While pursuing a master’s degree in aerospace guidance, navigation, and control theory at UT Austin, Terry Hill got an opportunity to work at NASA JSC as a primary investigator on a project his educational advisor was conducting. This...

The 2010 Create the Future Design Contest, sponsored by COMSOL, Inc., PTC, and Tech Briefs Media Group (publishers of NASA Tech Briefs), recognized innovation in product design in six categories: Consumer Products, Machinery & Equipment, Medical, Safety & Security, Sustainable Technologies, and Transportation....

COMSOL, PTC, and Tech Briefs Media Group thank the following judges for their participation.

The Portable Handheld Optical Window Inspection Device (PHOWID) is a measurement system for imaging small defects (scratches, pits, micrometeor impacts, and the like) in the field. Designed primarily for window inspection, PHOWID attaches to a smooth surface with suction cups, and raster scans a...

Based only on its appearance in imagery, this program uses close-range 3D terrain analysis to produce training data sufficient to estimate the traversability of terrain beyond 3D sensing range. This approach is called learning from stereo (LFS). In effect, the software...

An algorithm was developed to generate crop yield predictions from orbital remote sensing observations, by analyzing thousands of pixels per county and the associated historical crop yield data for those counties. The algorithm determines which pixels...

AEGSE Virtuoso Charting is an application that enables animated, real-time charting of telemetry streams of data from a rover. These automatically scaled charts are completely interactive, and allow users to choose the variables that they want to monitor. The charts can process...

A voice-command human-machine interface system has been developed for spacesuit extravehicular activity (EVA) missions. A multichannel acoustic signal processing method has been created for distant speech acquisition in noisy and reverberant environments....

Weather forecasting, hurricane tracking, and atmospheric science applications depend on humidity sounding of atmosphere. Current instruments provide these measurements from ground-based, airborne, and low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites by measuring radiometric temperature on the flanks of the 183-GHz water...

A differential SiGe oscillator circuit uses a resonant ring-oscillator topology in order to electronically tune the oscillator over multi-octave bandwidths. The oscillator’s tuning is extremely linear, because the oscillator’s frequency depends on the magnetic tuning of a YIG sphere, whose...

Yesterday, after unveiling Creo, PTC's soon-to-arrive design application suite, the company arranged for a panel of analysts to address attendee questions about the product. The roundtable included Marc Halpern, Research VP at Gartner, Sanjeev Pal, Research Manager at IDC, and John MacKrell, a senior consultant at...

There was a bit of a crowd lining up near Boston's Park Plaza this morning, and if it wasn't for all the business-casual attire, you may have thought another Apple Store was opening up down the street. The event was actually PTC's unveiling of its new product suite: Creo. Here's the quick rundown: Creo is a suite...