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Hi I'm Leigh and this is NASA Now.
Engineering at an incredibly small scale.
We'll zoom in on the futuristic world of nanotechnology.
And, just how small is a nanostructure?
Try this on for size,
10 nanometers is 1,000 times smaller
than the diameter of a human hair.
Now that's microscopic!
That's ahead.
First here's what's happening at NASA now.
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NASA has released the first images of Mercury captured
by the MESSENGER spacecraft.
This is the first time a spacecraft has recorded images
of Mercury in orbit around the planet.
Messenger's goal is to snap 75,000 images
over the next year.
This amazing spacecraft successfully achieved orbit
around Mercury on March 17th.
MESSENGER'S path included one Earth flyby,
two flybys of Venus, and three flybys
of Mercury before it went into orbit.
At its closest point, MESSENGER will only be 200 kilometers,
or 124 miles, above Mercury's surface.
Now, let's take a look at the past.
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The world's first nanoscale book was published back
in April 2007.
Using Nanotechnology, scientists from Simon Fraser University
in Canada carved letters into 30 micro tablets using a
gallium-ion beam.
The book, entitled "Teeny Ted
from Turnip Town" has a resolution of 40 nanometers.
Only catch, you need a scanning electron microscope to read it.
Manipulating matter on a molecular scale,
it's called nanotechnology.
And here to tell us how NASA is creating and using nano-devices
for space exploration is research scientist Dr. Michael
Oye from NASA Ames Center for Nanotechnology.
My name is Dr. Michael Oye and I work on nanotechnology over here
at the Center for Nanotechnology
at the NASA Ames Research Center.
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Nanotechnology is where you're trying to make something
that is useful out of these very small feature sizes.
And these feature sizes are about 100 nanometers small
and just to put this
in perspective 10 nanometers is 1,000 times smaller
than the width of a human hair.
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Nanostructures and nano-devices are feature sizes
that have lengths that are less than 100 nanometers.
And some of the biggest areas
that you may be aware of are in computers.
The reason why we have been able to make those much faster is
because they've been shrinking in size.
Same thing with the memory -
the reason why the hard drives are able
to increase its storage capacity is
because the feature sizes are getting much smaller.
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I'm currently working on these nanowires.
And you can imagine that this nanowire is so small
that you can't see it with your eyes.
You have to look at it underneath a microscope.
Now the thing is when you get
down to those small feature sizes there's a lot
of great things that happen to the mechanical properties,
but also the electrical properties,
that you can take advantage of to try
and make these power generators
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You can imagine that these nanowires they're something
like this.
But again really so small that you can't see with your eyes.
But you can imagine that this can be potentially woven
into clothing.
Because as long as you bend this than you can generate power.
You can also put them into flags for example.
So you might be able to put it into some sort of a material
that can flap in the wind and by doing
so you can generate power just from that mechanical motion.
So a lot of those different applications can be used
from these nanowires.
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You can imagine that a there's a lot
of space exploration that's dependent on solar panels.
So if you start moving farther away from the sun
than you would have to do something other
than use solar panels.
So, one thing that might be useful to generate some power is
to use these piezoelectric nanowires
for just mechanical energy harvesting
that would otherwise have led to wasted energy.
So if you could somehow recollect
that energy then you can effectively make more energy
efficient spacecraft potentially and that could be useful
for long scale exploration applications.
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I think nanotechnology is an enabling technology just
like the way railroads and cars were about 100 years ago.
Just the way the textile and the industrial revolution was
about 150 - 200 years ago.
I think the nanotechnology in itself is going to open up a lot
of new doors and avenues in the next 50 years that's going
to allow a lot of new
and different devices functional products
to come on the market place.
So it's very exciting to be a part of that.
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Did you know the prefix "nano" literally means one billionth?
That means that a nanometer is one billionth of a meter.
Now you know.
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Hey teachers!
Here's something you and your students can really focus on.
Check out the Module feature: Virtual Lab.
In this NASA Explorer Schools' content module,
students can operate a virtual scanning electron microscope
to examine 90 different samples of real specimens.
Well that's it for NASA Now, be sure to tune in next week
when we examine the subject of human research
on the International Space Station.
We'll see you THEN on NASA Now.
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NASA Now comes to you from the Virtual Campus
at NASA Explorer Schools.