I spent part of the week at the 2011 Siemens PLM Connection Americas Users Conference (in Las Vegas!). William Allen, senior engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and mechanical systems design lead on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), spoke to the crowd about how the JPL, based in Pasadena, CA,...

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) recently wrapped up its BODY FORWARD Challenge. Teams were asked to explore bio-engineering possibilities and discover innovative ways to improve and maximize the body's potential. The winning team, known as the "Flying Monkeys," will receive up to...

A system was designed to automate cryogenically cooled low-noise amplifier systems used in the NASA Deep Space Network. It automates the entire operation of the system including cool-down, warm-up, and performance monitoring. The system is based on a single-board computer with custom software and...

A multi-beam, multi-color, polarized laser transmitter has been developed for mapping applications. It uses commercial off-the-shelf components for a low-cost approach for a ruggedized laser suitable for field deployment.

An optical link from Earth to an aircraft demonstrates the ability to establish a link from a ground platform to a transceiver moving overhead. An airplane has a challenging disturbance environment including airframe vibrations and occasional abrupt changes in attitude during flight. These...

A new concept has been developed for a high-temperature luminescence-based optical thermometer that both shows the desired temperature sensitivity in the upper temperature range of present state-of-the-art luminescence thermometers (above 1,300 °C), while maintaining...

In order to verify the air content in hydraulic fluid, an instrument was needed to measure the dissolved air content before the fluid was loaded into the system. The instrument also needed to measure the dissolved air content in situ and in real time during the de-aeration process. The...

For a variety of applications, it is important to measure the sensitivity of the pointing of a beam emerging from a collimator, as a function of temperature changes. A straightforward method for carrying out this measurement is based on using interferometry for monitoring...

The position of the secondary mirror of a submillimeter telescope with respect to the primary mirror needs to be known ≈0.03 mm in three dimensions. At the time of this reporting, no convenient, reasonably priced arrangement that offers this capability...

New circuits have been designed and fabricated with operating frequencies over 325 GHz. In order to measure S-parameters of these circuits, an extensive process of wafer dicing and packaging, and waveguide transition design, fabrication, and packaging would be required. This is a costly and...

A technique was developed to provide a reconfigurable high-precision microwave electrical phase delay for resonators and phase shifters. The invention employs multiple branches of transmission lines with open-ended or ground-ended terminations as...

Exponential growth in microelectronics technology such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has enabled high-performance spaceborne instruments with increasing onboard data processing capabilities. As a commonly used digital signal processing (DSP) building...

There is a need to provide a portable and cost-effective galvanic isolation between ground support equipment and flight hardware such that any unforeseen voltage differential between ground and power supplies is eliminated. An interface board was designed for use between the ground support...

This software visualizes orbit paths for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), but was designed to be general and applicable to any Earth-observing mission. The software uses the Google Earth user interface to provide a visual mechanism to explore spacecraft orbit paths, ground footprint...

Mars Relay operations currently involve several e-mails and phone calls between lander and orbiter teams in order to settle on an agreed time for performing a communication pass between the landed asset (i.e. rover or lander) and orbiter, then back to Earth. This new application aims to...

RAPID (Robot Application Programming Interface Delegate) software utilizes highly robust technology to facilitate command-ing and monitoring of lunar assets. RAPID provides the ability for intercenter communication, since these assets are developed in multiple NASA centers.

A novel computational framework was developed of a 2D affine invariant matching exploiting a parameter space. Named as affine invariant parameter space (AIPS), the technique can be applied to many image-processing and computer-vision problems, including image registration, template...

Calibrate_Image calibrates images obtained from focal plane arrays so that the output image more accurately represents the observed scene. The function takes as input a degraded image along with a flat field image and a dark frame image produced by the focal plane array and outputs a corrected image. The three most prominent...

The ISS (International Space Station) Power Resource Officers (PROs) needed a tool to automate the calculation of thousands of ISS power availability simulations used to generate power constraint matrices. Each matrix contains 864 cells, and each cell represents a single power simulation that must be run. The...

Flip-chip hybridization, also known as bump bonding, is a packaging technique for microelectronic devices that directly connects an active element or detector to a substrate readout face-to-face, eliminating the need for wire bonding. In order to make conductive links between the...

A method is based on two unique processing steps that are both based on deterministic machining processes using a single-point diamond turning (SPDT) machine. In the first step, a high-MRR (material removal rate) process is used to machine the part within several microns of the final geometry. In the...