Electronics & Software

Hydrogen fluoride (HF) is a primary evolved combustion product of fluorinated and perfluorinated hydrocarbons. HF is produced during combustion by the presence of impurities and hydrogen-containing polymers including polyimides. This effect is especially dangerous in closed...

Hardware and algorithms have been developed to transfer electrical power and data connectivity safely, efficiently, and automatically from an identified damaged/defective wire in a cable to an alternate wire path. The combination of online cable testing capabilities, along with intelligent signal rerouting...

An InGaAs-based three-junction (3J) tandem thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell has been investigated to utilize more of the blackbody spectrum (from a 1,100 °C general purpose heat source — GPHS) efficiently. The tandem consists of three vertically stacked subcells, a 0.74-eV InGaAs cell, a...

A multichannel electrometer voltmeter has been developed that employs a mechanical resonator with voltage-sensing capacitance-probe electrodes that enable high-impedance, high-voltage, radiation-hardened measurement of an Internal Electrostatic Discharge Monitor (IESDM) sensor. The IESDM is...

PML researchers have devised a novel source of portable sunlight that may fill an urgent need in renewable energy research – namely, light sources that generate a near-perfect solar spectrum to be used in testing the performance and efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) materials.The team’s...

In order to reduce the effect of gain and noise instabilities in the RF chain of a microwave radiometer, a Dicke radiometer topology is often used, as in the case of the proposed surface water and ocean topography (SWOT) radiometer instrument. For this topology, a single-pole...

On Shaft Data Acquisition System (OSDAS) is a rugged, compact, multiple-channel data acquisition computer system that is designed to record data from instrumentation while operating under extreme rotational centrifugal or gravitational acceleration forces. This system, which was developed for the Heritage...

Several technological enhancements have been made to METI’s commercial Emergency Care Simulator (ECS) with regard to how microgravity affects human physiology. The ECS uses both a software only lung simulation, and an integrated mannequin lung that uses a physical...

A document discusses a fault-tolerant, self-aware, low-power, multi-core computer for space missions with thousands of simple cores, achieving speed through concurrency. The proposed machine decides how to achieve concurrency in real time, rather than depending on programmers. The driving...

A package of software computes the time-dependent propagation of a narrow laser beam in an arbitrary threedimensional (3D) medium with absorption and scattering, using the transientdiscrete- ordinates method and a direct integration method. Unlike prior software that utilizes a Monte Carlo method, this...

Determining trajectories of solar transients such as coronal mass ejections is not always easy. White light images from SECCHI’s (Sun Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation) heliospheric imagers are difficult to interpret because they represent a lineof- sight projection of...

A Software Defined Radio (SDR) concept uses a minimum amount of analog/radio frequency components to up/downconvert the RF signal to/from a digital format. Once in the digital domain, all other processing (filtering, modulation, demodulation, etc.) is done in software. The project will leverage...

The role of PLUTO (Plug-in Port UTilization Officer) and the growth of the International Space Station (ISS) have exceeded the capabilities of the current tool PiP (Plug-in Plan). Its users (crew and flight controllers) have expressed an interest in a new, easy-touse tool with a higher level of interactivity and...