Code created by a start-up company called Narrative Science takes data, including sports statistics, company financial reports, and housing sales, and turns it into readable news articles. Supporters of this type of software note an increasing sophistication in the technology's ability to make...

This week's Question: While companies debate the merits of cloud computing, the U.S. government has been weighing its own options. By gradually shifting to maintenance-free services that are based on the Internet and run by private companies, Vivek Kundra, the White...

The particle fallout limitations and periodic allocations for the James Webb Space Telescope are very stringent. Standard prediction methods are complicated by non-linearity and monitoring methods that are insufficiently responsive. A method for dynamically predicting the...

MATLAB Automated Test Tool, version 3.0 (MATT 3.0) is a software package that provides automated tools that reduce the time needed for extensive testing of simulation models that have been constructed in the MATLAB programming language by use of the Simulink and Real-Time Workshop programs. MATT 3.0 runs on...

The purpose of this system is to simulate an internal short on battery cells by causing deformation (a crushing force) in a cell without penetration. This is performed by activating a hydraulic cylinder on one side of a blast wall with a hydraulic pump located on the other. The operator can control the rate of the crush by...

The feasibility of using Fused Reality-based simulation technology to enhance flight test capabilities has been investigated. In terms of relevancy to piloted evaluation, there remains no substitute for actual flight tests, even when considering the fidelity and effectiveness of modern...

A system for turbo machinery blade vibration has been developed that combines time-of-arrival sensors for blade vibration amplitude measurement and radar sensors for vibration frequency and mode identification. The enabling technology for this continuous blade...

Thermography has been used in the past to monitor active, large, cryogenic storage tanks. This approach proposes to use thermography to monitor new or refurbished tanks, prior to filling with cryogenic liquid, to look for insulation voids. Thermography may provide significant cost and...

The Uninhabited Airborne Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) is a pod-based, L-band (1.26 GHz), repeatpass, interferometric, synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) used for Earth science applications. Repeat-pass interferometric radar measurements from an airborne platform require an antenna that can be...

This innovation provides reconfigurable circuitry and 2-Gb of error-corrected or 1-Gb of triple-redundant digital memory in a small package. RTIMS uses circuit stacking of heterogeneous components and radiation shielding technologies. A reprogrammable field-programmable gate array (FPGA), six...

A radiation-tolerant, ultra-low-dropout linear regulator can operate between –150 and 150 ºC. Prototype components were demonstrated to be performing well after a total ionizing dose of 1 Mrad (Si). Unlike existing components, the linear regulator developed during this activity is unconditionally stable over...

This work addresses the problem of excitation of a parallel plate waveguide by an array of rectangular waveguides that arises in applications such as the continuous transverse stub (CTS) antenna and dual-polarized parabolic cylindrical reflector antennas excited by a...

The Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) Simulator is a portable training aid, or demonstration tool, designed to physically illustrate real-time critical-safety concepts of electrical lockout/tagout. The objective is to prevent misinterpretations of what is off and what is on during maintenance and repair of complex electrical...

A PLGT FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is included in the LCC (Load Control Card), GID (Guidance Interface & Drivers), TMC (Telemetry Multiplexer Card), and PFC (Pyro Firing Card) boards of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft. (PLGT stands for PFC, LCC, GID, and TMC.) It provides the interface...

Sptrace is a general-purpose space utilization tracing system that is conceptually similar to the commercial “Purify” product used to detect leaks and other memory usage errors. It is designed to monitor space utilization in any sort of “heap,” i.e., a region of data storage on some device (nominally memory; possibly shared and...

The Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) system’s BP package, an implementation of the Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) Bundle Protocol (BP) and supporting services, has been specifically designed to be suitable for use on deep-space robotic vehicles. Although the ION BP...

This is a set of POSIX device driver level abstractions in the RTEMS RTOS (Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems real-time operating system) to SBand radio hardware devices that have been instantiated in an FPGA (field-programmable gate array). These include A/D (analog-to-digital) sample capture,...

An FPGA module leverages the previous work from Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) relating to NASA’s Space Telecommunications Radio System (STRS) project. The STRS SpaceWire FPGA Module is written in the Verilog Register Transfer Level (RTL) language, and it encapsulates an unmodified GSFCcore (which is written in...

A geodetic software analysis tool enables the user to analyze 2D crustal strain from geodetic ground motion, and create models of crustal deformation using a graphical interface. Users can use any geodetic measurements of ground motion and derive the 2D crustal strain interactively. This software also provides a...

Etalon mounts for tunable Fabry-Perot interferometers can now be fabricated from reaction-bonded silicon carbide structural components. These mounts are rigid, lightweight, and thermally stable. The fabrication of these mounts involves the exploitation of post-casting capabilities that (1)...

The fabrication of large optics is traditionally a slow process, and fabrication capability is often limited by measurement capability. While techniques exist to measure mirror figure with nanometer precision,...

A family of metal/ceramic composite materials has been developed that are relatively inexpensive, lightweight alternatives to structural materials that are typified by beryllium, aluminum, and graphite/epoxy composites. These metal/ceramic composites were originally intended to replace beryllium...

NASA requires a durable and efficient catalyst for the electrolysis of water in a polymer-electrolyte-membrane (PEM) cell. Ruthenium oxide in a slightly reduced form is known to be a very efficient catalyst for the anodic oxidation of water to oxygen, but it degrades rapidly, reducing...