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News: Software
Tactile handles forklifts, industrial trucks, and motorized carts are being developed that employ pressure sensors to detect the direction in which a user is pushing or pulling the...
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News: Test & Measurement
Many machines such as turbines, oil drills, health monitors, and nuclear reactors require internal sensors to monitor physical states such as temperature. Researchers are...
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News: Test & Measurement
A low-energy nuclear reaction imaging technique designed to detect the presence of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium in cargo containers arriving at U.S. ports was...
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News: Data Acquisition
NASA and its partners are validating and advancing technologies that will assist the FAA as they develop the regulations to allow integration of unmanned aircraft into the National Airspace...
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News: Manufacturing & Prototyping
After a full week in Germany, Rittal Corporation (www.rittal.us), the world’s largest enclosure manufacturer and a leader in thermal management of electrical, electronic, and IT...
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Question of the Week
Could tear-off screens catch on?
This week's Question: While LG and Samsung have worked to develop screens that roll and bend, a new patent from Google describes a screen that can be torn like a piece of paper. Images in the filing show an advertisement with coupons that can be pulled off and used in-store, as well as a drawing of a robot that has...
Briefs: Information Technology
Framework Software Library Version 1.0
Within the space community, there is a need to exchange a wide variety of data between partner organizations. The Framework software library can be used to exchange any type of data between partners. It provides these core capabilities:
Briefs: Information Technology
Crisis Mapping Toolkit (CMT) V1
The increasing availability of accessible geospatial data with a turnaround time of days or hours provides unique opportunities for responders to better plan responses to crises, and to inform victims, friends, and relatives of local crisis conditions. However, this raw data is not readily interpretable by the...
Briefs: Software
Real-Bogus Machine Learning Systems at the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory
The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) is a wide-field sky survey of the optical transient sky (e.g., supernovae, variable stars) that uses image subtraction for the discovery of astronomical transients. Astronomical transients, such as supernovae, are only...
Briefs: Information Technology
Scalable Gaussian Process Regression
Block GP is a Gaussian Process regression framework for multimodal data that can be an order of magnitude more scalable than existing state-of-the-art nonlinear regression algorithms. The framework builds local Gaussian Processes on semantically meaningful partitions of the data and provides higher prediction...
Briefs: Information Technology
MBSE-Driven Systems Engineering Visualization Suite
There is a need to define the information architecture, ontologies, and patterns that drive the construction and architecture of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) models, but less clarity is given to the logical follow-on of that effort: how to practically leverage the resulting semantic...
Briefs: Software
Python Turbulence Detection Algorithm (PyTDA)
This software, written in the Python programming language, estimates turbulence from Doppler radar data. It ingests radar data using the Department of Energy’s Py-ART open-source radar software toolkit.
Briefs: Imaging
One-Micron (1064-nm) Planar External Cavity Laser (PLANEX)
A highly reliable, very low-phase and low-amplitude-noise laser is required as an oscillator for the LISA mission. A commercial product made by Redfern Integrated Optics met these requirements (1550 nm PLANEX External Cavity Laser), but it operated at 1.5 microns, not the required LISA...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Micro Cylindrical Ion Trap Micro Mass Spectrometer Instrument System
The goal of this work was to advance the development of new, extremely small (≈2 cm3), low-power (≈3 W), and low-cost micro mass spectrometer instrument systems (μMSIS) through the application of microelectro-mechanical system (MEMS) design and fabrication, and microsystem...
Briefs: Imaging
Invertible Time Invariant Linear Filtering (InTILF) Method for Pattern Detection and Modeling of Stochastic One- or Two- Dimensional Data
X-ray astronomy offers the opportunity to observe important phenomena, including the early accretion of massive black holes and detecting diffuse ionized intergalactic gas that is heated to X-ray temperatures...
Briefs: Imaging
High-performance thermal imagers like Mars Climate Sounder (MCS) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment on the Lunar...
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Articles: Aerospace
Last year, engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, tested an additive manufacturing process that is being used to make some of the parts for NASA’s new rocket,...
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Application Briefs: Aerospace
maxon RE 13 brushed DC motors maxon precision motors Fall River, MA 508-677-0520 www.maxonmotorusa.com In 2018, the European Space Agency (ESA) will send the Solar Orbiter into space. A...
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Articles: Aerospace
NASA Technology Nick Blanton spends a lot of time outdoors, skiing in the winter months and hiking when the weather’s warm. All of this takes a toll on his electronic gadgets, which are...
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Articles: Manufacturing & Prototyping
The technologies NASA develops don’t just blast off into space. They also improve our lives here on Earth. Life-saving search-and-rescue tools, implantable medical devices, advances in commercial aircraft safety,...
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Articles: Imaging
Using sophisticated 3D imaging, a team at University College London, The European Synchrotron (ESRF), University of Manchester, Harwell Oxford, Oregon State University, and the National...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
There are many different types of filters in machine vision that can be utilized to improve or change the image of the object under inspection. It is important to understand the different technologies behind the...
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Application Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Modern fiber optics have undergone remarkable advances since their development in the 1960s. The growing demand for fiber-optic cable, especially in the telecommunications industry, has led to an...
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Application Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Using a custom-designed drone, a researcher from The Ohio State University mapped glaciers and wetlands in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range. Despite a discovered drop in glacier growth, the findings from...
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Briefs: RF & Microwave Electronics
High-Data-Rate Platform to Capture and Analyze Raw Baseband Clock/Data
The Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Testbed has a need to capture and analyze high-datarate (<2 Mbps required) baseband information sent over RF by the JPL Software-Defined Radio (SDR). An RF4425 front end, coupled with a MicroGate Synclink USB and custom C++...
Briefs: RF & Microwave Electronics
V-FASTR Radio Transient Classifier
The V-FASTR (VLBA Fast Transient Experiment) system was motivated by the desire to monitor the radio sky for interesting transient events. To be confident that no interesting extragalactic event is missed, every VFASTR candidate requires human review and evaluation. Candidates consist of pulsar pulses, spurious...
Briefs: RF & Microwave Electronics
Wideband, Dual-Polarized, Ultra-Low-Noise Focal Plane Array Feed for Active/Passive Microwave Remote Sensing
NASA missions utilize active, passive, or both, microwave sounders with a large reflector antenna as an important component. In most of these applications, design engineers have realized that desirable science requirements (spatial and...
Briefs: RF & Microwave Electronics
RF Source Modifications to Improve Performance of an Electronegative Plasma Thruster
In traditional gridded electrostatic ion thrusters, positively charged ions are generated from a plasma discharge of noble gas propellant and accelerated to provide thrust. A separate electron source, typically a neutralizer cathode that consumes propellant, is...

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