This article was taken from the June 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Last year, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Planck probe gave us the most detailed image of the infant universe, and the Rosetta's little Philae landed on Comet 67P. In February, we saw the most detailed images ever of Ceres, from the Dawn probe, and in a couple of months New Horizons will give us the first detailed views of Pluto.
It would be reasonable to ask if this is all worth it. Astronomers are often asked to defend public funding of their work, on the grounds that such endeavours should ultimately be economically beneficial to the public, and that astronomy clearly isn't. The former may be a matter of opinion, but the second is demonstrably false. Indeed, you probably own several pieces of space-based technology.
For a start, you most likely use Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is based on work by Australian astronomer John O'Sullivan. Your home Wi-Fi router uses technology developed by O'Sullivan and fellow astronomers at CSIRO, to transfer data at higher speeds across great distances. More than a billion people use it today.
It's well known that GPS determines its position by receiving the signals given off by satellites orbiting the Earth. But perhaps even more amazing is that every GPS satellite houses an atomic clock, and the system must incorporate Einstein's equations for general relativity in order to know positions precisely. It might be the most space-age thing you own.
Memory foam was created by Nasa contractors in 1966 as a way to comfortably secure people going in to space. Similarly, iodine water filters derive from Nasa's work in the 70s to create safe drinking water on space missions. Scratch-resistant glass coatings? They were created for spacesuit visors. (Contrary to popular belief, Teflon -- the non-stick coating on pans -- was not invented by Nasa. In fact, it already existed; Nasa simply used it.) At the airport you may walk through technology created by Italian astrophysicist Riccardo Giacconi and his group in the 60s and 70s. What they built for X-ray telescopes was used in luggage scanners; Giaconni won the Nobel Prize in 2002. Airports will sometimes check your bag or coat for traces of certain chemicals by placing swabs in a gas chromatograph with the same design as the one sent to Mars on Nasa's Viking landers to search for the chemical signature of life.
A great deal of medical technology has its roots in space exploration. Both fields often try to see things in tricky or unusual environments. Software for detecting features in satellite imagery is being applied to find signs of Alzheimer's in brain scans. The detection of breast-cancer tumours was vastly improved by techniques in radio astronomy, and equipment that began as a delicate way to monitor the temperature of fragile telescope instruments is now being used in neonatal care.
Former Nasa engineer David Bergeron took the solar pumps he designed for Moon bases in the 90s and uses them to create fridges for hospitals to store vaccines. They can run for more than ten years without mains electricity or maintenance: perfect for space travel, even better for rural hospitals in the developing world. Another Nasa spinoff in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is building the handheld rHEALTH sensor that takes rapid medical readings. Designed for a potential human mission to Mars, it is on sale in 2015 for use in research hospitals.
We should continue to explore the Universe for its own sake, but once in a while it's good to take stock and remember that, in many ways, we already live in the space age.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
