Electrical/​Electronics

Weather forecasting, hurricane tracking, and atmospheric science applications depend on humidity sounding of atmosphere. Current instruments provide these measurements from ground-based, airborne, and low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites by measuring radiometric temperature on the flanks of the 183-GHz water...

A differential SiGe oscillator circuit uses a resonant ring-oscillator topology in order to electronically tune the oscillator over multi-octave bandwidths. The oscillator’s tuning is extremely linear, because the oscillator’s frequency depends on the magnetic tuning of a YIG sphere, whose...

This proof-of-concept device consists of a thin film of graphene deposited on an electrodized doped silicon wafer. The graphene film acts as a conductive path between a gold electrode deposited on top of a silicon dioxide layer and the reversible side of the silicon wafer, so as to form a...

Grid-sphere electrodes have been proposed for use on the positively biased end of electrodynamic space tethers. A grid-sphere electrode is fabricated by embedding a wire mesh in a thin film from which a spherical balloon is formed. The grid-sphere electrode would be deployed from compact...

Traveling-wave tubes (TWTs), such as the Ka-band (26-GHz) model recently developed for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, are essential as communication amplifiers in spacecraft for virtually all near- and deep-space missions. This innovation is a computational design algorithm that, for...

This innovation is used to connect between synapse and neuron arrays using nanowire in quantum dot and metal in CMOS (complementary metal oxide semi-conductor) technology to enable the density of a brainlike connection in hardware. The hardware...

NASA is moving toward a network-centric communications architecture and, in particular, is building toward use of Internet Protocol (IP) in space. The use of IP is motivated by its ubiquitous application in many communications networks and in available commercial...

This innovation represents a method and circuit realization of a system designed to make in-situ measurements of test solar-cell operational parameters on orbit using readily available high-temperature and high-ionizing-radiation-tolerant electronic components. This innovation...

The use of underfill materials is necessary with flip-chip interconnect technology to redistribute stresses due to mismatching coefficients of thermal expansion (CTEs) between dissimilar materials in the overall assembly. Underfills are formulated using organic polymers and possibly inorganic...

COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) hardware using an industry-standard Camera Link interface is proposed to accomplish the task of designing, building, assembling, and testing electronics for an airborne spectrometer that would be low-cost, but sustain the required data speed...

The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) Advanced Orbiting Systems (AOS) space data link protocol provides a framing layer between channel coding such as LDPC (low-density parity-check) and higher-layer link multiplexing protocols such as CCSDS Encapsulation Service, which...

The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) Encapsulation Service is a convergence layer between lower-layer space data link framing protocols, such as CCSDS Advanced Orbiting System (AOS), and higher-layer networking protocols, such as CFDP (CCSDS File Delivery...

Recent advances in quantum information theory have inspired an explosion of interest in new quantum algorithms for solving hard computational (quantum and non-quantum) problems. The basic principle of quantum computation is that the quantum properties can be used to represent structure data, and...