Magazine

Micron-sized conductive fibers within a thermoplastic matrix enable polymeric antennas that can be molded in various shapes and sizes. The polymer antenna technology can even become an integral part of a device housing, thus reducing part count, concealing itself, and...

A 2000-pixel long-wave infrared sensor detects and monitors hot spots, wear points, and friction on operating machinery and other equipment. Using software, the device also displays the condition of heat-generating tools, including motors and bearings; collects temperature readings from...

A company seeks technology options for printing on a moving Polyvinyl Alcohol (PVA) film web before or during the production of liquitabs and other unit dose products. The technology must be able to print on PVA film either on-line (preferred), at line, or offline. The film production method, which will require a...

An organization is looking for technologies that can stabilize and deliver fragile RNA strands to plants and animals outside of a laboratory-controlled environment. The RNA strands may include dsRNA (double-stranded RNA) and shRNA (short hairpin RNA). A proposed solution must provide a method to...

All efforts to develop electronic equipment reach a stage where they need a board test station for each board. The SMAP digital system consists of three board types that interact with each other using interfaces with critical timing. Each board needs to be tested individually before combining into...

This innovation is intended to reduce the size, power, and complexity of pipeline analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) that require high resolution and speed along with low power. Digitizers are important components in any application where analog signals (such as light, sound, temperature, etc.) need...

A large category of scientific investigation takes advantage of the interactions of signals in the frequency range from 300 to 1,000 GHz and higher. This includes astronomy and atmospheric science, where spectral observations in this frequency range give information about molecular abundances,...

A document discusses the utilization of embedded clocks inside of operating network data links as an auxiliary clock source to satisfy local oscillator monitoring requirements. Modem network interfaces, typically serial network links, often contain embedded clocking...

A document discusses a liquid crystal variable retarder, an electro-optic element that changes the polarization of an optical beam in response to a low-voltage electronic signal. This device can be fabricated so that the element creates, among other states, a half-wave of...

For a given inertial frame of reference, the software combines the spacecraft orbits with the spacecraft attitude quaternions, and rotates the body-fixed reference frame of a particular spacecraft to the inertial reference frame. The conversion assumes that the two spacecraft...

AdapChem software enables high efficiency, low computational cost, and enhanced accuracy on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) numerical simulations used for combustion studies. The software dynamically allocates smaller, reduced chemical models instead of the larger, full chemistry models to evolve the calculation while ensuring the same...

The Extended Testability Analysis (ETA) Tool is a software application that supports fault management (FM) by performing testability analyses on the fault propagation model of a given system. Fault management includes the prevention of faults through robust design margins and quality assurance methods, or the...

The Proximity-1 Space Link Interleaved Time Synchronization (PITS) protocol provides time distribution and synchronization services for space systems. A software prototype implementation of the PITS algorithm has been developed that also provides the...

Keeping track of sequences onboard a spacecraft is challenging. When reviewing Event Verification Records (EVRs) of sequence executions on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER), operators often found themselves wondering which version of a named sequence the EVR corresponded to. The lack of this information...

This software allows science and mission operations to view graphs of geometric overflights of satellites and landers within the Mars (or other planetary) networks. It improves on the MaROS Web interface within any modern Web browser, in that it adds new capabilities to the MaROS suite.

MERTELEMPROC processes telemetered data in data product format and generates Experiment Data Records (EDRs) for many instruments (HAZCAM, NAVCAM, PANCAM, microscopic imager, Mössbauer spectrometer, APXS, RAT, and EDLCAM) on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER). If the data is compressed, then MERTELEMPROC decompresses the data...

pyam is a software development framework with tools for facilitating the rapid development of software in a concurrent software development environment. pyam provides solutions for development challenges associated with software reuse, managing multiple software configurations, developing software product lines,...

An innovation was created for the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor for integration of low-temperature detector chips with a silicon backshort and a silicon photonic choke through flip-chip bonding. Indium bumps are typically patterned using liftoff processes, which require thick resist. In some...