Tech Briefs

Developed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the subject technology is a portable airport runway/taxiway intersection lighting system and signage designed to prevent incursions. This proposed runway incursion prevention solution aids in the management and prevention of airport runway...

Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is a relatively new solid-state welding process, and many industries are now relying on this technique to produce advanced structures. Industries employing this technique include, but are not limited to, aeronautical, motor vehicle, and...

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center scientists have designed a vent that can be useful for purging closed compartments, while preventing backflow and foreign object entry. The technology uses a system of configurable devices to provide variable flow control and prevent water,...

Shock layer radiation is a form of aerodynamic heating that becomes significant at some entry velocities, depending on the vehicle trajectory and the planet’s atmosphere. Radiation heating is commonly computed with an appropriate method known as the tangent slab approximate in...

National Airspace (NAS)-wide simulations provide modeling to emulate tens of thousands of flights for full days of traffic in the U.S. They allow system-level research to be conducted for the simulated airspace, and are currently being used by NASA, FAA, and industry to study interactions, costs,...

Prior art techniques for testing abrasion resistance, such as the Taber test and the Bayer test, typically use a rubbing or scratching mechanism to test materials for abrasion resistance; specifically, either an abrasive material is rubbed across the test sample...

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center astrophysicists are developing better instruments to measure high-energy X-rays zipping about space when viewed from above the Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists at MSFC adapted a novel method for material removal and super-polishing to the mandrel...

Air sampling is used to collect samples of airborne particles present in an environment. Analyses of the air samples can provide information concerning potential exposure to harmful respirable agents. Bioaerosol sampling can be used to identify...

The Wallops Arc Second Pointer (WASP) is a balloon-borne attitude control system capable of pointing a telescope or instrument with accuracy and stability down to the arc second, or 1/3600 of a degree of angular measurement. When a high-powered telescope is integrated with WASP, it provides a highly precise...

The Orion Spacecraft is NASA’s vehicle for manned exploration outside of low Earth orbit. At the center of the Guidance, Navigation & Control (GN&C) subsystem is the GN&C Flight Software (FSW) that executes on the Vehicle Management Computers (VMCs). This software receives inputs...

The purpose of the Desktop Status application is to collect processor, memory, and storage usages of a computer running the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system, and record these data with time stamps to files at a user-defined time interval. A graphical user interface (GUI) captures users' inputs and displays them on a plot for...

In 2012, the National Research Council called for a new generation of astronomical telescopes to enable discovery of habitable planets, facilitate advances in solar physics, and enable the study of faint structures around bright objects by developing high-contrast imaging and...

Initially, relatively powerful computers were constructed as unique mainframes operated by larger corporations on isolated networks. Then, computers with modest amounts of computing power were made available to individuals as standalone personal computers. The...