Magazine

This invention presents a nanoscale vacuum tube or vacuum transistor fabricated entirely using current silicon integrated circuit manufacturing techniques. Vacuum is better for electron transport than any semiconductor since there is no electron scattering. In addition, vacuum devices are immune to radiation....

Liquid rocket engine injectors can be extremely expensive to manufacture and hard to iterate to achieve high performance. Internal sealing points can also be the source of reliability issues. The technology disclosed here covers the application of a 3D additive manufacturing...

An approach was developed for making low-density, flexible ablators for a thermal protection system (TPS) from a flexible fibrous carbon substrate and a polymer resin. The material is foldable and stowable, and can be deployed in space without compromising performance. In addition, the...

This is a modification to technology for realizing durable and stable electrical functionality of high-temperature transistors. This modification is believed crucial to experimental implementation of SiC junction field effect transistors that electrically operated continuously at...

The NASA objective of expanding the human experience into the far reaches of space requires the development of regenerable life support systems. This work addresses the development of a regenerable air-revitalization system for trace-contaminant (TC) removal for the...

In a lithium sulfur cell, the reduction of sulfur to lithium sulfide is a critical series of reactions that provides a large theoretical capacity of 1,672 mAh/g sulfur. One of many challenges in this system is the solubility of generated lithium polysulfides during the...

Single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) are fullerenes of closed-cage carbon molecules typically arranged in hexagons and pentagons. Commonly known as “buckytubes,” these cylindrical carbon structures have extraordinary properties, including high electrical and thermal...

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has evolved into one of the most powerful, non-invasive diagnostic imaging techniques in medicine and biomedical research. The superior resolution and in-depth anatomical details provided by MRI are essential for...

NASA Flywheel is an augmented reality application intended to highlight NASA Glenn’s research efforts in the area of flywheel energy storage systems. The app utilizes a printed optical target, available on the GRC Flywheel Program brochure and through the NASA Glenn Web portal, to present users with 3D views of flywheel...

The current steady-state performance-based system studies are not adequate to evaluate certain advanced technologies for the challenges associated with meeting the transient performance requirements without better definition and control of component operating margins. Additional...

When a maneuverable spacecraft confronts a potentially unsafe conjunction with another space object, its operators must decide whether to maneuver to mitigate the risk of a collision. Such decisions may not be straightforward, since the operators must balance their...

The class of 3DGRAPE codes is designed to generate volume grids using iterative methods to solve the non-linear, nonhomogeneous, elliptic partial differential heat equation with heat sources. The solution to the heat equation develops...

This software models the Delay Tolerant Link State Routing protocol. It runs inside the QualNet network simulator, and allows injecting of external bundles when running in emulation mode. It leverages QualNet’s library of networking protocols and JPL’s CCSDS models.

The EUROPA planning system is a general-purpose, reusable, artificial intelligence software system for automatically generating plans for performing complex activities in parallel, in accordance with constraints on activities and their interactions. One part of the system input...

Vendor software supplied with commercial acoustic emission equipment is incapable of performing the analysis required to characterize damage and make decisions on remaining life for NASA composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs). The Acoustic Emission Analysis Applet (AEAA) software, currently...

The objective of this work was to develop a robust, cost-effective receiver with maximum dynamic range to track the frequency and power variation of a beacon signal. The result was the development of a frequency estimation algorithm that yields a more accurate...

The software for NASA’s Northstar Systems computed tomography (CT) and Picometrix Terahertz CT systems do not have the ability to unwrap and reslice cylindrical CT data to allow top-to-bottom, 2D sheet views of the data. Therefore, it is difficult to size flaws laterally...

The NASA Technology Transfer System (NTTS) is a NASA-created technology transfer workflow management system, a schema-less database management system used to track the life-cycle of NASA inventions. It is built on XDB, a NASA homegrown XML database. Because of its schema-less approach to store data, NTTS can host a cluster...