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Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Compact Focal Plane Assembly for Planetary Science
A compact radiometric focal plane assembly (FPA) has been designed in which the filters are individually co-registered over compact thermopile pixels. This allows for construction of an ultralightweight and compact radiometric instrument. The FPA also incorporates micromachined baffles in order to...
Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Previously, it was difficult to fabricate deformable mirrors made by piezoelectric actuators. This is because numerous actuators need to be precisely assembled to control the surface shape of...
Briefs: Lighting
Using thousands of nanometer-scale wires, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a sensor device that converts mechanical pressure – from a signature or a...
Briefs: Robotics, Automation & Control
A Kinematic Calibration Process for Flight Robotic Arms
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) robotic arm is ten times more massive than any Mars robotic arm before it, yet with similar accuracy and repeatability positioning requirements. In order to assess and validate these requirements, a higher-fidelity model and calibration processes were needed.
Briefs: Lighting
Commercial uses for ultraviolet (UV) light are growing, and now a new kind of LED under development at The Ohio State University could lead to more portable and low-cost uses...
Briefs: Robotics, Automation & Control
Magnetostrictive Alternator
This innovation replaces the linear alternator presently used in Stirling engines with a continuous-gradient, impedance-matched, oscillating magnetostrictive transducer that eliminates all moving parts via compression, maintains high efficiency, costs less to manufacture, reduces mass, and eliminates the need for a...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
High-precision encoders are used by earth observation instruments and in mechanisms for laser communication terminals (LCTs). A micro-radian resolution encoder for the LCT was designed for...
Briefs: Materials
This product is an efficient concrete waterproofing solution. The crystalline, anti-corrosive material features a patented eka-molecular-sieve structure. The cement-based material...
Briefs: Materials
Aqueous Superabsorbent Coating (ASC) technology is a liquid polymer solution that dries to form an absorbent film. It can absorb up to 40 g/g by weight of water, depending on the...
Briefs: Materials
Mechanisms are used widely in engineering applications due to their ability to translate force and movement. They are found in kinematic pairs, gears, cams, linkages, and...
Briefs: Medical
Detection of Only Viable Bacterial Spores Using a Live/Dead Indicator in Mixed Populations
This method uses a photoaffinity label that recognizes DNA and can be used to distinguish populations of bacterial cells from bacterial spores without the use of heat shocking during conventional culture, and live from dead bacterial spores using...
Briefs: Medical
Intravenous Fluid Generation System
The ability to stabilize and treat patients on exploration missions will depend on access to needed consumables. Intravenous (IV) fluids have been identified as required consumables. A review of the Space Medicine Exploration Medical Condition List (SMEMCL) lists over 400 medical conditions that could present and...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Slowing Light Via Beam Coupling in Dye-Doped Chiral Nematics
Apart from the fundamental interest of discovering the physical effects that are behind the light-matter interaction processes that make it possible, slowing and storing light currently attracts a lot of attention because the ability to control the propagation speed of optical pulses, to...
Briefs: Software
Visiting Vehicle Ground Trajectory Tool
The International Space Station (ISS) Visiting Vehicle Group needed a targeting tool for vehicles that rendezvous with the ISS. The Visiting Vehicle Ground Trajectory targeting tool provides the ability to perform both realtime and planning operations for the Visiting Vehicle Group. This tool provides a...
Briefs: Software
Mobile Thread Task Manager
The Mobile Thread Task Manager (MTTM) is being applied to parallelizing existing flight software to understand the benefits and to develop new techniques and architectural concepts for adapting software to multicore architectures. It allocates and load-balances tasks for a group of threads that migrate across processors...
Briefs: Software
Workflow-Based Software Development Environment
The Software Developer’s Assistant (SDA) helps software teams more efficiently and accurately conduct or execute software processes associated with NASA mission-critical software. SDA is a process enactment platform that guides software teams through project-specific standards, processes, and...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Global Positioning System (GPS) meteorology provides enhanced density, low-latency (30-min resolution), integrated precipitable water (IPW) estimates to NOAA NWS (National...
Briefs: Information Technology
Spatial Statistical Data Fusion (SSDF)
As remote sensing for scientific purposes has transitioned from an experimental technology to an operational one, the selection of instruments has become more coordinated, so that the scientific community can exploit complementary measurements. However, technological and scientific heterogeneity across devices...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Cryogenic Liquid Sample Acquisition System for Remote Space Applications
There is a need to acquire autonomously cryogenic hydrocarbon liquid sample from remote planetary locations such as the lakes of Titan for instruments such as mass spectrometers. There are several problems that had to be solved relative to collecting the right amount of...
Briefs: Sensors/Data Acquisition
Integrating a Microwave Radiometer into Radar Hardware for Simultaneous Data Collection Between the Instruments
The conventional method for integrating a radiometer into radar hardware is to share the RF front end between the instruments, and to have separate IF receivers that take data at separate times. Alternatively, the radar and radiometer...
Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Quality knives are typically fabricated from high-strength steel alloys. Depending on the application, there are different requirements for...
Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
High-Pressure Lightweight Thrusters
Returning samples of Martian soil and rock to Earth is of great interest to scientists. There were numerous studies to evaluate Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission architectures, technology needs, development plans, and requirements. The largest propulsion risk element of the MSR mission is the Mars Ascent Vehicle...
Briefs: Materials
Recently, additive manufacturing (AM) techniques have been developed that may shift the paradigm of traditional metal production by allowing complex netshaped...
Briefs: Materials
Ambient Dried Aerogels
A method has been developed for creating aerogel using normal pressure and ambient temperatures. All spacecraft, satellites, and landers require the use of thermal insulation due to the extreme environments encountered in space and on extraterrestrial bodies. Ambient dried aerogels introduce the possibility of using aerogel...
Briefs: Materials
Passivation of Flexible YBCO Superconducting Current Lead With Amorphous SiO₂ Layer
Adiabatic demagnetization refrigerators (ADR) are operated in space to cool detectors of cosmic radiation to a few 10s of mK. A key element of the ADR is a superconducting magnet operating at about 0.3 K that is continually energized and de-energized in...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
This invention is a new approach to designing foil bearings to increase their load capacity and improve their reliability through passive thermal management. In...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Propellant-Flow-Actuated Rocket Engine Igniter
A rocket engine igniter has been created that uses a pneumatically driven hammer that, by specialized geometry, is induced into an oscillatory state that can be used to either repeatedly impact a piezoelectric crystal with sufficient force to generate a spark capable of initiating combustion, or can be...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Unibody Composite Pressurized Structure
An integrated, generic unibody composite pressurized structure (UCPS) combined with a positive expulsion device (PED), consisting of an elastomeric bladder for monopropellant hydrazine, has been quasi-standardized for spacecraft use. The combination functions as an all-composite, nonmetallic, propellant tank...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Lightweight Liquid Helium Dewar for High-Altitude Balloon Payloads
Astrophysical observations at millimeter wavelengths require large (2-to-5- meter diameter) telescopes carried to altitudes above 35 km by scientific research balloons. The scientific performance is greatly enhanced if the telescope is cooled to temperatures below 10 K with no...
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