Stories
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Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Photon, Inc., San Jose, California
A common misconception is that beam collimation angle measurements must involve a least two or more beam size measurements along the beam path. For this reason,...
Briefs: Software
FORTRAN Versions of Reformulated HFGMC Codes
Several FORTRAN codes have been written to implement the reformulated version of the high-fidelity generalized method of cells (HFGMC). Various aspects of the HFGMC and its predecessors were described in several prior NASA Tech Briefs articles, the most recent being "HFGMC Enhancement of MAC/GMC"...
Briefs: Software
Program for Editing Spacecraft Command Sequences
Sequence Translator, Editor, and Expander Resource (STEER) is a computer program that facilitates construction of sequences and blocks of sequences (hereafter denoted generally as sequence products) for commanding a spacecraft. STEER also provides mechanisms for translating among various sequence...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Glasses that comprise rare-earth oxides and aluminum oxide plus, optionally, lesser amounts of other oxides, have been invented. The other oxide(s) can include SiO2, B2O3, GeO2, and/or any of...
Briefs: Software
software prototype of BEAM (Beaconbased Exception Analysis for Multimissions) and successfully tested its operation in flight onboard a NASA research aircraft. BEAM (see NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 26, No. 9;...
Products: Photonics/Optics
Melles Griot Optics Group (Rochester, NY) has released the ExtremeService™ shutter designed for operation in environmental conditions involving variations in temperature. The shutter is suitable for OEM...
Briefs: Software
Mission Scenario Development Workbench
The Mission Scenario Development Workbench (MSDW) is a multidisciplinary performance analysis software tool for planning and optimizing space missions. It provides a number of new capabilities that are particularly useful for planning the surface activities on other planets. MSDW enables rapid planning of a...
Products: Photonics/Optics
Bristol Instruments (Victor, NY) offers the LC Series fiber-optic laser couplers that can be used to launch a free-space laser beam into a fiber, or return the laser to a collimated free-space beam. The couplers...
Briefs: Software
Marsviewer
Marsviewer is a multi-platform application designed to aid in quality control, browsing, and analysis of original science product images (Experiment Data Records, or EDRs) and derived image data products (Reduced Data Records, or RDRs) returned by the Mars Explorer Rover (MER) mission. Marsviewer offers an abstraction of the products'...
Products: Photonics/Optics
TT Electronics OPTEK Technology (Carrollton, TX) offers the OPB856Z Series wide-gap optical sensor that includes an emitter-sensor pair. The sensor consists of an LED and a phototransistor designed to operate over distances of...
Briefs: Software
Tool for Analysis and Reduction of Scientific Data
The Automated Virtual Laboratory Tool (AVLT) is designed to be an intelligent scientific analysis assistant (SAA) system, dedicated to facilitating analysis and reduction of data collected by spaceborne scientific instruments. Within the SAA, a variety of conventional and artificial-intelligence...
Products: Photonics/Optics
Universal Laser Systems (Scottsdale, AZ) has added a laser platform to its XL Series of industrial CO2 laser processing systems that can provide 400 watts of air-cooled laser power. The laser utilizes direct air-cooling,...
Briefs: Software
ASPEN Version 3.0
The Automated Scheduling and Planning Environment (ASPEN) computer program has been updated to version 3.0. ASPEN as a whole (up to version 2.0) has been summarized, and selected aspects of ASPEN have been discussed in several previous NASA Tech Briefs articles. Restated briefly, ASPEN is a modular, reconfigurable, application...
Products: Photonics/Optics
FBG Sensor Arrays
QPS Photronics (Montreal, QE, Canada) offers sensor arrays with 100 Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBGs) in each array, with the total length of the fiber measuring 20 kilometers. Through a front-end switch matrix, 16 of these fiber arrays can be connected together to form a Star Network that contains a total of 1,600 sensors. This fiber...
Briefs: Software
Secure Display of Space-Exploration Images
Java EDR Display Interface (JEDI) is software for either local display or secure Internet distribution, to authorized clients, of image data acquired from cameras aboard spacecraft engaged in exploration of remote planets. ("EDR" signifies "experimental data record," which, in effect, signifies image...
Products: Photonics/Optics
A custom CCD camera capable of operating at 100 million frames per second is available from KAMAN Electro-Optics Dev. Center (Tucson, AZ). The camera’s 10-nsec exposures offer speed-of-light image capture outside the gated-ICCD...
Briefs: Software
SONAR (SOund NAvigation Ranging) has been in use for decades to detect submerged objects, but researchers are finding how to extract new information from its echoes. With the help of...
Products: Photonics/Optics
The X1-1 + XD-9506-4 UV hazard meter and detector from Gigahertz- Optik (Newburyport, MA) can operate and display separate UV-C/B and UV-A detector measurements, and can calculate and display the sum of the two detector readings...
Briefs: Software
Rotating-Pump Design Code
Pump Design (PUMPDES) is a computer program for designing a rotating pump for liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, liquid nitrogen, water, methane, or ethane. Using realistic properties of these fluids provided by another program called "GASPAK," this code performs a station-by-station, mean-line analysis along the pump flow...
Products: Photonics/Optics
PerkinElmer Optoelectronics (Fremont, CA) has introduced the MultiBlue™ multi-purpose CCD imaging camera featuring 12-bit output depth and USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394b FireWire interfaces that provide dual plug-and-play connectivity....
Briefs: Software
SAUSAGE (Still Another Utility for SAR Analysis that's General and Extensible) is a computer program for modeling (see figure) the performance of synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) or interferometric...
Products: Photonics/Optics
OPTRA (Topsfield, MA) offers a laser event recorder that measures, characterizes, and documents laser exposures in support of dosimetry requirements for the protection of personnel working with, or who could potentially be...
Briefs: Software
Spectral Analysis Tool 6.2 for Windows
Spectral Analysis Tool 6.2 is the latest version of a computer program that assists in analysis of interference between radio signals of the types most commonly used in Earth/spacecraft radio communications. [An earlier version was reported in "Software for Analyzing Earth/ Spacecraft Radio Interference"...
Products: Photonics/Optics
Cleveland Crystals (Highland Heights, OH) has introduced the CRS150 counter rotation stage that can facilitate simultaneous angle-tuning of two crystals oriented for compensation of birefringent walkoff. The walkoff...
Briefs: Software
Multi-Platform Avionics Simulator (MPAvSim) is a software library for development of simulations of avionic hardware. MPAvSim facilitates simulation of interactions between flight software and such avionic...
Products: Photonics/Optics
The TT-02 from ELMO USA Corp. (Plainview, NY) is an XGA-output Visual Presenter that enables users to share information, documents, and small 3D objects with audiences. The camera contains a 5.3× optical zoom, 8× digital zoom,...
Briefs: Software
The Synergistic Engineering Environment (SEE) is a system of software dedicated to aiding the understanding of space mission operations. The SEE can integrate disparate sets of data with analytical...
Products: Photonics/Optics
Optical Surfaces (Surrey, UK) offers standard and custom optical flats measuring up to 600 mm in diameter and manufactured of materials such as glass, Zerodur, and silica. The optical flats can be used for measuring surface...
Briefs: Software
TetrUSS is a comprehensive suite of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) programs that won the Software of the Year award in 1996 and has found increasing use in government, academia, and...
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