Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Steel Primer Chamber Assemblies for Dual Initiated Pyrovalves
A solution was developed to mitigate the potential risk of ignition failures and burn-through in aluminum primer chamber assemblies on pyrovalves. This was accomplished by changing the assembly material from aluminum to steel, and reconfiguration of flame channels to provide more...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Aerial Deployment and Inflation System for Mars Helium Balloons
A method is examined for safely deploying and inflating helium balloons for missions at Mars. The key for making it possible to deploy balloons that are light enough to be buoyant in the thin, Martian atmosphere is to mitigate the transient forces on the balloon that might tear...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Voice Coil Percussive Mechanism Concept for Hammer Drill
A hammer drill design of a voice coil linear actuator, spring, linear bearings, and a hammer head was proposed. The voice coil actuator moves the hammer head to produce impact to the end of the drill bit. The spring is used to store energy on the retraction and to capture the rebound...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Radial Halbach magnetic bearings have been investigated as part of an effort to develop increasingly reliable non-contact bearings for future high-speed rotary machines that may be used in such applications...
Briefs: Materials
It is now possible to grow silicon nanowires at chosen positions and orientations by a method that involves a combination of standard microfabrication processes. Because their...
Briefs: Materials
Palladium chloride films have been found to be useful as alternatives to the gold films heretofore used to detect airborne elemental mercury at concentrations of the order of parts per...
Briefs: Materials
Like the palladium chloride (PdCl2) films described in the immediately preceding article, gold nanowire sensors have been found to be useful for detecting airborne elemental...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Nanowire electron scattering spectroscopy (NESS) has been proposed as the basis of a class of ultra-small, ultra-low-power sensors that could be used to detect and identify chemical compounds present...
Briefs: Information Technology
R4SA for Controlling Robots
The R4SA GUI mentioned in the immediately preceding article is a user-friendly interface for controlling one or more robot(s). This GUI makes it possible to perform meaningful real-time field experiments and research in robotics at an unmatched level of fidelity, within minutes of setup. It provides such powerful...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
A proposal has been made to develop devices that would generate spin-polarized electron currents characterized by polarization ratios having magnitudes in excess of 1. Heretofore, such...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Using Drained Spacecraft Propellant Tanks for Habitation
A document proposes that future spacecraft for planetary and space exploration be designed to enable reuse of drained propellant tanks for occupancy by humans. This proposal would enable utilization of volume and mass that would otherwise be unavailable and, in some cases, discarded. Such...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
A parameterized orthogonal tight-binding mathematical model of the quantum electronic structure of the bismuth telluride molecule has been devised for use in conjunction with a...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Connecting Node
A paper describes the Octanode, a connecting node that facilitates the integration of multiple docking mechanisms, hatches, windows, and internal and external systems with the use of flat surfaces. The Octanode is a 26-faced Great Rhombicuboctahedron Archimedean solid with six octagon-shaped panels, eight hexagon-shaped panels,...
Briefs: Materials
Electrolytes for Low-Temperature Operation of Li-CFₓ Cells
A report describes a study of electrolyte compositions selected as candidates for improving the low-temperature performances of primary electrochemical cells that contain lithium anodes and fluorinated carbonaceous (CFx) cathodes. This study complements the developments...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
An apparatus for extracting organic compounds from soils, sands, and other solid matrix materials utilizes water at subcritical temperature and pressure as a solvent. The...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
A proposed, low-power, backpack-sized instrument, denoted the micro electron microprobe and sample analyzer (MEMSA), would serve as a means of rapidly performing high-resolution microscopy and...
Briefs: Information Technology
A Software Rejuvenation Framework for Distributed Computing
A performability-oriented conceptual framework for software rejuvenation has been constructed as a means of increasing levels of reliability and performance in distributed stateful computing. As used here, “performability-oriented” signifies that the construction of the framework is...
Application Briefs: Photonics/Optics
FARO Technologies
Lake Mary, FL
800-736-0234
www.faro.com
Making its first flights to the International Space Station by the middle...
Briefs: Information Technology
An algorithm for solving a particular nonlinear independent-component-analysis (ICA) problem, that differs from prior algorithms for solving the same problem, has been devised. The...
Briefs: Information Technology
“Robust Real-Time Reconfigurable Robotics Software Architecture” (“R4SA”) is the name of both a software architecture and software that embodies the architecture. The architecture was conceived...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Integrated miniature planar arrays of optical sensors for detecting specific biochemicals in extremely small quantities have been proposed. An array of this type would have an area...
Briefs: Information Technology
Bio-Inspired Neural Model for Learning Dynamic Models
A neural-network mathematical model that, relative to prior such models, places greater emphasis on some of the temporal aspects of real neural physical processes, has been proposed as a basis for massively parallel, distributed algorithms that learn dynamic models of possibly complex...
Briefs: Information Technology
A methodology for processing spectral images to retrieve information on underlying physical, chemical, and/or biological phenomena is based on evolutionary and related computational...
Application Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Spectra Logic Federal
Boulder, CO
303-449-6400
www.spectralogic.com
NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA, installed...
Briefs: Information Technology
Efforts are under way to develop data- acquisition, data- processing, and data- communication systems for monitoring disasters over large geographic areas by use of uninhabited...
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Briefs: Information Technology
Complexity for Survival of Living Systems
A logical connection between the survivability of living systems and the complexity of their behavior (equivalently, mental complexity) has been established. This connection is an important intermediate result of continuing research on mathematical models that could constitute a unified representation of...
Techs for License
Low-Cost Engineered Properties for Non- Wovens, Films, and Laminates
A suite of nonwoven technologies offers low-cost mechanical processes that impart specific engineered properties to commodity-priced nonwovens, films, and laminates, and even to non-polymeric materials. A wide range of textures, controllable permeability, aperturing, multilayer...
Articles: Test & Measurement
The fourth servicing mission (SM-4) for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) offered an impressive and unprecedented set of advanced technologies that may yield the most...
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