research and development effort now underway is directed toward the use of subvocal speech for communication in settings in which (1) acoustic noise could interfere excessively with ordinary vocal communication and/or (2) acoustic silence or secrecy of communication is required. By "subvocal speech" is meant...

Relatively inexpensive processes have been developed for manufacturing lightweight, wide-aperture mirrors that consist mainly of reflectively coated, edge-supported polyimide membranes. The polyimide and other materials in these mirrors can withstand the environment of outer space, and the mirrors...

Equipment and a method for rapidly assaying solid surfaces for contamination by bacterial spores are undergoing development. The method would yield a total (nonviable plus viable) spore count of a surface within minutes and a viable-spore count in about one hour. In this method, spores...

A simplified, lightweight system for dissipating heat of a regenerative fuel- cell system would include a heat pipe with its evaporator end placed at the heat source and its condenser end integrated into the wall of the regenerative fuel cell system gas-storage tanks. The tank walls act as heat-radiating surfaces...

When an algorithm is distributed across multiple threads executing on many distinct processors, a loss of one of those threads or processors can potentially result in the total loss of all the incremental results up to that point. When implementation is massively hardware distributed, then the...

A compact symbolic formulation enables mapping of an arbitrarily complex decision tree of a certain type into a highly computationally efficient multidimensional software object. The type of decision trees to which this formulation applies is that known in the art as the Boolean class of...

A document describes a methodology for utilizing image data downlinked from cameras aboard a robotic ground vehicle (rover) on a remote planet for analyzing and planning operations of the vehicle and of any associated spacecraft. Traditionally, the cataloging and presentation of large numbers...

Mercury Computer Systems (Chelmsford, MA) has announced its integrated COTS application-ready platform for wideband data links and satellite communications (WBDLS) processing. The suite includes the Mercury Echotek™ Series ECV4-RFT 6U Wideband Remote Fiber Transceiver, which combines...

A document discusses the focal-plane calibration of the Spitzer Space Telescope by use of the instrument pointing frame (IPF) Kalman filter, which was described in "Kalman Filter for Calibrating a Telescope Focal Plane" (NPO-40798), NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 30, No. 9 (September 2006), page 62. To...

KineticSystems (Lockport, IL) has announced the V155, a VXI Slot-0 controller featuring a Pentium® M embedded processor. The V155 is a single- width C-size module with 1.1-GHz, 1.6-GHz, and 1.8-GHz clocking options. It features dual Ethernet controllers that support 10BaseT, 100BaseTX, and 1000BaseT interfaces;...

A report presents a slightly different perspective of the subject matter of "Fusing Symbolic and Numerical Diagnostic Computations" (NPO-42512), which appears elsewhere in this issue of NASA Tech Briefs. Briefly, the subject matter is the X-2000 Anomaly Detection Language, which is a...