Electronics & Software

In a high-speed signal transmission system that uses transformer coupling, there is a need to provide increased transmitted signal strength without adding active components. This invention uses additional transformers to achieve the needed gain. The prior art uses stronger drivers...

NASA Stennis Space Center’s (SSC’s) large rocket engine test facility requires the use of liquid propellants, including the use of cryogenic fluids like liquid hydrogen as fuel, and liquid oxygen as an oxidizer (gases which have been liquefied at very low temperatures). These fluids...

Soft x-ray optics can use narrow slots to direct x-rays into a desirable pattern on a focal plane. While square-pack, square-pore, slumped optics exist for this purpose, they are costly. Silicon (Si) is being examined as a possible low-cost replacement. A fabrication method was developed for...

A compact radiometric focal plane assembly (FPA) has been designed in which the filters are individually co-registered over compact thermopile pixels. This allows for construction of an ultralightweight and compact radiometric instrument. The FPA also incorporates micromachined baffles in order to...

The International Space Station (ISS) Visiting Vehicle Group needed a targeting tool for vehicles that rendezvous with the ISS. The Visiting Vehicle Ground Trajectory targeting tool provides the ability to perform both realtime and planning operations for the Visiting Vehicle Group. This tool provides a...

The Mobile Thread Task Manager (MTTM) is being applied to parallelizing existing flight software to understand the benefits and to develop new techniques and architectural concepts for adapting software to multicore architectures. It allocates and load-balances tasks for a group of threads that migrate across processors...

The Software Developer’s Assistant (SDA) helps software teams more efficiently and accurately conduct or execute software processes associated with NASA mission-critical software. SDA is a process enactment platform that guides software teams through project-specific standards, processes, and...

As remote sensing for scientific purposes has transitioned from an experimental technology to an operational one, the selection of instruments has become more coordinated, so that the scientific community can exploit complementary measurements. However, technological and scientific heterogeneity across devices...

Educational NASA Computational and Scientific Studies (enCOMPASS) is an educational project of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center aimed at bridging the gap between computational objectives and needs of NASA’s scientific research, missions, and projects, and academia’s latest...

A large-scale network that supports a large number of users can have an aggregate data rate of hundreds of Mbps at any time. High-fidelity simulation of a large-scale network might be too complicated and memory-intensive for typical commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) tools. Unlike a...

The objective of this research was to develop a fundamentally new method for detecting hidden moving targets within noisy and cluttered data-streams using a novel “soliton resonance” effect in nonlinear dynamical systems.

A document discusses the code RITRACKS (Relativistic Ion Tracks), which was developed to simulate heavy ion track structure at the microscopic and nanoscopic scales. It is a Monte- Carlo code that simulates the production of radiolytic species in water, event-by-event, and which may be used to simulate tracks and...

Carbon dioxide produced through respiration can accumulate rapidly within closed spaces. If not managed, a crew’s respiratory rate increases, head aches and hyperventilation occur, vision and hearing are affected, and cognitive abilities decrease....

The Mission Data System framework defines closed-loop control system abstractions from State Analysis including interfaces for state variables, goals, estimators, and controllers that can be adapted to implement a goal-oriented control system. The framework further provides an execution environment that...

ADEPT (Adaptive Distributed Environment for Procedure Training) is designed to provide more effective, flexible, and portable training for NASA systems controllers. When creating a training scenario, an exercise author can specify a representative rationale structure using the...

LEGEND (LEO-to-GEO Environment Debris model) is a three-dimensional orbital debris evolutionary model that is capable of simulating the historical and future debris populations in the near- Earth environment. The historical component in LEGEND adopts a deterministic approach to mimic the known...

Aerial refueling technology for both manned and unmanned aircraft is critical for operations where extended aircraft flight time is required. Existing refueling assets are typically manned aircraft, which couple to a second aircraft through the use of a refueling boom....

SpaceCube 1.5 is a high-performance and low-power system in a compact form factor. It is a hybrid processing system consisting of CPU (central processing unit), FPGA (field-programmable gate array), and DSP (digital signal processor) processing elements. The primary processing engine is the Virtex-5 FX100T FPGA, which has two...

High-speed serial communication (i.e., Gigabit Ethernet) requires differential transmission and controlled impedances. Impedance control is essential throughout cabling, connector, and circuit board construction.

This work involved developing space qualifiable switch mode DC/DC power supplies that improve performance with fewer components, and result in elimination of digital components and reduction in magnetics. This design is for missions where systems may be operating under extreme conditions, especially at elevated temperature...

This innovation is a series of time-tag pulses from a photomultiplier tube, featuring short time interval between pulses (e.g., 2.5 ns). Using the previous art, dead time between pulses is too long, or too much hardware is required, including a very-high-speed demultiplexer. A faster method is...

With the need for long periods of extravehicular activities (EVAs) on the Moon or Mars or a near-asteroid, the need for long-performance batteries has increased significantly. The energy requirements for the EVA suit, as well as surface systems such as rovers, have...