented groups in the geosciences.

This summer, SaSa’s first 25 participants will spend eight weeks gaining hands-on experience in all components of a scientific research campaign. That includes flying aboard the NASA P-3 research aircraft to collect measurements of land, ocean, and atmospheric phenomena. The program also includes mentoring, professional development, and networking opportunities to prepare these students to enter STEM graduate programs – those in science, technology, engineering, and math – and, later, NASA and research careers. 

Turning Big Data into Urgent Earth Discoveries

Using the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), researchers were able to forecast how global temperature might change up to 2100 under different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, with the ability to zoom in to view forecasts for individual days at the scale of a single city or town. For this forecast, NEX took a widely used climate dataset and refined its projections down to a scale of about 15 miles. Credits: NASA Read more

The NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) leans on Big Data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and NASA’s supercomputers at Ames to help scientists make new discoveries with huge datasets coming from the agency’s Earth System Observatory. Among the many projects of NEX are initiatives to understand climate projections on a finer scale and to study how climate changes, such as increasing risk of wildfires and heat waves, might affect a single town or region. The data from NEX projects becomes available in a NASA archive and helps inform decisions by policymakers, agencies, and other stakeholders about our climate future.

NEX is also a unique work environment for sharing, exploring, and analyzing huge datasets that empowers near-real-time understanding of complex phenomena from local to global scales and prepares scientists for new data coming from the Earth System Observatory. NEX is a key platform for stepping up to Earth’s challenges – today and in the future.

NASA’s Super-Efficient Supercomputers

The Modular Supercomputing Facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley gives researchers the ability to run thousands of complex simulations more quickly and with lower water and energy needs as they continue to support agency missions. Credits: NASA/Dominic Hart

High-end computing plays a big role in NASA’s work, but number-crunching supercomputers pump out a lot of heat. Ames’s Modular Supercomputing Facility (MSF), which opened its doors in 2019, is one of the most energy-efficient data centers in the world.

Supercomputing has enabled remarkable breakthroughs in NASA’s science and engineering missions, including in Earth science, exoplanet discovery, aircraft safety, and more. With the demand for NASA supercomputing expected to grow, the MSF was designed to flexibly expand Ames’ processing power while drastically reducing the resources naturally needed for its operation. 

Ames’ approach to the MSF’s design cleverly uses the local climate to cool high-powered computers naturally. Annually, the MSF required only 14% of the energy needed for cooling, and reduced water usage by 96%, as compared with the traditional NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility (NAS). These savings are made possible by cooling technology that uses outside air and evaporative methods ideally suited to the climate in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Investing in Eco-First Innovations

John Freeman, chief science officer of Intrinsyx Environmental, stands in front of the original grove of poplars planted at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. In September 2021, nine seasons after planting, the trees were more than 50 feet tall.  Credits:  Intrinsyx Environmental

Imagine if trees could help purify contaminated water and eating a fungus could serve as a sustainable protein alternative to meat. These are two projects NASA is helping to make a reality.

The Ames campus served as a testing ground for a project using symbiotic microbes in trees to purify groundwater. Conducted in partnership with Intrinsyx, about 1,000 trees helped eliminate contamination that had existed for decades. The project has expanded to over 30 sites around the US, helping to heal environments impacted by pollutants – and showing how even the smallest forms of biology, through trees, can change lives for the better. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation (SBIR) program and is supported by researchers at Ames.

Even with new purification techniques, water is still a precious resource – often used up in the production of food. Through NASA’s Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program, Natures Fynd is collaborating with NASA and Montana State University to develop bioreactors to cultivate an edible fungus that uses little water and could serve as a source of protein in space. Bioreactors are manufactured devices designed to support a certain biological process. While Nature’s Fynd is developing this bioreactor system with NASA for use in space, where water must be preserved and used sparingly, it also provides an energy-rich source of food on Earth. As a protein source that does not release atmosphere-damaging methane produced by most livestock, it could transform the way we eat on Earth as well. 

Marking a Decade of Sustainable Building

An aerial view of Sustainability Base at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. Credits: NASA/Eric James

When it was built 10 years ago at Ames, Sustainability Base was one of the greenest buildings in the federal government. It can house over 200 employees, and is an exemplar of sustainable design that brings many of the principles used for closed-loop systems on spacecraft down to Earth. Sustainability Base was designed to go beyond simply ‘not hurting’ the environment, but to be beneficial to nature and humans. It generates more energy than it needs to operate and uses 90% less potable water than conventional buildings of comparable size. Materials to build and furnish the building were locally procured and often recycled. For example, the oak planks that line the lobby floor were reclaimed from an old NASA wind tunnel.

The building’s concept was designed for a NASA competition in 2007 by architect William McDonough, a pioneer in sustainable architecture, alongside Dr. Steve Zornetzer, the Associate Center Director for Ames at the time. By implementing closed-loop technology, similar to what’s used by NASA to sustain life in space, the project is proof not only that this level of sustainable building is possible, but it can contribute to the health of our planet.

Source: From Supercomputers to Symbiotes, NASA Ames Invests in the Earth | NASA