Electronics & Software

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...

This software tool automates the statistical analysis of heating indicators for a family of trajectories. It allows for quick and clear relative comparison of the trajectories by concisely and meaningfully reducing an arbitrarily large set of body point heating into single values that are used to...

The magnetic sensitivity of a Ka-band isolator’s output phase is measured at 7 × 10–4 deg/G level. This high degree of precision is enabled by the sensitive phase measuring capabilities of a testbed built to mimic NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory...

New hybrid computing systems consist of a multicore CPU (central processing unit) and one or more massively parallel accelerator devices, such as GPUs (graphics processing units). Effectively utilizing these systems involves using all of the available computational resources, which may be difficult to...

JPL Unified Methodology Process (JUMP) is an effort to establish a common frame of reference across OCIO (Office of Chief Information Officer) and EBIS (Enterprise Business Information Services Division). The iterative approach to project management is more powerful and efficient, enables better reviews, and...

The Automated Evaluation Software Web application was created using Java Enterprise technologies, which provided capabilities for dynamic report generation and Microsoft output. The Tomcat Application server makes the application robust, fast, and reliable. HTML 4.0 was used to create the user...

Engineering design models are normally developed using specific modeling tools such as Excel, Matlab, Maple, and Mathematica. It is difficult to connect various models written in different modeling environments and produce results without extensive effort. Phoenix ModelCenter is a...

For effective range safety, global positioning system (GPS) metric tracking must be robust to interference with, and jamming of, GPS signals. The conventional approach to mitigating interference and jamming is to use a Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna (CRPA)....

In order to develop a software-only test environment for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) mission, a solution was needed to send commands and receive telemetry between the TCTS (Telemetry and Command Test Set) and CMM-S card. The as-is solution requires the utilization of commercial...

For certain semiconductors with important applications, the existing bulk crystal growth technique from the melt usually results in poor-quality multi-crystalline ingots that cause the typically low yield of the commercial growth process. The...

This software computes a single-phase turbulent flow. The solution is independent of the grid spacing on which it is computed, and on the discretization order used for the differential equations. Grid spacing and discretization-order independence can be achieved by reformulating the large-eddy...

This software computes two-phase turbulent flows with phase change, and the solution is independent of the grid spacing on which it is computed and on the discretization order used for the differential equations. Grid spacing and discretization-order independence can be achieved...

This software provides a toolbox of MATLAB functions for detecting precursor wiring faults, such as chafing, in shielded impedance-controlled cable using measurements from off-the-shelf time domain reflectometry or vector network analyzer hardware. It advances the state-of-the-art in...

The Pegasus software is used as a pre-processor for overset-grid computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations. The main features of the software include: automated hole cutting algorithms; a projection scheme for fixing small discretization errors in overset surfaces; efficient...

The NASA Langley Aeronautics Systems Analysis Branch (ASAB) is heavily involved in research studies to evaluate new and emerging concepts targeted at improving the National Airspace System (NAS). The primary tool used by ASAB to perform these studies is the Airspace Concept Evaluation System (ACES), a medium-fidelity, NAS-wide...

The current flight software approach is monolithic in nature. Every module has tentacles that reach deep within dozens of other software modules. Because of these interdependencies between modules, functionality is difficult to extract and reuse for other missions.

This software conducts preliminary design studies for spacecraft missions. It supports a collaborative work environment that allows multiple engineers to work simultaneously on the same design. When designing a spacecraft or mission, it is important that each engineer has concurrent...

In the context of systems health management, simulations serve many uses. For one, the underlying physical models can be used by model-based health management tools to develop diagnostic and prognostic models. These simulations should incorporate both nominal and faulty behavior with the ability to inject various faults into the system....

Scientists need to be able to quickly develop and run parallel simulations without writing low-level message passing codes using compiled languages such as C/C++/Fortran. Traditionally, high-level languages that support rapid development, such as MATLAB, IDL, Mathematica, and Python,...