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NASA wants you to know they’re pretty handy here on Earth, too. This here shows a way to make trains and other things that use big, strong bearings safer, by using tricks we learned on Skylab. Before it crashed.
As they explain:
Marhsall Space Flight Center’s scientists have developed a detection concept based on the fact that bearing defects excite resonant frequency of rolling elements of the bearing as they impact the defect. By detecting resonant frequency and subsequently analyzing the character of this signal, bearing defects may be detected and identified as to source.
From the Marshall Space Flight Center web archive.
[via humanoid history]