Electronics & Software

Ignitor and keeper power supplies have been developed specifically for a Hall-effect thruster with a cold cathode. Prior to the development of these power supplies, difficulties had been observed in the operation of cold-cathode Hall thrusters; in particular, they did not start reliably...

Range Safety Officers (RSOs) are used by NASA and other government agencies to assure protection of life and property during launch operations. The current decision-making system used by the RSOs at NASA Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) and the National Ranges, including the Eastern Range (ER) and Western...

QRAYPKS is a general-purpose FORTRAN optics-analysis computer program that enables the computation of path lengths to an unprecedented level of precision. The impetus for developing QRAYPKS was the need to mathematically model an outer-space laser interferometer to be used in detecting gravitational...

Engineering Data Summarization Flight Software is a computer program designed for use aboard a spacecraft to implement a concept, called "beacon monitoring," that has been discussed in several prior NASA Tech Briefs articles. The program generates summaries of operational data (e.g., sensor...

A computer program controls the automated acquisition, display, and reduction of data on the dynamics of magnetic bearings. The data gathered by use of this program are expected to enable the verification and enhancement of mathematical models of magnetic-bearing dynamics, thereby...

WebWinds is an interactive computer program that aids the visualization and exploration of scientific data. WebWinds is the successor to LinkWinds, which was reported in "LinkWinds — Flexible Software for Highly Interactive Visual Data Analysis" (NPO-19786), NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 20,...

The KSC Electronic Documentation System (KEDS) is a computer-intranet system at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for the storage and retrieval of engineering drawings and other engineering documents that have been officially released. Prior to the development of the KEDS, microfilm copies of...

Computer Aided Grid Interface (CAGI) is a computer program that serves as an interface between computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) programs and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) programs. CAGI reads Initial Graphics Exchange Specification (IGES) files from CAD/CAM...

A computer program introduces a predistortion into the chirp signal used to frequency-modulate a synthetic-aperture-radar (SAR) signal at the transmitter. The predistortion is intended to compensate for distortions introduced by nonideal performance of the various pieces of SAR equipment — especially the...

Experiments have shown that a substrate can be patterned with submicron features by the following procedure:

An advanced technique of deep reactive-ion etching (DRIE) has been developed for fabricating smooth vertical walls in silicon wafers. These walls are suitable for use as bounding surfaces of optical waveguides in photonic and optoelectronic devices. The roughness of a typical 8-µm-high...

A previously developed apparatus that tracks the orientation of the human eye has been modified to make it less susceptible to error induced by ambient infrared light. The apparatus is a commercial product intended primarily for use as a computer-control interface for a person who is physically unable to use a...

Interim User's Requirements Collection (IURC) is a software system that generates an interactive graphical user interface that enables users of the International Space Station (ISS) to specify their payload-planning and -scheduling requirements via the World Wide Web (WWW). IURC includes...

Three computer programs have been developed for ground processing of Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data from Landsat 7. The three programs and their functions are the following:

A report discusses the design of fast stochastic observers for spacecraft pointing control. In this special context, "observers" signifies mathematical algorithms, implemented on computers aboard spacecraft, through which one processes sensory data (principally, the outputs of star trackers and...