Tech Briefs

Electronics & Software

Access our comprehensive library of technical briefs on electronics and software, from engineering experts at NASA and major government, university, and commercial laboratories.

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Briefs: Information Technology
Injecting Errors for Testing Built-in Test Software
Two algorithms have been conceived to enable automated, thorough testing of Built-in test (BIT) software. The first algorithm applies to BIT routines that define pass/fail criteria based on values of data read from such hardware devices as memories, input ports, or registers. This algorithm...
Briefs: Information Technology
Guidance and Control System for a Satellite Constellation
A distributed guidance and control algorithm was developed for a constellation of satellites. The system repositions satellites as required, regulates satellites to desired orbits, and prevents collisions.
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Portable Health Algorithms Test System
A document discusses the Portable Health Algorithms Test (PHALT) System, which has been designed as a means for evolving the maturity and credibility of algorithms developed to assess the health of aerospace systems. Comprising an integrated hardware-software environment, the PHALT system allows systems health...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Technique for Performing Dielectric Property Measurements at Microwave Frequencies
A paper discusses the need to perform accurate dielectric property measurements on larger sized samples, particularly liquids at microwave frequencies. These types of measurements cannot be obtained using conventional cavity perturbation methods, particularly for...
Briefs: Energy
Most wind farms consist of horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWTs), but an alternative paradigm for wind energy extraction is found in vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) designs. A single spatially-isolated VAWT has a significantly lower power coefficient.
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Briefs: Energy
In recent years, better stabilizer formulations for ethylene vinyl-acetate have been developed, giving more confidence in the long-term stability of PV packaging materials. Because of this, some manufacturers have stopped using Ce-doped glass. National Renewable Energy Laboratory researchers studied Ce-free glass.
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Briefs: Energy
A circuit topology has been designed to guarantee the output of intrinsically safe power for the operation of electrical devices in a hazardous environment. This design...
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Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Mechanical squeezing has been found to alter the frequency tuning of a whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) optical resonator that has an elliptical shape and is made of lithium niobate. It...
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Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Configurable Multi-Purpose Processor
Advancements in technology have allowed the miniaturization of systems used in aerospace vehicles. This technology is driven by the need for next-generation systems that provide reliable, responsive, and cost-effective range operations while providing increased capabilities such as simultaneous mission support,...
Briefs: Software
Automated Computer Access Request System
The Automated Computer Access Request (AutoCAR) system is a Web-based account provisioning application that replaces the time-consuming paper-based computer-access request process at Johnson Space Center (JSC). AutoCAR combines rules-based and role-based functionality in one application to provide a...
Briefs: Software
Range Safety for an Autonomous Flight Safety System
The Range Safety Algorithm software encapsulates the various constructs and algorithms required to accomplish Time Space Position Information (TSPI) data management from multiple tracking sources, autonomous mission mode detection and management, and flight-termination mission rule evaluation. The...
Briefs: Software
Fast and Easy Searching of Files in Unisys 2200 Computers
A program has been written to enable (1) fast and easy searching of symbolic files for one or more strings of characters, dates, or numerical values in specific fields or columns and (2) summarizing results of searching other fields or columns. Intended for use in Unisys 2200-series...
Briefs: Software
Parachute Drag Model
DTV-SIM is a computer program that implements a mathematical model of the flight dynamics of a missile-shaped drop test vehicle (DTV) equipped with a multistage parachute system that includes two simultaneously deployed drogue parachutes and three main parachutes deployed subsequently and simultaneously by use of pilot...
Briefs: Software
Evolutionary Scheduler for the Deep Space Network
A computer program assists human schedulers in satisfying, to the maximum extent possible, competing demands from multiple spacecraft missions for utilization of the transmitting/receiving Earth stations of NASA’s Deep Space Network. The program embodies a concept of optimal scheduling to attain...
Briefs: Information Technology
Algorithms for Learning Preferences for Sets of Objects
A method is being developed that provides for an artificial-intelligence system to learn a user’s preferences for sets of objects and to thereafter automatically select subsets of objects according to those preferences. The method was originally intended to enable automated selection, from...
Briefs: Information Technology
Two image-data-processing algorithms are essential to the successful operation of a system of electronic hardware and software that noninvasively tracks the direction of a person’s...
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Briefs: Information Technology
Model for Simulating a Spiral Software-Development Process
A discrete-event simulation model, and a computer program that implements the model, have been developed as means of analyzing a spiral software-development process. This model can be tailored to specific development environments for use by software project managers in making quantitative...
Briefs: Information Technology
Adapting ASPEN for Orbital Express
By studying the Orbital Express mission, modeling the spacecraft and scenarios, and testing the system, a technique has been developed that uses recursive decomposition to represent procedural actions declaratively, schemalevel uncertainty reasoning to make uncertainty reasoning tractable, and lightweight, natural...
Briefs: Information Technology
Algorithm That Synthesizes Other Algorithms for Hashing
An algorithm that includes a collection of several subalgorithms has been devised as a means of synthesizing still other algorithms (which could include computer code) that utilize hashing to determine whether an element (typically, a number or other datum) is a member of a set (typically, a...
Briefs: Software
Integrating Radar Image Data With Google Maps
A public Web site has been developed as a method for displaying the multitude of radar imagery collected by NASA’s Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AIR-SAR) instrument during its 16-year mission. Utilizing NASA’s internal AIRSAR site, the new Web site features more sophisticated visualization...
Briefs: Software
Mercury Toolset for Spatiotemporal Metadata
Mercury http://mercury.ornl.gov is a set of tools for federated harvesting, searching, and retrieving metadata, particularly spatiotemporal metadata. Version 3.0 of the Mercury toolset provides orders of magnitude improvements in search speed, support for additional metadata formats, integration with...
Briefs: Software
Social Tagging of Mission Data
Mars missions will generate a large amount of data in various forms, such as daily plans, images, and scientific information. Often, there is a semantic linkage between images that cannot be captured automatically. Software is needed that will provide a method for creating arbitrary tags for this mission data so that...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Interface Supports Lightweight Subsystem Routing for Flight Applications
A wireless avionics interface exploits the constrained nature of data networks in flight systems to use a lightweight routing method. This simplified routing means that a processor is not required, and the logic can be implemented as an intellectual property (IP) core in a...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Demonstration of a Submillimeter-Wave HEMT Oscillator Module at 330 GHz
In this work, radial transitions have been successfully mated with a HEMT-based MMIC (high-electron-mobility-transistor-based monolithic microwave integrated circuit) oscillator circuit. The chip has been assembled into a WR2.2 waveguide module for the basic implementation with...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Flexible Peripheral Component Interconnect Input/Output Card
The Flexible Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Input/Output (I/O) Card is an innovative circuit board that provides functionality to interface between a variety of devices. It supports user-defined interrupts for interface synchronization, tracks system faults and failures, and...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Several different experimental monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) amplifiers have been designed to operate in frequency bands ranging from 350 to 500 GHz and were undergoing...
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Briefs: Software
Public Risk Assessment Program
The Public Entry Risk Assessment (PERA) program addresses risk to the public from shuttle or other spacecraft re-entry trajectories. Managing public risk to acceptable levels is a major component of safe spacecraft operation. PERA is given scenario inputs of vehicle trajectory, probability of failure along that...
Briefs: Software
Particle Swarm Optimization Toolbox
The Particle Swarm Optimization Toolbox is a library of evolutionary optimization tools developed in the MAT-LAB environment. The algorithms contained in the library include a genetic algorithm (GA), a single-objective particle swarm optimizer (SOPSO), and a multi-objective particle swarm optimizer (MOPSO)....
Briefs: Software
Telescience Support Center Data System Software
The Telescience Support Center (TSC) team has developed a database-driven, increment-specific Data Requirement Document (DRD) generation tool that automates much of the work required for generating and formatting the DRD. It creates a database to load the required changes to configure the TSC data...

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