This project investigated advanced navigation strategies required to approach, perform proximity operations, and return a sample from an asteroid or comet. An optimized navigation strategy for a notional mission to a near-Earth asteroid was developed to serve as...

The Orbit Determination Toolbox (ODTBX) 2012a (v5.0) is an advanced mission simulation and analysis tool used for concept exploration, proposal, early design phase, or rapid design center environments: the emphasis is on flexibility, but it has enough fidelity to produce credible results. ODTBX v5.0 includes...

Writing (recording) to a storage device and reading from it can be considered as a noisy channel. A storage device such as magnetic recoding and optical recording can be modeled as a partial response channel. Partial-response techniques are a special case of precoding technique where the...

This decision support system provides an integrated platform for assessing the quality of Spitzer scheduling options. The application aids in scheduling instrument selection, assigns schedule times to specific observation requests, and generates stored sequence products destined...

A software program enables a user to track a scene or a spot on Earth from space (such as from the ISS) using an innovative algorithm. This robust and highly accurate software allows a scene to be tracked that can be not only the shifted version of a previous scene,...

The task of producing Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) personnel schedules is daunting. Through automation, the labor and number of mistakes made are reduced when compared to the manual process. This software not only allows for common constraints to be expressed,...

Planning area coverage observations is a challenge in an architecture with a framing imager affixed to a bus that can be moved, and a mirror or other device that allows for small, but fast, observation of adjacent areas along the boresight of a telescope. The telescope boresight can slew slowly...

Apaper reports a method of converting distributed curvature measurements into a three-dimensional shape by combining elastic rod theory and differential geometry to arrive at a three-dimensional solution of the Frenet-Serret formulas. A new method of calculating the...

Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes are the best error-correcting codes known for a wide variety of communications applications. The AR4JA code family encompasses encoders and decoders for nine error-correcting codes. These include Accumulate, Repeat-by-4, and Jagged Accumulate (AR4JA) codes...

The prediction of a conserved scalar is important in many fields of study. For example, in modeling of combustion processes, if a conserved scalar exists, the mathematical problem can be greatly simplified. Inert gases transported in mixtures of other gases are also...

The Dictionary Management System (DMS) is a Web-based tool to develop and store a project command and telemetry dictionary. The dictionary defines a project’s flight/ground interface. In recent years, dictionaries have become very large, making it hard to maintain traditional methods of flat-file storage and manual...

Currently, there are no programmatic methods to query the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD) without downloading the entire database in XML format, parsing the content, loading the resulting data into a self-hosted database, and then developing an interface for querying the content. This tool...