Electronics & Software

The goal of this work was to model lunar surface systems using a declarative planning system (ASPEN — Activity Scheduling/Planning Environment), provide a parameterizable Excel document to aid in the model generation, and deliver both Mac and PC versions. An adaptation of Microsoft Excel and...

“Portable Distributed Scripts” (PoDS) is a Python application that allows users to execute serial independent tasks concurrently across nodes on multicore clusters. The package consists of a set of scripts working together through a simple text-based interface. A user only needs to provide minimal information...

In order to demodulate an optical PPM signal, the receiver must align its slot clock to that of the received waveform to count the number of arrivals within each slot. The large bandwidth expansion factor of PPM, M/log2(M) requires a prohibitively large sample rate when a fixed sample clock N times greater than...

The detection of distant objects in an image is relevant to applications in defense, security, and robotics. Successfully detecting objects of interest has been a common problem with respect to intelligent computer vision. Automatic target recognition (ATR) systems have been formulated and...

Orbital remote sensing provides a powerful way to efficiently survey targets for features of interest in inaccessible regions of the Earth as well as on other planets. One such feature of astrobiological relevance is the presence of surface sulfur deposits, which may...

The Spaceport Weather Data Archive provides a fully searchable database of weather data gathered at Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Weather data includes wind, temperature, and humidity data from a surface meteorological tower network; upper air soundings from both weather balloons...

Given a date range, the UAVSAR MySQL database is queried to evaluate data acquisition, processing status, and network performance, and uses the Google Charts API to dynamically return images of pie and bar charts to visualize processing and network statistics. The...

A software simulator was developed to simulate data flow from the Interface Data Processing Segment (IDPS) to the Science Data Segment (SDS) for the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) via multiple Secure FTP (sftp) connections. The simulator is a multi-threaded Java program that handles the...

The recently launched Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) satellite, operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA), is providing multispectral global observations over the next several years to support a broad array of research and...

NASA seeks to preserve, and make readily accessible, historical Space Shuttle launch footage to inspire and educate NASA stakeholders both in and outside the NASA family through the dissemination of the Ascent production materials as a DVD, and through both NASA...

Combustion of realistic fuels is described by thousands of reactions involving thousands of species. Coupling these detailed chemical mechanisms with turbulence simulations is completely impractical because there is no computer powerful enough to solve the resulting equations.

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes often suffer from an “error floor” in which increasing signal-to-noise ratios do not lead to substantially better error rate performance. Error floors of LDPC codes are often not an inherent problem of the code design, but rather, a...

Nondestructive evaluation (NDE) method capability is determined by a statistical flaw detection study called probability of detection (POD) study. In many instances, the NDE flaw detectability is given as a flaw size such as crack length. The flaw is either a crack or behaving like a crack in terms of...

Liquid sprays are commonly used to inject fuels into combustion devices, making it important to study multicomponent (MC) two-phase flows in order to reveal their physics. “Multicomponent” is the terminology describing all fuels that are combinations...

This innovation creates observations of both targeted geographical regions of interest and general mapping observations, while respecting spacecraft constraints such as data volume, observation timing, visibility, lighting, season, and science priorities. This...

GPS radio occultation measurements are vital for climate monitoring and atmospheric temperature change detection. However, the data are irregularly distributed in space and time, which makes it inconvenient for many applications.

The innovation provides enhanced health management routines for batteries. A mathematical model has been developed to describe battery behavior during individual discharge cycles, as well as over the cycle life. Different prognostic modes for estimating the state of charge, state of life, end of discharge,...

To reduce the cost of building specialized interfaces, missions can adopt Goddard Mission Services Evolution Center (GMSEC) technologies and applications. Assurances need to be made that application implementation should follow the GMSEC messaging standards. The GMSEC Interface...

Many control applications require precision, high-voltage-capable stimulus current drivers for sensor excitation. In particular, a requirement for a stimulus driver that can be primarily integrated into a motor feedback signal conditioning ASIC (application...

Scandate cathodes are able to produce about 20 times the emission of conventional all-tungsten cathodes at the same temperature. Conversely, they operate at about 200 °C lower temperature for the same emission. Scandate cathodes have been studied since at least the 1960s. Between...

This innovation uses an active materials-based force-amplified mechanism and advanced piezoelectric materials for more efficient energy harvesting from mechanical shock and vibration. The harvested energy is stored in rechargeable batteries. The hybrid force/stress...

Battery health monitoring is an emerging technology field that seeks to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of battery systems before they run out of charge. Such predictive measures require interpretation of large amounts of battery status data within a Bayesian prognostic framework.

A high-rate GMSK (Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying) modulator was developed for space operation. Currently, multi-user modems are under development, and the GMSK modulator provides a way of packing more users within a space environment, especially for Mars exploration.

The NASA Experiment Designer (NED) is a client-server application that enables end-to-end support for driving long-running scientific computer simulations such as climate and weather models. The tool provides a friendly, single point of entry for configuring parameters associated...

This software was designed to automate delivery of tasking requests to a central queue, enabling integrated observation scenarios across multiple assets. It is a JAVA code application that enables machine-to-machine access between a client platform and the Campaign Manager application program interface (API) to...

This library provides an abstraction layer that an end user can access, interpolate, and perform fieldline integration for space weather simulation data. Normally, accessing and interpolating space weather simulation data requires knowledge of...