Software

Speed and agility are hallmarks of the cheetah: The big predator is the fastest land animal on Earth, able to accelerate to 60 mph in just a few seconds. As it ramps up to top speed, a cheetah pumps its legs in tandem, bounding until it reaches a full gallop.Now MIT researchers have developed an algorithm for...

For Orion Exploration Flight Test One (EFT-1), the unit-under-test for flight software verification has been chosen as the entire integrated flight software load. At the time of this reporting, the unit test tool, while powerful, operates on very small units, usually classes. This leaves a sizable...

The Exploration Visualization Environment (EVE) is a graphical environment for the visualization, analysis, and simulation of engineering data, specializing in aerospace and aeronautic concepts. EVE is based on the history and successful application of the Synergistic Engineering Environment (SEE) and provides...

Documents, such as reports that are consistent in format, are excellent candidates for automation. Autodoc was designed as a means to automate such reports in order to reduce the amount of labor necessary to produce reports, and to improve the accuracy...

MAPS is a suite of software tools used for pre-flight planning, real-time support, and post-flight analysis of spacecraft attitude and pointing for the International Space Station (ISS), HII Transfer Vehicle (HTV), Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), and other low Earth orbit (LEO)...

A software program analyzes data measured by the Vehicle Cabin Atmosphere Monitor (VCAM) and quantifies the concentrations of trace chemicals detected by VCAM. The software contains a unique way to quantify the signal measured by VCAM, to establish the concentration curve,...

This software enables one to calculate elevation-dependent relative air mass. When imaging a setting or rising Sun on the ground or from space, the shape and the intensity distribution of a captured image are affected by the following three...

Mixed-initiative teams of robots and humans working side-by-side in close proximity to each other need to be capable of reasoning about the actions and activities of each other within a mission context. This capability requires the robotic agents to have a sense of self, and their...

A mobile device application created by NASA visualizes recent global climate data from Earth science satellites, including air temperature, sea surface salinity, carbon monoxide, ozone, and water vapor, as well as gravity and sea level variations. This app is an Open GL simple 3D object viewer for the Apple IOS and...

Web Sockets is a network full-duplex communication channel that allows Javascript programs embedded in Web pages to establish connections to applications running on the server that provided the Web pages. Two-way communication is...

Spaceflight and planetary exploration place severe constraints on the available bandwidth for downlinking large hyperspectral images. Communications with spacecraft often occur intermittently, so mission-relevant hyperspectral data must wait for analysis on the ground before it can inform...

The SAM/MSL Terrestrial Background Spectral Library is one of the tools developed for identifying known terrestrial background for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) mission. The SAM instrument suite can detect trace elements in the ppb range and therefore requires a...

Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) surface operations require precise and accurate knowledge of rover position. A key means of establishing/verifying position is to match ortho-rectified mosaics from the MSL onboard cameras to orbital data. Manual localization by matching mosaics to HiRISE...

The iSWA system is a Web-based dissemination framework for NASA-relevant space weather information that combines forecasts based on the most advanced space weather models with concurrent space environment information. A key design driver for the iSWA system is to generate and present vast amounts of...

The FAA, using its CARI-6 program, provides galactic cosmic radiation dosage rates for any location on the Earth from ground up to 60,000 ft (≈18,300 m). One way to protect astronauts from galactic cosmic radiation (GCR) on a Mars mission is to use...

Elementary-reaction chemical kinetics of hydrocarbon oxidation consists of hundreds to thousands of species and thousands of reactions. As such, it is impossible to use it in models and codes involving turbulence because computations are unfeasible due to lack of memory and...

A model describing supercritical-pressure, multi-species turbulent mixing has been developed to simulate situations prevailing in diesel, gas turbine, and HCCI (homogeneous charge compression ignition) engines. It is also a situation occurring in atmospheric planetary science,...

Communicating the current International Space Station (ISS) configuration and also potential ISS configurations is a necessity during ISS trade studies and Ops Con development. Often, multiple configuration options will need to be communicated. Doing so without a means of displaying an...

The Evolutionary Mission Trajectory Generator (EMTG) is a global trajectory optimization tool for designing interplanetary missions that perform multiple flybys and either low-thrust or high-thrust propulsive maneuvers on the way to destinations in the solar system. Some targets, such as Mars and Venus, are...

An easy-to-use design tool was developed in response to a large number of documented cases of critical (flight and ground) hardware failing after experiencing drops during commercial shipment. By entering the mass of the hardware to be protected, and the drop height, the software helps the user select the type and...