A History with NASA
While we were cleaning out our offices a few weeks ago a co-worker of mine handed me a great Norman Rockwell oil painting that we used to have hanging in one of our hallways. It was taken down when we were updating our facility. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. The reason we used to have it hanging up in the walls at Brooks (and the reason I’m going to find it another nice home on our walls) is because in the background of the picture you can see some Brooks Sho-Rate variable area flow meters between the two men on the left. Brooks provided Sho-Rate flow meters to NASA for some of the first missions into space.
This reminded me a of a blog post I wrote about a year ago about some of our SLA mass flow controllers supporting NASA research. The mass flow controllers are part of a gas mixing system and chamber that will simulate high thermal stress and the planet Venus’ corrosive atmosphere to test a new exploration module.
We also had a success story back in 2009 with our Quantim Coriolis mass flow controllers being sent into space via the International Space Station. In this application, the Coriolis mass flow controllers are being used in a process to manufacture medical fluids in space.
And in the 90s, after the Challenger disaster in 1986, Brooks thermal mass flow meters were used to leak test the space shuttle o-rings. It seems that Brooks has a good track record of working with NASA!
I personally found it very interesting and proud, to be honest, that Brooks has helped out the space program in so many ways with three of our product technologies. So, this old Norman Rockwell oil painting will find a nice home in our Hatfield, PA offices, maybe it will be right next to my desk.
