Carbon dioxide produced through respiration can accumulate rapidly within closed spaces. If not managed, a crew’s respiratory rate increases, head aches and hyperventilation occur, vision and hearing are affected, and cognitive abilities decrease....

The Mission Data System framework defines closed-loop control system abstractions from State Analysis including interfaces for state variables, goals, estimators, and controllers that can be adapted to implement a goal-oriented control system. The framework further provides an execution environment that...

ADEPT (Adaptive Distributed Environment for Procedure Training) is designed to provide more effective, flexible, and portable training for NASA systems controllers. When creating a training scenario, an exercise author can specify a representative rationale structure using the...

LEGEND (LEO-to-GEO Environment Debris model) is a three-dimensional orbital debris evolutionary model that is capable of simulating the historical and future debris populations in the near- Earth environment. The historical component in LEGEND adopts a deterministic approach to mimic the known...

Aerial refueling technology for both manned and unmanned aircraft is critical for operations where extended aircraft flight time is required. Existing refueling assets are typically manned aircraft, which couple to a second aircraft through the use of a refueling boom....

SpaceCube 1.5 is a high-performance and low-power system in a compact form factor. It is a hybrid processing system consisting of CPU (central processing unit), FPGA (field-programmable gate array), and DSP (digital signal processor) processing elements. The primary processing engine is the Virtex-5 FX100T FPGA, which has two...

High-speed serial communication (i.e., Gigabit Ethernet) requires differential transmission and controlled impedances. Impedance control is essential throughout cabling, connector, and circuit board construction.

Researcher Bart Remes and his team at the Micro Aerial Vehicle Laboratory at the Delft University of Technology have designed, built, and tested the world’s smallest open source autopilot for small unmanned aircraft. A smaller – and lighter – autopilot allows these small...

When Sierra Nevada Corporation’s (SNC) Dream Chaser spacecraft flies through the atmosphere, it will encounter a wide variety of environmental conditions. Any spacecraft traveling at hypersonic velocities must have a robust thermal protection system (TPS) to protect astronauts and cargo from...

A new type of miniature camera system promises to give users a big picture view without sacrificing high-resolution.The new imager achieves the optical performance of a full-size wide-angle lens in a device less than one-tenth of the volume. The technology has a 100x range of focus, meaning it can image...

A team of Stanford engineers has built a basic computer using carbon nanotubes, a semiconductor material that has the potential to launch a new generation of electronic devices that run faster, while using less energy, than those made from silicon chips.

Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories, along with partner institutions Georgia Tech, Bucknell University, King Saud University and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are using a falling particle receiver to more efficiently convert the sun’s energy to electricity in large-scale,...

Researchers at Rice University have come up with a secure way to dramatically cut the risk that an implanted medical device (IMD) could be altered remotely without authorization.

Engineers at Stanford University have devised a new way to generate electricity from sewage using naturally-occurring “wired microbes” as mini power plants, producing electricity as they digest plant and animal waste.

A new bioprinting project, backed by $24 million from the U.S. Department of Defense, will attempt to 3D-print miniature human organs. The 2-inch "body on a chip" will test how the human body reacts to diseases, chemical warfare agents, and new drugs intended to defend against...

Researchers at Harvard have developed a way for photographers and microscopists to create a 3D image through a single lens, without moving the camera. The technology relies only on computation and mathematics — no unusual hardware or fancy lenses. The effect is the equivalent of seeing a...

As smart as the Curiosity rover has been about landing and finding its own way on a distant world, the rover is pretty brainless when it comes to doing the science that it was sent 567 million kilometers to carry out. That has to change if future rover missions are to make discoveries...

SINTEF, an independent research organization in Scandinavia, will work to combine a rover and snake robot for Mars exploration. The researchers envision using the rover to navigate over large distances, after which the snake robot can detach itself and crawl into tight, inaccessible areas.

A team of San Francisco State University researchers is the first to build and demonstrate the ability of two-dimensional disordered photonic band gap material, designed to be a platform to control light in unprecedented ways.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from the sun.

Apple Inc. added a fingerprint scanner to its latest version of the iPhone, offering biometric security possibilities for workplaces or mobile commerce. Some analysts say that Apple's embrace of fingerprint scanning could lead to wider adoption and mainstream usage. Many laptops, external...