Electronics & Software

As crewed space missions extend beyond low Earth orbit, the need to reliably recover potable water is critical. Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the water is recycled from cabin humidity condensate, urine distillate, and hygiene wash wastes. In spacecraft cabin air environments,...

A micro-electrofluidic-spray propulsion (MEP) system was built on a micro scale, in which arrays of hundreds of nano-thrusters are etched on silicon wafers like ICs, only a centimeter on a side. Many dozens of these thruster chips can be...

The emerging interest in lunar mining poses a threat of contamination to pristine craters at the lunar poles, which act as cold traps for water, and may harbor other valuable minerals. Lunar Prospector type missions will be looking for volatile (molecular) compounds that may be masked by the exhaust...

The interactive visualization of large astrophysical datasets is a formidable challenge. Cosmological simulations performed on current terascale facilities typically generate datasets up to 100 gigabytes in size. In order to understand the complex three-dimensional structure within these...

DMLtoC.xsl is an XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) transform that converts a vehicle model described in DAVE-ML (an XML markup language) into a “C” language version of the same model. DAVE-ML is a markup language for describing aerodynamic vehicle models. A DAVE-ML...

This invention provides a visual and textual system, including a set of intuitive icons representing different activities, for indicating status of and/or change in a document or documents and/or in project operations, using the icons to indicate the presence of different classes of changes that have...

A software-based innovation called Mesh was developed that provides a single sign-on capability to the built-in public key authentication mechanism of Secure Shell (SSH) using system call interposition. Mesh is a secure, lightweight grid middleware. Each Mesh installation...

This simulation environment of Contact Graph Routing that uses the QualNet network simulator leverages the previously developed space communication models. This software models the Contact Graph Routing (CGR) system proposed for future NASA missions and used in DINETl and DINET2...

JavaGenes is a general-purpose software program that implements several different data optimization techniques. The program is intended for problems that have no gradient, comparing genetic algorithms with stochastic hill climbing and simulated annealing to generate optimal design solutions. JavaGenes can create many...

The atmospheric boundary layer is the lowermost layer of the atmosphere and is host to a plethora of physical processes that significantly affect weather, climate, and air quality. In many applications, detailed information about the boundary layer is required at high temporal and...

AROMA uses a boundary-element formulation to calculate normal and shear pressure distributions and sub-surface stresses for elastic bodies in contact. In addition to handling static normal and sheer loading, it also solves the contact problem for rolling elements such as bearings, traction drives, and...

There exist many datasets that can be viewed as multivariate time series, such as the daily high temperature at a locality, sensor recordings in diagnostic systems and scientific data, and music and video recordings. These time series reside in large...

A simple method of controlling recording and display of imaging spectrometer data in (airborne) flight was needed. Existing commercial packages were overly complicated, and sometimes difficult to operate in a bouncing plane. The software also was required to keep up with...

A series of scripts stitch together existing open-source Python modules for the purpose of displaying, cleaning, and measuring photometric properties within public Kepler data. The intent of these tools is to provide convenience to the Kepler science community, and to increase cost efficiency for the project....

This software provides the processing for a non-contact system that remotely estimates the heart rate and respiration rate of individuals as they carry on daily activities, and also enables detection of heart and respiration rate through walls.

Functional connections within the brain can be revealed through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which shows simultaneous activations of blood flow in the brain during response tests. However, fMRI specialists currently do not have a tool for visualizing the complex data that comes from fMRI scans....

Viewpoints software allows interactive visualization of multi-variate data using a variety of standard techniques. The software is built exclusively from high-performance, cross-platform, open-source, standards-compliant languages, libraries, and components. The techniques included are:

The development of the self-diagnostic accelerometer (SDA) is important to both reducing the in-flight shutdowns (IFSD) rate — and hence reducing the rate at which this component failure type can put an aircraft in jeopardy — and also as a critical enabling technology for future...

Wide-temperature and extreme-environment electronics are crucial to future missions. These missions will not have the weight and power budget for heavy harnesses and large, inefficient warm boxes. In addition, extreme-environment electronics, by their inherent nature, allow...

Polymeric and inorganic semiconductors offer relatively high quantum efficiencies, and are much less expensive and versatile to fabricate than non-amorphous silicon wafers. An optical fiber and cladding can be designed and fabricated to confine light for transport within ultraviolet and near-infrared media, using...

A new technology to create electrochemical double-layer supercapacitors is provided using carbon nanotubes as electrodes of the storage medium. This invention allows efficient transport between the capacitor electrodes through the porous nature of the nanotubes, and has a low interface resistance between...

A high level of autonomy is desired for future unmanned combat systems because lethality and survivability can be improved with much less communication bandwidth than would be necessary for preprogrammed or remotely operated systems. However, there are a number of technical...

Human space systems, such as the International Space Station (ISS) and future planned missions to the lunar surface and beyond, require the crew’s ability to locate and manage the physical resources that are required for use to achieve mission objectives. However, the...