Solar heating has been proposed as a means of deployment of structures of the type described in "Cold Hibernated Elastic Memory (CHEM) Expandable Structures," (NPO-20394), NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 23, No. 2 (February 1999), page 56. A few examples of structures that would be amenable to the CHEM...

A proposed valve unit called a "vacuum pumping station" would be incorporated into a plumbing system that supplies a vacuum for vacuum insulated cryogenic equipment. The vacuum pumping station is intended to perform functions now performed by, and to be a simpler and more reliable alternative to, an assembly of components...

A report describes experiments in which time-averaged and unsteady local variations in the densities of underexpanded supersonic free jets issuing from a choked circular nozzle were measured by laser-induced Rayleigh scattering. This study is part of a continuing effort to understand the...

Ignitor and keeper power supplies have been developed specifically for a Hall-effect thruster with a cold cathode. Prior to the development of these power supplies, difficulties had been observed in the operation of cold-cathode Hall thrusters; in particular, they did not start reliably...

Focal-plane electronic image sensors that would not saturate when exposed to intense illumination have been proposed. These sensors could be used to acquire accurate, scientific-quality data on images (including spectral images), even when the images contain both very bright and very dark areas. The proposed...

A proposed reciprocating pump would operate at a small stroke and would contain no sliding parts. The oscillatory motion of a piston in the pump could be provided by a magnetostrictive actuator, for example.

An electronic circuit has been designed as a prototype of a device that determines whether critical electrical systems have been compromised because of pyrolysis of polyimide-insulated wires. This circuit can be modified to prevent further pyrolysis and to check for indications of...

Active-pixel-sensor (APS) circuits and perhaps other dense complementary metal oxide/semiconductor (CMOS) very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits would be powered by infrared beams transmitted by laser diodes and received by photodetectors, according to a proposal. Clock signals for...