Electronics & Software

Sunstone Circuits, Mulino, OR, announced DFMplus, a Design to Manufacturing tool that allows potential issues to be fixed in the PCB design phase. The tool helps users verify PCB designs before ordering. The tool features a preview of possible failure points, provides efficient transfer of design file data into manufacturing,...

This Week's Question: Scientists are exploring the possibility of utilizing space solar power for Earth-bound purposes. The United States, China, India and Japan all have projects at various stages of development that would see robots assemble solar arrays that could provide the Earth with clean, renewable...

The PATTERNS scheduling tool was created to test the multi-plane concept of a Time Triggered Ethernet (TTE) network. The TTE network interface cards used in the Orion vehicle contain three physical network ports, referred to as planes. Each plane exists to serve...

The transformation of naturally occurring electromagnetic waves called “chorus” from a coherent nature to a quasi-coherent nature when propagating a distance from its source was demonstrated. The aim of the mission was to study the energizing of electrons by the waves...

The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission will have the first L-band radar/radiometer sensor suite dedicated to global measurements of soil moisture. For the radar sensor, the requirements for achieving high backscatter measurement accuracy from low-Earth orbit present a...

A wireless, connection-free, open circuit technology can be used for developing electrical devices like sensors that need no physical contact with the properties being measured. At the core of the technology is the SansEC (Sans Electrical Connections) circuit that is damage-resilient and...

The UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar) ground data processing infrastructure facilitates a wide range of mission operational processes through a centralized database, Web-enabled interfaces, and background automation. By...

Efficient aircraft designs are increasingly desired in order to support the continued growth of the air transportation industry. Continued expansion of this vital mode of transportation is threatened due to concerns over ever-increasing emissions, noise, and the demand for fuel. Current airport runway,...

An integrated communications and control system for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) utilizes automatic dependent surveillance broadcast (ADS-B) technology. The prime objective of this system is to address safety concerns related to UAS sharing airspace with...

Bandwidth and power-coded modulation schemes are very desirable for many applications in high-data-rate transmission over a given allocated bandwidth. The goal is to design such coded modulation system for a given throughput with the lowest possible signal-to-noise ratio for not only a channel...

LDSD (Low Density Supersonic Decelerator) is a Mars EDL (entry, descent, and landing) Technology Development Project that launches three test vehicles out of the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai. On the test vehicle, most mission science data can be recorded safely on land;...

In industrial synthetic chemistry laboratories, reactions are generally carried out using batch-mode methodologies, stepwise reactions, and purifications to generate a final product. Each step has an associated yield of both the reaction itself and of the final purification that...

A complex project having many tasks and sub-tasks, many phases, and many workers will often require an evaluation of completion of the tasks and sub-tasks at several times during the project’s duration. Initially and throughout the duration, suitability of the technical and inter-personal characteristics of the...

Sample-return missions to primitive solar system bodies (asteroids, comets, and planetary satellites) can provide a wealth of scientific information and insight into the composition and origins of the solar system. Recent interest in primitive body missions has been driven by the...

Half-Cycle Crack Growth software offers a reliable method for calculating theoretical fatigue crack growths that could lead to catastrophic structural component failures. The program builds upon and integrates Armstrong’s proven half-cycle and closed-form aging theories, and considers every half-cycle of loading spectra...

NASA Visualization Explorer (NASA Viz) is an intuitive, interactive iOS application (app) that delivers science stories with multimedia content linking high-quality explorable images, descriptive text, visualizations, videos, and interviews with a fresh look and feel. NASA Viz aims to excite a wide audience about...

In many fields of spectroscopy, classification of the measured multivariate response is not always a straightforward process. Accurate classification is limited by many factors that are highly dependent upon the spectroscopy method being utilized. In all cases, however,...

The primary function of the Feature Database (FDB) is to contain information about all the ground features seen so far in a sequence of aerial images. This information is organized so that features can be efficiently located and tracked into later images. As each new image is processed, the database grows to include more images and...

DRAT software overcomes limitations inherent in the Apache Release Audit Tool (RAT), and also brings code auditing and open-source license analysis into the realm of Big Data by using scalable, open-source Apache technologies. Distributed RAT (DRAT) leverages Apache Tika to automatically detect and classify...