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" If you could walk into a NASA wind tunnel, you might find model planes and rockets painted in the hottest pink you&amp;#039;ve ever seen. The color choice isn&amp;#039;t a simple aesthetic choice, though. NASA hopes this type of hot-pink paint could cut fuel use in half, pollution by around 75 percent, and noise to practically one-eighth of what it is today. The hot pink stuff is pressure sensitive paint (PSP), and its talent is that it shows how an aircraft model responds to pressure. PSP is being used in wind tunnel tests at the agency&amp;#039;s Ames Research Center in California and Langley Research Center in Virginia. NASA explains how it works in a somewhat confusing video.        If you were distracted by how much that video looked like Taiwanese news animators Next Media, here&amp;#039;s how PSP works. Inside the wind tunnel, the model aircraft is lit up by LEDs that really emphasize how hot this hot pink is. Then the wind starts coming. Oxygen in the air connects with luminophores\u2014fluorescent particles inside the paint. Areas with high air pressure have more oxygen, and the pink is dimmer as a result. As the luminophores start to dull the pink, scientists can determine exactly which parts of the model are being affected and how.  Scientists have known that oxygen can quench luminescence since 1935. NASA started experimenting with fluorescent dyes in the &amp;#039;80s. Blair McLachlan, a NASA researcher, worked back then with scientists at the University of Washington including Janet Kavandi. By 1989, Kavandi, McLachlan, and their team created the first generation of pink PSP paints. These days Kavandi is the director of NASA&amp;#039;s Glenn Research Center, putting her in the position of benefitting from her own research breakthroughs decades later.   The next generation of PSP, deemed Unsteady PSP, is already being prepared. Unsteady will be able to show changes in pressure at the microsecond level, and will be less sensitive to temperature. But NASA is proud of its color. Its press release notes that the color is unavailable in hobby stores and that when Unsteady arrives, &amp;quot;one thing that is not expected to change is the bright pink color of the specialty paint.&amp;quot; Source: Space.com "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a22312/nasa-hot-pink/>