Electronics & Computers

This parabolic cylindrical reflector uses Ku and Ka bands.

To support NASA’s planned 20-year mission to provide sustained global precipitation measurement (EOS-9 Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM)), a deployable antenna has been explored with an inflatable thin- membrane structure. This design uses a 5.3×5.3-m inflatable parabolic ...
Read More >>

Frame rates greatly exceed those of prior systems.

A prototype of an advanced robotic vision system both (1) measures its own motion with respect to a stationary background and (2) detects other moving objects and estimates their motions, all by use of visual cues. ...
Read More >>

This instrument could contribute to understanding of climate change.

A wide-band penetrating radar system for measuring the thickness of sea ice is under development. The need for this or a similar system arises as follows: Spatial and temporal variations in the thickness of sea ice are ...
Read More >>

A self-calibrating interferometric synthetic aperture radar instrument uses an electronically steerable radar antenna to achieve greater accuracy.

Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) has been shown to provide very sensitive measurements of surface deformation and displacement on the order of 1 cm. Future systematic measurements of surface deformation ...
Read More >>

Either or both of two input ports could be coupled to one output port.

A proposed device for combining or switching electromagnetic beams would have three ports, would not contain any moving parts, and would be switchable among three operating states:

These wireless communications components are useful for base-station receivers, consumer electronics, and industrial microwave instrumentation.

This design allows broadband power combining with high isolation between the H port and E port, and achieves a lower insertion loss than any other broadband planar magic-T. Passive micro wave/...
Read More >>

The Next Generation Flight Controller Trainer (NGFCT) is a relatively inexpensive system of hardware and software that provides high- fidelity training for space-shuttle flight controllers. NGFCT provides simulations into which are integrated the behaviors of emulated space-shuttle vehicle onboard general-purpose computers (GPCs), mission-control center (MCC) displays, and space-shuttle systems as ...
Read More >>

This apparatus functions as a very-low-loss, three-port circulator.

A quasi-optical transmission line (QOTL) has been developed as a low-loss transmission line for a spaceborne cloud-observing radar instrument that operates at a nominal frequency of 94 GHz. This QOTL could also readily be redesigned for use in terrestrial ...
Read More >>

Risk is reduced by use of fast state-machine and error-detection logic.

Single-event upsets (SEUs) pose great threats to avionic systems’ state machine control logic, which are frequently used to control sequence of events and to qualify protocols. The risks of SEUs manifest in two ways: (a) ...
Read More >>

A report discusses integrating multiple memory modules on the high-speed serial interconnect (IEEE 1393) that is used by a spacecraft’s inter-module communications in order to ease data congestion and provide for a scalable, strong, flexible system that can meet new system-level mass memory requirements.

A document discusses placing memory modules on the high-speed serial interconnect, which is used by a spacecraft’s computer elements for inter-processor communications, to allow all multiple computer system architectures to access the spacecraft data storage at the same time. Each memory board is identical electrically and receives its bus ...
Read More >>

A document discusses a method by which GMSK (Gaussian minimum shift keying) modulation and a pseudonoise (PN) ranging signal may be combined. By isolating the in-phase and quadrature components after carrier lock, and extracting their low-pass and band-pass filtered components, there is enough information available to both demodulate data and ...
Read More >>