Electronics & Software

New circuits have been designed and fabricated with operating frequencies over 325 GHz. In order to measure S-parameters of these circuits, an extensive process of wafer dicing and packaging, and waveguide transition design, fabrication, and packaging would be required. This is a costly and...

A technique was developed to provide a reconfigurable high-precision microwave electrical phase delay for resonators and phase shifters. The invention employs multiple branches of transmission lines with open-ended or ground-ended terminations as...

Exponential growth in microelectronics technology such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has enabled high-performance spaceborne instruments with increasing onboard data processing capabilities. As a commonly used digital signal processing (DSP) building...

There is a need to provide a portable and cost-effective galvanic isolation between ground support equipment and flight hardware such that any unforeseen voltage differential between ground and power supplies is eliminated. An interface board was designed for use between the ground support...

This software visualizes orbit paths for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), but was designed to be general and applicable to any Earth-observing mission. The software uses the Google Earth user interface to provide a visual mechanism to explore spacecraft orbit paths, ground footprint...

Mars Relay operations currently involve several e-mails and phone calls between lander and orbiter teams in order to settle on an agreed time for performing a communication pass between the landed asset (i.e. rover or lander) and orbiter, then back to Earth. This new application aims to...

RAPID (Robot Application Programming Interface Delegate) software utilizes highly robust technology to facilitate command-ing and monitoring of lunar assets. RAPID provides the ability for intercenter communication, since these assets are developed in multiple NASA centers.

A novel computational framework was developed of a 2D affine invariant matching exploiting a parameter space. Named as affine invariant parameter space (AIPS), the technique can be applied to many image-processing and computer-vision problems, including image registration, template...

Calibrate_Image calibrates images obtained from focal plane arrays so that the output image more accurately represents the observed scene. The function takes as input a degraded image along with a flat field image and a dark frame image produced by the focal plane array and outputs a corrected image. The three most prominent...

The ISS (International Space Station) Power Resource Officers (PROs) needed a tool to automate the calculation of thousands of ISS power availability simulations used to generate power constraint matrices. Each matrix contains 864 cells, and each cell represents a single power simulation that must be run. The...

When the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) is launched, the spacecraft adaptor (SA) fairings that cover the CEV service module (SM) are exposed to aero heating. Thermal analysis is performed to compute the fairing temperatures and to investigate whether the temperatures are within the...

The original Luby Transform (LT) coding scheme is extended to account for data transmissions where some information symbols in a message block are more important than others. Prioritized LT codes provide unequal error protection (UEP) of data on an erasure channel by modifying the original LT encoder. The prioritized algorithm...

Texture analysis would permit improved autonomous, onboard science data interpretation for adaptive navigation, sampling, and downlink decisions. These analyses would assist with terrain analysis and instrument placement in both macroscopic and microscopic image data products. Unfortunately,...

An improved computational model for simulating flows in liquid-propellant injectors in rocket engines has been developed. Models like this one are needed for predicting fluxes of heat in, and performances of, the engines. An important part of predicting performance is predicting fluctuations of...

New pointing models have been developed for large reflector antennas whose construction is founded on elevation over azimuth mount. At JPL, the new models were applied to the Deep Space Network (DSN) 34-meter antenna’s subnet for corrections of their systematic pointing errors; it...

Spacecraft formation flying involves the coordination of states among multiple spacecraft through relative sensing, inter-spacecraft communication, and control. Most existing formation-flying estimation algorithms can only be supported via highly...

A method was developed for in-orbit measurement of the relative pointing of spectrometer channels, and the relationship between the spectrometer channels and the spacecraft coordinate system. In this innovation, individual scans of the Moon, from the three channels, were used to...

Multibody dynamics play a critical role in simulation testbeds for space missions. There has been a considerable interest in the development of efficient computational algorithms for solving the dynamics of multibody systems. Mass matrix factorization and inversion techniques and the O(N)...

A new type of correlation has been developed similar to quantum entanglement in self-supervised dynamics (SSD). SSDs have been introduced as a quantum-classical hybrid based upon the Madelung equation in which the quantum potential is replaced by an information potential. As a result, SSD preserves the...

A paper describes advanced ceramic column grid array (CCGA) packaging interconnects technology test objects that were subjected to extreme temperature thermal cycles. CCGA interconnect electronic package printed wiring boards (PWBs) of polyimide were...