Electronics & Software

This software controls the behavior of a miniaturized microwave radar module. It controls the hardware, digitizes raw samples from the analog output of the module, and applies DSP (digital signal processing) algorithms to the data stream to reduce the bandwidth and data rate. It also implements an...

The Wallops Flight Facility Launch Range has a need to interface data from ship surveillance Furuno radar to an existing surveillance display system (SureTrak). SureTrak is a multi-sensor waterway and air surveillance system. The display of Furuno radar data by the SureTrak system will be used for risk...

Traditionally, quality flags provided a binary yes/no estimation of a datapoint’s utility. However, in modern instrumentation, significant auxiliary information for each datapoint can be obtained. This permits prediction of more than a...

This technique for compensating the gravitational attraction experienced by a test-mass freely floating onboard a satellite is new, and solves an important problem that all gravitational wave missions face. Its application to the geostationary Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (gLISA) mission concept...

In order to accomplish mission objectives, NASA must be able to plan and sequence assets (spacecraft and astronauts) in a short amount of time. Planning is a complex process that involves reasoning about thousands of constraints and uncertain conditions in order to produce a...

A software program builds PDS4 science product label (metadata) and automatically generates its description as part of the software interface specification (SIS) document. This software allows the mission system engineer to interact programmatically with the PDS4 information model, and...

The Problem Translator is a software program that translates functional Unified Modeling Language (fUML) activity models into a behavior-based computational problem representation language called Behavior XML (BXML). The BXML translation may then be solved by engines such as the Behavior and Analysis Engine. The...

Current data systems catalog and link data using a synthetic modeling approach that requires much domain knowledge in order to interact with the system. Domain knowledge includes what keyword to look for and how data artifacts are linked. OSCAR offers a semantic solution to data...

SPSCGR generates a contact graph suitable for use by the ION (Interplanetary Overlay Network) DTN (Delay/Disruption Tolerant Network) implementation from data provided by the JPL SPS (Service Preparation System) Portal. Prior to SPSCGR, there was no way for a mission or other entity to route DTN traffic across the DSN without manually...

Modern parallel file systems achieve high performance by distributing (“striping”) the contents of a single file across multiple physical disks to overcome single-disk I/O bandwidth limitations. The striping characteristics of a file determine how many disks it will be striped across and how large each...

Currently, there is a need for the computational handling of near-singularities that arise in many branches of physics, particularly for handling near-strong singularities. An example of such singularities is presented by the case of gradients...

This week's Question: Lars Eidnes, a Norwegian developer, recently created software that uses Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN)—a form of “deep learning”—to write new "clickbait” headlines. After training the software with several million articles from BuzzFeed, Gawker, Jezebel, the Huffington Post, and...

Using an air-fluidized bed trackway filled with poppy seeds or glass spheres, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology systematically varied the stiffness of the ground to mimic a variety of surfaces, from hard-packed sand to powdery snow. By studying how running lizards, geckos, crabs, and a robot...

For nearly two years, residents of the remote Mexican village of La Mancalona, most of whom are subsistence farmers, have operated and maintained a solar-powered water purification system engineered by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

CODE is a framework for control and observation in distributed environments. The framework enables the observation of resources (computer systems, storage systems, networks, and so on), services (database servers, application execution, servers, file transfer servers,...

Simple RunTime eXecutive (SRTX) software provides scheduling and publish/subscribe data transfer services. The scheduler allows dynamic allocation of real-time periodic and asynchronous tasks across homogeneous multi core/multiprocessor systems. Most real-time systems assign tasks to specific cores on an a priori...

Outlier or anomaly detection refers to the task of identifying abnormal or inconsistent patterns from a dataset. While they may seem to be undesirable entities, identifying them has many potential applications in fraud and intrusion detection, medical research, and safety-critical...

A report describes a self-stabilizing distributed clock synchronization protocol in the absence of faults in the system. It is focused on the distributed clock synchronization of an arbitrary, non-partitioned digraph ranging from fully connected to 1-connected...

This project investigated advanced navigation strategies required to approach, perform proximity operations, and return a sample from an asteroid or comet. An optimized navigation strategy for a notional mission to a near-Earth asteroid was developed to serve as...