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Briefs: Imaging
Plenoptic Imager for Automated Surface Navigation
An electro-optical imaging device is capable of autonomously determining the range to objects in a scene without the use of active emitters or multiple apertures. The novel, automated, low-power imaging system is based on a plenoptic camera design that was constructed as a breadboard system....
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Reconstituted Three-Dimensional Interactive Imaging
A method combines two-dimensional images, enhancing the images as well as rendering a 3D, enhanced, interactive computer image or visual model. Any advanced compiler can be used in conjunction with any graphics library package for this method, which is intended to take digitized images and...
Briefs: Software
Observing System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) for the HyspIRI Spectrometer Mission
The OSSE software provides an integrated end-to-end environment to simulate an Earth observing system by iteratively running a distributed modeling workflow based on the HyspIRI Mission, including atmospheric radiative transfer, surface albedo effects, detection, and...
Briefs: Software
Probabilistic Design and Analysis Framework
PRODAF is a software package designed to aid analysts and designers in conducting probabilistic analysis of components and systems. PRODAF can integrate multiple analysis programs to ease the tedious process of conducting a complex analysis process that requires the use of multiple software packages. The...
Briefs: Software
Excavator Design Validation
The Excavator Design Validation tool verifies excavator designs by automatically generating control systems and modeling their performance in an accurate simulation of their expected environment. Part of this software design includes interfacing with human operations that can be included in simulation-based studies and...
Briefs: Software
Momentum Management Tool for Low-Thrust Missions
A momentum management tool was designed for the Dawn low-thrust interplanetary spacecraft en route to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, in an effort to better understand the early creation of the solar system. Momentum must be managed to ensure the spacecraft has enough control authority to perform...
Briefs: Software
Mixed Real/Virtual Operator Interface for ATHLETE
The mixed real/virtual operator interface for ATHLETE (MSim-ATHLETE) is a new software system for operating manipulation and inspection tasks in JPL’s ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer). The system presents the operator with a graphical model of the robot and a palette of...
Briefs: Software
Antenna Controller Replacement Software
The Antenna Controller Replacement (ACR) software accurately points and monitors the Deep Space Network (DSN) 70-m and 34-m high-efficiency (HEF) ground-based antennas that are used to track primarily spacecraft and, periodically, celestial targets. To track a spacecraft, or other targets, the antenna must be...
Briefs: Software
Efficient Parallel Engineering Computing on Linux Workstations
A C software module has been developed that creates lightweight processes (LWPs) dynamically to achieve parallel computing performance in a variety of engineering simulation and analysis applications to support NASA and DoD project tasks. The required interface between the module and...
Briefs: Software
The FAILSAFE project is developing concepts and prototype implementations for software health management in mission-critical, real-time embedded systems. The project unites features of the...
Briefs: Software
This software has been designed to detect water bodies that are out in the open on cross-country terrain at mid- to far-range (approximately 20–100 meters), using imagery acquired from a stereo pair of...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Nonlinear Combustion Instability Prediction
The liquid rocket engine stability prediction software (LCI) predicts combustion stability of systems using LOX-LH2 propellants. Both longitudinal and transverse mode stability characteristics are calculated. This software has the unique feature of being able to predict system limit amplitude.
Briefs: Physical Sciences
JMISR INteractive eXplorer
MISR (Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer) INteractive eXplorer (MINX) is an interactive visualization program that allows a user to digitize smoke, dust, or volcanic plumes in MISR multiangle images, and automatically retrieve height and wind profiles associated with those plumes. This innovation can perform 9-camera...
Briefs: Software
Characterization of Cloud Water-Content Distribution
The development of realistic cloud parameterizations for climate models requires accurate characterizations of sub-grid distributions of thermodynamic variables. To this end, a software tool was developed to characterize cloud water-content distributions in climate-model sub-grid scales.
Briefs: Software
Autonomous Planning and Replanning for Mine-Sweeping Unmanned Underwater Vehicles
This software generates high-quality plans for carrying out mine-sweeping activities under resource constraints. The autonomous planning and replanning system for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) takes as input a set of prioritized mine-sweep regions, and a...
Briefs: Software
'In-Situ' Pointing Correction and Rover Microlocalization
Two software programs, marstie and marsnav, work together to generate pointing corrections and rover micro-localization for in-situ images. The programs are based on the PIG (Planetary Image Geometry) library, which handles all mission dependencies. As a result, there is no mission-specific...
Briefs: Software
Dayside Ionospheric Superfountain
The Dayside Ionospheric Superfountain modified SAMI2 code predicts the uplift, given storm-time electric fields, of the dayside near-equatorial ionosphere to heights of over 800 kilometers during magnetic storm intervals. This software is a simple 2D code developed over many years at the Naval Research Laboratory,...
Briefs: Software
Hybrid-PIC Computer Simulation of the Plasma and Erosion Processes in Hall Thrusters
HPHall software simulates and tracks the time-dependent evolution of the plasma and erosion processes in the discharge chamber and near-field plume of Hall thrusters. HPHall is an axisymmetric solver that employs a hybrid fluid/ particle-in-cell (Hybrid-PIC)...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
BioNet Digital Communications Framework
BioNet v2 is a peer-to-peer middleware that enables digital communication devices to “talk” to each other. It provides a software development framework, standardized application, network-transparent device integration services, a flexible messaging model, and network communications for distributed...
Briefs: Software
Operation Program for the Spatially Phase-Shifted Digital Speckle Pattern Interferometer — SPS-DSPI
SPS-DSPI software has been revised so that Goddard optical engineers can operate the instrument, instead of data programmers. The user interface has been improved to view the data collected by the SPS-DSPI, with a real-time mode and a play-back...
Briefs: Software
The iPatch computer code for intelligently patching surface grids was developed to convert conceptual geometry to computational fluid dynamics (CFD) geometry (see figure). It...
Briefs: Software
The Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science System (AEGIS) provides automated targeting for remote sensing instruments on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, which at...
Briefs: Software
Space Images for NASA/JPL is an Apple iPhone application that allows the general public to access featured images from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). A back-end infrastructure stores, tracks, and retrieves space...
Briefs: Software
Real-Time Feature Tracking Using Homography
This software finds feature point correspondences in sequences of images. It is designed for feature matching in aerial imagery. Feature matching is a fundamental step in a number of important image processing operations: calibrating the cameras in a camera array, stabilizing images in aerial movies,...
Briefs: Software
Stereo Imaging Tactical Helper
The Stereo Imaging Tactical Helper (SITH) program displays left and right images in stereo using the display technology made available by the JADIS framework, which was described in “JAVA Stereo Display Toolkit,” NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 32, No. 4 (April 2008), page 63. An overlay of the surface described by the...
Briefs: Software
XMbodyinfo was designed to evaluate potential reference trajectories, providing a proficient way to assess the quality of all satellite body flybys for a Cassini type mission tour. It is autonomous and will generate a variety of ORS...
Briefs: Software
Software was developed that automatically detects minerals that are present in each pixel of a hyperspectral image. An algorithm based on sparse spectral unmixing with Bayesian...
Briefs: Software
Over 150 years ago, Faraday provided the first comprehensive scientific study on the physics of burning candles. Complex combustion driven by the rate at which gases diffuse through each other produces...
Briefs: Software
Plasmas consist of electrons, ions, and neutral species interacting with each other and with externally imposed electromagnetic fields. Plasma etching and deposition of thin films are critical...
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