Electronics & Software

Dispersed Fringe Sensing (DFS) is a technique for measuring and phasing segmented telescope mirrors using a dispersed broadband light image. DFS is capable of breaking the monochromatic light ambiguity, measuring ab solute piston errors between segments of large segmented primary mirrors to tens of...

Fault detection, diagnosis, and prognosis are essential tasks in the operation of autonomous spacecraft, instruments, and in situ platforms. One of NASA’s key mission requirements is robust state estimation. Sensing, using a wide range of sensors and sensor fusion approaches, plays a central role in robust...

Qualification and verification of advanced electronic packaging and interconnect technologies, and various other types of hardware elements for the Mars Exploration Rover’s Spirit and Opportunity (MER)/Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) flight projects, has been performed to...

Wireless sensors connected in a local network offer revolutionary exploration capabilities, but the current solutions do not work in extreme environments of low temperatures (200K) and low to moderate radiation levels (<50 krad). These sensors (temperature,...

Bump bonding hybridization techniques use arrays of indium bumps to electrically and mechanically join two chips together. Surface-tension issues limit bump sizes to roughly as wide as they are high. Pitches are limited to 50 microns with bumps only 8–14 microns high on each wafer. A new process...

In situ missions typically have pointable, mast-mounted cameras, which are capable of taking panoramic mosaics comprised of many individual frames. These frames are mosaicked together. While the mosaic software applies radiometric correction to the images, in many cases brightness/contrast seams still exist...

Changes in the shape of the Earth’s surface can be routinely measured with precisions better than centimeters. Processes below the surface often drive these changes and as a result, investigators require models with inversion methods to characterize the sources. Simplex inverts any combination of GPS...

VML (Virtual Machine Language) is an advanced computing environment that allows spacecraft to operate using mechanisms ranging from simple, timeoriented sequencing to advanced, multicomponent reactive systems.

A multi-scale three-dimensional variational data assimilation system (MS-3DVAR) has been formulated and the associated software system has been developed for improving high-resolution coastal ocean prediction. This system helps improve coastal ocean...

Pandora Operation and Analysis Software controls the Pandora Sun- and sky-pointing optical head and built-in filter wheels (neutral density, UV bandpass, polarization filters, and opaque). The software also controls the attached spectrometer exposure time and thermoelectric cooler to maintain the spectrometer...

Electron beam freeform fabrication (EBF3) is a member of an emerging class of direct manufacturing processes known as solid freeform fabrication (SFF); another member of the class is the laser deposition process. Successful application of the EBF3 process requires precise control...

IMAGESEER is a new Web portal that brings easy access to NASA image data for non-NASA researchers, educators, and students. The IMAGESEER Web site and database are specifically designed to be utilized by the university community, to enable teaching image processing (IP) techniques on NASA data, as...

Using a stereo camera pair, imagery is acquired and processed through the “JPLV” stereo processing pipeline. From this stereo data, large 3D blobs are found. These blobs are then described and classified by their shape to determine which are vehicles and which are not. Prior vehicle...

Hybrid Diagnosis Engine (HyDE) is a general framework for stochastic and hybrid model-bused diagnosis that offers flexibility to the diagnosis application designer. The HyDE architecture supports the use of multiple modeling paradigms at the component and system level. Several...

As communication and networking technologies advance, networks will become highly complex and heterogeneous, interconnecting different network domains. There is a need to provide user authentication and data protection in order to...

The Sensory Ego-Sphere (SES) is a short-term memory for a robot in the form of an egocentric, tessellated, spherical, sensory-motor map of the robot’s locale. Visual attention enables fast alignment of overlapping images without warping or position optimization, since an attentional...

Offshore wind is an enormous potential resource for the United States - with strong, consistent winds located in the Atlantic, Pacific, the Great Lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico. As part of a planned six-year $180 million initiative, an initial $20 million will be available from the DOE this year as the first...