Keyword: Systems engineering

INSIDER: Sensors/Data Acquisition

The term “gigafactory” has become common lexicon for a manufacturing facility constructed to produce the almost incalculable number of individual battery cells required for the millions of...

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Articles: Energy
Research and development work continue to deliver cleaner, more efficient, and more diverse ways of generating the energy we need to power modern society.
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Application Briefs: Automotive
The moving assembly line remains an integral piece of most automobile manufacturing.
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Application Briefs: Robotics, Automation & Control
OPTIMISM, the full-scale engineering model of Perseverance, is helping NASA assess the risk of potential driving hazards on Mars.
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Briefs: Green Design & Manufacturing
The eco-friendly process removes heavy metals, dyes, and other pollutants.
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Articles: Electronics & Computers
Live discussions will explore electric vehicles, propulsion, advanced electronics, and more.
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Briefs: Aerospace
CAESAR Plug-in for MagicDraw
Users can maintain the consistency of a flight system design.
Articles: Mechanical & Fluid Systems

In recent years, cable management has come into the limelight because machine reliability has increased dramatically, even though robots have grown more complex. Unfortunately, the...

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Articles: Test & Measurement

Laser engineers are leveraging new materials, unusual gain mechanisms, and innovative cavity designs to push laser performance into new regimes. Pulse lengths are getting...

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Facility Focus: Defense

Sandia National Laboratories — headquartered in Albuquerque, MN, with a principal lab in Livermore, CA — is operated and managed by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC (a wholly owned...

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Briefs: Propulsion
Thruster-Based Attitude and Translation Control with Minimum Pulse-Count Disturbance Rejection

Thruster-based control typically requires a substantial engineering effort in order to mitigate an important issue: the control system tends to use many thruster pulses to accomplish what a single thruster pulse could do instead. This fundamental...

Facility Focus: Aerospace

The MITRE Corporation was chartered in 1958 as a private, not-for-profit organization to provide engineering and technical guidance for the federal government. Today, with locations in McLean, VA and Bedford, MA, MITRE...

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Briefs: Software
Using SysML to Model Layered System Interfaces

To produce accurate system architecture descriptions, it is essential to be able to describe interfaces between system elements at different levels of abstraction and from different perspectives at the same time. For example, the connection from system A to system B may be viewed at a high level as...

Articles: Motion Control

Direct drive servo motor and drive technology has many advantages. It reduces an axis’ parts count, mechanical losses, and often its objectionable noise. What’s more, it also...

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Briefs: Photonics/Optics

After more than 16 years of operation, NASA’s Earth Observing–1 (EO-1) spacecraft was decommissioned on March 30 of this year. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) developed by...

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Briefs: Software
Human Factors Analysis Support Tool (H-FAST) v 2.0

Large-scale systems engineering projects involve multiple teams of engineers working in parallel. These projects typically include numerous human factors challenges, many of which first become evident during the integration stage. Human factors evaluations are essential in gathering human...

Briefs: Electronics & Computers

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison created computer chips that can be configured to perform complex calculations and store massive amounts of information within the...

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Briefs: Software
A Systems Engineering Approach to Architecture Development

Architecture development often is conducted prior to system concept design when there is a need to determine the best-value mix of systems that works collectively in specific scenarios and time frames to accomplish a set of mission area objectives. Conducted prior to Pre-Phase A of the...

Briefs: Software
Multi-Mission Operations System (MMOS)

Each mission needs to develop a Mission Operations System (MOS). Without a standard design to use as a reference, system engineers typically look to a subset of previous missions and develop a system with a mix of heritage, new design, and in some cases, reinvention of existing capabilities. If a reference...

Briefs: Information Technology
Systems Engineering Education and Development (SEED) Web Application

This application serves as Web-based management of the Systems Engi - neering Education and Development (SEED) program, and enables the SEED Program Manager to track and manage the applications and assignments. In the past, the handling of the applications and assignments was...

Briefs: Software
Extended Testability Analysis (ETA) Tool V8.0

An assessment of a system’s safety requirements is required early in the design process when cost and time impacts are minimal. These requirements include fault detection, failure isolation, and failure recovery. Systems engineering groups at NASA have been exploring model-based products to better...

Articles: Aerospace

Technology often takes circuitous paths. A magnetron developed for precision bombing during World War II led to the microwave oven, and a battery-powered drill created for collecting...

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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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Briefs: Materials

NASA has developed a class of low-density, flexible ablators that can be fabricated into heat-shields capable of being packaged, stowed, and deployed in space. The key characteristics of this new...

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Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Characterizing Richness of Previously Unmapped Terrain and Estimating its Impact on Navigation Performance using 3D Range Sensors in Flight

Landers to large planetary bodies such as Mars typically use a secondary reconnaissance spacecraft to generate high-fidelity 3D terrain maps that are subsequently used for landing site selection and creating...

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: Photonics/Optics
Characterizing Richness of Previously Unmapped Terrain and Estimating its Impact on Navigation Performance using 3D Range Sensors in Flight

Landers to large planetary bodies such as Mars typically use a secondary reconnaissance spacecraft to generate high-fidelity 3D terrain maps that are subsequently used for landing site selection and creating...

Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Scenario Power Load Analysis Tool (SPLAT) MagicDraw Plug-in

Power consumption during all phases of spacecraft flight is of great interest to the aerospace community. As a result, significant analysis effort is exerted by both system and electrical-domain engineers to understand the rates of electrical energy generation and consumption under many...

Briefs: Communications
Confidence Intervals for the Bit Error Rate of Coded Communications Systems

The bit error rate (BER) is a wellunderstood metric for measuring communications system performance. When a system is not amenable to analytical performance analysis, a Monte Carlo simulation is often used to determine the performance. In such simulations, it is...