Magazine

The current state-of-the-art Stirling engines use sinusoidal piston and displacer motion to drive the thermodynamic cycle and produce power. Research performed at NASA Glenn has shown that non-sinusoidal waveforms have the potential to increase Stirling engine power density, and...

This technology provides a method for interrogating collections of items with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. It increases the read accuracy, meaning that more of the item tags will be successfully read. It also permits smaller tag antennas than would otherwise be necessary.

Some meteorites representative of certain classes of asteroids are 25% or more water by weight. This is consistent with infrared spectra of some asteroids, indicating hydrated minerals are abundant in some varieties of carbonaceous chondrite asteroids. Since water is very valuable in space, it would...

Stirling engines typically achieve high efficiency, but lack power density. Low power density prevents them from being used in many applications where internal combustion engines are viable competitors, and increases system costs in applications that require...

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory offers a method to manufacture biomarker sensor arrays with nanoscale resolution and active regions on the order of 1 micron by applying nanolithographic direct-write techniques to the fabrication of Silane...

The use of thin-film sensors has several advantages over wire or foil sensors. For example, thin-film sensors do not require special machining of the components on which they are mounted, and, with thicknesses less than 10 μm, they are considerably thinner than wires or...

The Deep Space Network (DSN) is a collection of three sites around the globe. The positioning of the sites, 120° longitude apart, allows at least one site to see every patch of sky at all times, thus facilitating continuous coverage for any deep...

The representation of mission operations systems (MOS) has been unique to each mission, although there are many common concerns that need to be addressed. A consistent approach and language are needed for representing mission operations systems. The Mission Service Architecture Framework (MSAF) is a...

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...

The modeling of turbulent reactive flows is a subject of contemporary research. Current turbulent-reaction models cannot account for realistic complexities such as distinct species...

The NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) is a data-centric system designed for the processing and archiving from NASA’s Earth Observation missions and their distribution, as well as provision of specialized services to users. The major...

The NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) is a data-centric system designed for processing and archiving from NASA’s Earth Observation missions and their distribution, as well as provision of specialized services to users. The major...

The Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program is responsible for providing communications and navigation services to spaceflight missions located throughout the solar system. Astronauts, mission controllers, and scientists depend upon the reliable transmission of information between...

Many natural or complex engineered systems rely upon critical functions or processes that can be measured with the aid of various sensors or other novel devices. As a result, sensor and measurement data can be used to learn a parametric or non-parametric model of the behavior for a...

The Matlab Webification Science Client consists of several functions that access remote w10n-sci repositories to retrieve data. It supports user sessions to authenticate and authorize access to restricted repositories. In command line mode, it can list the contents of a w10n-sci node, change to other nodes, and...

Current science objectives, such as high-contrast imaging of exoplanets, have led to the development of high-order adaptive optics (AO) systems possessing several thousand deformable mirror (DM) actuators. These systems typically rely on integrator-based control...

X-ray astronomy offers the opportunity to observe important phenomena, including the early accretion of massive black holes and detecting diffuse ionized intergalactic gas that is heated to X-ray temperatures...

Ahighly reliable, very low-phase, and low-amplitude-noise laser is required as an oscillator for the LISA mission. A commercial product made by Redfern Integrated Optics met these requirements (1550-nm PLANEX External Cavity Laser), but it operated at 1.5 microns, not the required LISA...

Stereoscopic time-resolved visualization of three-dimensional structures in a hypersonic flow was performed for the first time in NASA Langley Research Center’s 31-inch Mach 10 Air Tunnel. Nitric oxide (NO) was seeded into hypersonic boundary layer flows...

NASA’s Langley Research Center has developed the Ground-to-Space Laser Calibration (GSLC) system concept for calibrating Earth observing sensors measuring reflected radiance. GSLC is capable of calibrating sensitivity to polarization, degradation of optics, and response to stray light of...