Computer programs that are used to define safety margins for fiery spacecraft re-entries and help detect planets outside our solar system are co-winners of NASA’s 2007 Software of the Year Award.

Software engineers at NASA’s Ames Research Center developed the Data-Parallel Line Relaxation, or DPLR, which is used to analyze and predict the extreme environments human and robotic spacecraft experience during super high-speed entries into planetary atmospheres.

At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, software engineers developed the Adaptive Modified Gerchberg-Saxton Phase Retrieval program. The software uses a telescope’s science camera with innovative and robust algorithms to characterize possible errors that limit its imaging performance. The September issue of NASA Tech Briefs will feature further coverage of the 2007 Software of the Year Award.

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Ohio State University physicists have invented a new kind of MRI technique to see inside a magnet that’s smaller than the head of a pin. The magnet is a ferromagnet and has too strong of a magnetic field to be studied with typical MRI. The technique may eventually enable the development of extremely small computers, and give doctors a new tool for studying the plaques in blood vessels – which are too small for typical MRI to see – that play a role in diseases such as heart disease.

The scientists dubbed the technique “scanned probe ferromagnetic resonance force microscopy,” or scanned probe FMRFM. It involves detecting a magnetic signal using a tiny silicon bar with an even tinier magnetic probe on its tip. Since the new probe system generates a magnetic field that varies naturally, the physicists could sweep the probe over an array of magnets and get a 2D view that’s similar to a medical MRI. Experts believe that one day, tiny magnets could be implanted on a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) chip.

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NASA’s Innovative Partnerships Program has selected seven Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, companies to participate in reduced-gravity test flights in early September. The companies will have the opportunity to test their newly developed hardware on an aircraft that simulates the weightless conditions of spaceflight. The flights will the first by NASA’s program called Facilitated Access to the Space Environment for Technology Development and Training, known as FAST.

Testing new technologies in weightless conditions is an important step in making them available for applications in NASA space projects. An aircraft flying on a parabolic trajectory can create weightless conditions for up to 30 seconds at a time and simulate the reduced gravity conditions of the moon or Mars. This allows developers to test new technologies to ensure that they will work in space or, if they do not work during testing, to understand why.

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Purdue University researchers have uncovered a potentially less expensive method to produce solid-state lighting based on light-emitting-diode (LED) technology. This development could hasten the day when LEDs, which are more energy efficient and longer lasting than conventional incandescent light bulbs, become the preferred lighting technology.

Existing LED lights are prohibitively expensive, in part because they are created on a substrate, or first layer, of sapphire. The sapphire-based LEDs require a separate mirror-like collector to reflect light that ordinarily would be lost. To overcome this problem, the Purdue researchers developed a means to create LEDs on low-cost, metal-coated silicon wafers, whereby the the silicon substrate is metalized with a built-in reflective layer of zirconium nitride.

According to Timothy Sands, professor of Materials Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, the silicon-based process will allow the scaling up of production using large silicon wafers, thus reducing cost. The widespread adoption of solid-state lighting could dramatically reduce the energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with generating electricity, as one-third of all electrical power consumed in the United States is from lighting.

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Researchers from UCLA and the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System have developed a design for an automated, wearable artificial kidney, or AWAK. Around 1980, a similar artificial kidney machine was built which was portable, but not wearable. The new technology would allow patients to go about their regular business while undergoing dialysis.

The peritoneal-based AWAK would function continuously, as natural kidneys do, eliminating patient shocks that occur in traditional hemodialysis. Because it does not involve blood circulation outside the body, it is bloodless. It also regenerates and reuses fluid and protein components in the spent dialysate – the fluid that has abstracted toxins from the patient’s blood and which is discarded in current practice – making it waterless, and minimizing or eliminating protein loss.

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