Electrical/​Electronics

A computer program has been written as a tool for developing optical pulse-position-modulation (PPM) receivers in which photodetector outputs are fed to analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and all subsequent signal processing is performed digitally. The program can be used, for example, to simulate an...

An electrical connector was developed that is tolerant of the presence of lunar dust. Novel features of the connector include the use of a permeable membrane to act both as a dust barrier and as a wiper to limit the amount of dust that makes its way into the internal chamber of the connector. The development...

High-speed, low-power, reconfigurable electronic hardware has been developed to implement ICER-3D, an algorithm for compressing hyperspectral-image data. The algorithm and parts thereof have been the topics of several NASA Tech Briefs articles, including “Context Modeler for Wavelet...

The high-speed ring bus at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) allows for future growth trends in spacecraft seen with future scientific missions. This innovation constitutes an enhancement of the 1393 bus as documented in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 1393-1999 standard for a spaceborne...

The power and communications module is a printed circuit board (PCB) that has the capability of providing power to an embedded processor and converting Ethernet packets into serial data to transfer to the processor. The purpose of the new design is to address the shortcomings...

A two-dimensional synthetic-aperture radiometer, now undergoing development, serves as a test bed for demonstrating the potential of aperture synthesis for remote sensing of the Earth, particularly for measuring spatial distributions of soil moisture and ocean-surface salinity. The goal is to use the...

Electronic devices that exploit electrical switching of physical properties of thin films of perovskite materials (especially colossal magnetoresistive materials) have been invented. Unlike some related prior devices, these devices function at room temperature and do not depend on externally...

Nonvolatile electronic memory devices that store data in the form of electrical-resistance values, and memory circuits based on such devices, have been invented. These devices and circuits exploit an electrically-variableresistance phenomenon that occurs in thin films of certain oxides that exhibit the...

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 proposed method of modulating a sinusoidal carrier signal to convey digital information involves the use of histograms representing probability density functions (PDFs) that characterize samples of the signal waveform. Although almost any modulation can be characterized as amplitude, phase, or...

A system of electronic hardware and software synthesizes, in nearly real time, an image of a portion of a scene surveyed by as many as eight video cameras aimed, in different directions, at portions of the scene. This is a prototype of systems that would enable a pilot to view the scene...

In this invention, command and monitor functionality is moved between the two independent pieces of hardware, in which one had been dedicated to command and the other had been dedicated to monitor, such that some command and some monitor functionality appears in each. The only constraint is that the...

A prototype embedded avionics system has been designed for the next generation of NASA extra-vehicular-activity (EVA) spacesuits. The system performs biomedical and other sensor monitoring, image capture, data display, and data transmission. An existing NASA Phase I and II award winning design for an...

This innovation is designed to prevent a single end system communication node from negatively influencing the whole system’s behavior so that the network system can still operate if an end node is faulty. Placing a hub (star) in the middle of the system prevents propagation of critical control information that...

A modulator utilizing the Ku-band instead of the usual S-band has been developed to improve transmission rates for suborbital platforms. The unit operates in the 14.5–15.5-GHz band and supports data rates up to 200 Mbps.

Submillimeter-wave radiometers have traditionally been built by packaging each chip with a distinct function separately, and then combining the packaged chips to form subsystems. Instead of packaging one chip at a time, the radiometer on a chip (ROC) integrates whole wafers together to provide a robust, extremely powerful way...

An instrument for measuring the lifetime of luminescence (fluorescence or phosphorescence) includes a digital signal processor (DSP) as the primary means of control, generation of excitation signals, and analysis of response signals. In contrast, prior luminescencelifetime- measuring instruments...

Sensor signal processing is widely used on aircraft and spacecraft. The scheme employs multiple input/output nodes for data acquisition and CPU (central processing unit) nodes for data processing. To connect 110 nodes and CPU nodes, scalable interconnections such as backplanes are desired...

A new approach has been proposed for increasing astronaut comfort and speech capture. Currently, the special design of a spacesuit forms an extreme acoustic environment making it difficult to capture clear speech without compromising comfort. The current system, called...