While Congress failed to repeal light bulb efficiency standards last week, many had been debating the importance of LED bulbs and compact fluorescents. Supporters of incandescents say that the light source is cheap compared to alternatives, and its quality is fairly good. Others argue that the...

Last week, Toshiba unveiled a glasses-free 3D laptop, the Qosmio F750. The screen displays 2D and 3D simultaneously in separate windows. The display uses a lenticular lens sheet, capable of sending slightly different images to the left and right eye separately, thus giving the user a sense of image depth. The computer has...

A contact force model was developed for use in touch and go (TAG) surface sampling simulations on small celestial bodies such as comets and asteroids. In TAG scenarios, a spacecraft descending toward the surface of a small body comes into contact with the surface for a short duration of time, collects...

A document describes the development and demonstration of an apparatus, called a “dust mitigation vehicle,” for reducing the amount of free dust on the surface of the Moon. The dust mitigation vehicle would be used to pave surfaces on the Moon to prevent the dust from levitating or adhering to surfaces.

A document discusses a thermal radiator design consisting of lightweight composite materials and low-emittance metal coatings for use on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) structure. The structure will have a Thermal Subsystem unit to provide passive cooling to...

A document discusses how the HST SM4 SpaceCube flight spare was modified to create an experiment called the SpaceCube Demonstration Platform (SC DP) for use on the MISSE7 Space Station payload (in collaboration with NRL). It is designed to serve as an on-orbit platform for demonstrating advanced fault tolerance...

A document discusses a new parity pupil mask design that allows users to unambiguously determine the image space coordinate system of all the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) science instruments by using two out-of-focus images. This is an improvement over existing mask...

A document discusses the creation of a Ka-band modulator developed specifically for the NASA/GSFC Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). This flight design consists of a high-bandwidth, Quadriphase Shift Keying (QPSK) vector modulator with radiation-hardened, high-rate driver circuitry that receives...

A report describes the first phase in an effort to enhance the NaviGaze software to enable profoundly disabled persons to operate computers. (Running on a Windows-based computer equipped with a video camera aimed at the user’s head, the original NaviGaze software processes the user’s...