Electrical/​Electronics

A report presents additional information on the Mechanical System Design/Analysis Tool (MSAT) computer program, which was reported in "Program for Designing a Mechanical System" (LEW-16710, NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 23, No. 9 (September 1999), page 32. To recapitulate: MSAT is a user-friendly, multidisciplinary software system that...

Spectrometers are used for applications such as chemical analysis, remote sensing, environmental measuring, and optical measurements. Most spectrometers utilize prisms and gratings, where the dispersion of light depends upon the angle and rotation of the grating. But gratings and other moving parts are...

A wireless information network (WIN) is undergoing development for use by workers at locations scattered across Kennedy Space Center (KSC). This WIN could be a prototype of a larger network that would serve all of NASA; by logical extension, it could also be a prototype of commercial WINs. By use of a combination of...

An electronic circuit has been designed as a prototype of a device that determines whether critical electrical systems have been compromised because of pyrolysis of polyimide-insulated wires. This circuit can be modified to prevent further pyrolysis and to check for indications of...

A unique data-acquisition system converts analog input voltages to 8-bit digital data at a rate as high as 109 samples per second (1 GHz), stores the data, and makes the data available for further processing. The system is compact, is highly resistant to ionizing radiation, consumes relatively...

In a proposed method of controlling the electric current supplied for charging a nickel/hydrogen battery, the rate of evolution of heat would be taken into account along with the electrical quantities (voltage, current, and/or charge as functions of time) that are traditionally taken into...

A test procedure has been devised to increase the accuracy with which lightning currents on a protective wire can be determined from raw current measurements. The procedure was conceived specifically for determining lightning currents on a steel cable used to protect the space shuttle...

A paper presents the concept of a system for autonomous communication among multiple satellites and other spacecraft. The design of the system would be based on an evolvable architecture of multiple intelligent agents (that is, artificial-intelligence constructs implemented in software and...

Sensor webs are developmental collections of sensor pods that could be scattered over land or water areas or other regions of interest to gather data on spatial and temporal patterns of relatively slowly changing physical, chemical, or biological phenomena in those regions. Each sensor pod would be a node in a data-gathering/...