Magazine

An interferometer objective lens (or diverger) may be used to transform a collimated beam into a diverging or converging beam. A typical objective lens is optimized to deliver a diffraction-limited beam to an optic or optical system under test. Often, imaging...

A compact CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) camera system has been developed with high resolution (1.3 Megapixels), a USB (universal serial bus) 2.0 interface, and an onboard memory. A compact design of a 2×4 in. (≈5×10 cm) multilayer PCB (printed circuit board) was designed that contains the...

A crater-detection algorithm has been conceived to enable automation of what, heretofore, have been manual processes for utilizing images of craters on a celestial body as landmarks for navigating a spacecraft flying near or landing on that body. The images are acquired by an electronic camera...

The Radio Science Receiver (RSR) is an open-loop receiver installed in NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), which digitally filters and records intermediate-frequency (IF) analog signals. The RSR is an important tool for the Cassini Project, which uses it to measure perturbations of the...

A promising method of detecting imminent tsunamis and estimating their destructive potential involves the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) data in addition to seismic data. Application of the method is expected to increase the reliability of global tsunami-warning systems, making it possible to save lives...

A genetic programming (GP)-based, nonlinear modeling structure relates soil moisture with synthetic-apertureradar (SAR) images to present representative soil moisture estimates at the watershed scale. Surface soil moisture measurement is difficult to obtain over a large area due to a...

A proposed development of laserbased instrumentation systems would extend the art of laser Doppler vibrometry beyond the prior limits of laserassisted remote hearing and industrial vibrometry for detecting defects in operating mechanisms. A system according to the proposal could covertly measure...

This work extends the lossless data compression technique described in “Fast Lossless Compression of Multispectral-Image Data,” (NPO- 42517) NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 30, No. 8 (August 2006), page 26. The original technique was extended to include a...

Two prototype Reconfigurable, Bidirectional Flexfet Level Shifters (ReBiLS) have been developed, where one version is a stand-alone component designed to interface between external low voltage and high voltage, and the other version is an embedded integrated...

A single-pixel prototype of a W-band detector module with a digital backend was developed to serve as a building block for large focal-plane arrays of monolithic millimeter-wave integrated circuit (MMIC) detectors. The module uses low-noise amplifiers, diode-based mixers, and a...

Superconducting electronic components have been developed that provide current rectification that is tunable by design and with an externally applied magnetic field to the circuit component. The superconducting material used in the device is relatively free of pinning sites with its critical current...

An integrated waveguide-to-MMIC (monolithic microwave integrated circuit) chip operating in the 300-GHz range is designed to operate well on highpermittivity semiconductor substrates typical for an MMIC amplifier, and allows a wider MMIC substrate to be used, enabling integration with larger MMICs...