Electronics & Software

A Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery (FDIR) system needs some internal concept of how the monitored system operates. This “operating concept” needs mathematical logic to represent the cause and effect relationship between constituent components of the system,...

Available guidance approaches for large numbers (i.e., swarms) of artificial agents are currently very limited. Swarms in nature (e.g., bees, birds, ants) typically contain hundreds to thousands of agents. The problem is how to mimic nature, and develop guidance laws for artificial (manmade)...

In the United States, as many as 7,000 commercial and private aircraft may be in the air simultaneously at any given time and date, and the total number of commercial flights in a given 24-hour period generally exceeds 50,000. To maintain the safety and efficiency of air travel, this innovation...

DAPS was designed to support the DAWN-AIR project participating in the Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) hurricane campaign. It controls the data acquisition system consisting of a scanner that directs the lidar beam, an inertial navigation system/GPS (INS/GPS) unit for monitoring...

The Debris & ICE Mapping Analysis Tool (DIMAT) system is a Web-based system that supports communication, data integration, data sharing, and problem definition/resolution through use of an integrated presentation framework for ice and debris description and analysis. It provides an integrated...

This lidar data fusion approach is based on associating samples from sparse lidar data with groups of region objects determined by a unique image segmentation approach, HSeg (Hierar - chical Segmentation). This segmentation approach, which was previously developed by...

Driving loads such as electric motors, relay coils, and solenoids requires a relatively large initial pull-in or start-up current from a driver in order to initiate operation of the load. To maintain continuous operation, the hold or running operating current required for a load may be 20%...

The invention is a radio frequency identity detector (RFID)-based system that assists a user in location of an item, in response to an electronic query for the status of the item. The item(s) being sought may be a book on a library shelf, an item from a store inventory, a legal or financial document, a medical...

Ionizing radiation has a detrimental effect on digital electronics that need to operate in extraterrestrial environments. As space missions become longer and more complex, there is a need for flight computers that can withstand harsh radiation environments...

This software reduces the workload of the mission manager by distributing selected aircraft data to the various investigators onboard the aircraft so they do not have to continuously request the data updates. This system will then send the investigator’s comments and observations that were previously written in notebooks to a server...

ACT is able to provide insight into acquisition, operational, and life-cycle affordability early in program formulation prior to a commitment of architecture, or anytime during the program to change systems or subsystems. ACT analyzes different systems or architecture configurations for affordability that...

A feature-added, interactive version of the video release entitled “Ascent” was developed. The software version contains the full HD (high definition) movie along with extra scenes, still imagery, a movie trailer, and producer notes. The software has been packed as an iOS app, intended for use on...

This iPhone/iPad application allows the general public to access information about the Cassini mission. It enables viewing of the latest images released by the mission, allows access to images that describe the present position of the spacecraft, and provides flyby countdowns for each targeted flyby.

(LWWE) is a cross-platform server that provides support for automation and orchestration of task execution.

A computer program implements a model of the performance of the CheMin (Chemistry and Mineralogy) instrument — a miniaturized instrument that simultaneously performs x-ray diffraction (XRD) and x-ray fluorescence (XRF) measurements on small material samples. The CheMin instrument is being...

This software specializes in discovering the location and intrinsic parameters of an imaging camera when such information was not recorded in the metadata of an image. It provides a simple command line interface for specifying the input and output for the two camera perspectives.

Software has been developed that mitigates anomalously low CO2 retrieval values, due to low-lying clouds, for improved CO2 sensing accuracy. Using machine learning techniques, hand-labeled data was used to train intelligently a multivariate...

The notion of Timeline has been used informally in spacecraft operations software for some time, but it has not heretofore been formalized and unified either syntactically or semantically. In this work, the Timeline has been formalized and unified so that the commonality can be exploited to reduce the cost of developing...

Particle filters (PFs) offer the possibility of addressing many unsolved problems in orbit determination and prediction. This work builds on an existing GSRP (Graduate Student Researchers Project) effort to incorporate a particle filter into GSFC’s (Goddard Space Flight...

A quantity called “the conserved scalar” is very important in the modeling of turbulent reactive flows in large eddy simulations because, if it can be defined, it numerically simplifies the solution of the conservation equations by confining the reaction term to a...

A common objective for primitive body missions (i.e., those to asteroids, comets, and small planetary moons) is to map the target body surface as completely as possible. Ideally, this map is constructed from a large collection of images containing multiple views of every point on the...

Research on using inexpensive and personal-level parallel computing architectures to speed up the implementations of the class of particle filters has been conducted. This study leverages NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and multi-core CPUs (central processing units) that are quickly becoming commonly...

Modern datasets consisting of retrievals from space-based missions have target results, but often are accompanied by hundreds or thousands of other retrieved parameters or facts regarding a particular retrieval (e.g., pressure, temperature, spectral...

A number of deep space missions have imaged plumes at Io, Enceladus, and other smaller bodies. These phenomena provide valuable information regarding these bodies. To date, this imagery has been captured fortuitously. The ability to utilize onboard processing to conduct campaigns capturing large numbers...

A software application detects the heart rate of an individual by using a real-time video stream from a common camera connected to their computer. This involves no contact between the user and the camera, or calibration between individual users. NASA’s...