Electronics & Software

The Radio Science Receiver (RSR) is an open-loop receiver installed in NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), which digitally filters and records intermediate-frequency (IF) analog signals. The RSR is an important tool for the Cassini Project, which uses it to measure perturbations of the...

A genetic programming (GP)-based, nonlinear modeling structure relates soil moisture with synthetic-apertureradar (SAR) images to present representative soil moisture estimates at the watershed scale. Surface soil moisture measurement is difficult to obtain over a large area due to a...

This work extends the lossless data compression technique described in “Fast Lossless Compression of Multispectral-Image Data,” (NPO- 42517) NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 30, No. 8 (August 2006), page 26. The original technique was extended to include a...

Two prototype Reconfigurable, Bidirectional Flexfet Level Shifters (ReBiLS) have been developed, where one version is a stand-alone component designed to interface between external low voltage and high voltage, and the other version is an embedded integrated...

A single-pixel prototype of a W-band detector module with a digital backend was developed to serve as a building block for large focal-plane arrays of monolithic millimeter-wave integrated circuit (MMIC) detectors. The module uses low-noise amplifiers, diode-based mixers, and a...

Superconducting electronic components have been developed that provide current rectification that is tunable by design and with an externally applied magnetic field to the circuit component. The superconducting material used in the device is relatively free of pinning sites with its critical current...

An integrated waveguide-to-MMIC (monolithic microwave integrated circuit) chip operating in the 300-GHz range is designed to operate well on highpermittivity semiconductor substrates typical for an MMIC amplifier, and allows a wider MMIC substrate to be used, enabling integration with larger MMICs...

A proposed method of modulating a sinusoidal carrier signal to convey digital information involves the use of histograms representing probability density functions (PDFs) that characterize samples of the signal waveform. Although almost any modulation can be characterized as amplitude, phase, or...

A system of electronic hardware and software synthesizes, in nearly real time, an image of a portion of a scene surveyed by as many as eight video cameras aimed, in different directions, at portions of the scene. This is a prototype of systems that would enable a pilot to view the scene...

In this invention, command and monitor functionality is moved between the two independent pieces of hardware, in which one had been dedicated to command and the other had been dedicated to monitor, such that some command and some monitor functionality appears in each. The only constraint is that the...

A prototype embedded avionics system has been designed for the next generation of NASA extra-vehicular-activity (EVA) spacesuits. The system performs biomedical and other sensor monitoring, image capture, data display, and data transmission. An existing NASA Phase I and II award winning design for an...

This innovation is designed to prevent a single end system communication node from negatively influencing the whole system’s behavior so that the network system can still operate if an end node is faulty. Placing a hub (star) in the middle of the system prevents propagation of critical control information that...

A modulator utilizing the Ku-band instead of the usual S-band has been developed to improve transmission rates for suborbital platforms. The unit operates in the 14.5–15.5-GHz band and supports data rates up to 200 Mbps.

Submillimeter-wave radiometers have traditionally been built by packaging each chip with a distinct function separately, and then combining the packaged chips to form subsystems. Instead of packaging one chip at a time, the radiometer on a chip (ROC) integrates whole wafers together to provide a robust, extremely powerful way...