Advanced aerobots that would be powered by solar photovoltaic batteries and that would be capable of storing energy for occasional operation during short intervals at power levels far beyond those of the photovoltaic batteries have been proposed. Aerobots are robotic balloon-buoyed airborne...

The NASAView computer program provides access to, and display of, sets of scientific data in the Planetary Data System (PDS) archive. These data — totalling about 5 terabytes — were acquired during NASA's planetary-exploration missions and are stored along with descriptive information...

The Operations Impact Assessor (OIA) computer program facilitates rapid assessment of the effects of designs of spacecraft on spacecraft-processing operations at a launch site. OIA is a user-friendly, object-oriented, artificial-intelligence application program that features model-based...

A brief report summarizes the design of the lightweight, high-torque wheel drive of a small robotic vehicle used to explore the surface of Mars. Planetary gearing was selected for compactness and high torque capability. The input stages were fitted with ball bearings to survive the cold (down to -100 °C) Martian...

The Dynamics Algorithms for Real-Time Simulation (DARTS) computer program solves the equations of motion of tree-topology, flexible, and/or multibody mechanical systems as diverse as molecules, mechanisms, robots, spacecraft, and ground vehicles. It has proven to be particularly useful for...

A signaling-and-detection scheme has been proposed for use in conjunction with the remote-monitoring concept described in "Beacon Monitoring Would Reduce Interactions With Remote Systems" (NPO-19706), NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 21, No. 5 (May 1997), page 54. To recapitulate: A remote system (a...

Two reports describe early phases of continuing studies directed toward the selection and adaptation of industrial work-measurement and methods-analysis procedures for application to the Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF) at Kennedy Space Center. These studies were prompted by a need to...

DARTS Shell (Dshell) is a multimission spacecraft simulator for the development, integration, and test of flight software and hardware. Dshell reduces the time and cost of developing simulation programs by enabling the development of the software in modular, reusable form and by...

The Flight Software Memory Tracker (FMT) computer program is a collection of utility subprograms developed for use on the ground to track images of the flight software (FSW) in the computers aboard the Cassini spacecraft. [As used here, "images" signifies both (1) the memory load and...

The paper entitled "Potential Commercial Applications From Combustion and Fire Research in Space" reviews the status of potential commercial applications derived from research on combustion in microgravity environments encountered in orbiting spacecraft. Such research...

The Virtual Reality Mars Atlas User Interface (VR-MAUI) provides an atlaslike interface for access to Mars data. This access is provided via the World Wide Web, using JAVA. Within VR-MAUI, images are organized as maps. These maps provide a natural coordinate system, which...