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Q&A
This
month’s question addresses the steps needed
to make nanotechnology ready for the commercial
marketplace. Nanotech Briefs posed the
following question to Leonard Yowell, lead of
the Nanomaterials Project at NASA’s Johnson
Space Center in Houston, TX.
What
needs to be accomplished to make nanotech innovations
ready for industry to develop and market?
 Leonard
Yowell: I want to make the point that
it is very important that we spend time and resources
and invest in understanding nanoscale phenomena
fundamentally before we have the realistic expectations
of getting revolutionary new materials that are
going to transform industries and NASA.
To truly be a disruptive technology,
I think it is very important that we continue
to focus and invest in the fundamentals. From
our standpoint, we would consider the synthesis
(understanding of how nanostructures are formed),
production, processing, manipulation, and characterization
of nanomaterials (being able to see and understand
a material across a variety of length scales)
to be critical to applications development.
It is important that we don’t
jump straight to the applications and leave behind
the fundamentals. While there are some exciting
and significant near-term benefits of nanotechnology,
there is still a lot a lot of fundamental work
to be done.
Find
out more about the NASA Johnson Nanomaterials
Project at: http://mmptdpublic.jsc.nasa.gov/jscnano/
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