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Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Some modifications that could be made, separately or together, have been conceived as improvements of the generic design of a structure of the type described in “Hybrid Inflatable...
Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Electrostatic Separator for Beneficiation of Lunar Soil
A charge separator has been constructed for use in a lunar environment that will allow for separation of minerals from lunar soil. Any future lunar base and habitat must be constructed from strong, dense materials to provide for thermal and radiation protection. It has been proposed that lunar...
Briefs: Materials
Wider-Opening Dewar Flasks for Cryogenic Storage
Dewar flasks have been proposed as containers for relatively long-term (25 days) storage of perishable scientific samples or other perishable objects at a temperature of –175 °C. The refrigeration would be maintained through slow boiling of liquid nitrogen (LN2). For the purposes of the...
Briefs: Materials
Supercapacitor Electrolyte Solvents With Liquid Range Below –80 °C
A previous NASA Tech Brief [“Low-Temperature Supercapacitors” (NPO-44386) NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 32, No 7 (July 2008), page 32] detailed ongoing efforts to develop non-aqueous supercapacitor electrolytes capable of supporting operation at temperatures below commercially...
Briefs: Materials
Silicon Oxycarbide Aerogels for High-Temperature Thermal Insulation
A high-performance, silicon oxycarbide (SiOC) aerogel material is suitable for use as thermal insulation at temperatures approaching 1,200 °C. These aerogel composites were created using cost-effective and commercially available polymeric precursors (the polymethylsiloxane resin,...
Briefs: Materials
New designs, and materials appropriate for such designs, are under investigation in an effort to develop coronagraph occulting masks having broad-band spectral characteristics...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Turbulence and the Stabilization Principle
Further results of research, reported in several previous NASA Tech Briefs articles, were obtained on a mathematical formalism for postinstability motions of a dynamical system characterized by exponential divergences of trajectories leading to chaos (including turbulence).
Briefs: Physical Sciences
An improved thermal-gradient cloud condensation nucleus spectrometer (CCNS) has been designed to provide several enhancements over prior thermal- gradient counters, including fast response and...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
An improved mathematical model has been developed of the time dependence of buildup or decay of electric charge in a high-resistivity (nominally insulating) material. The model is...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Terahertz Mapping of Microstructure and Thickness Variations
A noncontact method has been devised for mapping or imaging spatial variations in the thickness and microstructure of a layer of a dielectric material. The method involves (1) placement of the dielectric material on a metal substrate, (2) through-the-thickness pulse-echo measurements by...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Efficient Algorithmic Interleaver for Turbo Decoder
An efficient bit-interleaving algorithm for a turbo encoder differs from prior such algorithms in that it does not require memory to store permutation mappings and can work with constituent decoders that produce multiple bit reliabilities per decoding stage. The algorithm can be implemented in...
Briefs: Information Technology
Generalized Approach to Prognosis for an Engineering System
This new generalized approach to prognostics can provide an automated early failure prediction of an engineering system or its components, often in time to prevent occurrence of hard failures. This approach has been demonstrated in a proof-of-concept software prototype, shown to accurately...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
A proposed mobile robot, denoted the amorphous rover, would vary its own size and shape in order to traverse terrain by means of rolling and/or slithering action. The amorphous rover was conceived as a robust, lightweight...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
The space-frame antenna is a conceptual antenna structure that would be lightweight, deployable from compact stowage, and capable of deforming itself to a size, shape, and orientation required for a specific use. The...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
The space-frame lunar lander is a conceptual spacecraft or spacecraftlike system based largely on the same principles as those of the amorphous rover and the space-frame antenna described in the two immediately...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Traditionally, infrared (IR) space instruments have been focused by iterating with a number of different thickness shim rings in a thermal vacuum chamber until the focus meets requirements. This...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
This actuator design allows the extension and contraction of turnbuckle assemblies. It can be operated manually or remotely, and is extremely compact. It is ideal for turnbuckles that are hard to reach by...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Two packaged monolithic microwave integrated-circuit (MMIC) mixers have been designed to operate as subharmonically pumped frequency down-converters in receivers of satellite- or...
Briefs: Materials
Statistical Sampling of Tide Heights Study
The goal of the study was to determine if it was possible to reduce the cost of verifying computational models of tidal waves and currents. Statistical techniques were used to determine the least number of samples required, in a given situation, to remain statistically significant, and thereby reduce...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Multiparallel Three-Dimensional Optical Microscopy
Multiparallel three-dimensional optical microscopy is a method of forming an approximate three-dimensional image of a microscope sample as a collection of images from different depths through the sample. The imaging apparatus includes a single microscope plus an assembly of beam splitters and...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Sub-aperture interferometers — also called wavefront-split interferometers — have been developed for simultaneously measuring displacements of multiple targets. The terms “sub-aperture” and...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Vacuum-Compatible Wideband White Light and Laser Combiner Source System
For the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) Spectrum Calibration Development Unit (SCDU) testbed, wideband white light is used to simulate starlight. The white light source mount requires extremely stable pointing accuracy ( lights were coupled to a photonic crystal fiber (PCF).
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
In the process of connecting widely distributed antennas into a coherent array, it is necessary to synchronize the timing of signals at the various locations. This can...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Optical Tapers as White-Light WGM Resonators
A theoretical analysis has revealed that tapered optical waveguides could be useful as white-light whispering-gallerymode (WGM) optical resonators. The compactness and the fixed-narrow-frequency- band nature of the resonances of prior microdisk and microsphere WGM resonators are advantageous in...
Briefs: Imaging
Utilizing a Compact Color Microscope Imaging System (CCMIS), a unique algorithm has been developed that combines human intelligence along with machine vision...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Objective Lens Optimized for Wavefront Delivery, Pupil Imaging, and Pupil Ghosting
An interferometer objective lens (or diverger) may be used to transform a collimated beam into a diverging or converging beam. A typical objective lens is optimized to deliver a diffraction-limited beam to an optic or optical system under test. Often, imaging...
Briefs: Imaging
CMOS Camera Array With Onboard Memory
A compact CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) camera system has been developed with high resolution (1.3 Megapixels), a USB (universal serial bus) 2.0 interface, and an onboard memory. A compact design of a 2×4 in. (≈5×10 cm) multilayer PCB (printed circuit board) was designed that contains the...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Processing Images of Craters for Spacecraft Navigation
A crater-detection algorithm has been conceived to enable automation of what, heretofore, have been manual processes for utilizing images of craters on a celestial body as landmarks for navigating a spacecraft flying near or landing on that body. The images are acquired by an electronic camera...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
A special image-data-processing technique has been developed for use in experiments that involve observation, via optical microscopes equipped with electronic cameras, of moving boundaries...
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