Electronics & Software

Time-Tag Generation Script (TTaGS) is an application program, written in the AWK scripting language, for generating commands for aiming one Ku-band antenna and two S-band antennas for communicating with spacecraft. TTaGS saves between 2 and 4 person-hours per every 24 hours by automating the repetitious process of...

TES Product File Reader software extracts data from publicly available Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) HDF (Hierarchical Data Format) product data files using publicly available format specifications for scientific analysis in IDL (interactive data language). In this innovation, the...

A suite of computer programs, called “seq diff suite,” reports differences between the products of other computer programs involved in the generation of sequences of commands for spacecraft. These products consist of files of several types: replacement sequence of events (RSOE), DSN...

The Joint Execute Package Development and Integration tool is a Web utility program that provides an integrated capability to generate and manage messages and “execute” package data for members of a space shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS). (An “execute” package...

A mission reliability estimation method has been designed to translate mission requirements into choices of robot modules in order to configure a multi-robot team to have high reliability at minimal cost. In order to build cost- effective robot teams for long-term missions, one must be able...

This algorithm provides a new way to improve the accuracy and asymptotic behavior of a low-dimensional system based on the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD). Given a data set representing the evolution of a system of partial differential equations (PDEs), such as the Navier-Stokes equations...

A method of parameterizing the coefficients of a dynamical system based of a proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) representing the flow dynamics of a viscous fluid has been introduced. (A brief description of POD is presented in the immediately preceding article.) The present...

Confidence-based Feature Acquisition (CFA) is a novel, supervised learning method for acquiring missing feature values when there is missing data at both training (learning) and test (deployment) time. To train a machine learning classifier, data is encoded with a series of input features describing each item....

The Tin Whisker Metal Vapor Arcing Risk Assessment Tool has been designed to evaluate the risk of metal vapor arcing and to help facilitate a decision toward a researched risk disposition. Users can evaluate a system without having to open up the hardware. This process allows for investigating components at...

The Antenna and Optical Systems Branch at NASA’s Glenn Research Center is working on many innovations in nanotechnology for use in communications applications. One such emerging field of nanotechnology receiving significant attention for its promising results is nanoionics....

A computer program has been written as a tool for developing optical pulse-position-modulation (PPM) receivers in which photodetector outputs are fed to analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and all subsequent signal processing is performed digitally. The program can be used, for example, to simulate an...

Day two at SolidWorks World, the worldwide event for SolidWorks users, drew a record crowd. And this time it wasn’t because of the sunny Southern California weather. It was because the special guest speaker happened to be James Cameron, who just this morning was nominated for Best Director and Best Picture Academy Awards...

An electrical connector was developed that is tolerant of the presence of lunar dust. Novel features of the connector include the use of a permeable membrane to act both as a dust barrier and as a wiper to limit the amount of dust that makes its way into the internal chamber of the connector. The development...

Software has been developed to implement the ICER-3D algorithm. ICER-3D effects progressive, threedimensional (3D), wavelet-based compression of hyperspectral images. If a compressed data stream is truncated, the progressive nature of the algorithm enables reconstruction of hyperspectral data at...

A context-modeling subalgorithm has been developed as part of an algorithm that effects three-dimensional (3D) wavelet-based compression of hyperspectral image data. The context-modeling subalgorithm, hereafter denoted the context modeler, provides estimates of probability...