The lightest material on Earth. Aerogel

[Topcat]

This is what the insulation in homes and cars may have in the future. Amazing stuff.

http://ceramictechweekly.org/?p=962

[72bluNblu]

That stuff is awesome! Has already been used on a space mission to collect comet tail dust, I forget what the name of the mission was, few years back now. I used it as insulation on a design project for one of my aerospace classes in school, its insulation properties are just incredible (just a design class, I never got to use the real stuff just its numerical properties). A must have if you need to land a sample retrieval craft on Venus...

[ViperMan]

A must have if you need to land a sample retrieval craft on Venus...

Whew!!  I'll keep that in mind!   

Jeff

[Scatterbrain]

Seeing the pictures is one thing, I've seen the real stuff.  My Master's Degree was paid for by NASA.  The research I was working on involved robotics (I was doing all the AI stuff) and I had a presentation with my Professor at JPL.  They gave us a tour and had some of the stuff in a display case.  It was carved out to spell JPL.  It is amazing looking.  I always likened it to when Scooby Doo would cut out a donut from fog in the old cartoons.

[ViperMan]

Interesting... Dunlop is apparently selling Aerogel tennis racquets...  Talk about an unfair advantage.  But I also read that Aerogel is very hard to come by - just about ever bit produced goes to NASA.

[sleepychallenger]

did you notice the torch right by his hand and not burning.