Electronics & Software

An excerpt from JPL Document D-12104 presents additional information on the control system of a steerable microwave antenna that is mounted on the roof of a land vehicle and used to communicate with a geostationary satellite. The antenna and control system were described previously in...

When a silicon wafer is cut from an ingot, it is essentially impossible to align the cut perfectly with the crystal structure. Therefore the surface contour of the wafer will be a flat plane on which terraces consisting of additional atomic layers will be scattered. An atomic step will be...

Plasma windows can separate vacuum and atmosphere, or regions of high and low vacuums, in a way which facilitates transmission of various particle beams and/or radiation from low- to high-pressure regions. In a prototype device, a stabilized plasma arc...

Advanced aerobots that would be powered by solar photovoltaic batteries and that would be capable of storing energy for occasional operation during short intervals at power levels far beyond those of the photovoltaic batteries have been proposed. Aerobots are robotic balloon-buoyed airborne...

The Quick and Unusually Easy Repository Search computer program simplifies the search for information contained in a repository of documents at Marshall Space Flight Center. Searching for information on the basis of general subjects can be very time-consuming and frustrating: The repository at...

CACHESIM is a C-language computer program that simulates (1) cache-memory options associated with a computer hardware design concept and (2) related properties that can be expected to affect the overall performance of the computer, before the computer is constructed. Heretofore, the performance effects...

The NASAView computer program provides access to, and display of, sets of scientific data in the Planetary Data System (PDS) archive. These data — totalling about 5 terabytes — were acquired during NASA's planetary-exploration missions and are stored along with descriptive information useful...

Version 3.0 of the Boundary Element Solutions Technology Composite Modeling System (BESTCMS 3.0) is an advanced engineering software system for the microanalysis of fiber composite structures. BESTCMS is based on the BEST3D boundary-element program (COSMIC program LEW-15351). BESTCMS affords...