NASA-Derived Textiles are Touring France by Bike

During the Tour de France, athletes have to maintain a constant speed while bike riding for dozens of miles through cold rains and summer heat. These cyclists need gear that adapts to the different environments they encounter. One company is using a material with NASA origins to ensure these athletes stay comfortable while taking their grand tours.

Phase-change materials use basic properties of matter to maintain a steady temperature. When a substance melts from a solid to a liquid, the material absorbs heat, and when it becomes solid again, it releases that heat. In the 1980s, Triangle Research Corporation received a NASA Small Business Innovation Research award to explore how phase-change materials could be incorporated into textiles to control temperatures in spacesuit gloves. By placing phase-change materials in small capsules woven throughout a textile, these temperature-regulating properties can be tuned to the comfort of the human body. While these textiles weren’t incorporated into any gloves flown on NASA missions, they formed the basis for a new product, sold under the name Outlast.

Outlast has since become one of the most widely distributed temperature-regulating fabrics, found in products such as bedding, loungewear, and office chairs. It has seen especially extensive use in activewear, ranging from jogging clothes to professional sports gear. 

Founded in 2001 and based in Fréjus, France, the company Ekoï makes clothing and accessories for cyclists, particularly those who bike competitively. The company first encountered Outlast at the Performance Days fabric trade fair in Munich, Germany, and was impressed with its capabilities as well as its NASA heritage.

“When you say NASA, it’s always impressive.” said Celine Milan, director of textiles at Ekoï. “At the beginning we were even saying in here in our offices, ‘Wow, this technology was developed by NASA.’ It’s on another level.”

Ekoi’s Outlast line officially launched in July 2022, during that year’s Tour de France. Over the course of that race, the company found it improved cyclists’ performance in the event’s mountain stages, where elevation changes mean wide swings in temperature. It also improved athletes’ aerodynamics, as their jerseys could stay closed in warmer environments, rather than opening them to let in wind.

Today, Ekoï sells several products that incorporate Outlast materials, including jerseys, gloves, and socks. These products are internationally known for their NASA heritage. Whether engineering for astronaut’s comfort in space or competitive athletes, NASA aims for excellence. 

Learn more about NASA’s Spinoff Technologies: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/

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NASA, Oxford Discover Warmer Uranus Than Once Thought

KEY POINTS

• Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune each emit more energy than they receive from the Sun, meaning they have comparatively warm interiors.
• NASA’s Uranus flyby with Voyager 2 in 1986 found the planet colder than expected, which challenged ideas of how planets formed and evolved.
• However, with advanced computer modeling and a new look at old data, scientists think the planet may actually be warmer than previously expected.

For millennia, astronomers thought Uranus was no more than a distant star. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that Uranus was universally accepted as a planet. To this day, the ringed, blue world subverts scientists’ expectations, but new NASA research helps puzzle out some of the world’s mystique. 

Uranus is unlike any other planet in our solar system. It spins on its side, which means each pole directly faces the Sun for a continuous 42-year “summer.” Uranus also rotates in the opposite direction of all planets except Venus. Data from NASA’s Voyager 2 Uranus flyby in 1986 also suggested the planet is unusually cold inside, challenging scientists to reconsider fundamental theories of how planets formed and evolved throughout our solar system.

“Since Voyager 2’s flyby, everybody has said Uranus has no internal heat,” said Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “But it’s been really hard to explain why that is, especially when compared with the other giant planets.”

These Uranus projections came from only one up-close measurement of the planet’s emitted heat made by Voyager 2: “Everything hinges on that one data point,” said Simon. “That is part of the problem.” 

Now, using an advanced computer modeling technique and revisiting decades of data, Simon and a team of scientists have found that Uranus does in fact generate some heat, as they reported on May 16 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal. 

A planet’s internal heat can be calculated by comparing the amount of energy it receives from the Sun to the amount it of energy it releases into space in the form of reflected light and emitted heat. The solar system’s other giant planets — Saturn, Jupiter, and Neptune — emit more heat than they receive, which means the extra heat is coming from inside, much of it left over from the high-energy processes that formed the planets 4.5 billion years ago. The amount of heat a planet exudes could be an indication of its age: the less heat released relative to the heat absorbed from the Sun, the older the planet is.

Uranus stood out from the other planets because it appeared to give off as much heat as it received, implying it had none of its own. This puzzled scientists. Some hypothesized that perhaps the planet is much older than all the others and has cooled off completely. Others proposed that a giant collision — the same one that may have knocked the planet on its side — blasted out all of Uranus’ heat. But none of these hypotheses satisfied scientists, motivating them to solve Uranus’ cold case.

“We thought, ‘Could it really be that there is no internal heat at Uranus?’” said Patrick Irwin, the paper’s lead author and professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford in England. “We did many calculations to see how much sunshine is reflected by Uranus and we realized that it is actually more reflective than people had estimated.”

The researchers set out to determine Uranus’ full energy budget: how much energy it receives from the Sun compared to how much it reflects as sunlight and how much it emits as heat. To do this, they needed to estimate the total amount of light reflected from the planet at all angles. “You need to see the light that’s scattered off to the sides, not just coming straight back at you,” Simon said.

To get the most accurate estimate of Uranus’ energy budget yet, Oxford researchers developed a computer model that brought together everything known about Uranus’ atmosphere from decades of observations from ground- and space-based telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii. The model included information about the planet’s hazes, clouds, and seasonal changes, all of which affect how sunlight is reflected and how heat escapes.

The researchers found that Uranus releases about 15% more energy than it receives from the Sun, a figure that is similar to another recent estimate from a separate study funded in part by NASA that was published July 14 in Geophysical Research Letters. These studies suggest Uranus it has its own heat, though still far less than its neighbor Neptune, which emits more than twice the energy it receives.

“Now we have to understand what that remnant amount of heat at Uranus means, as well as get better measurements of it,” Simon said.

Unraveling Uranus’ past is useful not only for mapping the timeline of when solar system planets formed and migrated to their current orbits, but it also helps scientists better understand many of the planets discovered outside the solar system, called exoplanets, a majority of which are the same size as Uranus.

By Emma Friedman
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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NASA’s X-59 Quiet Supersonic Aircraft Begins Taxi Tests

NASA/Jacob Shaw

NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft has officially begun taxi tests, marking the first time this one-of-a-kind experimental aircraft has moved under its own power.

NASA test pilot Nils Larson and the X-59 team, made up of NASA and contractor Lockheed Martin personnel, completed the aircraft’s first low-speed taxi test at U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, on July 10, 2025.

The taxiing represents the X-59’s last series of ground tests before first flight. Over the coming weeks, the aircraft will gradually increase its speed, leading up to a high-speed taxi test that will take the aircraft just short of the point where it would take off.

During the low-speed tests, engineers and flight crews monitored how the X-59 handled as it moved across the runway, working to validate critical systems like steering and braking. These checks help ensure the aircraft’s stability and control across a range of conditions, giving pilots and engineers confidence that all systems are functioning as expected.

The X-59 is the centerpiece of NASA’s Quesst mission, which aims to demonstrate quiet supersonic flight by reducing the loud sonic boom to a quieter “thump.” Data gathered from the X-59 will be shared with U.S. and international regulators to inform the establishment of new, data-driven acceptable noise thresholds related to supersonic commercial flight over land.

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NASA to Launch SNIFS, Sun’s Next Trailblazing Spectator

July will see the launch of the groundbreaking Solar EruptioN Integral Field Spectrograph mission, or SNIFS. Delivered to space via a Black Brant IX sounding rocket, SNIFS will explore the energy and dynamics of the chromosphere, one of the most complex regions of the Sun’s atmosphere. The SNIFS mission’s launch window at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico opens on Friday, July 18. 

The chromosphere is located between the Sun’s visible surface, or photosphere, and its outer layer, the corona. The different layers of the Sun’s atmosphere have been researched at length, but many questions persist about the chromosphere. “There’s still a lot of unknowns,” said Phillip Chamberlin, a research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder and principal investigator for the SNIFS mission.  

The chromosphere lies just below the corona, where powerful solar flares and massive coronal mass ejections are observed. These solar eruptions are the main drivers of space weather, the hazardous conditions in near-Earth space that threaten satellites and endanger astronauts. The SNIFS mission aims to learn more about how energy is converted and moves through the chromosphere, where it can ultimately power these massive explosions.  

“To make sure the Earth is safe from space weather, we really would like to be able to model things,” said Vicki Herde, a doctoral graduate of CU Boulder who worked with Chamberlin to develop SNIFS.  

The SNIFS mission is the first ever solar ultraviolet integral field spectrograph, an advanced technology combining an imager and a spectrograph. Imagers capture photos and videos, which are good for seeing the combined light from a large field of view all at once. Spectrographs dissect light into its various wavelengths, revealing which elements are present in the light source, their temperature, and how they’re moving — but only from a single location at a time. 

The SNIFS mission combines these two technologies into one instrument.  

“It’s the best of both worlds,” said Chamberlin. “You’re pushing the limit of what technology allows us to do.” 

By focusing on specific wavelengths, known as spectral lines, the SNIFS mission will help scientists to learn about the chromosphere. These wavelengths include a spectral line of hydrogen that is the brightest line in the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV) spectrum, and two spectral lines from the elements silicon and oxygen. Together, data from these spectral lines will help reveal how the chromosphere connects with upper atmosphere by tracing how solar material and energy move through it. 

The SNIFS mission will be carried into space by a sounding rocket. These rockets are effective tools for launching and carrying space experiments and offer a valuable opportunity for hands-on experience, particularly for students and early-career researchers.

“You can really try some wild things,” Herde said. “It gives the opportunity to allow students to touch the hardware.” 

Chamberlin emphasized how beneficial these types of missions can be for science and engineering students like Herde, or the next generation of space scientists, who “come with a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of new ideas, new techniques,” he said. 

The entirety of the SNIFS mission will likely last up to 15 minutes. After launch, the sounding rocket is expected to take 90 seconds to make it to space and point toward the Sun, seven to eight minutes to perform the experiment on the chromosphere, and three to five minutes to return to Earth’s surface.  

The rocket will drift around 70 to 80 miles (112 to 128 kilometers) from the launchpad before its return, so mission contributors must ensure it will have a safe place to land. White Sands, a largely empty desert, is ideal. 

Herde, who spent four years working on the rocket, expressed her immense excitement for the launch. “This has been my baby.” 

By Harper Lawson
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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