SMART MATERIALS—MATERIALS THAT ADAPT TO CHANGING CONDITIONS - Chemistry: Notable Research and Discoveries - page 126

defenseAdvancedresearchProjects
Agency(dArPA)
This agency got its start as the Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA), established by a Department of Defense di-
rective on February 7, 1958. The motivation for its estab-
lishment is quite clear. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union
shocked the world when it initiated the space age by launch-
ing Sputnik, the fi rst artifi cial satellite. (In Russian, the term
sputnik means traveling companion.) The United States, the
world's leading democracy, and the Soviet Union, then the
world's leading communist country, were at the time locked
in a fi erce political battle of one-upmanship known as the cold
war. Fearing that the Soviet Union's science and engineering
were outpacing everyone else, the United States decided to
close the gap by establishing research agencies and increas-
ing the amount of money spent on research.
On March 23, 1972, ARPA's name changed to Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). (Then-president
Clinton's administration switched the name back to ARPA on
Some types of airplane used on board Navy aircraft carriers can fold
their wings. But these wings are heavy and ineffi cient—they are designed
to fold in order to save space in the severely cramped quarters of a ship,
rather than any attempt to increase fl ight capability. Th e goal of morph-
ing projects is to design and build wings and other structures that could
change shape in fl ight. In order for the airplane to excel at diff erent tasks,
a 50-75 percent change in wing area will probably be necessary.
Smart systems involve sensing changing conditions and activating
some sort of response, usually with an actuator. A project known as
Active Aeroelastic Wing (AAW), conducted by the National Aeronau-
tics and Space Administration (NASA), the U.S. Air Force Research
Laboratory, and Boeing Company, studied wing elasticity in a modi-