Published in New Scientist, 18 Jan 2010
A space probe plunges its way through Titan’s atmosphere and lands safely on the surface. Over a billion kilometres away here on Earth, a machine fills a bag of potato crisps. Georg Koppenwallner didn’t think that Saturn’s largest moon had much in common with his favourite bar snack – at least not until he got a call from the European Space Agency (ESA).
Koppenwallner’s company Hyperschall Technologie Göttingen in Germany runs experiments in wind tunnels and calculates the aerodynamics of spacecraft, including ESA’s. This time ESA had an unusual request: could the firm’s scientists and engineers take time out from their daily grind to help find a way of packing crisps faster? Koppenwallner’s team duly obliged. Sure enough, they found a way to fill 50 per cent more bags using clever aerodynamic tricks with air pulses to speed up crisps on the production line.
It might sound strange that ESA is helping out such a decidedly non-space industry. Yet it makes good economic sense. With tens of billions of dollars spent on research every year, ESA, NASA and the Japanese space agency JAXA have access to some of the best technology and facilities in the world. That’s where Frank Salzgeber, head of ESA’s technology transfer office in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, comes in. “We make the best out of every buck the taxpayers pay,” he says. […]
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