Electronics & Software

The objective of the current innovation was to develop a simple but accurate method for predicting boundary layer transition that would include the growth characteristics of laminar boundary layer disturbances while requiring only the pressure distribution over an aerodynamic...

Google Earth is a geospatial browser produced by Google that allows interactive exploration of the world from data servers on the Internet. An integral part of Google Earth is a built-in “cache” that is stored locally on the user’s computer, and allows the user to later revisit previously...

A methodology was developed for the analysis and design of systems subject to parametric uncertainty in which design requirements are specified via hard inequality constraints. Hard constraints are those that must be satisfied for all parameter realizations within a given uncertainty model....

While keyword full-text searches work well for textual data, they do not work well for numeric, date, or other more highly structured information. In particular, Netmark/XDB could retrieve any record where the author contained “Knight” in the text, but could not return only those records from...

This work was conducted to create a means of simulating and visualizing the behavior of a self-stabilizing distributed clock synchronization protocol developed at LaRC (Langley Research Center). The protocol has many applications including projects that directly...

The CCSDS ENCAP Over AOS Over UDP software engine encapsulates live Internet Protocol (IP), DTN Bundle Protocol (BP), or Licklider Transport Protocol (LTP) traffic over a Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS)-compliant Encapsulation Ser vice...

There is an association between High-Intensity Long-Duration Continuous AE (HILDCAA) activity intervals and the acceleration of relativistic >1 MeV electrons in the magnetosphere. All of the HILDCAAs that occurred in solar cycle 23 (SC23) from 1995 to 2008 led to the acceleration of...

For formation flying, rendezvous and docking, and proximity operations with small bodies of the solar system, spacecraft require simultaneous translational and rotational agility. The necessary agility is generally provided by combinations of multiple small thrusters and torque-only actuators. To use these...

This technology is a method for registration of terrain models created using stereovision on a planetary rover. Most 3D model registration approaches use some variant of iterated closest point (ICP), which minimizes a norm based on the distances between corresponding points on an arbitrary 3D surface where closest points...

Traditional error budgets that characterize pointing capability in terms of a single radial angle lack sufficient information to support analysis of pointing error in terms of distance along a nearby surface.

Traceable Automation with Remote Display and Interruptible Scheduler (TARDIS) is a software set designed for use in ground operations. TARDIS is a multi-mission automation framework that supports seamless integration of manual and automatic processing. It was...

The JPF Core System is a framework to analyze and verify Java bytecode programs. The major component of JPF core is an extensible and runtime-configurable virtual machine (VM) that can be customized with runtime components such as specific instruction sets and plug-ins to observe program execution. The JPF core can...

Single-Doppler retrieval of low-level, two-dimensional winds is desired to compare ground radar wind retrievals to satellite scatterometer wind retrievals. This needs to be integrated within the growing collection of open-source radar tools maintained by the Python Atmospheric/Ocean Sciences (PyAOS)...

Prior space missions have not routinely used onboard decision-making. The Autonomous Sciencecraft (ASE), flying onboard the Earth Observing One spacecraft, has been flying autonomous agent software for the past decade that enables it to analyze acquired imagery onboard, and use that analysis to...

libSPRITE is a set of software libraries used in the development of software applications. The libraries provide components for encoding engineering units, math functions, a task scheduler built on top of pthreads, a publish/subscribe data distribution system, and a Lua scripting language interface.

Spacecraft design is inherently difficult due to the complexity of the systems involved and the expense of testing hardware in a realistic environment. The number and cost of flight tests can be reduced by performing extensive simulation and analysis studies to understand vehicle...

The ability to read complicated Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) files in MATLAB was required for analyzing data from the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) cryovac test campaign for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project.This software was written to fill that specific need, but...

The Space Station Research Explorer provides current information on International Space Station (ISS) experiments, facilities, and research results through video, photos, interactive media, and in-depth descriptions on iOS and Android devices.

Radio telescopes that employ arrays of many antennas are in operation, and ever-larger ones are being designed and proposed. Signals from the antennas are combined by cross-correlation. While the cost of most components of the telescope is proportional to the...

The objective of this innovation was to develop a methodology of fabricating thermopile detectors using standard semiconductor fabrication techniques. The goal was to develop a fabrication process that minimized the roughening of the Si legs during patterning of the metallic couples, and to...

High-temperature electronic integrated circuits have been demonstrated in silicon carbide (SiC) depletion mode MESFETs. This process is only capable of producing depletion mode n-channel MESFET transistors. With only this type of transistor, designing a logic gate is a challenge. A previous logic gate design that can be...

Microwave power transmission using rectenna technology has attracted a strong interest in conjunction with wireless electric power delivery to infrastructure and subjects located at a remote place. A typical rectenna, which is a major...

Within the space community, there is a need to exchange a wide variety of data between partner organizations. The Framework software library can be used to exchange any type of data between partners. It provides these core capabilities:

The increasing availability of accessible geospatial data with a turnaround time of days or hours provides unique opportunities for responders to better plan responses to crises, and to inform victims, friends, and relatives of local crisis conditions. However, this raw data is not readily interpretable by the...

The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) is a wide-field sky survey of the optical transient sky (e.g., supernovae, variable stars) that uses image subtraction for the discovery of astronomical transients. Astronomical transients, such as supernovae, are only...

Block GP is a Gaussian Process regression framework for multimodal data that can be an order of magnitude more scalable than existing state-of-the-art nonlinear regression algorithms. The framework builds local Gaussian Processes on semantically meaningful partitions of the data and provides higher prediction...

There is a need to define the information architecture, ontologies, and patterns that drive the construction and architecture of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) models, but less clarity is given to the logical follow-on of that effort: how to practically leverage the resulting semantic...

This software, written in the Python programming language, estimates turbulence from Doppler radar data. It ingests radar data using the Department of Energy’s Py-ART open-source radar software toolkit.

The Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Testbed has a need to capture and analyze high-datarate (<2 Mbps required) baseband information sent over RF by the JPL Software-Defined Radio (SDR). An RF4425 front end, coupled with a MicroGate Synclink USB and custom C++...