Magazine

A document discusses a zeolite-based sprayable molecular adsorber coating that has been developed to alleviate the size and weight issues of current ceramic puck-based technology, while providing a configuration that more projects can use to protect against degradation from outgassed materials within a spacecraft,...

A paper describes the Space-to-Space Communications System (SSCS) Software-Defined Radio (SDR) research project to determine the most appropriate method for creating flexible and reconfigurable radios to implement wireless communications channels for space vehicles so that fewer radios are...

Voting is officially open for the 2011 NASA Tech Briefs Readers’ Choice Product of the Year awards. You can cast your vote for one of 12 nominees featured this year as Products of the Month.

A new video compiles 309 images taken by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, providing an historic record of a three-year trek that totaled about 13 miles across a Martian plain pocked with smaller craters. While Opportunity was traveling from Victoria crater to Endeavour crater, between...

NASA engineers have produced a material that absorbs, on average, more than 99 percent of the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared light that hits it -- a development that promises to open new frontiers in space technology. Engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, developed...

Tractor beams — the ability to trap and move objects using laser light — are not just “Star Trek” science fiction, and are not beyond current technology. A team of NASA scientists has won funding to study the concept of remotely capturing planetary or atmospheric particles, and delivering them to a...

The 2011 Create the Future Design Contest — sponsored by COMSOL, Inc., PTC, and Tech Briefs Media Group (publishers of NASA Tech Briefs) — recognized innovation in product design in seven categories: Electronics (new this year), Consumer Products, Machinery & Equipment, Medical, Safety & Security,...

The Telemetry and Science Data Software System (TSDSS) was designed to validate the operational health of a spacecraft, ease test verification, assist in debugging system anomalies, and provide trending data and advanced science analysis. In doing so, the system parses, processes, and organizes raw data...

Single event upsets (SEUs) are a threat to any computing system running on hardware that has not been physically radiation hardened. In addition to mandating the use of performance- limited, hardened heritage equipment, prior techniques for dealing with the SEU problem often involved...

CropEx is a Web-based agricultural Decision Support System (DSS) that monitors changes in crop health over time. It is designed to be used by a wide range of both public and private organizations, including individual producers and regional government offices with a vested interest in...

The data analysis tool of choice for many Sun-Earth Connection missions is the Interactive Data Language (IDL) by ITT VIS. The increasing amount of data produced by these missions and the increasing complexity of image processing algorithms requires access to higher computing...

A microfabrication process is proposed to produce a nanopore membrane for continuous passive drug release to maintain constant drug concentrations in the patient’s blood throughout the delivery period. Based on silicon microfabrication technology, the dimensions of the...

High-power ultrasonic actuators are generally assembled with a horn, backing, stress bolt, piezoelectric rings, and electrodes. The manufacturing process is complex, expensive, difficult, and time-consuming. The internal stress bolt needs to be insulated and presents a potential internal discharge...

A high-performance design, and fabrication and growth processes to implement the design, have been devised for encapsulating a hydrated salt in a container that both protects the salt and provides thermal conductance between the salt and the environment surrounding the container. The unitary...

The front-to-back interface between microstrip and CPW (coplanar waveguide) typically requires complex fabrication or has high radiation loss. The microwave crossover typically requires a complex fabrication step. The prior art in microstrip-CPW transition requires a physical...

The use of electronic parts at cryogenic temperatures (

G-DYN is a multi-body dynamic simulation software engine that automatically assembles and integrates equations of motion for arbitrarily connected multibody dynamic systems.

G-TAG is a software tool for the multibody simulation of a spacecraft with a robotic arm and a sampling mechanism, which performs a touch-and-go (TAG) maneuver for sampling from the surface of a small celestial body. G-TAG utilizes G- DYN, a multi-body simulation engine...