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Briefs: Green Design & Manufacturing

The Data Service Provider Cost Estimation Tool (CET) and Comparables Database (CDB) package provides to NASA’s Earth Science Enterprise (ESE) the ability to estimate the full range of year-by-year...

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News: Green Design & Manufacturing

A system constructed by Duke University and Duke Energy on a hog finishing facility converts hog waste into electricity and creates carbon offset credits. Google, which invests in carbon...

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Question of the Week
Do the benefits of a "cloud-first" strategy outweigh the risks and drawbacks?
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...
Articles: Green Design & Manufacturing

Inverters/converters are a key element of most renewable energy systems where the power generated is not suitable to either be used locally or to provide power directly to the electric...

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Articles: Photonics/Optics

In the world of precision motion control there is a continuous pursuit of higher performance, whether it’s resolution, speed, stability, accuracy or step size. Even if a specified device appears...

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Articles: Robotics, Automation & Control

After turning the dial to heavy-duty and pushing the start button, Modi waits for the click that indicates that the interlock mechanism successfully locked the door of the washing machine. Shortly after, the...

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Articles: Sensors/Data Acquisition

Over the past ten years, the worldwide sensors technology market has experienced tremendous growth. Today’s sensor technology has been woven seamlessly into our everyday lives...

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Application Briefs: Photonics/Optics

We have known for decades that the sun radiates enough energy to meet the world’s needs for power, both now and in the future. As in any energy conversion from original source to...

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Articles: Imaging

Today’s human-machine interfaces (HMIs) provide the link between sophisticated technology and the human touch required to effectively operate essential systems and applications. By...

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Articles: Imaging

Although thermal imagers tend to be judged on the detector technology employed, the detected image must first be formed by an infra-red lens, and the quality and performance of this lens will be an...

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Who's Who: Aerospace

Dr. Lin Chambers is Project Scientist in the Innovations in Global Climate Change Education program. The congressionally mandated project, initiated in 2008,...

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Podcasts
Dr. Lin Chambers, Project Scientist, NASA Langley Science Directorate, Hampton, VA

Dr. Lin Chambers is Project Scientist in the Innovations in Global Climate Change Education program. The congressionally mandated project, initiated in 2008, awards grants to institutions that educate communities about climate science. The group develops...

Briefs: Physical Sciences
Dynamic Monitoring of Cleanroom Fallout Using an Air Particle Counter

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...

Briefs: Software
Test Generator for MATLAB Simulations

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...

Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Crush Test Abuse Stand

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...

Briefs: Physical Sciences
Fused Reality for Enhanced Flight Test Capabilities

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...

Briefs: Physical Sciences
Enhancement to Non-Contacting Stress Measurement of Blade Vibration Frequency

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...

Briefs: Physical Sciences
Thermography to Inspect Insulation of Large Cryogenic Tanks

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...

Briefs: Electronics & Computers
UAVSAR Active Electronically Scanned Array

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...

Briefs: Electronics & Computers

Current practice is to uniquely key the connectors, which, when mated, could not be verified by ground tests such as those used in explosive or non-explosive initiators...

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Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Radiation-Tolerant Intelligent Memory Stack — RTIMS

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...

Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Ultra-Low-Dropout Linear Regulator

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...

Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Excitation of a Parallel Plate Waveguide by an Array of Rectangular Waveguides

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...

Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) Simulator

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...

Briefs: Electronics & Computers
FPGA for Power Control of MSL Avionics

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...

Briefs: Software
Sptrace

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...

Briefs: Software
Interplanetary Overlay Network Bundle Protocol Implementation

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...

Briefs: Software
S-Band POSIX Device Drivers for RTEMS

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,...

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