How NASA is recycling urine into drinking water

As a life support engineer at NASA Ames Research Center, it's Michael Flynn's job to keep astronauts alive in space, making sure they have the basic necessities like clean water to survive. But launching clean water into space is cost-prohibitive, so for years, Flynn and his team have been working on new ways to recycle waste water into safe, drinking water. SmartPlanet visits Flynn's lab and looks at how he's doing it through a process known as "forward osmosis."






PARC: Purifying water through movement




Meng Lean, a principal scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, is developing a new method to purify waste water. Using the flowing motion of water and centrifugal force, a portable device uses the method, hydrodynamic separation, to split up waste particles, eliminating the need for a filtration barrier.