Electronics & Software

Two-piece screens have been designed specifically for use in filtering a granular material to remove contaminant particles that are significantly wider or longer than are the desired granules. In the original application for which the two-piece screens were conceived, the granular material is...

The NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) IRKM-P tightly couples risk management and knowledge management processes and tools to produce an effective “modern” work environment. IRKM-P objectives include: (1) to learn lessons from past and current programs (Apollo, Space...

A document presents an update on the innovation reported in “Integrated Radial Probe Transition From MMIC to Waveguide” (NPO-43957), NASA Tech Briefs Vol. 31, No. 5 (May 2007), page 38. To recapitulate: To enable operation or testing of a monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC), it is...

A document presents data from tests of a low-noise amplifier module operating in the frequency range from 290 to 340 GHz — said to be the highest-frequency low-noise, solid-state amplifier ever developed. The module comprised a three-stage monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC)...

A paper presents further results of continuing research reported in several previous NASA Tech Briefs articles, the two most recent being “Stochastic Representations of Chaos Using Terminal Attractors” (NPO-41519), [Vol. 30, No. 5 (May 2006), page 57] and “Physical Principle for...

The silicon substrate carrier was created so that a large-area array (in this case 62,000+ elements of a microshutter array) and a variety of discrete passive and active devices could be mounted on a single board, similar to a printed circuit board. However, the density and...

A method and apparatus were developed to minimize latency (time delay) in virtual environment (VE) and other discrete-time computer-based systems that require real-time display in response to sensor inputs. Latency in such systems is due to the sum of the finite time required for information...

PrimeSupplier, a supplier cross-program and element-impact simulation model, with supplier solvency indicator (SSI), has been developed so that the shuttle program can see early indicators of supplier and product line stability, while identifying the...

A conceptual “intelligent assistant” and an artificial-intelligence computer program that implements the intelligent assistant have been developed to improve control exerted by a human supervisor over a robot that is so distant that communication between the human and the robot involves...

A document discusses the use of saturating transformers in a matrix arrangement to address individual cells in a high-voltage battery. This arrangement is able to monitor and charge individual cells while limiting the complexity of circuitry in the battery. The arrangement...

A document describes a tool that predicts the likelihood of land-falling tropical storms and hurricanes exceeding specified peak speeds, given the mean wind speed at various heights of up to 500 feet (150 meters) above ground level. Empirical models to calculate mean and standard deviation of...

Two tools were developed for designing station-keeping trajectories and estimating delta-v requirements for designing missions to a small body such as a comet or asteroid. This innovation uses NPOPT, a non-sparse, general-purpose sequential quadratic programming (SQP) optimizer and the...

An integrated modeling tool has been developed to include multi-body dynamics, orbital dynamics, and touch-and-go dynamics for spacecraft covering three types of end- effectors: a sticky pad, a brush-wheel sampler, and a pellet gun.

Agora software is a simulation of spacecraft attitude and orbit dynamics. It supports spacecraft models composed of multiple rigid bodies or flexible structural models. Agora simulates multiple spacecraft simultaneously, supporting rendezvous, proximity operations,...

Port-O-Sim is a software application that supports engineering modeling and simulation of launch-range systems and subsystems, as well as the vehicles that operate on them. It is flexible, distributed, object-oriented, and real-time. A scripting language is used to configure an array of simulation objects...

A computer program loads configuration code into a Xilinx field-programmable gate array (FPGA), reads back and verifies that code, reloads the code if an error is detected, and monitors the performance of the FPGA for errors in the presence of radiation. The program consists mainly of a set of VHDL files (wherein...